Facebook. I was convinced "social" was just a fad. Played around with the app platform in undergrad in 2008 but thought it would be stupid to build something completely reliant on a 3rd party social platform. I had the opportunity to join FB pre-IPO in 2010 but I still thought it was a fad that couldn't last. I just don't get social.

Snapchat.

But than again if we look at their finances (and stock), they have always been in the red and are resorting to selling glasses and hotdog costumes now (huge losses).

So maybe they aren't that successful after all.

Yes, that one totally got me as well...

An app whose only novel idea is that the messages and photos you send delete themselves after some time, except for the fact that once they're in your friend's phone, they can of course take a screencap, or just have an app installed to store them... so the whole idea is based on cluelessness about basic security... and yet, there it is.

It's not based on cluelessness, people are aware that there are ways to circumvent the screenshot notification. The vast majority of people don't install third-party apps to save their friends' snaps, so content you share on Snapchat is still drastically less likely to be on someone's phone forever than if you were to send it some other way.

I was never about security. They use FOMO to create a daily habit. When you post, people see it and react quickly, which further strengthens the addiction.

snapchat's biggest problem is the interface, it's extremely hard to use. I think the plan was to make it complicated so that older people don't get into it, turns out nobody wants to struggle using a selfie app

>turns out nobody wants to struggle using a selfie app

Tons of people use the app. The interface is central to its virality. Snap's growth wasn't a problem until Facebook did everything they could to clone it. Snaps failing because everyone is starting to realize that if you aren't GOOG or FB, you aren't worth spending $$$ on. Just the other day I saw an "OfferUp" ad on Snap that looked like a 90s banner ad. I can't tell if Snap went full self serve or if they are struggling to find people to buy on their platform. And who would after advertisers have been spoiled by FB's demographic data and GOOG's intent data?

Edit: I feel like I spend a lot of time defending snapchat when I hardly use the app.

IMHO even if facebook cloned all the functionality, if people found snapchat easier to use they wouldn't have jumped ship the moment it became an option.

I think that's on purpose. So friends have to show you the app first... It kinda creates a "lock-in" effect, like "I already bothered to learn this with my friends, why change now?"

React.

Who would've known people would come to like JSX? I used to think it was an abomination.. now it's great.

i mean.. also Javascript. people learned to live with it, and it evolved to be more tolerable through a messy mishmash of tooling and language evolution.

YouTube - it didn't look profitable and I thought they'd go out of business

From official statements here and there, and especially the "Adpocalypse" happening this year, I doesn't look like they are profitable even now.

Sometimes I think the only thing keeping Youtube alive as a Google product is that the internet would rip them to shreds if they were to shut it down.

I think Google was expecting Youtube to no longer exist as an entity in its own right, but just be a part of Google+ after they integrated all of their properties into a massive Facebook killer social media app, but that was a colossal failure.

Now, I think they want to use the infrastructure to build something that competes against Netflix and Amazon, but to do that they have to destroy the existing economic incentives for content creators and drive off as many content derivative users as they can (anyone incorporating or using licensed content, even as covered by fair use), and basically rebuild Youtube from the inside out.

I was worried rampant infringement suits might kill Google.

YouTube loses billions of dollars a year. If they weren't being subsidized by Google search profits, they would be out of business.

Instagram.

Sharing pictures and comenting on them, like Fotolog.com in the early 2000s, but more closed (it didn't want you to browse photos on mobile without the app)... yeah, revolutionary.

Flickr should have owned the simple sharing of pictures in a social network because ... they already had one. I'd consider that the biggest, most damning failure of Yahoo!'s management that they didn't immediately devote huge resources to countering Instagram when it appeared.

Instagram has a slick, easy to use, minimalist ui. Fotolog.com looks messy in comparison.

Google! At the time I heard about this startup in the search space, I thought these people were idiots. Didn't they know that there was already Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Alta Vista, Etc. Another search engine is doomed to failure - especially if they don't even know enough to spell "googol" correctly.

Uber. It's a "taxi service except about half the price because it starts over with no unions". If it's so profitable, why didn't other taxi services do it instead? Is the whole reason because it lowers the bar for taxi drivers to be hired, thus reaching those who would be fine with the lower pay?

> If it's so profitable, why didn't other taxi services do it instead?

Because that was illegal. This isn't a secret - it's constantly mentioned by pro-Uber and con-Uber groups.

Reimagine it as "it's half the price because it is not the beneficiary of a government-granted monopoly on its business".

Twitter

It's like Facebook, but without pictures, friends, or events! Just status updates. Oh, and they're limited to 140 characters. It's going to be awesome. /s

turns out restrictions can breed creativity :)

Yeah. All of the tech listed here, but this one especially. When I first heard about it, I thought it was spectacularly stupid.

x86. Even Intel seemed bent on dismantling it with Itanium. And while they were distracted, AMD humiliated Goliath with the Opteron. It was EPIC - no wait, it wasn't!

I don’t recall the Opteron stealing anybody’s lunch. It was the Athlon that outshone contemporary Pentium III chips.

Wasn’t Itanium a good idea, just too ahead of its time?

No.

Bitcoin.

I knew about Bitcoin quite early, but I was convinced the government would shut it down. I am mystified as to why they didn't.

Possibly because it's not actually as anonymous as some people believe.

Some governments have banned it, many haven't. It's likely that Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) aren't, and never were, the existential threat to governments as a whole that anarcho-capitalists wanted it it to be.

States and law enforcement are more likely to be concerned with what Bitcoin is used for, than the mere fact that it is used.

The government can't just "shut down" whatever it wants in a society like the US with (relatively) strong rule of law.

They cannot--coordinating enforcement is impossible for nation state actors, at least not yet.

Shutting it completely down is impossible, but making possession illegal is not.

Same here. In the early days, the price was driven by emotion. Every time there was a problem, everyone sold and the price went to the floor.

Facebook

Myspace without stylesheets. And only your university friends even have access. Yeah, did not see that getting big.

drones

I can definitely understand why these have grown in popularity. Why is it a surprise?

I don't really know, I just kinda got blindsided.. i saw 1 or 2 people playing with drones and i was like "this is a specific group of people like the model aircraft folk" and then the next day it was everywhere.

Now I can totally understand that it's an important evolution in tech and will probably solve the last mile problem (at least some of it) in the near future.

Alexa and amazon.com

Has it taken over the world really? Techies love it but I am not convinced there is a mass market for it yet. I don't know if people really like talking to objects, and have non discoverable UIs.