Case in point: Wednesday, Google's European Chief John Herlihy sent tech bloggers into a tizzy with his prediction that "in three years' time, [desktop computers] will be irrelevant."
His rationale was based on the ever-increasing sophistication and worldwide popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices. Herlihy correctly pointed to Japan as a place where the number of people accessing in the Internet via mobile phones has already definitively eclipsed the number of computer-Internet users for the past several years now.
Google
John Herlihy, a Google executive, predicts that smartphones are on their way to replacing desktop computers over the next three years.
He also expressed a company-wide apprehension that the next industry-altering startup would emerge seemingly out of nowhere, as Google itself did over a decade ago.
"The digital world is fundamentally different to the traditional business world," he was quoted by the Web site Silicon Republic. "Things happen much faster, Web sites spring up from nowhere, a video could be a YouTube hit in hours."
Bloggers continue to debate the likelihood of his specific vision coming true, yet most agree that the time when desktops are done-for is almost certainly sooner rather than later.
In either case, Herlihy's quote exemplifies a favorite tactic of silicon soothsayers: dealing the death card. That is, suggesting that a popular product or service will meet an untimely demise at the hands of a newer, better replacement.
For a similar example of this practice by a figure on the other end of the tech totem pole, look to writer Sam Machkovech, who this week pronounced the surprising "Death of the iPod" on the Web pages of a freshly redesigned (and quickly re-redesigned) Atlantic.
At the risk of oversimplification, Machkovech's argument is essentially that the iPod has become a victim of its own success. By making such a revolutionary product line ubiquitous, Apple Inc. has in effect doomed it to extinction. Everyone now expects MP3-playing capability as a baseline on all of their mobile devices. Future products will have to contain far more spectacular features to really take off.
He points to the January premiere of the iPad, Apple's long-hyped e-reading device, as the first digital death warrant for the iPod:
Amid these dire predictions, though, a thoroughly outdated tech prediction was dug up from its grave, re-examined, and passed around a vindictive blogosphere accompanied by jeers and retrospective ridicule.January 24th's much-ballyhooed iPad event was the first iPod funeral. At that reveal, candy-colored silhouettes didn't dance around the screen using the iPad's touted features, like eBooks, new apps, or screen-filling touch keyboards. In fact, rarely did the event show any once-iconic earbuds in use. Apple, quite visibly, had moved on from the iPod.
In February 1995, just over 15 years ago, astronomer Clifford Stoll penned an essay for Newsweek under the incriminating title "The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana." It reveals another type of vision common throughout the business: that of the non-starter, a new product or advancement that is interesting, but has no real chance of catching on with the masses, let alone having a significant impact on culture.
Stoll disputed futurists' fawning over "telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms," and the access of "books and newspapers straight over the Internet." At the time, he didn't see how any of these things could ever possibly achieve the quality and reliability of their analog-formatted counterparts.
Perhaps the most regrettable blunder, however, came toward the end of the essay, when Stoll completely failed to recognize the power of the Web as a social connectivity tool. "Computers and networks isolate us from one another," he wrote. "A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee."
This notion seems laughable today given the hundreds of millions of users around the world on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, not to mention the programmers of aspiring social networks such as Google Buzz and FourSquare.
Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, but is there another message to be read beyond the fallibility of tech tea leaves?
To his credit, Stoll has been very open and honest about his profound miscalculation. Responding at the popular blog Boing Boing, he compared his 1995 essay to other, less public "screwups" he endured throughout his life. In so doing, he claimed to have learned an important lesson:
A valuable takeaway, especially for the author of these very words, who has been known to over-inflate tech trends on occasion. Because the industry is so volatile, it is difficult not to get swept up in the enthusiasm of innovative product launches and impressive advancements, to think of every new development as game-changing.Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ...
Because really, how many advances are so destructive to be considered "killer apps," entering the market and extinguishing their lower-tech predecessors?
History would seem to indicate that rather than wholly replacing our older technologies with distinctly different new ones, humans prefer to blend the two together; to take the old devices and re-integrate them into the new, in the process dissolving previous limitations and boundaries.
Remember when a phone could be used only to make calls? In case you didn't know, it now allows us to surf the Internet and project films. It must be noted, of course, that the landline, like the desktop computer, appears to be on the verge of obsolescence. The core technology survives, to be sure, but not without shedding its old skin.
Occasionally, though, the process of fusing old and new allows even formerly sidelined technologies to achieve more mainstream acceptance as well. Just look at the way amateur video, once the province of well-off suburban families and artsy kids, has exploded thanks to the Internet.
Thus, it is prudent to stay somewhat reserved when making tech predictions, especially dire ones. After all, to mangle a famous metaphor, the trail of progress is haunted by the echoes of bad calls. Here are a few of the more notable examples:
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
-- Western Union internal memo circa 1876, one of many wildly incorrect judgments made in the early days of the device. By the end of 2006, global mobile phone usage hit 50 percent.
"I have anticipated radio's complete disappearance ... confident that the unfortunate people who must now subdue themselves to listening in, will soon find a better pastime for their leisure."
-- Science fiction author H.G. Wells circa 1925, erroneously predicting the end of a technology that not only still exists but has morphed.
"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."
-- Film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox, in 1946, not the only famous figure to doubt the popularity and persistence of Americans' most popular leisure activity.
"The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage."
-- Film star and famous funnyman Charlie Chaplin circa 1916, possibly toying with his audience. American film admissions did drop by 2.6 precent in 2008, to 1.36 billion.
And, coming full circle:
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
-- Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., circa 1977. Of course, as Snopes points out, computers were very different at that time -- giant, impractical, high-maintenance machines that were not designed for and certainly did not appeal to the casual consumer.
