Predicting the future is kind of hard

Original post:  Mar 20, 2013

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."    

Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

It is easy to look at the quote above with the benefit of hindsight and laugh. We can look at the world around us and see just how wrong this statement was.

Perhaps there is a simpler explanation at work. In 1977, computers cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. There was little to no software available that would do much of anything. Mr. Olson may have made this statement while talking to analysts about his business. Digital probably focused on their core audience of major business enterprises. At that point in time, it may have been difficult to predict just how rapidly Moore's law might drive the evolution in computers from the hulking behemoths of the past to the mighty midgets of today. Perhaps Mr. Olson just didn't spend enough time with his engineers to know what was coming. Perhaps his engineers lacked the insight to imagine why you might want to market to a personal consumer. Whatever the case, these words look spectacularly silly today.

I think a similar analogy from a company perspective might be trying to imagine a world where an 840 ventilator might be placed into the home. At today's prices and with today's applications, that is improbable for anyone without a personal fortune. However, if we were able to continually improve the performance and miniaturize the technology, it may someday be possible to shrink the unit to a more portable size. Who knows? Fifty years from now, we might laugh at a prediction that stated no one would ever need a ventilator in their home!

At a recent workgroup meeting, we were discussing mobile technology. To give the attendees some sense of the rapid pace of change, the meeting opened with this photo below:

The world is morphing so quickly that it is difficult to imagine what the future will be like. We were discussing mobile applications. Ironically, up until a few years ago, mobile applications truly didn't exist in any meaningful numbers. Will it always be this way? Will the near term future rely on these streaking meteors that flash across the sky and disappear?

I'm not sure anyone truly knows the answer but it will certainly be entertaining to try and find out!