The failures that were not. Failed predictions in the field of technology

Since someone said that man reached the limit of his inventiveness and there was no room for future improvements, making predictions in terms of technology it's a sure way to make a fool of yourself. Above all, because the one who said that was the Roman senator Julius Frontenus in the year 10 of our era.

In another article I reproduce prediction from an IBM executive on what the future of the industry holds. In this I am going to make a compilation of the future that was not. Here's a list of failed predictions

Types of Failed Technology Predictions

Failures to predict the impact of new technologies They are of two types; To assure the failure of technologies that were successful o gambling on the success of failed technologies. Of course, in the latter case it is impossible to speak of failures since in many cases these technologies were later successful or inspired others that did.

The failures that were not

In 1878, giving his opinion over the phone, William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post said:

Americans need the phone, but we don't. We have many messengers.

1878 does not seem to have been a particularly lucid year for the British. An Oxford professor named Erasmus Wilson opined about electric light:

When the Universal Exposition in Paris ends, the electric light will end it and the subject will no longer be heard.

In 1913 a prosecutor indicted inventor Lee DeForest for fraudulently selling stocks through the mail for his radiotelephony company. According to the prosecutor:

Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the wrong public ... has been persuaded to buy shares in your company ...

Three years later came the contribution of Charles Chaplin to this list of papers:

Cinema is little more than a passing fad. It is a canned drama. What the audience really wants to see is flesh and blood on stage.

Another "visionary" was Darryl zanuck, 20th Century Fox film producer who in 1946 said:

Television will not be able to maintain any market it captures for more than 6 months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.

We come to 1959 where IBM commits one of its legendary gaffes that would lead to its decline

The potential world market for photocopying machines is 5.000 at most.

10 years before, company founder Thomas Watson had stated:

I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers.

To be sure, in the 60s, Time magazine assured his readers that:

Although remote purchase is possible, it will ultimately fail.

In 1995, the founder of the 3Com company he held very convinced

I predict that the Internet will soon go into a spectacular supernova and in 1996 it will collapse catastrophically.

Also in 95, Clifford Stoll, Q.who is apparently a physicist and computer expert, did not hesitate to maintain:

Even if there was a reliable way to send money over the Internet - which there isn't - the web is missing one more essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Two years later, the entry to this list of MichaelDell, the founder of the eponymous computer company who commented on what He would do with Apple.

He would close it down and return the money to the shareholders.

The '97 Apple is not the one it is now. The company had been unsuccessful for years and no one could predict the impact of the iPod, iPad and iPhone

To show that a Nobel Prize is no guarantee of anything, economist Paul Krugman said son the Internet in 1998.

Around the year 2005 we will see that the impact of the Internet on the economy will not be greater than that of the fax machine.

Of course, making flawed predictions is a requirement for a Ph.D. in economics.

Microsoft's history with mobile devices would give for a documentary or one of those comedies based on the main character's stupidity. For example we have this phrase by Steve Ballmer pronounced in 2007

There is no possibility that the iPhone is going to have a significant market share.

These are some of the thousands of failed predictions. In fact, I intend to lock my devices until January 2. It is not something that after the toasts it occurs to me to predict the future and end up entering the list.