I think most people failed at extrapolating, seeing the trend and imagining what is possible. Maybe they didn’t want to. This is still the issue today. Some developers were overconfident about their understanding of how AI works, without really understanding deep learning at all. They assumed the limitations and shortcomings at the time were definitive. Tooling and harnesses were not a big invention at all. They were obvious from day one but took time to build and turn them into somewhat mature products we have today.