August 28, 2023 • 42 mins
It turns out that it's not easy to predict what's next to happen in tech. We look at some famously off-the-mark predictions, including some that have been misunderstood or misattributed to the wrong person so that we can set the record straight.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you? You know, Predicting the future is really hard,
(00:25):
even though that's where we're going to spend the rest
of our lives. Thank you, Plan nine from outer Space.
So I used to start every year off with a
big tech predictions episode, and I would sit down and
try and guess what could unfold in the following year.
And I think I had a pretty dismal average on
(00:47):
those predictions. Some years I was like, you know, mostly correct,
but in a very lame way, and a lot of
times I felt like it was because the predictions I
made were very, very safe ones, so I was never
particularly happy with them. Some of the time I would
get big predictions partly right, very very rarely, I would
(01:08):
get one right on the money, but it wouldn't again
be impressive because the writing would already be on the
wall right, like saying that a company is going to
go out of business when the company is currently like
massively struggling, not a big prediction. So yeah, most of
the time I was off the mark, and sometimes by
a significant margin. However, I have learned I should not
(01:29):
beat myself up over that, because, as it turns out,
a lot of people have made really bad tech predictions
over the years. Some of those folks were or are
way way smarter than I am. So today we're going
to talk about a few predictions that were notably incorrect. Now,
(01:50):
let us first remind ourselves, and I'm going to touch
on this a couple times in this episode, that often
we end up being wrong in our predictions because we
are rejecting from what we know is possible today, right,
And that's understandable. But obviously you can't bring into the
picture anything like breakthroughs in fields that make the previously
(02:12):
impossible now possible, or on the flip side, we can't
imagine the hurdles will encounter that will slow or stop
our progress toward a lofty goal. See also driverless cars,
which have proven to be much more complicated than most
folks believed a decade ago. Or if you want to
(02:33):
be really cynical, you can take things like farahanos and say, well,
of course people believed it was possible, even though it
would later turn out that no the technology was not
possible or not practical, all right. So we are also
really good at misattributing statements to folks. So several of
(02:54):
the claims that I'm going to talk about today did
not come from the peer people who often will see
their names attached to those statements, and this is a
real problem. As I was researching this episode, I would
come across a prediction and I'd think, Wow, do they
really say that? Then I would do some more research,
and I would start digging in, and I would start
(03:15):
looking for the history of a particular statement and ultimately
find out that the person who was doing the supposed
prognostication never actually said the ding dang darned thing in
the first place. Sometimes someone else said it and actually
was trying to predict it. Sometimes the prediction just appeared
(03:37):
to be an invention meant to make a famous person
seem foolish. So we'll talk about a few of those
two in this episode. Now. To kick us off, I
thought I would talk about a very likely apocryphal story.
In fact, I'll just say I think this one is fake.
The person who allegedly made the prediction would later deny
(03:59):
that it ever happened. Frequently, and there's no reason to
disbelieve this person. So this relates to Bill Gates, the
co founder of Microsoft. Now, according to the story, supposedly
back in the early eighties, Bill Gates proclaimed that six
hundred and forty kilobytes of memory quote ought to be
(04:21):
enough for anybody. End quote. Now this line pops up
again and again if you start looking for examples of
people who are making bad predictions or outright dumb statements
about technology, and you know, there's this delicious irony, this
person who is really influential in the text space making
(04:42):
an outright incorrect statement or prediction. So, if you're not aware,
six hundred and forty kilobytes was a decent amount of
memory back in nineteen eighty one when this story supposedly
took place. But it's a minuscule amount of memory these days,
like not even worth talking about. Like you know, computers today,
(05:03):
if you if you've got a computer that is on
the low side, you're still talking something like two gigabytes
of memory, maybe up to sixty four gigabytes, and then
you could maybe expanded up to one hundred twenty eight gigabytes.
If you've got a sixty four bit system. So remember
a kilobyte is one thousand bytes. Okay, well, really we
should be doing this in base two. It should really
(05:23):
be one thy twenty four bytes. But it really depends
upon the company, Like some companies will just round it off,
and some companies will use the base two. So either
a thousand or one thousand, twenty four bytes, that's what
a kilobyte is, So six hundred and forty would be
six hundred forty times that. A gigabyte is a billion bytes,
or if we're going base two, it's technically one billion,
(05:45):
seventy three million, seven hundred and forty one thousand, eight
hundred and twenty four bytes. So yeah, like gigabytes are
orders of magnitude larger than kilobytes. So obviously the story
seems to paint Bill Gates as extremely short sighted. To
assume that six hundred and forty kilobytes would be enough
for anybody would be an enormous whiff when these days
(06:07):
even a bargain computer will have orders of magnitude more
memory as standard. But the thing is, Gates says he
never actually made this claim. In fact, he said that
he was always pushing to create systems that could take
advantage of more memory, which is pretty much the opposite
of what the claim says. So on top of that,
(06:28):
while the general stories that Gates said this at some
point at some trade show in nineteen eighty one, there's
no actual record of him saying that. There's no account
from that year that says at this event, during this conversation,
Bill Gates said this thing. So Gates would later say
(06:49):
in an interview quote, I've said some stupid things and
some wrong things, but not that No one involved in
computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory
is enough for all time. End quote. So if Gates
had said this, he would certainly qualify someone making a
wrong prediction or statement about tech. But it doesn't seem
(07:11):
like that ever happened. There's lots of stuff we could
say about Gates that is terrible and deeply disturbing, but
when it comes to making this particular prediction that appears
to just be made up in whole cloth. There's a
similar story that I want to touch on that also
paints a tech leader in a foolish light, but this
(07:33):
is due to a lack of context. This leader would
be Ken Olsen. He was a co founder of a
company called Digital Equipment Corporation or DEC. Later on COMPAC
would acquire DEC, and then even later Hewlett Packard would
acquire COMPAC. So there's always a bigger fish. But the
(07:54):
story goes that Olsen, back in nineteen seventy seven gave
a present at the World Future Society in which he proclaimed,
quote there is no reason for any individual to have
a computer in his home. End quote. Now, if we
take that quote on the face of it, it sounds
like what Olsen was saying is that the very idea
(08:18):
of a home personal computer is ludicrous. And considering that
the nineteen seventies, the late seventies that was the launching
ground for the home computer, Olsen's words appear to be indefensible,
like he was just totally wrong. The personal computer would
become a huge deal. Today it's a market that's nearly
two hundred billion dollars in value. But here's the thing.
(08:41):
Olsen explained that the problem was people were lifting that
statement out of his presentation without the benefit of context.
He later defended what he said. He said he wasn't
talking about personal computers. He wasn't talking about little desktop
computers that let us do all sorts of stuff. He
obviously believe that those would be a thing, because dec
(09:03):
was in that business itself, So there's no reason why
his company would be pursuing that line of business if
he didn't believe that it was viable. Rather, what Olsen
was talking about was that you were not going to
see people get a mainframe like computer system installed in
their home for the purposes of automating everything, like having
(09:25):
a computer run household. That's what he was talking about.
So we're not going to see people get a computer
to be the central operating system of your home. So
we're talking about functions like controlling your lights or climate controls,
or the sort of stuff that we can now do
with network products like smart thermostats and light bulbs. Olsen
(09:48):
was saying he didn't see a future where people were
going to buy and install these hefty computer systems, and
also that people wouldn't want their lives to be run
by computers. And this would have been back in the
night teen seventies when he made this statement, and he
was mostly right right, like, we didn't see people pay
ridiculous amounts of money to automate their homes. Now these days,
(10:09):
we do have lots of home automation products out there,
and depending upon how deeply integrated your computer calendar is
with your life, maybe you do feel like you're being
your life is being run by a computer, which that's
a possibility, but it doesn't. It's not the same thing
as holding his statement up and saying, oh, he was
(10:31):
totally wrong about home computers. So Olsen's point was aimed
more at Pie and the sky futurists who had imagined
the fully automated home, which is a vision that actually
dates back decades. Some of my favorite cartoons as a
kid were cartoons that were about the home of tomorrow,
and the cartoonists and writers found goofy ways to poke
fun at basic automation concepts. Olsen was saying that was
(10:54):
the sort of system no one would be buying for
their home, and he was right about that, but a
misinterpretation of his meaning had people to say that he
was absolutely wrong and that he was talking about home computers. Okay,
Next up, I want to talk about The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy and how Douglas Adams dreamed up an
outlandish technology in the titular Guide. When Adams wrote the
(11:18):
first version of the story, which was actually a radio
play for BBC Radio back in nineteen seventy eight. There
are like half a dozen different versions of the Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy story, and no two are exactly alike.
You know, you have the radio play, you have the novels,
you have a TV series, you've got a movie like
and each version tells the story slightly differently. Even even
(11:40):
the vinyl record which took the radio play scripts, changed things.
So there's no definitive version of Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy. Anyway.
When he wrote this back in nineteen seventy eight, personal
computers were really new, right, they had not been around
for very long. So in his story he has a
(12:00):
character that has this Guide to the Galaxy, and it
is essentially a digital book. It's about the size of
a book, and it contains enormous amounts of information on
pretty much anything you could encounter in the great big
galaxy out there. Although some entries warranted longer descriptions than others,
(12:21):
Earth's entry, for example, was just mostly harmless, and even
before that it was just harmless. While Adams's work reveled
in absurdity and comedy, this idea of this sort of
portable device that could have access to vast amounts of
information would persist beyond the pages of fiction, and as
companies found ways to build smaller components and then cram
(12:43):
those components into microchips, computers got more powerful and capable
of storing more information. Adding the ability to network these
devices and things really would start to take off. This
brings me to Andy Grove, the former CEO of INDI Hell.
Back in nineteen ninety two, Andy Grove famously dismissed the
(13:04):
notion that before long, executives would be walking around with
a wireless digital personal communications device capable of doing things
like sending and receiving email or can you just imagine
being able to pull up like real time local maps
complete with traffic information and a suggested route to get
to your next destination. Essentially, Grove thought this vision, which
(13:28):
would slowly coalesce into the smartphone, was a pipe dream,
and that it was something being hyped up by companies
that were greedy but unrealistic. Of course, Grove was wrong.
The invention of the personal digital assistant and then the
gradual convergence of the PDA with the cell phone would
give birth to the modern smartphone, and it wouldn't just
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be executives who would carry them around. It would be
tons of people, hundreds of millions of people. Something that
was once in the realm of science fiction would now
be a reality. Now we all have access to a
vast database of information. Some of the information is really useful,
some of it is diverting, some of it's outright harmful.
(14:13):
We can send and receive emails or instant messages, even
photos and videos. We could jump online and interact with
various platforms. We can shop from our phones, we can
use them as navigation devices. We could just play with
them like toys. It turns out that the pipe dream
was in fact a possibility and then a reality. But
(14:35):
back in nineteen ninety two you could probably understand Grove's skepticism.
Apple launched the Newton in ninety two, and that became
the first product that would be called a personal Digital assistant,
or PDA. But that particular device had a lot of
limitations and quirks, plus it lacked wireless connectivity. Still, IBM
released a PDA with analog cell phone connectivity in nineteen
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ninety four, and Nokia followed with a PA that had
digital cell phone connectivity in nineteen ninety six, so it
did not take very long for Grove's prediction to fall flat. Okay,
we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be
back with some more bad tech predictions. We're back and
(15:24):
next up. Sometimes the guy who helped build the thing
ends up being very wrong about the thing. So in
this case, I'm talking about Robert or Bob Metcalf. So
when he was a graduate student, Metcalf worked on ARPANET.
So for those who are unfamiliar with arpa neet, you
(15:45):
can think of it as sort of the predecessor to
the Internet. You add a lot of engineers and scientists
and researchers who worked to create the means to network
different computers together, even if those computers were far apart
from from one another. This was a non trivial task.
You know, these different computers worked on different operating systems.
(16:06):
You could think of it as they communicated in different languages.
So you had to create a way, a common ground
for these different machines to be able to send and
receive information in a useful way with it or other machines.
And then how does that information travel across communications lines.
You had to come up with ways for that to
(16:26):
be foolproof, or at least as close to foolproof as
you could get, because if it were something where it
was just a solid connection and there was an interruption
in that connection, then what happens to the process. These
were all practical problems that the arpinet folks had to solve,
and the work would become a foundational component for the
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Internet which would follow after arpinet. Metcalf wrote an early
definitive work describing different ways to use the arpinet. He
also included information on resources and instructions to make use
of arpinet. He would then go on to take a
job at Xerox Park. That's a facility that I've talked
about in recent tech Stuff episodes, very important in various
(17:09):
technological innovations, although Xerox itself had a reputation for failing
to capitalize on the developments that came out of Park.
And while he was at Park, he developed ethernet. That's
the cable based technology that allows data transfers between connected computers.
He based it off of the Alohan net that was
used by the University of Hawaii, which relied on radio
(17:32):
waves rather than cables to send signals back and forth.
But he built upon the technologies of alohan Net to
develop ethernet. Okay, but let's flash forward to nineteen ninety five,
So this is five years after the US government had
already decommissioned Arpinet. It had been shut down a couple
of years earlier, got decommissioned in nineteen ninety the Internet
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itself was actually really taking off. It was helped in
large part by the development of the Worldwide Web, which
wasn't a thing when the Internet was first coalescing, but
became a thing in the early nineties. And on December fourth,
nineteen ninety five, the magazine InfoWorld published an article written
(18:16):
by Metcalf in which the network visionary said, quote, I
predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section
here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in
nineteen ninety six catastrophically collapse end quote. So Metcalf thought
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the Internet was growing beyond the technological and economic capacities
that would be needed to support the Internet. He envisioned
a scenario in which the money just wouldn't be there
to build out the infrastructure that would be required to
allow for the explosive growth. He didn't deny that the
Internet was growing. He just said it's going to reach
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a tipping point where where we're not able to supply
it with the technology needed to let it run, and
it's going to collapse under its own weight. So he
also predicted that we were going to see a lot
more vulnerabilities in the Internet that would facilitate security breaches,
and that would convince folks that the Internet would be
too dangerous. Right once you have a couple of big
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security breaches, people would say, oh, we can't you know,
we can't rely on the Internet because if we do,
we're going to potentially lose everything. So he proclaimed that
he would even eat his words if he were proven wrong.
In April nineteen ninety seven, Bob Metcalf proved to be
a man of his word. While at a tech conference,
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Metcalf had a cake wheeled out. His column was printed
on icing on the cake. Some versions of the story
say that the crowd kind of turned against him, saying
that he was taking the easy way out, and so
at least one version of the story says that he
then had the actual physical article on paper brought out
out and then put the article in a blender with
(20:02):
some water and blended it into kind of slurry, and
then he ate the goop. But either way, he reportedly
did in fact eat his own words and admitted that
he had been wrong, which I totally respect. Metcalf failed
to predict the innovations that would drive the Internet's expansion,
and again that really gets back to that heart of
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a lot of wrong predictions that we lean so heavily
on basing our guess of what comes next by looking
at how we do things currently. But obviously this fails
to take into account new techniques and technologies and ideas, which,
let's be fair, makes sense because if we could predict
new techniques and technologies and ideas, we would already have them. Like,
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you can't fault people for not guessing something that hasn't
been thought up yet, because otherwise they would have thought
it up. Of course, technologists aren't the only ones who
get tech predictions wrong. Economists can do a real fine
job of getting stuff wrong too, while also referencing a technologist,
perhaps in the process. See In nineteen ninety eight, an
(21:10):
economist named Paul Krugman had a dire prediction for the Internet,
and he ended up referencing our previous example of Robert Metcalf.
Krugman wrote an article in a magazine titled red Herring
and said, quote, the growth of the Internet will slow
drastically as the flaw in Metcalf's law, which states that
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the number of potential connections in a network is proportional
to the square of the number of participants, becomes apparent.
Most people have nothing to say to each other. By
two thousand and five or so, it will become clear
that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no
greater than the fax machines. End quote. All right, so
(21:51):
this does raise the question about Metcalf's law. What is that?
What actually comes from an observation that Robert Metcalf had
made way back in nineteen eighty, which was that the
financial value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the
square of the number of connected communication devices on that network.
Sometimes we simplify this to say the number of users
on a network, but it's really more fair to say
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nodes or connected devices. Essentially, met Keef was saying that
the more devices you have connected within a network, the
more possible connections exist between those devices, and we can
express this mathematically with the equation of n times n
minus one divided by two. In in this case would
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be the number of users or connected devices or nodes
however you want to think of it. So if we
only have two devices, right, let's say that we've got
a direct connection between device one and device two. But
that's it. Well, we would fill in our equation. We
would use two in place of end, So our equation
will be two times two minus one, which is one
and then divided by two. So then that means we
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get two times one divided by two. That means we
eventually just get one. That's the number of possible connections
between these two connected devices. You only have one possible connection.
But let's say we've got twenty connected devices on this network. Well,
that means now our equation is twenty times twenty minus
one divided by two, So that means it's twenty times
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nineteen then divide by two, or we get one hundred
and ninety possible connections. So as you add more users
or devices to a network, then network's value increases significantly.
But Krugman was saying that if no one has anything
interesting to say to each other then you don't really
have any added value there, and then growth is going
to slow down, and this is going to show that
(23:40):
Metcalf's law is flawed. Clearly, the era of social media
has proved Krugman way wrong. People spend all day not
saying anything to each other, at least nothing of substance,
and it is going like gangbusters. Even as some platforms
are slowing down, others are picking up. Krugman and himself
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had said that he was just trying to be provocative,
and sometimes when you do try to be provocative, you
end up just being very wrong, and he just happened
to be very very wrong about this. Now, sometimes we
get predictions of doom and gloom from someone who appears
to be driven by having a vested interest in a
competing technology. They say, oh, that technology is going to fail,
(24:23):
partly because they are supporting a different technology. There's a
quote frequently and also incorrectly attributed to a Hollywood movie
producer named Darryl F. Zanuk. He was one of the
folks responsible for creating the film company twentieth Century Pictures,
among a lot of other things. But the story goes
that Xanik famously and incorrectly dismissed the impact of television, saying, quote,
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video isn't able to hold on to the market it captures.
After the first six months, people soon get tired of
staring at a plywood box every night. End quote. Now,
clearly the movie studios saw television as an existential threat.
I mean, why would people go to the cinema to
spend a few hours watching movies and cartoons and newsreels
(25:12):
if they could get access to many of those things
just from home through the television. For a while, film
studios saw television as being a true threat to their
very existence, at least until movie studios started to consolidate
with TV studios. So, of course it would be delicious
to point to a movie mogul who stuck his neck
out to proclaim that television would be no more than
(25:33):
a passing fad, only to be proven very wrong and
television would become an incredibly important component in communications. Now,
I'm not saying that no one at all ever made
these quotes apart from like like, I'm not saying they
were just invented, but it certainly doesn't appear to have
been Zanak. He is not the person who said these things.
(25:57):
The website quote investigator actually looked into this particular statement.
The earliest version they found from the statements about video
and the Plywood box actually came from a Wall Street
Journal article back in nineteen fifty one, and it appeared
as two separate statements from two different people. So the
(26:18):
video isn't able to hold onto the market it captures
after the first six months. Statement supposedly came from a
movie executive based out of New York. The phrase people
soon get tired of staring at plywood box every night
came from quote a San Franciscan end quote. In fact,
it doesn't even get specific enough to say it's a
movie executive in San Francisco, although we can assume that
(26:41):
was the case. However, either way, Xanik, the person who
often gets attributed with this these pair of quotes that
are combined into a single quote, he was based in Hollywood,
so presumably he was neither of the unnamed individuals who
provided the Wall Street Journal with these quotes. So Xanuuk
(27:01):
is in the clear. Still assuming the Wall Street Journal
reporter was not inventing quotations of a thin air, there
were two people in the movie business who were brazenly
predicting the downfall of television. Now, this was during a
time when movie theaters were starting to see a rise
in attendance. There had been multiple years of audience drop off,
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so like four years in a row they saw smaller
audiences for movie theaters, and then things were picking up
in nineteen fifty one. So it's possible that movie executives
were chomping their cigars and saying, ha, TV took a
swing at us, but it's not staying around. Light my
cigar with another one hundred dollars bill or something. I
(27:45):
admittedly have a very cartoonish imagination. They probably weren't saying that,
but it does make it sound like movie executives were thinking, oh,
television took a temporary hit out of our business. But
as it turns out, people prefer their experience in the theaters,
TV is too expensive for the average person, etc. Etc.
(28:06):
And so now we're just dismissing it. And of course
it would turn out that television was not just a
passing fad, at least not a short one. You could
argue that maybe because of cord cutting and stuff, that
it was a very long passing fad, but certainly at
the time. It wasn't just a passing fad, and that
predicting that people would get tired of TV and come
(28:26):
back to the movie theaters was just an optimistic prediction
on behalf of the executives. Another example of someone making
a prediction when he had a vested interest in the
outcome is Steve Balmer, the former CEO of Microsoft. Balmer
was actually employee number thirty at Microsoft when he joined
in nineteen eighty, and he became CEO of the company
(28:48):
in two thousand. His presentations are the stuff of legend.
If you've not had the experience of digging up a
clip of Steve Balmer on stage at some event over
on YouTube, you need to give that a go. There
are a lot of different ones. The famous one is developers, Developers, Developers,
but that's just one. You know, you should check them out.
Just make sure your volume is turned down a bit,
(29:10):
because that dude loves dal and scream and intense is
a good way to describe him. Anyway. In two thousand
and seven, Balmer reacted to something that, unbeknownst to pretty
much everyone at the time, was actually going to lead
to enormous changes in the tech space. And that was
the debut of the Apple iPhone. Balmer said, quote, there's
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no chance that the iPhone is going to get any
significant market share. No chance end quote, and he went
on to call the iPhone a quote five hundred dollars
subsidized item end quote. He predicted that Microsoft's software would
be in most phones on the market, and that while
Apple could make a lot of money selling phones, they
(29:53):
would not make up a significant amount of the market share.
They would maybe have two or three percent of the
market at best. So Microsoft strategy was a lot like
what we would see from Google a little later on,
which was to create the operating system in the software
for smartphones, but to leave the manufacturing to the handset companies.
Apple was taking an all in approach rather than licensing
(30:16):
software to businesses that made the hardware. Balmer was convinced
that was the bad way to go, that it made
way more sense to just focus on the software and
license it out to the hardware companies. But as it
turned out, Apple strategy worked like gangbusters. In two thousand
and seven, Apple sold around one point thirty nine million iPhones.
That was the year that they introduced it. They didn't
(30:38):
offer it for sale until the back half of the year.
In two thousand and eight, Apple sold eleven point three
six million iPhones, so more than around ten million more
than they had the year before. By the end of
the next year, that doubled again at around twenty point
seven three million units sold. In fact, Apple saw sales
(30:58):
numbers increase every year until you get to twenty sixteen,
because in twenty fifteen the company sold two hundred and
thirty one point two two million iPhones, and in twenty
sixteen it sold quote unquote only two hundred eleven point
one point eight million units, still more than two hundred
million units, but a drop of around twenty million. As
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for Microsoft, the company pushed hard to try and establish
a foothold in smartphone operating systems, but it just never
really worked out for the company. Companies stopped making Windows
phone devices in twenty seventeen, and the company completely ended
support for the operating system in twenty twenty two. Okay,
we're going to take another quick break, but we still
(31:39):
have some more bad predictions to get through. We're back.
And just before the break, I was talking about Steve
Baumer dismissing the iPhone, and of course it turned out
that he was totally off. I mean, granted, it's not
(32:01):
like he could have said that the iPhone's going to
be a huge hit. He was leading a major competitor
to Apple at the time, So whether he believed that
the iPhone truly was just gonna be a failure or not,
I can't say, but I certainly don't think he could
have said anything different. Anyway, Apple also was not immune
to making bad predictions. Steve Jobs, a man through force
(32:24):
of personality and a famous intolerance for deviation from his vision,
returned to a struggling Apple in the nineteen nineties and
set it on a path to become a company that
is today worth more than two point eight trillion dollars
at the time of this recording. Anyway, back in two
thousand and three, Apple introduced the iTunes music store for
the first time. So the company had already introduced the
(32:46):
iPod a couple of years earlier, but now it was
introducing an online digital music store where you could buy
albums and tracks, either to port over to an iPod
or to listen from your computer. Job believed the customers
wanted to own their music. He was dismissive of the
business model that was being used by Rhapsody and by
(33:09):
press Play, both of which offered subscription services to customers
to get access to music. So you pay a certain
amount of money each month and then you're able to
listen to music that is covered by these different companies.
Jobs said, quote, we think subscriptions are the wrong path.
One of the reasons we think this is because people
(33:30):
bought their music for as long as we can remember.
We bought our music on LPs. We bought our music
on cassettes, we bought our music on CDs. And we
think people want to buy their music on the internet
by buying downloads, just like they bought LPs, just like
they bought cassettes, just like they bought CDs. They're used
(33:51):
to buying their music, and they're used to getting a
broad set of rights with it. When you own your music,
it never goes away. When you own your music, you
have a broad set of personal use rights. You can
listen to it however you want. End quote. And it's
not like Jobs was wrong, right. People do like to
own stuff. I think it's safe to say that most
(34:12):
people definitely prefer owning music to losing access to something
because a licensing deal has expired. I'm sure everyone out
there has had that experience where something that used to
be covered on one of the streaming services you either
listen to or watch or whatever goes away because a
licensing deal expired, or because the company that was in
(34:34):
charge of it decided to get rid of it because
of you know, sticky residual deals. I'm looking at you
Max and Zaslov, who would remove stuff so that he
wouldn't have to worry about paying residuals to people anyway,
we know that people prefer being able to access their stuff.
They hate it when the stuff goes away. But despite
all that, the subscription based business model has seen incredible success.
(34:59):
It's a very convene thing, like instead of buying track
by track or album by album, you get access to
a huge library of material. In fact, it was so
successful that Apple would introduce its own music subscription service
in twenty fifteen. Notably, Steve Jobs had passed away in
twenty eleven, so it didn't happen within his lifetime, and
(35:21):
he again he was famously dismissive of it when he
introduced the music store. But in twenty fifteen we got
Apple Music, which would expand to include not just music
tracks but also video. Oh. Also, journalists get stuff wrong
a lot too. Goodness knows, I've gotten a lot wrong.
Although I really shouldn't reference myself as a journalist. I'm
(35:43):
not really a journalist. I don't have those qualifications. But
David Pogue wrote a piece for The New York Times
about Apple in September two thousand and six. That piece
was called iPhone Rumors, and it starts off with quote,
Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with
a cell phone. My answer is probably never. End quote.
(36:04):
And of course Apple introduced the iPhone the very next year.
But if you read Poke's piece, he lays out some
really good arguments about why it would make sense to
be skeptical that Apple would release a phone. One of
his really big points is that telecommunications carriers, you know,
the companies that actually own the infrastructure that allows communication
across devices. You know your AT and t's, your Verizons,
(36:27):
et cetera, they have a lot of power when it
comes to hardware. The telecommunications companies can actually approve or
deny features on devices. Essentially, they do this by saying, Okay,
well we're not going to let your hardware work on
our network. If you include that feature, we don't want
to support that feature. We will not allow you to
(36:49):
use that device on our network if they don't like something.
So Pogue's point was that Apple was not the type
of company that would compromise or allow some other business
that little control into their processes, and that was reasonable,
Like you can't imagine Steve Jobs being told in no
uncertain terms like we're not going to allow that. You
(37:09):
have to design it this way. So it seemed to
be a reasonable conclusion to say that Apple was not
going to release a phone in the first place. But
as it turned out, Apple worked very closely with AT
and T for the launch of the iPhone. It was
an AT and T exclusive here in the United States
when it first launched. But common sense would have suggested
that Apple would not have managed such a relationship and
(37:30):
that the company would have instead focused on technologies where
it would maintain near total control of the user experience.
So you can understand why Pogue made that particular statement.
It just turned out to be completely wrong, but again,
just based on the information that was available, it was
an understandable one. So yeah, it is really fun to
(37:51):
go back over these kind of old statements and old
predictions and see with the benefit of hindsight how off
they were. Or at least it's fun to me, because
again I used to make predictions, and I was often
just as wrong, or sometimes far more wrong than any
of the examples I've cited here. I think that some
of y'all might even remember one of those I famously predicted.
(38:13):
I don't know, famous that's giving myself too much credit.
I very much predicted that the iPad was going to
be a flop. I could not see the iPad succeeding,
and that was because tablet computers had been around for ages.
Even touchscreen tablet computers had been around for quite some time,
but no one had managed to make one that appealed
(38:36):
to the broader consumer market. The tablet computers that were
in use were niche products. They were used in very
specific applications, like you had some in the sciences, you
had some in medicine, but you didn't really have a
consumer tablet that had seen great success. And I just
couldn't imagine people wanting something of that form. Factor too
(38:59):
big to be easily portable unless you're carrying a bag around,
too small and too limited to be really useful if
you wanted it for something like productivity, because typing on
a screen is far slower than typing on a keyboard.
So I just assumed that even Apple wouldn't be able
to make the tablet computer commercial success for the consumer market,
(39:21):
and I was totally wrong. I doubted Steve Jobs's marketing ability,
I doubted Apple's engineering and making a product that had
a very compelling user interface. And my prediction was one
hundred percent incorrect, and I own it. It was, you know,
(39:42):
I felt like I had based it on some solid ground,
but it all turned out to be quicksand I guess
so it can happen to anyone. I don't think I'll
be bringing the Predictions episodes back anytime soon. They would
cause me huge amounts of stress because it's hard, right.
It involves doing a lot of work to just look
(40:03):
at what is the current state of technology, and even
working from that, I have an incomplete picture, because obviously
there are people and companies working on things that are
not yet publicly known, and so I have an incomplete
picture from that respect, and basing predictions off of an
incomplete picture is even more shoddy than just you know,
(40:26):
having to concede that you can't anticipate the innovation that's
going to follow in the months ahead. So I don't
think i'll bring it back. We'll see. Maybe toward the
end of the year, I'll think, ah, heck, I'll give
it another shot, and I'll see if I can predict
what will happen in twenty twenty four. But honestly, when
I look back at the last like three years, when
(40:47):
I stopped doing predictions episodes, I see so many examples
of stuff I never would have predicted. I definitely wouldn't
have predicted Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, for example. That would
not have been on my list. I'm not sure that
I would have predicted. You know, everyone knows my opinion
of Elon Musk is pretty dodgy. But I don't think
I would have predicted that Elon Musk taking over Twitter
(41:08):
would lead to such a train wreck, a slow degrading
situation for Twitter at this point, as the company appears
to be falling apart. I don't know that I would
predicted that either. So yeah, we'll see. If I'm feeling
spunky at the end of the year, maybe I'll give
(41:29):
it another go, but it is interesting to keep an
eye out for these. Maybe I'll also do another episode
where I'll take good predictions, stuff that people thought was
coming across the horizon and it turned out they were,
you know, mostly right, or maybe completely right. That would
be fun too. It's fun to look at the ones
where we got it totally wrong because it kind of
(41:51):
brings a little humility into the situation. But once in
a while people will make a prediction and boy how
they they get it bang on the money. So maybe
I should try and do an episode it's based on
that too. In the meantime, I hope you are all
well and I will talk to you again really soon.
(42:15):
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you? You know, Predicting the future is really hard,
(00:25):
even though that's where we're going to spend the rest
of our lives. Thank you, Plan nine from outer Space.
So I used to start every year off with a
big tech predictions episode, and I would sit down and
try and guess what could unfold in the following year.
And I think I had a pretty dismal average on
(00:47):
those predictions. Some years I was like, you know, mostly correct,
but in a very lame way, and a lot of
times I felt like it was because the predictions I
made were very, very safe ones, so I was never
particularly happy with them. Some of the time I would
get big predictions partly right, very very rarely, I would
(01:08):
get one right on the money, but it wouldn't again
be impressive because the writing would already be on the
wall right, like saying that a company is going to
go out of business when the company is currently like
massively struggling, not a big prediction. So yeah, most of
the time I was off the mark, and sometimes by
a significant margin. However, I have learned I should not
(01:29):
beat myself up over that, because, as it turns out,
a lot of people have made really bad tech predictions
over the years. Some of those folks were or are
way way smarter than I am. So today we're going
to talk about a few predictions that were notably incorrect. Now,
(01:50):
let us first remind ourselves, and I'm going to touch
on this a couple times in this episode, that often
we end up being wrong in our predictions because we
are rejecting from what we know is possible today, right,
And that's understandable. But obviously you can't bring into the
picture anything like breakthroughs in fields that make the previously
(02:12):
impossible now possible, or on the flip side, we can't
imagine the hurdles will encounter that will slow or stop
our progress toward a lofty goal. See also driverless cars,
which have proven to be much more complicated than most
folks believed a decade ago. Or if you want to
(02:33):
be really cynical, you can take things like farahanos and say, well,
of course people believed it was possible, even though it
would later turn out that no the technology was not
possible or not practical, all right. So we are also
really good at misattributing statements to folks. So several of
(02:54):
the claims that I'm going to talk about today did
not come from the peer people who often will see
their names attached to those statements, and this is a
real problem. As I was researching this episode, I would
come across a prediction and I'd think, Wow, do they
really say that? Then I would do some more research,
and I would start digging in, and I would start
(03:15):
looking for the history of a particular statement and ultimately
find out that the person who was doing the supposed
prognostication never actually said the ding dang darned thing in
the first place. Sometimes someone else said it and actually
was trying to predict it. Sometimes the prediction just appeared
(03:37):
to be an invention meant to make a famous person
seem foolish. So we'll talk about a few of those
two in this episode. Now. To kick us off, I
thought I would talk about a very likely apocryphal story.
In fact, I'll just say I think this one is fake.
The person who allegedly made the prediction would later deny
(03:59):
that it ever happened. Frequently, and there's no reason to
disbelieve this person. So this relates to Bill Gates, the
co founder of Microsoft. Now, according to the story, supposedly
back in the early eighties, Bill Gates proclaimed that six
hundred and forty kilobytes of memory quote ought to be
(04:21):
enough for anybody. End quote. Now this line pops up
again and again if you start looking for examples of
people who are making bad predictions or outright dumb statements
about technology, and you know, there's this delicious irony, this
person who is really influential in the text space making
(04:42):
an outright incorrect statement or prediction. So, if you're not aware,
six hundred and forty kilobytes was a decent amount of
memory back in nineteen eighty one when this story supposedly
took place. But it's a minuscule amount of memory these days,
like not even worth talking about. Like you know, computers today,
(05:03):
if you if you've got a computer that is on
the low side, you're still talking something like two gigabytes
of memory, maybe up to sixty four gigabytes, and then
you could maybe expanded up to one hundred twenty eight gigabytes.
If you've got a sixty four bit system. So remember
a kilobyte is one thousand bytes. Okay, well, really we
should be doing this in base two. It should really
(05:23):
be one thy twenty four bytes. But it really depends
upon the company, Like some companies will just round it off,
and some companies will use the base two. So either
a thousand or one thousand, twenty four bytes, that's what
a kilobyte is, So six hundred and forty would be
six hundred forty times that. A gigabyte is a billion bytes,
or if we're going base two, it's technically one billion,
(05:45):
seventy three million, seven hundred and forty one thousand, eight
hundred and twenty four bytes. So yeah, like gigabytes are
orders of magnitude larger than kilobytes. So obviously the story
seems to paint Bill Gates as extremely short sighted. To
assume that six hundred and forty kilobytes would be enough
for anybody would be an enormous whiff when these days
(06:07):
even a bargain computer will have orders of magnitude more
memory as standard. But the thing is, Gates says he
never actually made this claim. In fact, he said that
he was always pushing to create systems that could take
advantage of more memory, which is pretty much the opposite
of what the claim says. So on top of that,
(06:28):
while the general stories that Gates said this at some
point at some trade show in nineteen eighty one, there's
no actual record of him saying that. There's no account
from that year that says at this event, during this conversation,
Bill Gates said this thing. So Gates would later say
(06:49):
in an interview quote, I've said some stupid things and
some wrong things, but not that No one involved in
computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory
is enough for all time. End quote. So if Gates
had said this, he would certainly qualify someone making a
wrong prediction or statement about tech. But it doesn't seem
(07:11):
like that ever happened. There's lots of stuff we could
say about Gates that is terrible and deeply disturbing, but
when it comes to making this particular prediction that appears
to just be made up in whole cloth. There's a
similar story that I want to touch on that also
paints a tech leader in a foolish light, but this
(07:33):
is due to a lack of context. This leader would
be Ken Olsen. He was a co founder of a
company called Digital Equipment Corporation or DEC. Later on COMPAC
would acquire DEC, and then even later Hewlett Packard would
acquire COMPAC. So there's always a bigger fish. But the
(07:54):
story goes that Olsen, back in nineteen seventy seven gave
a present at the World Future Society in which he proclaimed,
quote there is no reason for any individual to have
a computer in his home. End quote. Now, if we
take that quote on the face of it, it sounds
like what Olsen was saying is that the very idea
(08:18):
of a home personal computer is ludicrous. And considering that
the nineteen seventies, the late seventies that was the launching
ground for the home computer, Olsen's words appear to be indefensible,
like he was just totally wrong. The personal computer would
become a huge deal. Today it's a market that's nearly
two hundred billion dollars in value. But here's the thing.
(08:41):
Olsen explained that the problem was people were lifting that
statement out of his presentation without the benefit of context.
He later defended what he said. He said he wasn't
talking about personal computers. He wasn't talking about little desktop
computers that let us do all sorts of stuff. He
obviously believe that those would be a thing, because dec
(09:03):
was in that business itself, So there's no reason why
his company would be pursuing that line of business if
he didn't believe that it was viable. Rather, what Olsen
was talking about was that you were not going to
see people get a mainframe like computer system installed in
their home for the purposes of automating everything, like having
(09:25):
a computer run household. That's what he was talking about.
So we're not going to see people get a computer
to be the central operating system of your home. So
we're talking about functions like controlling your lights or climate controls,
or the sort of stuff that we can now do
with network products like smart thermostats and light bulbs. Olsen
(09:48):
was saying he didn't see a future where people were
going to buy and install these hefty computer systems, and
also that people wouldn't want their lives to be run
by computers. And this would have been back in the
night teen seventies when he made this statement, and he
was mostly right right, like, we didn't see people pay
ridiculous amounts of money to automate their homes. Now these days,
(10:09):
we do have lots of home automation products out there,
and depending upon how deeply integrated your computer calendar is
with your life, maybe you do feel like you're being
your life is being run by a computer, which that's
a possibility, but it doesn't. It's not the same thing
as holding his statement up and saying, oh, he was
(10:31):
totally wrong about home computers. So Olsen's point was aimed
more at Pie and the sky futurists who had imagined
the fully automated home, which is a vision that actually
dates back decades. Some of my favorite cartoons as a
kid were cartoons that were about the home of tomorrow,
and the cartoonists and writers found goofy ways to poke
fun at basic automation concepts. Olsen was saying that was
(10:54):
the sort of system no one would be buying for
their home, and he was right about that, but a
misinterpretation of his meaning had people to say that he
was absolutely wrong and that he was talking about home computers. Okay,
Next up, I want to talk about The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy and how Douglas Adams dreamed up an
outlandish technology in the titular Guide. When Adams wrote the
(11:18):
first version of the story, which was actually a radio
play for BBC Radio back in nineteen seventy eight. There
are like half a dozen different versions of the Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy story, and no two are exactly alike.
You know, you have the radio play, you have the novels,
you have a TV series, you've got a movie like
and each version tells the story slightly differently. Even even
(11:40):
the vinyl record which took the radio play scripts, changed things.
So there's no definitive version of Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy. Anyway.
When he wrote this back in nineteen seventy eight, personal
computers were really new, right, they had not been around
for very long. So in his story he has a
(12:00):
character that has this Guide to the Galaxy, and it
is essentially a digital book. It's about the size of
a book, and it contains enormous amounts of information on
pretty much anything you could encounter in the great big
galaxy out there. Although some entries warranted longer descriptions than others,
(12:21):
Earth's entry, for example, was just mostly harmless, and even
before that it was just harmless. While Adams's work reveled
in absurdity and comedy, this idea of this sort of
portable device that could have access to vast amounts of
information would persist beyond the pages of fiction, and as
companies found ways to build smaller components and then cram
(12:43):
those components into microchips, computers got more powerful and capable
of storing more information. Adding the ability to network these
devices and things really would start to take off. This
brings me to Andy Grove, the former CEO of INDI Hell.
Back in nineteen ninety two, Andy Grove famously dismissed the
(13:04):
notion that before long, executives would be walking around with
a wireless digital personal communications device capable of doing things
like sending and receiving email or can you just imagine
being able to pull up like real time local maps
complete with traffic information and a suggested route to get
to your next destination. Essentially, Grove thought this vision, which
(13:28):
would slowly coalesce into the smartphone, was a pipe dream,
and that it was something being hyped up by companies
that were greedy but unrealistic. Of course, Grove was wrong.
The invention of the personal digital assistant and then the
gradual convergence of the PDA with the cell phone would
give birth to the modern smartphone, and it wouldn't just
(13:51):
be executives who would carry them around. It would be
tons of people, hundreds of millions of people. Something that
was once in the realm of science fiction would now
be a reality. Now we all have access to a
vast database of information. Some of the information is really useful,
some of it is diverting, some of it's outright harmful.
(14:13):
We can send and receive emails or instant messages, even
photos and videos. We could jump online and interact with
various platforms. We can shop from our phones, we can
use them as navigation devices. We could just play with
them like toys. It turns out that the pipe dream
was in fact a possibility and then a reality. But
(14:35):
back in nineteen ninety two you could probably understand Grove's skepticism.
Apple launched the Newton in ninety two, and that became
the first product that would be called a personal Digital assistant,
or PDA. But that particular device had a lot of
limitations and quirks, plus it lacked wireless connectivity. Still, IBM
released a PDA with analog cell phone connectivity in nineteen
(14:56):
ninety four, and Nokia followed with a PA that had
digital cell phone connectivity in nineteen ninety six, so it
did not take very long for Grove's prediction to fall flat. Okay,
we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be
back with some more bad tech predictions. We're back and
(15:24):
next up. Sometimes the guy who helped build the thing
ends up being very wrong about the thing. So in
this case, I'm talking about Robert or Bob Metcalf. So
when he was a graduate student, Metcalf worked on ARPANET.
So for those who are unfamiliar with arpa neet, you
(15:45):
can think of it as sort of the predecessor to
the Internet. You add a lot of engineers and scientists
and researchers who worked to create the means to network
different computers together, even if those computers were far apart
from from one another. This was a non trivial task.
You know, these different computers worked on different operating systems.
(16:06):
You could think of it as they communicated in different languages.
So you had to create a way, a common ground
for these different machines to be able to send and
receive information in a useful way with it or other machines.
And then how does that information travel across communications lines.
You had to come up with ways for that to
(16:26):
be foolproof, or at least as close to foolproof as
you could get, because if it were something where it
was just a solid connection and there was an interruption
in that connection, then what happens to the process. These
were all practical problems that the arpinet folks had to solve,
and the work would become a foundational component for the
(16:46):
Internet which would follow after arpinet. Metcalf wrote an early
definitive work describing different ways to use the arpinet. He
also included information on resources and instructions to make use
of arpinet. He would then go on to take a
job at Xerox Park. That's a facility that I've talked
about in recent tech Stuff episodes, very important in various
(17:09):
technological innovations, although Xerox itself had a reputation for failing
to capitalize on the developments that came out of Park.
And while he was at Park, he developed ethernet. That's
the cable based technology that allows data transfers between connected computers.
He based it off of the Alohan net that was
used by the University of Hawaii, which relied on radio
(17:32):
waves rather than cables to send signals back and forth.
But he built upon the technologies of alohan Net to
develop ethernet. Okay, but let's flash forward to nineteen ninety five,
So this is five years after the US government had
already decommissioned Arpinet. It had been shut down a couple
of years earlier, got decommissioned in nineteen ninety the Internet
(17:55):
itself was actually really taking off. It was helped in
large part by the development of the Worldwide Web, which
wasn't a thing when the Internet was first coalescing, but
became a thing in the early nineties. And on December fourth,
nineteen ninety five, the magazine InfoWorld published an article written
(18:16):
by Metcalf in which the network visionary said, quote, I
predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section
here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in
nineteen ninety six catastrophically collapse end quote. So Metcalf thought
(18:36):
the Internet was growing beyond the technological and economic capacities
that would be needed to support the Internet. He envisioned
a scenario in which the money just wouldn't be there
to build out the infrastructure that would be required to
allow for the explosive growth. He didn't deny that the
Internet was growing. He just said it's going to reach
(18:59):
a tipping point where where we're not able to supply
it with the technology needed to let it run, and
it's going to collapse under its own weight. So he
also predicted that we were going to see a lot
more vulnerabilities in the Internet that would facilitate security breaches,
and that would convince folks that the Internet would be
too dangerous. Right once you have a couple of big
(19:20):
security breaches, people would say, oh, we can't you know,
we can't rely on the Internet because if we do,
we're going to potentially lose everything. So he proclaimed that
he would even eat his words if he were proven wrong.
In April nineteen ninety seven, Bob Metcalf proved to be
a man of his word. While at a tech conference,
(19:41):
Metcalf had a cake wheeled out. His column was printed
on icing on the cake. Some versions of the story
say that the crowd kind of turned against him, saying
that he was taking the easy way out, and so
at least one version of the story says that he
then had the actual physical article on paper brought out
out and then put the article in a blender with
(20:02):
some water and blended it into kind of slurry, and
then he ate the goop. But either way, he reportedly
did in fact eat his own words and admitted that
he had been wrong, which I totally respect. Metcalf failed
to predict the innovations that would drive the Internet's expansion,
and again that really gets back to that heart of
(20:23):
a lot of wrong predictions that we lean so heavily
on basing our guess of what comes next by looking
at how we do things currently. But obviously this fails
to take into account new techniques and technologies and ideas, which,
let's be fair, makes sense because if we could predict
new techniques and technologies and ideas, we would already have them. Like,
(20:46):
you can't fault people for not guessing something that hasn't
been thought up yet, because otherwise they would have thought
it up. Of course, technologists aren't the only ones who
get tech predictions wrong. Economists can do a real fine
job of getting stuff wrong too, while also referencing a technologist,
perhaps in the process. See In nineteen ninety eight, an
(21:10):
economist named Paul Krugman had a dire prediction for the Internet,
and he ended up referencing our previous example of Robert Metcalf.
Krugman wrote an article in a magazine titled red Herring
and said, quote, the growth of the Internet will slow
drastically as the flaw in Metcalf's law, which states that
(21:30):
the number of potential connections in a network is proportional
to the square of the number of participants, becomes apparent.
Most people have nothing to say to each other. By
two thousand and five or so, it will become clear
that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no
greater than the fax machines. End quote. All right, so
(21:51):
this does raise the question about Metcalf's law. What is that?
What actually comes from an observation that Robert Metcalf had
made way back in nineteen eighty, which was that the
financial value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the
square of the number of connected communication devices on that network.
Sometimes we simplify this to say the number of users
on a network, but it's really more fair to say
(22:13):
nodes or connected devices. Essentially, met Keef was saying that
the more devices you have connected within a network, the
more possible connections exist between those devices, and we can
express this mathematically with the equation of n times n
minus one divided by two. In in this case would
(22:34):
be the number of users or connected devices or nodes
however you want to think of it. So if we
only have two devices, right, let's say that we've got
a direct connection between device one and device two. But
that's it. Well, we would fill in our equation. We
would use two in place of end, So our equation
will be two times two minus one, which is one
and then divided by two. So then that means we
(22:56):
get two times one divided by two. That means we
eventually just get one. That's the number of possible connections
between these two connected devices. You only have one possible connection.
But let's say we've got twenty connected devices on this network. Well,
that means now our equation is twenty times twenty minus
one divided by two, So that means it's twenty times
(23:17):
nineteen then divide by two, or we get one hundred
and ninety possible connections. So as you add more users
or devices to a network, then network's value increases significantly.
But Krugman was saying that if no one has anything
interesting to say to each other then you don't really
have any added value there, and then growth is going
to slow down, and this is going to show that
(23:40):
Metcalf's law is flawed. Clearly, the era of social media
has proved Krugman way wrong. People spend all day not
saying anything to each other, at least nothing of substance,
and it is going like gangbusters. Even as some platforms
are slowing down, others are picking up. Krugman and himself
(24:01):
had said that he was just trying to be provocative,
and sometimes when you do try to be provocative, you
end up just being very wrong, and he just happened
to be very very wrong about this. Now, sometimes we
get predictions of doom and gloom from someone who appears
to be driven by having a vested interest in a
competing technology. They say, oh, that technology is going to fail,
(24:23):
partly because they are supporting a different technology. There's a
quote frequently and also incorrectly attributed to a Hollywood movie
producer named Darryl F. Zanuk. He was one of the
folks responsible for creating the film company twentieth Century Pictures,
among a lot of other things. But the story goes
that Xanik famously and incorrectly dismissed the impact of television, saying, quote,
(24:49):
video isn't able to hold on to the market it captures.
After the first six months, people soon get tired of
staring at a plywood box every night. End quote. Now,
clearly the movie studios saw television as an existential threat.
I mean, why would people go to the cinema to
spend a few hours watching movies and cartoons and newsreels
(25:12):
if they could get access to many of those things
just from home through the television. For a while, film
studios saw television as being a true threat to their
very existence, at least until movie studios started to consolidate
with TV studios. So, of course it would be delicious
to point to a movie mogul who stuck his neck
out to proclaim that television would be no more than
(25:33):
a passing fad, only to be proven very wrong and
television would become an incredibly important component in communications. Now,
I'm not saying that no one at all ever made
these quotes apart from like like, I'm not saying they
were just invented, but it certainly doesn't appear to have
been Zanak. He is not the person who said these things.
(25:57):
The website quote investigator actually looked into this particular statement.
The earliest version they found from the statements about video
and the Plywood box actually came from a Wall Street
Journal article back in nineteen fifty one, and it appeared
as two separate statements from two different people. So the
(26:18):
video isn't able to hold onto the market it captures
after the first six months. Statement supposedly came from a
movie executive based out of New York. The phrase people
soon get tired of staring at plywood box every night
came from quote a San Franciscan end quote. In fact,
it doesn't even get specific enough to say it's a
movie executive in San Francisco, although we can assume that
(26:41):
was the case. However, either way, Xanik, the person who
often gets attributed with this these pair of quotes that
are combined into a single quote, he was based in Hollywood,
so presumably he was neither of the unnamed individuals who
provided the Wall Street Journal with these quotes. So Xanuuk
(27:01):
is in the clear. Still assuming the Wall Street Journal
reporter was not inventing quotations of a thin air, there
were two people in the movie business who were brazenly
predicting the downfall of television. Now, this was during a
time when movie theaters were starting to see a rise
in attendance. There had been multiple years of audience drop off,
(27:24):
so like four years in a row they saw smaller
audiences for movie theaters, and then things were picking up
in nineteen fifty one. So it's possible that movie executives
were chomping their cigars and saying, ha, TV took a
swing at us, but it's not staying around. Light my
cigar with another one hundred dollars bill or something. I
(27:45):
admittedly have a very cartoonish imagination. They probably weren't saying that,
but it does make it sound like movie executives were thinking, oh,
television took a temporary hit out of our business. But
as it turns out, people prefer their experience in the theaters,
TV is too expensive for the average person, etc. Etc.
(28:06):
And so now we're just dismissing it. And of course
it would turn out that television was not just a
passing fad, at least not a short one. You could
argue that maybe because of cord cutting and stuff, that
it was a very long passing fad, but certainly at
the time. It wasn't just a passing fad, and that
predicting that people would get tired of TV and come
(28:26):
back to the movie theaters was just an optimistic prediction
on behalf of the executives. Another example of someone making
a prediction when he had a vested interest in the
outcome is Steve Balmer, the former CEO of Microsoft. Balmer
was actually employee number thirty at Microsoft when he joined
in nineteen eighty, and he became CEO of the company
(28:48):
in two thousand. His presentations are the stuff of legend.
If you've not had the experience of digging up a
clip of Steve Balmer on stage at some event over
on YouTube, you need to give that a go. There
are a lot of different ones. The famous one is developers, Developers, Developers,
but that's just one. You know, you should check them out.
Just make sure your volume is turned down a bit,
(29:10):
because that dude loves dal and scream and intense is
a good way to describe him. Anyway. In two thousand
and seven, Balmer reacted to something that, unbeknownst to pretty
much everyone at the time, was actually going to lead
to enormous changes in the tech space. And that was
the debut of the Apple iPhone. Balmer said, quote, there's
(29:32):
no chance that the iPhone is going to get any
significant market share. No chance end quote, and he went
on to call the iPhone a quote five hundred dollars
subsidized item end quote. He predicted that Microsoft's software would
be in most phones on the market, and that while
Apple could make a lot of money selling phones, they
(29:53):
would not make up a significant amount of the market share.
They would maybe have two or three percent of the
market at best. So Microsoft strategy was a lot like
what we would see from Google a little later on,
which was to create the operating system in the software
for smartphones, but to leave the manufacturing to the handset companies.
Apple was taking an all in approach rather than licensing
(30:16):
software to businesses that made the hardware. Balmer was convinced
that was the bad way to go, that it made
way more sense to just focus on the software and
license it out to the hardware companies. But as it
turned out, Apple strategy worked like gangbusters. In two thousand
and seven, Apple sold around one point thirty nine million iPhones.
That was the year that they introduced it. They didn't
(30:38):
offer it for sale until the back half of the year.
In two thousand and eight, Apple sold eleven point three
six million iPhones, so more than around ten million more
than they had the year before. By the end of
the next year, that doubled again at around twenty point
seven three million units sold. In fact, Apple saw sales
(30:58):
numbers increase every year until you get to twenty sixteen,
because in twenty fifteen the company sold two hundred and
thirty one point two two million iPhones, and in twenty
sixteen it sold quote unquote only two hundred eleven point
one point eight million units, still more than two hundred
million units, but a drop of around twenty million. As
(31:18):
for Microsoft, the company pushed hard to try and establish
a foothold in smartphone operating systems, but it just never
really worked out for the company. Companies stopped making Windows
phone devices in twenty seventeen, and the company completely ended
support for the operating system in twenty twenty two. Okay,
we're going to take another quick break, but we still
(31:39):
have some more bad predictions to get through. We're back.
And just before the break, I was talking about Steve
Baumer dismissing the iPhone, and of course it turned out
that he was totally off. I mean, granted, it's not
(32:01):
like he could have said that the iPhone's going to
be a huge hit. He was leading a major competitor
to Apple at the time, So whether he believed that
the iPhone truly was just gonna be a failure or not,
I can't say, but I certainly don't think he could
have said anything different. Anyway, Apple also was not immune
to making bad predictions. Steve Jobs, a man through force
(32:24):
of personality and a famous intolerance for deviation from his vision,
returned to a struggling Apple in the nineteen nineties and
set it on a path to become a company that
is today worth more than two point eight trillion dollars
at the time of this recording. Anyway, back in two
thousand and three, Apple introduced the iTunes music store for
the first time. So the company had already introduced the
(32:46):
iPod a couple of years earlier, but now it was
introducing an online digital music store where you could buy
albums and tracks, either to port over to an iPod
or to listen from your computer. Job believed the customers
wanted to own their music. He was dismissive of the
business model that was being used by Rhapsody and by
(33:09):
press Play, both of which offered subscription services to customers
to get access to music. So you pay a certain
amount of money each month and then you're able to
listen to music that is covered by these different companies.
Jobs said, quote, we think subscriptions are the wrong path.
One of the reasons we think this is because people
(33:30):
bought their music for as long as we can remember.
We bought our music on LPs. We bought our music
on cassettes, we bought our music on CDs. And we
think people want to buy their music on the internet
by buying downloads, just like they bought LPs, just like
they bought cassettes, just like they bought CDs. They're used
(33:51):
to buying their music, and they're used to getting a
broad set of rights with it. When you own your music,
it never goes away. When you own your music, you
have a broad set of personal use rights. You can
listen to it however you want. End quote. And it's
not like Jobs was wrong, right. People do like to
own stuff. I think it's safe to say that most
(34:12):
people definitely prefer owning music to losing access to something
because a licensing deal has expired. I'm sure everyone out
there has had that experience where something that used to
be covered on one of the streaming services you either
listen to or watch or whatever goes away because a
licensing deal expired, or because the company that was in
(34:34):
charge of it decided to get rid of it because
of you know, sticky residual deals. I'm looking at you
Max and Zaslov, who would remove stuff so that he
wouldn't have to worry about paying residuals to people anyway,
we know that people prefer being able to access their stuff.
They hate it when the stuff goes away. But despite
all that, the subscription based business model has seen incredible success.
(34:59):
It's a very convene thing, like instead of buying track
by track or album by album, you get access to
a huge library of material. In fact, it was so
successful that Apple would introduce its own music subscription service
in twenty fifteen. Notably, Steve Jobs had passed away in
twenty eleven, so it didn't happen within his lifetime, and
(35:21):
he again he was famously dismissive of it when he
introduced the music store. But in twenty fifteen we got
Apple Music, which would expand to include not just music
tracks but also video. Oh. Also, journalists get stuff wrong
a lot too. Goodness knows, I've gotten a lot wrong.
Although I really shouldn't reference myself as a journalist. I'm
(35:43):
not really a journalist. I don't have those qualifications. But
David Pogue wrote a piece for The New York Times
about Apple in September two thousand and six. That piece
was called iPhone Rumors, and it starts off with quote,
Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with
a cell phone. My answer is probably never. End quote.
(36:04):
And of course Apple introduced the iPhone the very next year.
But if you read Poke's piece, he lays out some
really good arguments about why it would make sense to
be skeptical that Apple would release a phone. One of
his really big points is that telecommunications carriers, you know,
the companies that actually own the infrastructure that allows communication
across devices. You know your AT and t's, your Verizons,
(36:27):
et cetera, they have a lot of power when it
comes to hardware. The telecommunications companies can actually approve or
deny features on devices. Essentially, they do this by saying, Okay,
well we're not going to let your hardware work on
our network. If you include that feature, we don't want
to support that feature. We will not allow you to
(36:49):
use that device on our network if they don't like something.
So Pogue's point was that Apple was not the type
of company that would compromise or allow some other business
that little control into their processes, and that was reasonable,
Like you can't imagine Steve Jobs being told in no
uncertain terms like we're not going to allow that. You
(37:09):
have to design it this way. So it seemed to
be a reasonable conclusion to say that Apple was not
going to release a phone in the first place. But
as it turned out, Apple worked very closely with AT
and T for the launch of the iPhone. It was
an AT and T exclusive here in the United States
when it first launched. But common sense would have suggested
that Apple would not have managed such a relationship and
(37:30):
that the company would have instead focused on technologies where
it would maintain near total control of the user experience.
So you can understand why Pogue made that particular statement.
It just turned out to be completely wrong, but again,
just based on the information that was available, it was
an understandable one. So yeah, it is really fun to
(37:51):
go back over these kind of old statements and old
predictions and see with the benefit of hindsight how off
they were. Or at least it's fun to me, because
again I used to make predictions, and I was often
just as wrong, or sometimes far more wrong than any
of the examples I've cited here. I think that some
of y'all might even remember one of those I famously predicted.
(38:13):
I don't know, famous that's giving myself too much credit.
I very much predicted that the iPad was going to
be a flop. I could not see the iPad succeeding,
and that was because tablet computers had been around for ages.
Even touchscreen tablet computers had been around for quite some time,
but no one had managed to make one that appealed
(38:36):
to the broader consumer market. The tablet computers that were
in use were niche products. They were used in very
specific applications, like you had some in the sciences, you
had some in medicine, but you didn't really have a
consumer tablet that had seen great success. And I just
couldn't imagine people wanting something of that form. Factor too
(38:59):
big to be easily portable unless you're carrying a bag around,
too small and too limited to be really useful if
you wanted it for something like productivity, because typing on
a screen is far slower than typing on a keyboard.
So I just assumed that even Apple wouldn't be able
to make the tablet computer commercial success for the consumer market,
(39:21):
and I was totally wrong. I doubted Steve Jobs's marketing ability,
I doubted Apple's engineering and making a product that had
a very compelling user interface. And my prediction was one
hundred percent incorrect, and I own it. It was, you know,
(39:42):
I felt like I had based it on some solid ground,
but it all turned out to be quicksand I guess
so it can happen to anyone. I don't think I'll
be bringing the Predictions episodes back anytime soon. They would
cause me huge amounts of stress because it's hard, right.
It involves doing a lot of work to just look
(40:03):
at what is the current state of technology, and even
working from that, I have an incomplete picture, because obviously
there are people and companies working on things that are
not yet publicly known, and so I have an incomplete
picture from that respect, and basing predictions off of an
incomplete picture is even more shoddy than just you know,
(40:26):
having to concede that you can't anticipate the innovation that's
going to follow in the months ahead. So I don't
think i'll bring it back. We'll see. Maybe toward the
end of the year, I'll think, ah, heck, I'll give
it another shot, and I'll see if I can predict
what will happen in twenty twenty four. But honestly, when
I look back at the last like three years, when
(40:47):
I stopped doing predictions episodes, I see so many examples
of stuff I never would have predicted. I definitely wouldn't
have predicted Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, for example. That would
not have been on my list. I'm not sure that
I would have predicted. You know, everyone knows my opinion
of Elon Musk is pretty dodgy. But I don't think
I would have predicted that Elon Musk taking over Twitter
(41:08):
would lead to such a train wreck, a slow degrading
situation for Twitter at this point, as the company appears
to be falling apart. I don't know that I would
predicted that either. So yeah, we'll see. If I'm feeling
spunky at the end of the year, maybe I'll give
(41:29):
it another go, but it is interesting to keep an
eye out for these. Maybe I'll also do another episode
where I'll take good predictions, stuff that people thought was
coming across the horizon and it turned out they were,
you know, mostly right, or maybe completely right. That would
be fun too. It's fun to look at the ones
where we got it totally wrong because it kind of
(41:51):
brings a little humility into the situation. But once in
a while people will make a prediction and boy how
they they get it bang on the money. So maybe
I should try and do an episode it's based on
that too. In the meantime, I hope you are all
well and I will talk to you again really soon.
(42:15):
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