I have been known to be pretty stupid at times but what I have never attempted to do has been to predict where any particular technology was going to be in X number of years. I leave that kind of brinksmanship to others – people who have a lot more to lose…
T3, a British gadget magazine, has
printed, but not yet published on their web site, a top ten list of technology predictions that have gone sadly wrong. Bill Gates manages to get into two of the top ten slots, although one is probably undeserved. That one is the old classic of him predicting, in 1981, that nobody would ever need more than 640 kbyte of memory in their PC. If you
research it you will find that there is not one actual reference to show that he really said it and a lot of anecdotal evidence to show that he really never did. He certainly did not understand at that time what an operating system was and did not understand why IBM wanted one, which is probably an additional reason to assume he didn’t even know what a byte was.
Gate’s second entry on the list has more evidence to damn him. At the World Economic Forum in 2004 he very clearly
told the Forum that Spam would be solved in two years. Yeah, right. (Loved the CBS headline, “Spam will be canned.” W00t to be on a copy desk with this kind of incoming material!)
The other big, big goof on the list was by Sir Alan Sugar – British entrepreneur and UK version of the potential employer bully in
The Apprentice – who declared that the iPod, in a interview with London’s Daily Telegraph early in 2005, “will be dead, finished, gone, kaput” by Christmas. Two hundred million units of product later…
But whether it is a peer of the realm like the great Lord Kelvin who, as president of the Royal Society in 1883, said, "X-rays will prove to be a hoax" or Hollywood mogul Darryl Zanuck who famously declared in 1946 that television wouldn’t last because viewers will "soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night"...nothing, surely, can beat the Boeing engineer who declared in 1933, after the first flight of the Boeing 247, that the twin engined plane, seating ten passengers, would
never be beaten in size. As an older brother once said to our father, watching a 747 take off for the first time and expressing amazement that it could fly: “If you had that much power up your arse you would fly as well.” Ah, the indelicacies of the mechanical engineer.
