Isn't it also a bit self-fulfilling? You imagine what's next, and you steer your company in that direction in order to be ready for it. Doing so (and speaking about it, etc.) contributes heavily to it even happening. If you were wrong, and your company disappears as a result, that contributes to us not analyzing it later.

Ha yeah that was what I was thinking. Probably some survivorship bias in play here.

My personal view is that it’s not hard to see where things are going, and anyone reasonably smart and informed will have a good sense of where things are generally headed.

The hard part of delivering the right trade off between usability, reliability, timeliness, cost with the right team and ecosystem.

I mean everyone knew that rich web over mobile would work but did that look like blackberry, iPhone, Android, windows phone etc

Survivorship bias?

Formative experiences hanging around the fringe - the Aspen Institute, PARC, Homebrew Computer Club, etc.