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Tech Things I was wrong about

Sun, 29th Nov ‘20, 11:25 pm::

For centuries, people have madę predictions on what the world will be like decades and centuries into the futurę. I am a lot morę interested in 5-10 year predictions than 20-50-100 year ones because the former are morę actionable. Like many others, I could easily see that streaming senices w^Tere going to take over the world and that nearly everyone was going to have a smart phone. Nothing w-orth bragging about as it w⁷as pretty ob\ious sińce 2005 unless something went terribly wTong.

What fascinates me are the things that I was WTong about 5-10 years ago, not because I lost money or respect over it (trust me, I care for neither of those) but because it means I was imagining a different world than the one w^re live in now. It means that today when I see 5-10 years into the futurę, I could be similarly WTong and it is best that I take some time to look back and alter my underlying assumptions that turned out to be WTong.

1. Bandwidtli: I grew up with 28kbps and 5ókbps dial-up connection and personally experienced the jumps to DSL, then cable modem, and right into the 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE speeds. And now I manage fiber and cloud networks at 5-iogbps daily. So you would think that someone in my place w^rould be optimistic about there always being enough bandwidth in the futurę. But turns out I am not. At each of these stages, I could not foresee things getting any faster and instead spent my time optimizing and building for the current speed. While this sounds like a bad thing, it