3 technological predictions from the 2010’s that aged badly
With the end of 2019, it brought along with it the end of a remarkable decade. A decade full of new technologies, new inventions, new job prospects and bringing a new look to already existing products.
A lot can happen in a span of ten years, the early 2010’s were pretty different from what we would now call the early 2020’s. The internet landscape was fairly different from what it is now, social media was different, technology was different and untapped and all the marketing techniques and tricks of today are not even close to what it was ten years ago.
As a result of the constant change in the last decade, many predictions of what the future would look like in 2010’s have turned out to be untrue and off the mark.
Here are three marketing and technology related predictions made in the early 2010’s that have aged pretty badly:
- QR codes, the future of mobile marketing
One of the most hyped and up and coming trend of the 2010’s that will go down in history as a major flop is the QR codes. QR codes were invented in 1994 by a Japanese company Denso Wave, but reached their peak hype in around 2011.
During that time, QR codes were everywhere. Every brand had a QR code, every ad had one, and every marketing material had somehow incorporated QR codes within. They were the in thing of that time, and a lot of commentators predicted that they would become even more universal as brands fine-tuned their use in mobile marketing.
By 2012, the backlash of QR codes started building, when Forbes published an article stating that QR codes are the thing of the past now, they are dead. Some brands continued to use them but ultimately were met with failure. By 2014, QR codes were amongst the technologies that failed to live up to the hype.
- Virtual reality will become mainstream
Among the many technologies that seemed to have a promising future, virtual reality was one of them. The hype of virtual reality started way before the 2010’s but at that time this technology was expensive, clunky and hard to manage and extremely underwhelming for the advancing world.
This was the case until the Oculus Rift was introduced which was later purchased by Facebook for close to $3 billion. This gave a rise to the virtual reality enthusiasts where brands like Sony, Google, Microsoft to name a few started creating their own headsets of the sort. Being the talk of the time, brands were keen on jumping on the bandwagon of VR marketing.
However, this success of VR headsets was short-lived as most of the problems it had before were still present to a great extent. The headset was still big and bulky, they were pricey and were seen as an anti—social product. Thus, it eventually became less popular not being up to the mark of what the marketeering experts had predicted.
- Tablet computing will explode
In 2010 Apple released their latest product which was an iPad. A technology that was so successful and so startling with the kind of ease and comfort it provided that it had become the biggest success of its time.
Thus, at that time tablets other technologies like e-readers were becoming the talk of the time, revolutionising computing with the option of being portable and an alternate to desktop computers and laptops.
However, tablets have become a really important part of the world today, it didn’t exactly live up to the hype that it had promised. As Smartphones became bigger and better, with improved functions and even more things to offer and laptops becoming even more portable and lightweight as the years pass, the importance of tablets started to decline. This led to a great decrease in their sales and thus bringing a somewhat decline to the hyper surrounding it.
Just like several other technologies, these technologies failed to live up to the hype it created and thus leading to a somewhat failure in its part.
