Why the Internet Will Fail (from 1995)

That is totally awesome...

It is AMAZING how far we have come in such a short time... NOw you can do your whole life on your phone...lol

Most people never seen any of this coming.


Jeff Mitchell

Very prominent guy. It was the chairman of IBM.

If this dude had any journalistic credulity , he would have done a follow-up article somewhere evaluating on why his judgement was flawed, in addition to exploring parameters for more better tools to get closer to more future accuracy and evaluation.

Probably an egotist who equated his power of the pen to be that of a world changer...,not.

The 13th Warrior

Way back in '93 or '94 I was writing software books, and one of my co-authors tried to talk me into writing a book with him on this new thing called the World Wide Web. He tried hard to explain it to me, but I just couldn't grok it. He said, well you'll be able to include pictures. I said, you can do that now with gopher. He said, yeah but it'll all work together, it'll change everything. I don't remember exactly what else he said, but I kept saying, yeah but you can already do this with telnet, you can do that with ftp. I just couldn't see how we needed one more fancy thing, so I didn't do the book, which of course turned out to be one of the first best sellers about the web. Live and learn (hopefully).

That and my love for sf are why I get so bugged when I see a talking head explaining why something is impossible to achieve, or why it'll never be "practical" to implement some solution.

The most recent example of this is the new Bloom Box technology, which was recently covered on 60 minutes. All the talking head bigwig scientists are saying it'll never work, it'll never be a cost effective model, etc. Excuuuuuse me, but how the f*** do they know?

When I was a kid, a calculator was a big expensive proposition. Now it's a $1.97 throwaway tool. And I could go on and on with examples like that.


Some quotes from my "it's impossible" collection:

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

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"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."
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what ... is it good for?"
--Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968,
commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
--Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.,
1977

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
--Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The
literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."
--Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M
"Post-It" Notepads

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better
than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible."
--A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's
paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to
found Federal Express Corp.)

"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction
and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to
react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high
schools."
--1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary
rocket work

"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of
your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have
to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of
weight training."
--Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by
inventing Nautilus

and the classic "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
--H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

And there are lots more where these came from...

Marc, thanks man, I thought I was the only one that
thought the world was flat.

Still somewhat addicting but not as addicted to it when I first played it.

Cheaters took some of the fun out of it.

Yep.

Like

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as
a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
--Western Union internal memo, 1876

Agenda much?

To digress... anyone remember carbon paper? And Liquid Paper's still around, but that used to be the only way to make corrections. One mistake, especially if you didn't catch it til you took the paper out of the typewriter, and you had to type the whole stupid thing over.

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when the IBM self-correcting Selectric came out.

In case, you haven't figured it out by now, I'm old.

Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20

That was the prevailing opinion at the time. And even those who didn't see the internet as a fad didn't have a clue where it was going in terms of ecommerce. Heck, if I'd had a clue, I would have made a land grab for a mess of domains and wouldn't be struggling in here now.

If you recall, Jeff Bezos was a bit of a laughingstock in some circles for the first 4 or 5 years, and Amazon didn't have a profitable quarter for, I think, 7 years.

One of the comments: "Mr. Bezos opened a Web site he audaciously called 'Earth's Biggest Bookstore.'"

Most people just don't see and just don't/can't get it. We're often too invested in our current reality to allow for the endless possibilities that exist.

The author was about 98% wrong, but a lot of people thought that back then too. Even I was pretty skeptical at first, but being a total geek I wanted to believe all this stuff was possible, and sure enough it was.

I was running a BBS in February of 1995, and it was still doing great at that time. I figured the web would take away some of my audience, but people wouldn't abandon the BBS completely. By February 1996 my BBS was long gone. Apparently I wasn't the world's best visionary either.

The one thing I do agree with in this article that's still true today:

It's still that way, and the author did predict that, but it's the most obvious thing you could have said about the internet at the time.

I worked for print media a few years back and some owners still didn't want to have a website created for their business. Our most frequently heard objection to purchasing a website. Was "Nobody looks online for what I am selling". So sad, its like some people just let the internet pass them by.

Time travel happens all the time. We're all hurtling forward through time at this very moment. Time travel in reverse, well, we'll have to wait and see...

He can still be proven right some day. If humankind dies out, the internet might stop working.

I mean, who's going to fix the tubes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

That reminds me of a short story I read awhile back.

Start with the usual setup, where a person gets to have anything they wish for. The granter of the wish puts one restriction on the wish - it has to be unexpected. No wishing for immortality, wealth or more wishes.

The hero thinks for moment, and says, "I got it. I want a year's worth of newspapers."

The wish-granter blinks, and says "Okay, you got me there. I did not expect that. What year's newspapers would you like?"

"Next year..."