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