Framtiden är inte vad den var

2Spare har samlat ihop 87 dåliga framtidsförutsägelser. Vilket helt klart visar att det inte direkt är någon barnlek att prognosticera framtiden.

  • «It will be gone by June.»//Variety, passing judgement on rock ’n roll in 1955.
  • «Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop – because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.»//TIME, 1966, in one sentence writing off e-commerce long before anyone had ever heard of it.
  • «That virus is a pussycat.»//Dr. Peter Duesberg, molecular-biology professor at U.C. Berkeley, on HIV, 1988.
  • «The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.»//The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903.
  • «There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.»//Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.
  • «Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years.»//Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.
  • «The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.»//Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878
  • «While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.»//Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926.
  • «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.

Den bästa är ändå IBM:s Robert Lloyd, som 1968 pratade om mikroprocessorer1:

«But what… is it good for?»

(via Creative Generalist)

  1. Jag vet – jag skrev mikroprofessorer vilket ju är något helt annat… []