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Predicting The Future
When you own a pile of APC magazines going back to 92, one of the interesting things to do with them is read the editorials by technology experts of the day. And laugh your arse off. Its simply amazing how bad so called technology experts can get it wrong.
Take this example. Columnist John Sterlicchi wrote a piece in the 92 March issue of APC with this intro: "While Open Systems Interconnection is here to stay, it seems manufacturers have failed to embrace the trend". OSI was the government endorsed network protocol that was meant to provide for all your network needs. The gist of his piece seemed to be that Australian software makers should rush in a fill the void of market need for OSI products because their American counterparts were avoiding it like the plague. They preferred to invest their effort in that apparently dead end protocol called TCP/IP.
Another beauty is from Helen Dancer when in 93 she wrote piece with the title "Newton: more than a new toy". She humbly predicted that "Apple will license its technology to complementary and even competitive providers, to grow the market and create a threshold which will even compete with the mighty Microsoft". Bwahhahaha.
In 94, Jim Seymore suggested that the graphic interfaces would be soon changing dramatically because of a problem that "hardware cant fix". The problem being that laptops only have a screen resolution of 640 by 480 which is too small to be very useful for many windows applications. The very next year laptops with a screen resolution of 600 by 800 started appearing in APC advertisements.
Jeremy Horey wrote in 96 that "Apple is in trouble". He points out Apple had recently made a conscious decision to go into consumer products, but that he thinks they would be much better off getting into file server and niche high performance workstations. Today (2005), a consumer product, the iPod, makes up about a third of Apple's revenue.
Jeremy Torr in the same 96 issue made an interesting comparison of the Internet to CB radio. He said that CB had died out because "the airwaves became so congested with idiots and no-hopers that the original idealists simply could not access the medium. He warns that "unless we as users are extremely careful about the way we use the net" the net could go the way of CB. After nearly 10 years the Internet is filled with idiots and no-hopers on a scale that Jeremy could only have dreamed of in 96 but I'm able to use the net more effectively than ever before.
Still in 96, Bruce McCabe said “in the coming years we can expect [microphones] to become a mandatory requirement” on new PC's. True enough but this was to become a prelude to eliminating your keyboard and replacing it with pure voice command of your computer. “The concept of computer literacy [made into] a thing of the past.” Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for my voice controlled PC.
From these examples, it should easy to see that predicting the future can be a tough job and is especially hard to get right. Considering this site is about making predictions for the future of computing I can only hope that I'll do better than these beauties. |
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