I recommend that you spend a moment reading this now notorious article which appeared in Newsweek in 1995. It is entitled ‘The Internet? Bah!’ and is written by the eminent astronomer and scientist Clifford Stoll . In the article and in his book , Silicon Snake Oil, Stoll pours scorn on the prospects for the internet and e-commerce. He made a number of predictions which were wrong on an epic scale. For example he said;
- ‘Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.’
- ‘The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.’
- ‘Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. ‘
It is easy for us now to laugh about how wrong he was. We can happily add him to the list of other experts who made egregiously wrong predictions. But how can we be sure that we are not falling into the same trap – confident in our assumptions and dismissing the prospects for all sorts of innovations?
When Stoll reviewed the internet in 1995 he saw all of its flaws and underestimated its powers of development. When we see an emergent technology or idea it is easy to find fault with its early form. But technologies improve. Problems get fixed. People adapt. Small improvements accumulate. We must never underestimate the power of innovation.
For examples of some other predictions famous for being bad have a look at http://www.rinkworks.com/said/predictions.shtml. Irionically the first one listed (“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943) is actually a misquote of his son, the then IBM President Thomas J. Watson, Jr., at the annual IBM stockholders meeting, April 28, 1953. He was speaking about the potential market for IBM 701’s, a model they had just started renting to customers at $12,000 and $18,000 a month.