Technology improves, but it doesn't always improve in ways you expect. Steve Balmer discounted the iPhone for business because it didn't have a keyboard, for example. The articles proclaiming that the metaverse was going to take over the world and plots of virtual land were going to be a multi-billion dollar industry have turned out to be as absurd as they looked at the time but there's a little cottage industry of VR uses. A lot of catchphrase technologies didn't end up the way people thought, such as big data, and in practice they had hard limitations that limited their applicability.

It was a surprisingly long time ago now that cloud gaming was going to be the next big thing, but it basically collapsed too.