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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
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hey there and welcome to tax stuff i'm your host jonathan strickland diamond executive producer with iheart radio and how the tec aria you know predicting the future is really
art even though that's where we're going to spend the rest of our lives thank you planned nine from outer space so i used to
start every year off with a big tech predictions episode and i
sit down and try and guess what could unfold
in the following year and i think i a pretty
a dismal average on those
action some years i was like
they are 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
be with them some
this time i would get big predictions partly right very
a very rarely i would get one right on the money but a wooden again be
as of 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 protection
so yeah most of the time i was off the mark and sometimes by a significant margin however
i have learned i should not 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 let us
first remind ourselves and i i'm gonna touch on this a couple times in this episode that often we end
being wrong in our predictions because we are projecting from what we know is possible today right
that's understandable but
obviously you can't bring into the picture anything like breakthroughs in fields that make the previously impossible now possible or on the flip side
we can imagine the hurdles willing counter that will slow or stop our progress toward a lofty go see also driverless
hours which have proven to be much more complicated than most folks believed a decade ago
or if you want to be really cynical you can take things like therein us and say
it will of course people believed it was possible even though
would later turn out that no the technology was not possible or not practical
i'd so we are also really
good at miss attributing statements to folks so
the role of the claims that i'm going to talk about today did not come from the people
who often will see their names attached to those statements
and this is a real problem as i was
searching this episode i would come across a prediction and i'd think well today
really say that then
but do some more research and i would start again and i would start looking for the history of a particular statement and
ultimately find out that the person who was due
the supposed prognostication net
actually said the ding dang durned thing in the first place sometimes
what else said it and actually was trying to protect it sometimes the
the protection just appeared to be an invention meant to make a famous person seem foolish so we'll talk about it
you have those two in this episode now to kick us off i thought
but talk about a very likely apocryphal story in fact i'll i'll just say i think this one is fake
the person who allegedly made the prediction
later deny that ever happened frequently
there's no reason to disbelieve this person so this rule
it's too bill gates the co founder of microsoft now
according to the story supposedly back
the early eighties bill gates proclaimed that six hundred forty kilobytes of memory quote ought to be enough for any body end quote
now this line pops up again and again if you start look
for examples of people who are making bad predictions or outright dumb statements about technology
she and the others this delicious irony
person who is really
influential in the tax base making a an outright incorrect statement or british
and so if you're not aware six hundred forty kilobytes was
diesel amount of memory back in nineteen eighty one when the story supposedly took place but it's a
in a school amount of memory these days like not even worth talking about like you
peters today if you if you gotta computer that as on the low side you're still talking something like two gigabytes of memory maybe up
sixty four gigabytes and then you could
may expanded up to a hundred twenty eight gigabytes if you ve got a sixty four bit
systems i remember i kill a bite is a thousand bites ok
we should be doing this and base to it should really be a thousand twenty four bites but it really depends upon the company like some companies will just rounded off in some companies we use the base to so
there are a thousand or a thousand twenty four bites that's what a kilobytes six hundred forty would be six hundred forty times that a gigabytes
it is a billion bites or of organ
base to its technically one billion seventy three million seven hundred forty one thousand eight hundred twenty four bites so yeah like gig
by are orders of magnitude larger than kilobytes so
obviously the story seems to paint bill gates as extremely short sighted to assume
six hundred forty kilobytes would be enough for anybody but
the enormous whiff when
his days even a bargain computer will have orders of magnitude more memory as standard but the thing is gates sir
he never actually made this claim in fact
dead 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 while the general stories that gates said this at some point at sea
trade show in
dean eighty one
there's no actual record of
i'm saying that no there's no account
on that year that says at this event during this we know
precision bill gates said this thing so
gates would later say in an interview quote i've said
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
it would certainly qualifies someone making a wrong protection or statement about tech
it doesn't seem like that ever happened there's lots
stuff we could say about gates that is terrible and deeply
disturbing but when it
mr making this particular prediction that appears to just be made up in whole cloth
there's a similar story then i want
touch on the also paints a tech leader in a foolish light
but this is due to a lack of context this law
there would be can also he was a co founder of a company called digital equipment corporation or die
easy i later on compaq would acquire d c and then even less
their hewlett packard would acquire come back so there's always a bigger fish
but the story goes that also
back in nineteen seventy seven gave presentation 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 he also was saying is that the very idea of a home personal computer is ludicrous
considering that the nineteen seventeen the late seventies that was the launching ground for the home computer
lessons words appear to be indefensible like he was just
totally wrong the personal computer would become a huge deal
day it's a market this nearly two hundred billion dollars in value but here's the thing also
explain that the problem was people were lifting that statement out of his presentation without the benefit of context he later d
ben did what he said he said
he wasn't talking about personal computers he wasn't time but little desktop computers though
do all sorts of stuff he obviously believe that those would be a thing because de ce was in
at 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 all
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
a computer run household that's what he was talking about
so we're not gonna see people get a computer
to be the central operating system of your home summertime
functions like controlling your lights or not
i'm a controls or the sort of stuff
we can now do with network products like smart thermostats and light bulbs
also saying he didn't see a future where people are going to buy and install these hefty computer systems and also that
but wouldn't want their lives to be run by computers and this would have been
back in the nineteen seventys 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 we do have lots of cooperation automation products out there and deepen
upon how deeply
integrated your computer cattle
there 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 totally wrong about home computers so all since by
was aimed more at pie in the sky for
tourists 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
or about the home of tomorrow and the cartoon
than writers found give you ways to poke fun at basic automation concepts also was saying
that was the sort of system no one would be buying for their home and he was right about that but it misses
reputation of his meaning lead people to say that he was absolutely wrong and that he was talking about home computers ok next up i want to talk about the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and how douglas
comes dreamed up an outlandish technology in the titular guide when adams wrote
first version of the story which was actually a radio play for bbc radio back in nineteen seventy eight there there are like half a dozen
different versions of the hedge guide to the galaxy story and no to or exactly alike now have the
be a play you of the novels you have it
you ve serious you got a movie like and each version
what's the story slightly differently even the even the v
in a record which took the radio play scripts changed things so
there's no definitive version of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy anyway when
he wrote this back in nineteen seventy eight personal computers
really knew right there
i've been around for very long so in
story he has a character that has the
guide to the galaxy and it
is essentially a digital book it's about the size of a book and
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 earths entry for example was just mostly harmless and even before that it was just
harmless while adamses work ready
the absurdity and comedy
this idea of this sort of portable
the vice that could have access to vast amounts of information would persist beyond the pages of fiction and ask him
these found ways to build smaller components and then crammed those components into microchips
it has got more powerful and capable of storing more information
add in the ability to network these devices and things really woodstock
to take off this brings me to
andy grove the former
the of intel back and ninety
ninety two andy grove fame
sleep dismiss the notion that before long executor
it would be walking around with a wireless digital personal communications device cable
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
the route to get to your next destination
essentially grove thought this vision
which would slowly coalesce into these smartphone was a pipe dream and that
with 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 p with the cell phone would give birth
to the modern smartphone and it wouldn t
the executives who would carry them around there 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 other informations really useful some of it is diverting
some of its outright harmful weaken
send and receive emails or instant messengers even photo
videos wicked
upon line interact with various platforms we can shop from our phones
you can use them as navigation devices we get just play with them
like toys it turns out that the
pipe dream was in fact apply
the and then a reality but bag
nineteen ninety two you could probably understand groves scepticism apple
the newton and ninety two and that became the first product that would be called apron
no digital assistant or pda but
particular device and allow limitations and quirks plus it lacked wireless connectivity still
i b released a pda with analogue cellphone connectivity and nineteen ninety four and knock your father
with a pda that had digital cellphone connectivity and ninety ninety six so it did not take
very long for groves prediction to false
okay we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more bad tech predictions i i i i i i i i
paper gas listeners returning for season for is the restless ones and original podcast presented by t mobile for business and i heart radio
join me as i sit down for in depth discussions with the people at the intersection of technology and business learn of their unique missions and challenges to enhance optimization and drive their organizations forward we reveal how
today's forward thinking leaders continue to thrive and a world of ever changing technology
here from those on the leading edge of business share industry expertise and how a strong inflexible network lays the foundation for positive changes in their fields for
revolutions and customer experience and employee enable meant to
it is with the power to change the game and even the world they are building a bridge to what's next and adopting transport
technologies like five g to create a more connected and meaningful future today check out new
episodes of the restless ones avail
hold on i hurt radioactive apple pod or wherever you listened abad guests paper boys peddling down the street chucking newspapers male carrier stuffing mailboxes the internet the way we get our news is always changing but no matter how its delivered the economist has remained the global trusted source for one hundred eighty years and now
the economists new economist podcast split subscription you can get your news another way enjoy unlimited access the economists complete noise cancelling bud gas collection weekday editions of their current affairs pod cast the intelligence plus a new weakened show special limited series and all their popular weekly podcast on business china american politics science and technology personally i like the babbage bond cast that's their technology pod guess they have incredible deep dives into big important elements that are happening in the tec space become an economist pod casts plus subscriber with a one month retrial or take the whole year for just forty nine dollars the pod casts deliver the analysis wit and integrity of the economists journalism and audio giving you the freedom to listen to sound reasoning while you go about your day tune into the world with
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next up
sometimes the guy who helped build the thing ends
being very wrong about the thing so
case i'm talking about robert or bob met calf
but when he was a graduate student madcap worked on arpanet so
those who are unfamiliar with arpanet
you can think of this sort of the predecessor to the internet
you had a lot of engineers and scientists and researchers who work to create
means to network different computers together even of those
peters where far apart from one another this
aid nontrivial task in all these different computers worked on different operating systems they you could think of
as they communicated a different languages so you had to create away a common ground for these different machines
the elder send and receive information in a useful way with it or other machines and then how does that information travel across the communications lines you had to come up with ways for that to be foolproof or at least as close to full pay
as you could get because if it were something whereas justa a solid connection and there was an
robin and that that connection then what happens to the process
these are all practical problems that the arpanet folks had to solve and the work
would become a foundational component for the internet which would follow after arpanet met caffeine
an early definitive work describing different ways to use the arpanet he also
but information resources and instructions to make use of arpanet
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 indeed
yes technological innovations although xerox itself had a reputation for failing to
capitalize on the develop
it's the came out a park
and while he was at park he developed ethernet that's the cable based
malagigi that allows data transfers between connected computers he based it off of the aloha net
there was used by the university of hawaii which rely
on radio waves rather than cables to send signals back and forth but he had built upon the
technologies of a low on that to develop ethernet ok
let's flesh board
i ninety five
five years after the u s government had already decommissioned arpanet and have been
shut down a couple years earlier
a decommissioned in nineteen ninety the internet itself
was actually really taking off it was helped in large part by the development of the worldwide web which it 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 them
is in infoworld published an article written by met calf in which the
work visionary said quote i predict the internet which only
recently got this section here and infoworld will soon go spectre
kill early supernova and in ninety ninety six catastrophically collapse in quote so
met gaff thought the internet was growing beyond the technological and economic capacities that would be needed to support the
that he invasion a scenario in which the money you just
wouldn't be there to build out the end
structure that would be required to
i'll for the explosive growth he didn't deny that the internet was growing he just said it's going to reach it
being point where we are not able to supply it with the technology needed to let it run and it's gonna collapse under its own weight
we 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 of the internet would be too dangerous right once you have
couple a big security breaches people would say oh we can't
romeo we cannot 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 met gaff prove
to be a man of his word while i had tat conference met calf had a cake wheeled out his call
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
least one version of story says that he then had the actual physics
article on paper brought out and then put the
article in a blunder with some water and blended into a kind of slurry and then he ate the goop
but either way he reported lead
did in fact eat his own words and admitted that he had been wrong which i totally respect madcap failed to predict
the innovations that would drive the internet's expansion
and again that really gets back to that heart of a lot of wrong predictions that we leaned so heavily on basing our gas of what comes next by looking at her
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 like you can't you can't fault people for not
guessing something that has been thought up yet because
ways they would have thought it up of course technologists
aren't the only ones who get tech predictions wrong economists can
do our real fine job of gettin stuff wrong to lie
also referencing a technologist perhaps in the process
see and ninety ninety eight an economist named paul krugman headed
air prediction for the internet and he end
a in our previous example of robert met calf
krugman wrote an article in a magazine titled red herring and said quote
the growth of the internet will slow drastically
the flaw in met calf's law which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proposed
to the square of the number of participants becomes apparent most people have nothing to say to each other
by two thousand 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 i saw
this does raise the question about met caps law what is that
well actually comes from an observation the robert mcafee made way back in nineteen eighty which was at the fine
she'll value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the
where the number of connected communication devices on that
work sometimes we simplify this to say the number of users on a network but really
more fair to say nodes or a connected devices essentially mecca
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
times and minus one divided by two
and in this case would be the number of users or connected devices or nodes however you want to think of it
so we only have two devices right let's say that we ve got a direct connection between device one a device to but that's it well we would
in our equation we would use to in place of ants are equation will be two times to minus one which has won and the divided by
so then that means we get to terms one divided by two that means
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 will that means now are equation is twenty times twenty minus one divided by to see
that means it's twenty times nineteen then divide by
you or we get a hundred ninety possible connections so
as you add more users or devices to a network the network's value
increases significantly but
krugman was saying
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
going to show the mecca law is flawed
clearly the era of social media has proved krugman
way wrong peep
spend all day not saying anything to each other at least loving of of substance and it
is going lagging busters either
as some platforms are slowing down others are picking up krugman
set himself had said that he was just trying to be provocative and some
when you do try to be brief
could have you end up just being very wrong and he just have
there very very wrong about this now sometimes we
predictions of doom and gloom for someone
here's to be driven by having a vested interest in a competing technology they say
that technology is going to fail part
because there they are supporting a different technology there's a quote free
quickly and also incorrectly attributed
way hollywood movie producer named darrell f zanuck he was one of them
responsible for creating the film company twentieth century pictures among a lot of other things but the story goes that zanuck famous
the and incorrectly dismissed the impact of television saying quote video
is it able to hold on to the market it captures after the first six months people see
get tired of staring at a plywood box every night end quote now clearly the
but these studios saw television as eighth an existential threat i mean why would be
we'll go to the cinema to spend a few
where's watching movies and cartoons and newsreels if they could get
so too many of those things just from home through the television
for a while films studios sod television as being a truth
to their very existence at least until movie sue you started to consolidate with tv studious so of course
would be delicious deploy
to a movie mogul who stuck his neck out to proclaim that television would be no more than a passing fad
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 zanuck he is not
the person who said these things though
i quote investigator actually looked into this particular statement the earliest version they found from the
statements about video and the plywood box actually
from a wall street journal article back in nineteen fifty one and it
it is to separate statements from two different people so the view
yo is unable 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
tired of staring at plywood box every night came from quote a san franciscan end quote infected doesn't even get
specific enough to say it's a movie executive in san francisco although we can assume that was the case however either way zanuck the person
who often gets attributed with this these pair of quote
the combined into a single quote he was
based in hollywood so presume
lee he was neither of the unnamed individuals who pay
i did the wall street journal with these quotes so zanuck is it in the clear
still assuming the wall street journal reporter was not inventing quotations of thin air there were to be
all in the movie business who are brazenly
predicting the downfall of television now
it was during a time when movie theatres
we are starting to see a rise in attendance there had been multiple years of audience drop off
so like four years in a row they saw smaller audiences for movie theatres and then things were
drawing up a nineteen fifty one sir
it's possible that movie executives
chopping their cigars and her team
he took a swing in us but it's not stay in iran
lay my cigar with another hundred dollar bill or something
admittedly have a very cartoonish imagination they probably
weren't saying that but it does make it sound like movie executives worth
the king oh tell him
john took a temporary hit out of our business but as it turns out people
further experience in the theatres tv is too expensive for the average person etc etc
and so now we're just dismissing it and of course it would
out the television was not just a passing fad at least not a short one you could
view that may be because of cord cutting and stuff the hit it
a very long passing fad butter but answer
at the time it wasn't just a passing fad and that predicting that people would get tired of tv and come back to the movie theatres was just an optimistic prediction on me
half of the executives another example of so and making a prediction when he had a vested interest in the outcome is steve bomber the farmers
the eu of microsoft bomb
was actually employ number thirty at microsoft when he joined in nineteen eighty and he became
ceo of the company in two thousand
his presentations are the stuff of legend if you ve not had the experience of digging up a clip of steve bomber on staff
egypt some event over on youtube
he d give that a girl there a lot
different ones the famous one is developers developers developers thus just one
you should check him out just make sure your volume is turned down a bit because that dude loves deal and scream and in time
this is a good way to describe him anyway
in two thousand seven bomber reacted to something
unbeknownst to pretty much everyone at the time was actually going to lead to enormous changes in the tax base and that
as the debut of the apple iphone bomber said quote
there is 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
for dollar subsidized item end quote he put it
that microsoft software would be in most phones on the market and that while apple could make a lot of money selling phones they would not
make up a significant amount of the market share they would maybe have two or three percent on the market at best so michael
our strategy was alive
like what we would see from google a little later on which was decree
the operating system in the software for smartphones
but to leave the manufacturing to the handset companies
always taking an all in approach rather than licensing software to businesses that made the hardware bomb
i was convinced that was the bad waiting
oh they made way more sense to just focus on the software and licence it out to the hardware companies
but as it turned out apple strategy work like gangbusters into
seven apple soul around one point three nine million iphones that was the year
that they introduce it they didn't offer it for sale
the back half of the year in two thousand 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
the next year that doubled again at around twenty
point seven three million unit salt in fact
apple saw sales numbers increase every year until you get two thousand sixteen because
in two thousand and fifteen the company sold two hundred thirty one point two two million iphones and in two thousand and sixteen it sold quote unquote only two hundred eleven point one eight
oh yeah units still more than two hundred million units backdrop of around twenty million as for microsoft the company pushed hard to try to establish a foot
in smartphone operating systems
just never really worked out for the company companies
making windows phone devices in twenty seventeen and the company completely
that support for the operating system in twenty twenty two ok we're gonna take another key
break but we still have some more bad predictions to get through
hey podcast listeners returning for season for is the restless ones and original podcast presented by t mobile for business and i heart radio
join me as i sit down for in depth discussions with the people at the intersection of technology and business learn of their unique missions and challenges to enhance optimization and drive their organizations forward we reveal how
today's forward thinking leaders continue to thrive and a world of ever changing technology
here from those on the leading edge of business share industry expertise and how a strong inflexible network lays the foundation for positive changes in their fields
revolutions and customer experience and employee enable meant to
ideas with the power to change the game and even the world they are building a bridge to what's next and adopting transfer
but the technologies like five g to create a more connected and meaningful future today check out new
results of the restless ones away
on the radio web apple podcast or wherever you listened broadcasts paper boys peddling down the street chucking newspapers male carrier stuffing mailboxes the internet the way we get our news is always changing but no matter how its delivered the economist has remained the global trusted source for one hundred eighty years and now
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we are back and just before the break i was talking about steed bomber dismissing the iphone and of course it turned out that
he was totally off i granted its
like he could have said that the iphones gotta be a
huge head he was leading a major competitor to apple at the time so what
or he believed that the iphone truly was just going to 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 of personality in a famous intolerance for deviation from his vision
return to a struggling apple in the nineteen nineties and set it on a path to become accompany those today worth more than two point eight trillion dollars at the time of this recording anyway
back in two thousand three
apple introduce the itunes music store for the first time
though the company had already introduced the ipod a couple of years earlier but
oh it was introducing an online digital music store where you could buy albums and tracks either deport over to an ipod
or to listen from your computer jobs believed
the customers wanted to own their music
he was dismissive of the business model that was being used by rhapsody and by press play both of which offered
description services to customers to get access to music
oh you pay a certain amount of money each month and
we are 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 bought their music for as long as we can remember
we bought our music on l peace we bought our music on cassettes we bought our music on cds and we
people want to buy their music on the internet bye bye
an downloads just like they bought l bees
it's like they bought cassettes just like that
bought cds their use
to buying their music and there you
to getting a broad set of rights with it
you own your music
never goes away we
own your music you have a broadside
for 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
safe to say that most people definitely prefer owning music to
losing access to something because a licensing deal has expired
i am sure everyone out there has had that experience where something that you
to be covered on one of the streaming services you listen you either listen to your watch or whatever goes away
as a licensing deal expired or because the company that was in charge of it decided to get rid of it because of
sticky residual deals i'm looking at you max
zack love who would remove
staff so that he wouldn't have to worry about paying residuals two people anyway we know that people prefer being able to
does their stuff they hate it when the stuff goes away but despite all that the serbs
russian based business model has seen in radical success it's a very convenient thing
instead of buying track by tracker album by album you get access to it
huge library of material
in fact it was so successful that
what would introduce its own music subscription service in two thousand fifteen notably steve
absurd passed away in two thousand and eleven so
it didn't happen within his lifetime
again he was famously dismissive of it when he introduced though the music store but
in fifteen we got apple music which would expand
include not just music tracks but also video
oh also journalists get stuff wrong a lot to goodness knows
you ve a lot wrong although i really shouldn't reference myself as a journalist i am not really a journalist i dont have those qualifications but david poke
wrote a piece for the new york times about apple in september two thousand six that peaceful
called iphone rumours and starts off with quote
everyone's always asking me when apple will come out with a cellphone my answer is probably never end quote and of course
apple introduce the iphone the very next year but if you re
folks pc lays out some really good arguments about why it would make
thence to be sceptical
apple would release a phone
one of his really big points is that true
communications carriers you know the companies that actually own the infrastructure
that allows communication across devices your your eighty and tease your verizon's etc they have
but a power when it comes to hardware
telecommunications companies can actually approve or deny features on devices essentially
they do this by saying
hey what we're not gonna let your hardware work on our network if you include that feature
dont want to support that feature we will not allow you to use that device on our network if they dont like something so pokes point was that apple was not the type of
company that would compromise or allow some other business that level can
oh into their processes and that was reasonable like me you can't imagine steve jobs being told
in no uncertain terms like we're not going to allow that you have to design it this way so
it seemed to be a reasonable conclusion to say that
paul was not going to release a phone in the first place but as it turned out apple worked very closely
with a t and t for the launch of the iphone it was an a t and t exclusive here in the united states when it first launched but common sense
we have suggested apple would not have manage such a relationship and 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 poke made that better
your statement just turned out to be completely wrong but
again just based on the information that was available it was an understandable one
it is really fun to go
back over these kind of old statements and old predictions and see with the benefit of hindsight how off they were released its fun to me
again i used to make predictions and i was
then just as wrong or sometimes far more wrong than any of the examples of cited here i
think that some of you might even remember one of those i famously predicted i found no famous that's that's give myself too much credit i
i am very much predict the ipad was going to be a flop i could not see the
i succeeding and now
because tablet can be
there have been around for agents even touch screen
what computers had been around for quite some time but no one had managed to make one that appealed to the brain
consumer market the tablet
it is that were in use were meat products they were used in very specific applications like
add 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 for
factor too big to be easily
he portable unless you're carrying a bag around
two small and to limit
to be really useful if you wanted it for something like productivity because typing
screen is far slower than typing on a keyboard
i just assumed that even apple wouldn't be able to make
tat like computer
she'll success for the consumer market and i would
totally wrong i doubted
steve jobs as marketing ability i doubted apples engineering and making approach
that had a very
compelling user interface and
my prediction was one hundred percent incorrect and i own it that was
yeah i felt like i had base it on some solid ground but at all turned out to be quicksand i guess
so it can happen anyone i dont think
i'll be bringing the predictions episodes back anytime soon
who had caused me huge amounts of stress because it's hard right
it involves doing a lot of work to just look at what is the current state
of technology and even working
that i have an incomplete picture
because obviously there are people and companies working on things that are not yet publicly
own and so i have an incomplete picture from that respect and
basing predictions off of an incomplete picture is even more shoddy than justino having to come
it that you can't anticipate the
nation 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 think a hack 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 where it when i stopped doing predictions episodes i see so many examples of stuff i never would have predicted i i definitely
predicted elon musk purchasing twitter for example that would not have been on my list
i am not sure that i would have predicted a 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 would
aid to such
the train wreck a slowed degrading situation for twitter at this point as the company appears to be falling
part i don't know that would predicted that either so yeah we'll see if if i'm feelin spunky
the year maybe i'll give 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 it turned out they were
mostly right or may be completely right that would be fun to it
look at the ones where we got it totally wrong as a kind of brings
humility into the situation but once in a while people
make a prediction and boy howdy they
get it back on the money so maybe i should of trying to an episode it's based on that too in the meantime
i hope you are all well and i will
it's you again really said
the tech stuff is
i heart radio production for more pod
as for my heart radio visit the
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Transcript generated on 2023-12-18.