The Internet Will Fail' -- Bold Predictions That Completely Bombed

The good people at BoingBoing recently noted the 15-year anniversary of astronomer Clifford Stoll's painfully inaccurate prediction that the Internet will fail. Stoll argued in a 1995 Newsweek story, "The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher, and no computer network will change the way government works."

Fifteen years later, the newspaper industry is dying, people earn degrees online, and we read incredible facts about Chuck Norris.

But we're not here to skewer Stoll. He's a talented person who made a bad call. He even left a lighthearted comment on the story: "Wrong? Yep. At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems." He added, "Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."

Stoll is definitely not alone with his 1995 "howler," as he describes it. Check out this roster of other bold predictions that completely whiffed. We predict that you will be amused.

"Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite 'The Iliad.'" -- Bruce Sterling, a science-fiction writer and journalist, told The New York Times.

Although Newsweek has said, "All the world's a-Twitter," and John Stewart has made light of it, not everyone has praised the 140-character platform. Still, Twitter has more than proven itself in the eyes of many, thanks to roles in breaking news and helping organize massive protests in Iran.

"For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few ... On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper.

"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so ... Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing." -- Erik Sandberg-Diment, the founder of the early computer magazine ROM, said in a Dec. 8, 1985, op-ed in the New York Times

In fact, there are now fishing apps for the iPhone.

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I'm looking at you Steve Ballmer (Bill Gates' college roommate).

This guy was way off about the Internet.

Twitter has its uses for quick relay of news, as in the situations cited, but for "literate communication"? No.

I have no use for Twitter.

I use FB for personal communication with friends I don't get to see in person, so it has a function for me. Twitter does not.

Thus there will always be howlers like that. Most people are incapable of seeing society becoming different then what it is now, or if they can they only see it as a negative and spout hysterical nonsense about the degeneration of society.

This is exactly why the Recording Industry is fighting for it's last breaths.

:thumbsup:

And I'm surprised that Stoll thinks that the 'Net would fail, especially with that book.

Hawkeye-X

it's hard to believe the it's the same person that wrote the book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNGJkkkagGw

then MSN started being packaged with windows as "an alternative".

And add Twitter to the mix, and its doom on the horizon

Newspapers were dead before the Internet. It simply buried the corpse.

I'm not sure "the way government works" has actually changed.

People who fish with their iphone have probably not given up actually fishing. They just have a new way to waste time doing something that interests them when they can't get to the river or lake.

Internet fail? No, not hardly.

But it ain't "all that" either.