Failing To Predict The Power Of The Web

I read a couple of books about technology leaders in the last week. Books that were written fifteen or twenty years ago. It’s a fascinating demonstration of how the development of the web has changed perspectives. “Expert” commentators couldn’t predict the changes, and working practices seem so different when we look back. It shows that for all we discuss things, we’re probably not going to predict the next big thing. It’ll be unexpected.

Nobody Wants Computers

“It may be difficult to convince people they need a computer…” (Masao Morita, then head of home and personal computers for Sony, quoted in Akio Morita’s ‘Made In Japan’, written in 1986)

We’ve all seen the older quotes about the need for computers – that the world would only need five (from the chairman of IBM in 1943), or that they would weigh tons (Popular Mechanics in 1949). Those are predictions from a different age. The quote from ‘Made In Japan’ comes from a time that we might already consider the digital age. They come from a time when it wasn’t just conceivable, it was perfectly possible, for people to own a personal computer.

I think in 1986 I had three computers, a Spectrum, an Atari ST, and a PC, but that was unusual. Yet here’s the guy in charge of home computers for Sony still talking about how people didn’t see the need to own a computer. Twenty years later it’s a surprise when I meet people who don’t own a computer, even if they don’t need it for work or entertainment. A computer with internet access feels almost like a standard domestic appliance.

Email Is A ‘Major Project’

“His first day on the job, Friedman got a window office. A week later he had his first major project – connecting Microsoft’s foreign offices to corporate headquarters in Bellevue by E-Mail.” (from ‘Hard Drive – Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft empire, talking of the hiring of Neal Friedman in the mid 1980s)

Email is ubiquitous today. If it’s surprising if someone doesn’t have a computer, it’s amazing if someone doesn’t have an email address. A “long wait” for email might be if it takes a day for the IT department to set up your work account when you get a new job. I can’t imagine the impracticality of working without access to email, but pre-Internet the installation of email was a major project even for a company like Microsoft.

Companies Will Succeed By Providing “Full Systems”

“…in the not too far future, a computer will have to be able to hook up to larger networks of information, into systems for home security, weather forecasting, financial affairs, shopping and so on.” (Akio Morita, co-founder and chairman of Sony, writing in ‘Made In Japan’)

OK, a good start here. Morita has basically predicted the internet and its impact and necessity for the personal computer market. He goes on to say:

“Making the bits and pieces of such a system will not serve a company well; a successful company will have to come up with the full systems that are needed.”

If anything he was totally wrong about this. Companies haven’t been successful by trying to provide everything from weather forecasts, shopping, etc. The most successful companies are the ones that have focused on a particular service – Amazon, Monster, ebay, YouTube. Providing one service well seems to have been the route to success. The internet itself offers that full service, and Morita presumably never predicted how the likes of Google would provide a service that pulled all the elements together, but single companies don’t try and provide that catch-all.

Predicting The Future

I read a fun fact recently, that if you take a scientist using complex computer models to predict future events – e.g. environment, economy, etc, and you compare that with the predictions of a random sample of ‘average people’, then the random sample will be more likely to be right. The reason being that on average people expect things to stay pretty much the same in future as they are now. I don’t think that holds true for online though, and not only will things not stay the same I’m pretty confident that the biggest developments won’t be predicted at all.