Different, but nobody could predict what would happen next. We know now how different it was, but we didn’t know back then how it would be different now. There were people/companies who were right, and more people who weren’t. I had good predictions, and bad predictions. I didn’t understand why people didn’t use their phone already like how they use smartphones now. You could do everything what you can do now (except things which were discovered since then, mainly ML stuffs). Browse the internet (it was always interesting how people didn’t know what was WAP), listen to music, read books, play games, run random apps (there was waaaay more freedom regarding this back then by default, people just didn’t know how). But still, we needed smartphones. That was the thing which crossed the line for normies, and for most of them only more than 5 years after iPhone was released. My prediction of convergence would have failed without the modern smartphone, which I couldn’t foresee. It was pure luck. We needed a breakthrough.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t predict anything with high certainty. You just don’t know whether the status quo will be disturbed. And when you need a status quo disturbance for your prediction, you’re in pure luck category. When your prediction requires lack of status quo changes, then your prediction is safer. And of course sorter the term the better. When ChatGPT came out, Cursor and Claude Code could be predicted, I predicted them. Because no changes in status quo was required and it was a short term prediction. But if there would have been a new breakthrough, then those wouldn’t have been created. When they predicted fully self driving cars, or less people checking X-rays, you needed a status quo change: legal first, but in case of general, fully self driving cars, even technical breakthroughs. Good luck with that.