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15 Worst Tech Predictions Of All Time

This article is more than 9 years old.

There’s an old saying that goes, “Predicting the future is easy … getting it right is the hard part.”  As we welcome in the start of another year, we’re greeted with an almost unlimited supply of Nostradamus-wannabes trying to predict how the future of technology will play out.  The interesting part comes when one looks back on past predictions to see who was on target and who missed the mark by a mile.

For almost all technology predictions there is the usual debate about the actual wording or context of the prediction or even if the attribution is correct.  Sometimes the debate turns out to be more fun than the prediction itself.

And then there are predictions that become famous simply by how wrong they actually turned out to be, such as IBM Chairman Thomas Watson’s famous 1943 quote that “… there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Below are my favorite 15 technology predictions, spanning the past 150 years, that didn’t quite turn out as expected.

1876: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not.  We have plenty of messenger boys." — William Preece, British Post Office.

1876: "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." — William Orton, President of Western Union.

1889: “Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time.  Nobody will use it, ever.” — Thomas Edison

1903: “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

1921: “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value.  Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”

1946: "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months.  People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.

1955: "Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years." — Alex Lewyt, President of the Lewyt Vacuum Cleaner Company.

1959: "Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles.  We stand on the threshold of rocket mail." — Arthur Summerfield, U.S. Postmaster General.

1961: "There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States." — T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.

1966: "Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop.” — Time Magazine.

1981: “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.” — Marty Cooper, inventor.

1995: "I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." — Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com.

2005: "There's just not that many videos I want to watch." — Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube expressing concerns about his company’s long term viability.

2006: "Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone.  My answer is, 'Probably never.'" — David Pogue, The New York Times.

2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

So, what’s your technology predictions for the New Year?

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