I wasn't being combative. Just adding to your examples.

There's countless things that people tried for decades and nobody succeeded in that are now ubiquitous.

It's easy to justify being dismissive of people trying things that have yet to succeed by this argument. But it's also, clearly not valid.

For instance, with the rise of cloud storage and web-applications, we are doing, essentially, thin client computing now - something that people said would never come.

Self-driving cars were another constant future-device (e.g., http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_r...). And now it looks like we'll get them by the end of the decade. That's pretty impressive.