15 Worst Tech Predictions Of All Time


1876: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." — William Preece, British Post Office.

1876: "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." — William Orton, President of Western Union.

1889: “Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.” — Thomas Edison

1903: “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

1921: “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”

1946: "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.

1955: "Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years." — Alex Lewyt, President of the Lewyt Vacuum Cleaner Company.

1959: "Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail." — Arthur Summerfield, U.S. Postmaster General.

1961: "There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States." — T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.

1966: "Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop.” — Time Magazine.

1981: “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.” — Marty Cooper, inventor.

1995: "I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." — Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com.

2005: "There's just not that many videos I want to watch." — Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube expressing concerns about his company’s long term viability.

2006: "Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'" — David Pogue, The New York Times.

2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.



And my favorite that isn't on the Forbes list: "That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The atomic bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives." - Fleet Admiral William Leahy, 1945

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, 1949.

> 1946: "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.

Well, he got one right.

Then there is this gem.

"Two years from now, spam will be solved." Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004

To his credit, Edison knew better. It was just against his vested financial interests that Westinghouse and Tesla would be successful with the AC concept as he was simultaneously building a DC electricity grid that he wanted to monopolize. So he played hardball in the business with smear campaigns and propaganda attacks, this statement probably being a part of it.


That aside, I'm generally highly wary of anyone making predictions about the future. The future is unknown, and will remain so. Seers only tell us what we already know, just in a different way, or they are making sh!t up. Either way it's a bad idea believing predictions as it makes us vulnerable to prediction error. Interestingly the people making predictions usually have no skin in the game, and they suffer no consequences at all from telling everybody lies about the future. They do however win a lot of attention (=their reward) if they are lucky enough to be right on one or two occasions.

That being said, I think that Admiral Grace Hopper was worth listening to. She was both cautious making predictions, but bold where she did, and usually was right about it. Also, she always carried a piece of cable with her to explain to people around her what a microsecond was. She once let a cable drum rolled into a conference room to demonstrate a millisecond.

Well, the dot-com bubble just burst 5 years later than predicted, so he was not completely wrong.

And w.r.t. horse and cars, there is a similar quote from Kaiser Wilhelm II. 1912: "I believe in horses, the automobile hype will pass."

Wilhelm was just sour grapes that he lost the lawsuit to the number plate "Berlin 1" to some merchant who bought a car and had it registered before his majesty, who then had to ride around eternally as "Berlin 2".

The dot-com bubble burst was strictly due to over-inflated stock prices for web companies. The "irrational exuberance" that Alan Greenspan spoke about.


The internet itself as a new way of communicating and doing business was not the issue.

Damn. I had a good one, but it would mean shoveling the thread into PWEC

Didn't Gates also say that people would NEVER need more than like 512k of memory for computing?

I'm sure he meant the people's brain capacity for computing

Don't forget whoever came up with the idea for Windows 8 having that start screen for desktop PCs.



The Jedi Master

Um yeah..just one of the many reasons Ballmer was kicked out as CEO!

To me that was always an example how group thinking can result in fatally flawed concepts.

He said "640K ought to be enough for anybody", in reference to the maximum memory size of the PC when it first came out.

FWIW, a *lot* of us at the time, completely agreed with that assessment. In that same timeframe, the TRS80 shipped with 4K and could be expanded to 16K (and later 32K & 48K), and most other machines of the day were similar in capacity.

Even mainframes of the day (IBM 360 series) had a maximum code-page space of 32K, so the idea of 640K was absolutely *huge* by comparison...


Regards,
4 <S!>

Thanks for clearing that up FourSpeed. The correct quote does indeed exonerate Bill Gates of any buffoonery. He was obviously referring to what the needs of the consumer market would be for that time.

All was good until Falcon 3.0 and Quarterdeck EMM came along.

I want the windows on my B-52s!!!!




The Jedi Master

Ayup... I had my IBM PC (PC2 to be technically correct) maxed out at 640K via the addition of an AST Six Pack card. Programs were small back then, leaving RAM available to be used for a Printer Buffer and a RAM disk. The RAM disk was really a big help.

A 540 meg hard drive. I will never fill that up.

Thomas Cofield, 1993.