HN Explorer

Ask HN: What assumption was considered true until a product proved it false?

2 points by jeffkeen ↗ HN
I'm looking for the best examples of products/businesses proving assumptions wrong. What's your favorite?

Some examples:

- 2007 assumption: "Nobody wants to hop into a stranger's car" | Lyft, Uber, etc

- 1999 assumption: "A video rental business makes its money on late fees" | Netflix

3 comments

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uberman
People used to fear that the big brother was listening to them on via their phone or watching them via their tv. Now those things are considered features rather than threats.
bell-cot
How about human (vs. birds, etc.) heavier-than-air flight being impossible?

Or sailing west(-ish) from Europe being a possible (if not practical) way to get to the "Far East" (because the Earth wasn't flat after all)?

RNeff
from wikipedia: Quibi (/ˈkwɪbi/ KWIB-ee) was a short-lived American short-form streaming platform that generated content for viewing on mobile devices. It was founded in Los Angeles in August 2018 as NewTV by Jeffrey Katzenberg and was led by Meg Whitman, its CEO. The service raised $1.75 billion from investors.[1] It launched in April 2020, but shut down in December 2020 after falling short of its subscriber projections.[2][3][4] In January 2021, Quibi's content library was sold to Roku, Inc. for less than $100 million.[5][6][7]