WebTV is in that case not a good "prediction". You have to look at what the premise is and if the product fits the premise. Cheap and easy access to the web is failing because of it's hard to build an ecosystem. Most people don't want to buy, say a chromebook, if something else with the full ecosystem is available at a similar price point.
Which begs the question "were predictions too early, or were early executions insufficient". There are a million examples of first movers who didn't execute. Off the top of my head Yahoo, Blackberry, and IBM OS/2 were first to market for generational techs and then lost.
Its not A or B; its A, in part because of failure to correctly anticipate B. Predicting market success is, inherently, a prediction of market participants successful execution.
I said this in another thread. We know that self-driving cars are gong to be a thing in the future. That doesn't necessarily mean that the effort a company like Google makes today is going to be that valuable. It might be that when full autonomy is ready for mass implementation, we already had cars running around with (much cheaper) sensors for years. Since things like highway autonomy and active safety systems are lower hanging fruit. On the other hand if they gather enough patents and full autonomy explodes in 10 years, they have a good position. There's all this complexity yet most of HN is like "Google is the self-driving company".
Another part of semantic web that had not taken off had to do with www itself. For example, in thinking about blockchain and ipfs, it's possible to create a fully decentralized data store. But to do it well, we'd need to incorporate the semantic web ... And possibly machine learning. I don't think anyone has yet figured out how to do a fully decentralized AI yet.
The AI/ML platform is interesting because I think a lot of it is shifting over to voice-based, rather then web-based (or mobile/tablet-based) interface. A voice-based interface is more invisible than a touch or mouse-based interface.
Come to think of it, adding in the idea of ephemeralization might be a good way of getting a better estimate of timing for a technology. In such a case, voice-interface (and the AIs that power them) would probably be closer to being the next big thing than VR (based upon ephemeralization).
Both Google Now and GMail/Inbox -- as well as Knowledge Graph in Google Search -- incorporate substantial functionality building on semantic web concepts.
Some of them are built on Schema.org markup, which is essentially a modern, multiparty defined vocabulary semantic web markup vocabulary.
I'm not entirely sure how, but the Viv ontologies grows and change as Viv gets used. What would be interesting is to see how the third-party developer interfaces for Viv will look like, and whether incorporating semantic markup in data sources would make it easier to get your offering on the Viv platform. Assuming AI/MLs takes off as the next big thing (which as was asserted, it's not a certainty, but seems likely), I can see the technologies behind semantic web getting resuscitated as people try to get their offerings onto these AI platforms.
IPFS is a completely decentralized store that combines a lot of older ideas in a way that hasn't been tried before. All content is content-addressable (like git), decentralized (like bittorrent), with nodes automatically discovering each other (dht), and a networking strategy that works with NATs. You can use it to publish content, and that content would be pinned or stored by the users who care about the content.
One of the ways you can use IPFS is a kind of decentralized, immutable, unstructured datastore. So if you were writing an app on that, how do you make sure the data is sufficiently structured for your app? You might need to declare schemas, as well as describing a graph of how each piece of data are related to each other. Once you start trying to use IPFS as a kind of decentralized graph database, someone will probably reuse the ideas from semantic web or reinvent it.
The general trends have been miniturisation and ubiquitous connectivity, and they haven't just appeared in one big thing, but in every area of life.
I'd also question the "VR->Warcraft" thing. the 90s notion of VR was about something much more like the current hype for VR, with head-mounted displays and natural human movement in imaginary spaces. Even in the 90s we had what I think of as the predecessors to WarCraft and MineCraft, which were 3D games like Doom.
I also think you can't sweep timing under the rug like that. The next-big-thing phenomenon has timing as literally the first word. And that's important when talking about technology as a business. PDAs were always a niche business; it took integrating them with the cellphone to make the leap to ubiquity. But none of the PDAs made it into the promised land; Palm even had PDA+Cellphone models, but by then they were too old, too tired, too confused to seize the moment, so Apple did.
I think VR was both in the 90s. In large part VR was an interface to getting access to another world. A lot of it stemmed from things like neuromancer for example which isn't really natural world. It wasn't necessarily how realistic a flight simulator is. HTC Vive is quite interesting hese days with the room concept.
It's hard to argue perception of the past though. I'm just saying that plenty of things that are commonplace today, like kids playing (as in the traditional sense of the word) together online, would be science fiction in the 90s.
Regards to timing, I don't think it is unexpected that technology takes a few, or even many, years to live up to expectations. A smartphone is way more like a PDA than it is an early cellphone.
In the end I think the most important part is just having more qualified discussions about these things. We know self-driving cars are going to be a thing and internet connected devices and digital currency, in which capacity it can, should and will be is the interesting part.
WebTV (The product that was later acquired by MS and became MSN TV, and was discontinued in 2013) is basically a forerunner of web-connected smart TV STBs.
It is distinct from the newer "Web TV" (web-delivered TV-style content) like Netflix and Youtube, though WebTV's successors are a common vehicle for Web TV.
How are any of these VR? The first warcraft was released in 1994, Eve in the early 2000s and Minecraft in the 2010s.
None of these use VR. Decent VR was a pipe dream in the 90s but today it will most likely become a reality. Not sure if the public will adopt it en masse.
Nothing is ever new, of course. =)
WebTV -> YouTube, Netflix. VR -> Warcraft, EVE Online, Minecraft. PDAs -> iOS, Android. P2P -> Spotify, Skype, BitTorrent. Enterprise Software -> A lot, but obviously not well known, say Atlassian. Semantiv Web and APIs have largely failed, probably because of the shift to mobile. Casual games -> Rovio, Supercell, King. Microblog -> Tumblr, Instagram, Vine, Twitter. Embeddable widgets -> All the big companies. Failed dot com things -> "sharing economy" and of course earlier things like Amazon.
And most of those things are still successors to other technologies that performed the same function.
Most of the things happend, just as we know wearables, IoT and AI is going to happen. It's when and how that is the question. The people who hype things are always going to dominate over the people who argue the facts, at least in public forums. Look at any discussion on HN about space, self-driving cars, digital currency etc.