On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:13 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/11/17 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554 Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect as foresight is rare.
And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.
- d.
Which makes his article and his book _Silicon Snake Oil_ all the worse: he knew better! (Although as an astronomer turned sysadmin who hasn't done anything interesting since, I'm not sure how much we could credit Stoll with in terms of history & sociology & trends.)
For example: "None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later.""
Seriously, Cliff? Seriously? This is your idea of a cogent point, that bandwidth sucked in '95? Yet you should've known perfectly well about all the fiber being put in, that broadband tech like ADSL and cable modems were realities in not just the labs but were becoming commercial tech, that all the trends - all! - said that bandwidth would just keep on going up.
"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."
Amazon was founded in '94, and started selling books just a few months after this article. And Amazon was by no means the first to sell books online. And his prediction we would never read books on computers, with Kindle, has obviously been falsified. (E-paper, incidentally, was first invented in the '70s, and the early '90s saw the development of what Kindle would use, e-ink.)
And his 2 paragraphs on e-commerce? Equally risible. We can forgive him for thinking salespeople necessary. (Although I can't; what, did mail-order not prove in the *previous* century that salespeople were unnecessary?) But saying that there was no way to send money online is both ignorant and stupid. What, had banks for all the 20th century been schlepping around documents and whatnot in cars and trains? No, by '95, they had long been using electronic methods, routed over - *computer networks*. Astonishing. (Paypal, BTW, was founded 1998.)
Cliff gets exactly *1* thing right: that computers will be largely useless in juvenile education. When your competition is a stopped clock and your predictions could be seen to be wrong or dubious even before they were made, you know your prognosticating skills are bad.