Top 12 worst predictions of all time:
“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” ~ William Preece, British Post Office (1876)
“Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.” ~ Thomas Edison (1889)
“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 (1903)
“Talking films are a very interesting invention, but I do not believe they will remain long in fashion.” ~ Louis-Jean Lumière, inventor of the cinematograph (1929)
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” ~ IBM president Thomas Watson (1943)
“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 (1946)
“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 (1961)
“Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop.” ~ Time Magazine (1966)
“Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.” ~ Marty Cooper, pioneer of wireless communications (1981)
“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” ~ Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com in 1995 (Robert said he would eat his words if he was wrong. At a conference in 1997, he put his article in a food processor and ate/drank it).
“There’s just not that many videos I want to watch.” ~ Steve Chen, Co-founder of YouTube expressing concerns about Youtube’s future when he started it in 2005. (It then went into hyper-drive and he sold it to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion)
“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 in 2006. (The iPhone came out in 2007)
The worst way to predict the future is to bet on the lack of change.
The best way is to be the change.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” ~ Peter Drucker
