Kevin Kelly: "Digital things I've been wrong about"
Kevin Kelly, one of the smartest people I know, wrote a great blog post about digital things he's been wrong about. He thought The Sims would flop, but 100 million copies have been sold. He thought Photoshop, ink jet printers, Quicken, and eBay were sure losers and that push technologies, MusicJam, and virtual shared workspaces were sure winners.
Sadly I can detect no pattern to my mis-predictions. In some cases, I did not anticipate improvements and advances that would remake a pathetic first version into a truly cool tool. In others I anticipated advances that never came.LinkIf I could actually tell which inventions were going to succeed, I'd be a billionaire. You would too.
I believe no one can always be right about what will work because the number of variables determining success are too high. The details of execution for each idea matter greatly. The Sims by a different genius, different company, different platform, different ecosystem may well have flopped. Photoshop by a different team may have crashed. Likewise, MusicJam or Second Life is a different setting may have flown.
This inherent uncertainty about success is what makes life so interesting.
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So, what did he predict correctly? I'd be interested in seeing that list, for comparison.
I remember seeing one of the early IBM PC's. It had to run off a drive: it had a BIOS but most of the operating system came off the floppy. It was big. The graphics could manage 3 colours: red greeen and yellow, or cyan magenta and white. It was big and clunky and an unappetizing browny-grey color. A Commodore 64 or a Spectrum looked so much better.
"Even coming from IBM won't save that dog. It'll be gone in six months".
Not one of my better predictions.
I watched the first Happy Days and told anyone who would listen to my 10-year-old ravings that it would be canceled immediately.
To be fair -- the early version was not Fonzie-centric -- and ABC honcho Freddy Silverman had not pointed this out to Gary Marshall yet ...
I also loved a show called "Lifeline" a show about medical doctors. It was canceled after a 2 year run, always had low ratings, but won some emmes. Oh yeah, I would posit it truly was the first commercial network reality show ...
KK says he doesn't see a pattern in what he got wrong. But I think there is one.
It has to do with technology that non-technical people from the "real world" (not the techie) world like. ebay, the sims, both were successful because they brought in respectively people who otherwise didn't or barely used the internet, and people who otherwise didn't play video games. Photoshop brought in graphic designers, artists and photographers who probably did use computers but weren't computer geeks.
All the things that us technogeeks think are cool aren't really what everyone else finds worth their time.
I remember getting to sit down to an original Mac, typing for a few moments, having the guy who'd brought it in tell me that there were functions you could only get to with the mouse, and saying "Well that's stupid, who'd want to keep taking their hands off the keyboard every 5 seconds?"
(Photoshop's rise was also was luckily timed with the growth of the web and the growth of graphics on the web, which helped a lot I bet.)
He was absolutely right about Quicken, though... He just needs to step back and look at it in a broader perspective.
People with too much time on their hands still use it to balance their checkbooks, but the vast majority of people will forget that brief era that existed between manual checkbook balancing and the online banking age where checks are written and mailed for you by your bank, and your checkbook is constantly and automatically balanced for you by somebody else's computer.
Perhaps his expectations were a few years ahead of their time.
Perhaps this is why "fail early and often" is a successful strategy.
I was sure the Nintendo DS was going to be a flop.
Regardless of any of the otehr predictions, its absurd that ANYONE thought 'push' technology (in the form it was originally presented) was going anywhere.
I stopped subscribing to Wired with the issue that said "Push!" on the cover, its was just plane rubbish.
Hey, The Sims *Online* flopped, and everyone thought that would be a big hit, so maybe that's just a partial miss.
The Nintendo DS was a flop. Almost no one bought it for its original purpose as a high-end potato chip bag clip. Microsoft and Sony already owned that market, though their chip clips were designed for more adult-oriented snack foods.
It was only when some blogger discovered that with a little effort the DS could also be made to play video games that it really took off, and Nintendo had to scramble to reposition the product. The new strategy was ultimately successful, but the DS's backward compatibility with corn chips and pretzels is also believed to have helped.
I add this item to my very long list of things that I admire about Kevin Kelly... that he would volunteer a laundry list of mistakes he's made. That is still a very rare action among people who write about the techo-future.
Carl Sagan did something like this in one of his later books -- a long list of things that he had been wrong about. Makes for interesting reading.
I remember back in the 1990s, when all my friends were getting dot-com jobs but I wasn't, hearing about Pointcast and thinking it sounded really annoying. "Who the hell would want that?" But oh well, I thought, they all say that's the next big thing, so I guess there's something to it that I don't understand and I'd better get used to it... Turns out I was more correct than I thought.
Of course, a few years before I thought Nirvana represented a new nadir in music.
Back in the early days of the net - many years before the birth of the WWW - I remember thinking that buying a domain name for your company was a silly way to show off and a foolish way of wasting money - much like buying vanity plates for your car.
I may have been wrong.
One of Australia's foremost music gurus (at least at the time) Ian "Molly" Meldrum, predicted that Cyndi Lauper would be a bigger star than Madonna.
alisong76 at #17 writes:
> One of Australia's foremost music gurus (at least at the time) Ian "Molly" Meldrum, predicted that Cyndi Lauper would be a bigger star than Madonna.
He also thought Kllatu were either a) going to be bigger than The Beatles or possibly b) were The Beatles. Good old Molly.