David- From my subcriber's email this morning comp...

2008-07-11T13:05:00.000+01:00

David- From my subcriber's email this morning compounded with additions sent in by readers:

Rory Sutherland now chairman of Ogilvy was fired as a copywriter for Microsoft for suggesting they should bundle a modem with every operating system.

In 1996, when I was at a certain very large financial services company which does almost all of its business online today, and a small group of us were campaigning to start some kind of Worldwide Web (as we called it then) initiative, my boss, quoting her boss, said, "Very interesting, but I don't see the business purpose."

Leading the charge, back in 1876, President Rutherford B. Hayes saw the telephone for the first time. In reaction, he said to Alexander Graham Bell, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” During the same year, a Western Union Internal Memo predicted similarly that, “The ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered a means of communication.” How wrong they both were.

Forward thinkers haven’t always done better. In 1926, Lee DeForest, a pioneer in the development of radio, said of television: “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it to be an impossibility…a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

In 1927, Harry Warner, President of Warner Brothers, said, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” The same year, however (apparently at the urgings of brother Sam, the studio’s co-founder), Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, one of the most expensive films they’d ever made. (Sam died before the New York premier). Turned out, The Jazz Singer was a major hit and helped usher in the era of “talking pictures.”

Not even experienced technologists are immune. In a famous recent example, one from a technologist who’d presumably know better, Ken Olsen, then President, Chairman and Founder of DEC, famously said in 1977: “There is no reason for any individuals to have a computer in their home.” He was right - there wasn’t much of a reason given the state of in the industry at the time - but fast forward a few years, or a decade or two, and how different the story became.

Optimists championing technology have fallen into similar traps at the opposite pole of opinion. In one example, in an 1858 book called "The Story of the Telegraph," authors Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick wrote: "Of all the marvelous achievements of modern science the electric telegraph is transcendentally the greatest and most serviceable to mankind … [it] binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist.." Impossible? Not at all.

The reality of futurism or any kind of technology prediction is they’re often going to be wrong, either too conservative or too optimistic.

The only thing we know for sure about the future, is that it will won’t look anything like today.

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David- From my subcriber's email this morning comp...