—David Pogue, The New York Times, 2006" data-pin-do="buttonBookmark">
"Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'"—David Pogue, The New York Times, 2006
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In my Scientific American column this month, I pondered why it's so hard to predict the future of technology. It sometimes seems as though it's not even worth the effort; inevitably you wind up looking like an idiot.
Especially if the gist of your prediction is that something won't happen or isn't possible. You wind up with enough egg on your face to make an omelet.
If you're not convinced, have a look at these whoppers: some of the biggest muffed tech predictions of all time, and spoken by people you'd expect would know better.
* "I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."—Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet, writing in a 1995 InfoWorld column
Metcalfe is well aware how silly his prediction came to look. He ate his words—literally. In 1999, addressing the Sixth International WWW Conference, Metcalfe put a copy of his infamous column into a blender, pureed it, and drank it.
* "There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States."—T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission commissioner (1961)
Needless to say, Mr. Craven is no longer the commissioner of the FCC.
* "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."—Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
Of course, Watson was referring to room-size mega-machines filled with vacuum tubes. But still.
* "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."—Sir William Preece, chief engineer, British Post Office, 1876
How're the messenger boys working out for you, England?
* "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication."—Western Union internal memo, 1876.
Oops! Western Union sent its last telegram in 2006.
* "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."—Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946
He was right. We've moved on to aluminum and plastic.
* "Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'"—David Pogue, The New York Times, 2006
Yeah, Okay. I'll admit it. My prediction was wrong—but my thinking was right. I knew that Steve Jobs would never tolerate the micromanagement that the carriers (Verizon, AT&T and so on) then exercised on every aspect of every phone they carried. "I cannot imagine Apple giving veto power to anyone over its software design. It just ain't gonna happen," I wrote.
What I didn't realize, of course, is that Jobs planned an end-run—a deal that Cingular ultimately accepted, which ran like this: "You let us design our phone without your input, and I'll give you a five-year exclusive." And the rest is history.
The Bill Gates Collection
Maybe the most quoted bad tech prediction of all time never really happened. It's the famous 1981 Bill Gates quote: "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Unfortunately, there's no evidence that he ever actually said that (and he emphatically denies that he did).
That doesn't let Mr. Gates off the hook, though—he's made plenty of doozies.
* World Economic Forum, 2004: "Two years from now, spam will be solved."
Today, spam accounts for over 90 percent of all e-mail sent.
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19 Comments
Add CommentI understand it may be an urban legend, but...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899 (attributed)
To be fair, most of the entertaining 'predictions' quoted in the article were not really intended to be long term predictions at all, but assessments of then current conditions (often moderated to protect vested interests).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany reasonable assessments of current technological capabilities are soon invalidated...
Did you write this article just to try to make light of your silly prediction? I mean, that Gates tablet PC prediction, in the context of how accurate one can possibly be, is pretty spot on. It's just iPads instead of Windows at the moment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe majority of the quotes on page 1... aren't f%^&*cking predictions! At all! Like jtdwyer said. None of them have the language of future prognostication. They're just observations of the current state. Which were probably pretty damn true, at the time.
Be sure to save all the quotes from your writers predicting sea-level rises, They'll fit nicely into articles at whatever magazine you work in 20 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother one about Apple, and also I suppose not a future prediction, but funny - I remember a Simpson's episode from '96 or so about a rock festival. Homer goes to a record store to buy tickets, and mentions the "US Festival". The kid at the counter says "The *what* festival?" Homer says "You know, the one sponsored by that guy from Apple Computers." The kid says "*What* computers?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"How're the messenger boys working out for you, England?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey're too busy up the chimneys.
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy sentiments exactly, but a quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick.
This article would have been more enlightening if it took the time (and space?) to compare successful predictions with the ones cited. Example: compare Tom Watson's "prediction" with Herb Grosch's "law" which observed that the speed of computers would increase exponentially vs their cost.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLeo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA
MrDrT,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems that climate change is catching up with religion as a topic that attracts heated opinion that ignores facts.
I invite you to check this http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/downloads/797655_16br01_slr_080911.pdf. It is a report on sea levels that finds that actual, measured sea level increases have been tracking the maximums of the range in forecasts produced in the last IPCC report in 2007 and the rate of increase has accelerated in recent decades.
But as with true believers in the religion wars waged through these blogs, I do expect that facts will get in the way of deeply held opinions.
Hey, if you're so sure of that, why don't you come down to Texas and buy some land on the Bolivar Peninsula. A lot of it is vacant since Ike, a Category 2 storm, scrubbed thirty miles of it clean as a whistle. If a storm comes, you can pray the tides away.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou forgot to mention Bill Gates comment some years ago saying that Microsoft did not see any future in the internet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisoops!!! First off all nice collection of such comments and predictions. England is busy with messenger boys. Bill gates has cleared many of bills till now but after all it is history.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy should we remember this odd ones...???
Fusion researchers back in the 60s "We'll have fusion power in 20 years". They repeat that every 20 years... ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSame goes for quantum computers, though I give that area more hope at this point. Not sure about grandiose claims but some useful stuff.
Still, as every engineer knows, the devil is in the details!
When in 1968 I saw the film "2001 A Space Odyssey", I considered it as having a set of predictions. Probably not what Clarke and Kubrick intended, however they strove to make the film scientifically correct. And it's interesting now to see what panned out in their "predictions" and what didn't. Most famously, computing/AI technology is nowhere near the level of the HAL device from the film.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislesizz,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn 1968 IBM was trying to keep computing centralised so they could control it. HAL was their goal, and IBM wanted to control it. IBM research labs developed risc chips and buried them because they recognised the threat to their objectives from decentralised processing.
In real life we ended up with much greater computing power than HAL's, but distributed, not centralised in one giant machine.
There was one Space Odyssey prediction that came true, the tablet PC. When Apple took Samsung to court claiming they stole Apple's idea, Samsung ran Space Odyssey to show that Apple might have stolen Kubrick's idea.
AI has taken time because scientists figured that if they wanted to understand intelligence they needed to work out how the brain works. They are still trying to work it out, but maybe that is because what the brain produces is only intelligent by accident.
Then they have been trying to work out how a machine can handle ambiguity and make decisions with incomplete or contradictory data.
I am not making a prediction, but I do often ask why humans are still driving cars. Horses and carts needed drivers, but we have the technology to have driverless vehicles. We could call for a vehicle when needed to take us door to door. We could have a transport system that work out the best way to get around, taking into account current traffic flows around the system.
Combine that with electric vehicles that dock themselves for a recharge between trips and it looks like something that could be universal within the next 20 years - easy!!
In TechnoFiles you advise predictions should be about things to come based on extrapolations of history and technology. Using this technique I predict the imminent coming of age of robots.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are a lot of big industrial ones in many companies, operated by experts, but (like the olden days of computers) small "personal" ones are expensive, awkward and very limited (e.g. Roomba, or the delivery robots that run up and down the halls of hospitals).
If robots go the way of computers (arguably they are the next incarnation of computers) it won’t be long before you can buy them in K Mart, everyone will NEED at least 3 or 4, and they’ll come in all sizes and do all kinds of incredible things, both necessary and stupid.
...and porn?!
With Jobs' untimely loss, one might wonder what the company will do in his absence. Do about? A replacement genius with backbone and the stick needed to ride rough-shod over the nay sayers. A prophet is not without honor save in his own village, and it's the seasoned inspired surfer who creates just the right size, drift and feel of the giant wave who rides it in. It is no accident that the queen bee is worth her weight in... ( )? Ask any beekeeper.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@David Pogue: Apparently, a lot of the quotes turn out to be urban legends...see http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2005-07-05-famous-quotes_x.htm. For whatever it's worth, I've bought into the myths, as well...I found this article to be quite illuminating.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSomeone already has made a website dedicated to predictions of Apple's failure:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismacobserver.com slash tmo slash death_knell
They have been getting a lot less frequent, so of late they're accepting predictions of the iPhone or iPad's failure.