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The wrong stuff
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Jan. 7, 2000 |
For Byrne, the list was a source of droll humor. But in today's technology marketplace, such prognostication is a serious business. The past weeks have inundated us with crystal-ball-gazing exercises full of Byrne-like prediction lists: "In the future, we will abandon our PCs as the Internet migrates to our toasters and refrigerators." "In the future, we will communicate directly with one another via IP-enabled brainwaves." Here's a personal prediction: In the future, I will not write one of those "we will" columns -- this year or, if I can help it, this millennium. But as the recent future-tense media orgy subsides, a look back over the technology predictions of the past decade may prove useful -- as a humbling reminder of how regularly wrong the conventional wisdom has been. Here's a roster of misfired predictions, expectations and assumptions that pundits of every stripe -- including, in many cases, myself -- embraced in the 1990s, only to be proven ludicrously mistaken. (1) The Web will never take off as a vehicle for financial services until it offers truly secure transactions. In 1994, when the Web first burst onto the world stage and dragged the Internet with it, the keepers of the previous generation of proprietary networks scoffed at both Web and Net for the openness and relative lack of security that their university-researcher inventors designed into them. And it did seem highly unlikely that these not-so-secure networks -- in which new holes seem to be exposed nearly every day -- would become places where everyday people felt comfortable managing their money. It turns out that, whether they're naive or just allergic to the complexity of the issue, security is the last thing everyday people worry about, at least in the United States. The Web is now where more and more Americans trade their stock, shop for loans and mortgages and manage their retirement plans. Small purchases -- "microtransactions" -- were supposed to rule the day online; instead, it seems, the bigger the transaction, the more willing we are to commit it to cyberspace. (2) America Online is doomed. In the mid-'90s, AOL had such a legacy of poor customer support, sluggish software and dismissal of the Web as "just a passing fad" that Internet-savvy observers almost universally believed that the service would wither and die. At best its easy-onramp approach would keep it around as a supplier of "Internet training wheels" for newbies; at worst its clumsy proprietary network and content would consign it to the same trash heap that was getting ready to absorb the old-line Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi and Compuserve networks. AOL fooled all of us. It made a series of very smart moves -- switching to a flat-rate fee, offering its users full (if slow) access to the Web and continuing to burnish its reputation as the easiest way for beginners to get online. Gradually, it transformed itself from "a company that would be made obsolete by the Internet" to "an Internet company" -- without ever abandoning its proprietary network. It was a neat trick. Having pulled it off, AOL now faces a similar challenge in the age of cable-modems and DSL: Can the largest dial-up-modem operation in the world transform itself yet again? Today, AOL's size and vast customer base mean that the pundits are no longer betting against it. | ||
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