"Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney."
Or so said a Newsweek article, published in 1995 and recovered by the blog ThreeWordChant, where you can read the full article. This is the era of Usenet (BBS), of the first mobile phones in the workplace, the shift from desktops to laptops (but nothing to be compared with what we use now). I should check my old professional files: I'd probably come up with this kind of stuff as well. The only part of it which isn't totally wrong is the part about a more democratic government. Still a long way to go there.
And I would absolutely love for someone to take 15 years of Forrester reports with 5 year predictions and calculate how often they were wrong. Or any other big consulting firm, for that matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment