In our digital age, predicting what’s going to sink and swim is a dodgy business: you’re at the mercy of a connected community who change their minds at the drop of a hat. Folks have been making bad tech predictions for more than a century, and still don’t learn that going out on a limb can often backfire. In celebration of those who sacrificed said metaphorical limbs, we’ve gathered together some of the worst, most off the mark tech predictions ever, from the failure of the telephone to wonky iPad predictions and the definite flop of the Huffington Post. Read on!
Table of Fails:
- TV will flop
- The telephone is impractical
- Twitter won’t catch on
- The Huffington Post is DOA
- Nobody wants to work it out on a computer
- iPad sales
- World of Warcraft will flop
1. TV will flop
One particularly terrible tech prediction came from Daryl Zanuck, a movie producer for 20th Century Fox who grossly underestimated our tolerance for staring at screens when he said:“Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” Little did he know that we would all be in throes to the various gods of programming, and that nations would gather to watch fame hungry IT workers from Milton Keynes embarrass themselves in front of a bitter man with a horrible hairdo.
2. The telephone is not practical
Step back a couple of decades and try to recall those phones with cables we called landlines. Remember? British physicist Dennis Gabor thought the telephone a ridiculous contraption, and condemned it as something we’d now refer to as vaporware, saying: “Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.” Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer at the British Post Office said: “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
3. The revolution will not be tweeted
Last October there was a hoo-ha about an article written by Malcolm Gladwell for the New Yorker, with the subhead “Why the revolution will not be tweeted”. Six months down the line and there’s been more than one revolution. Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Three revolutions, and guess what? They were tweeted. One user even made a video of the Egyptian revolution via Twitter. The data shown represents only around 10% of retweets.
4. The Huffington Post is DOA
This mis-fire has now been credited with getting the Huffington Post on the map, and one step along on the ladder that’s lead to the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315m. Journalist Nikki Finke, (LA Weekly columnist, Deadline.com editor and once named in Elle’s 25 most influential women in Hollywood) said: “Judging from Monday’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself.” Ouch. Not just that, Finke also said: “This website venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable.”
5. Nobody wants to work it out on a computer
As you sit there, with five different spreadsheets strewn across a plethora of tabs, trying to export it into a table and display it in a PowerPoint presentation, think back to the words of one previous editor of business books for major publishing house Prentice Hall, who in 1957 said: “I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” Although we hear the abacus could be making a comeback…
6. iPad Sales
It is the job of an analyst to make accurate predictions. In 2010, not one Apple analyst predicted iPad sales figures correctly. Not one even got close. Apple sold almost 15m iPads in 2010, but the highest prediction from Wall Street sat at 7m. Even the bloggers were way off, with John Gruber predicting 8m, and Clayton Morris shooting for 9m. The real sales figure was three times the average prediction. That’s an epic misfire.
7. World of Warcraft will flop
Games analyst Michael Pachter’s WoW predictions were mindblowingly off the mark. In the New York Times in the autumn of 2005 he said: “I don’t think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month…I frankly think it’s the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers.
“It may continue to grow in China, but not in Europe or the U.S. We don’t need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn’t work in the U.S. It just doesn’t make any sense.” As of October 2010, WoW had 12million subscribers.
The predictions they didn’t make
Along with these whopping great tech prediction fails, there are a clutch of urban myths, that have been morphed by Chinese whispers or that were never spoken in the first place. Here’s two of the biggest falsies:
- Bill Gates saying we’d only ever need 640KB
The story goes that in 1981 Bill Gates said: “No one will need more than 640 kilobytes of memory for a personal computer.” Gates has denied that he ever uttered such a thing, and there’s no reliable source for the info.
- The president of IBM on the demand for personal computers
In 1943 it is alleged that the then president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Nobody knows where it originated, but it’s thought it might have been a misattribution of a warped version of something said by Cambridge mathematician Douglas Hartree.
Got a bad tech prediction we’ve not included? Shout out in the comments!
