It'll Never Catch On

The experts, visionaries, and titans of industry explain — with total confidence — why the world you currently live in is impossible.

There is no figure in history quite so reliably wrong as the credentialed expert pronouncing on the future. Not the fool — the fool at least knows he is guessing. This is the authority, the man at the very top of his field, calmly explaining why the obvious next thing will never happen, in the moments before it happens to him. Every device in your pocket and your home was, at some point, declared a non-starter by someone whose entire job was to know better. The blade is for the certainty of the expert, never for the ordinary person who simply had not been asked.

“Guitar Groups Are on the Way Out” — Decca Records, 1962

When a young band auditioned, Decca passed, reportedly explaining to their manager that “we don't like their sound, and guitar groups are on the way out.” The band was the Beatles. Decca had signed a different act that day instead, the identity of which history has mercifully allowed everyone to forget.

The verdict: He was paid — specifically, and well — to hear the future, in a room with the future standing right in front of him, playing it.

“Of No Value to Us” — Western Union, 1876

Offered the patent on Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Western Union's internal verdict, as it has come down to us, was that “this 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication — the device is inherently of no value to us.” They were then the most powerful communications company on earth. They are now a way to send fifty dollars to a relative.

The verdict: The most expensive sentence a market leader can utter is “of no value to us” — and it is almost always uttered about the thing that is about to replace him.

“Heavier-Than-Air Flying Machines Are Impossible” — Lord Kelvin, c. 1895

Kelvin was arguably the most eminent physicist of his age — president of the Royal Society, a man with an absolute temperature scale named after him — and he declared, flatly, that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible. For good measure he also dismissed X-rays as a hoax. The Wright brothers, who had no temperature scale, had other ideas about eight years later.

The verdict: The grander the authority and the more total the confidence, the more spectacular the crater when the future arrives exactly on schedule.

“A Million Years Away” — The New York Times, 1903

The paper of record editorialized at length on the folly of flying machines, suggesting a practical aircraft might emerge in perhaps one to ten million years of patient effort by mathematicians and engineers. The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk roughly nine weeks later.

The verdict: The estimate was off by about a million years, give or take nine weeks — a margin that did not stop anyone from setting it in type with full confidence.

“No Reason to Have a Computer in His Home” — Ken Olsen, 1977

The founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation — then a colossus of computing — told a convention that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” He ran one of the largest computer companies in the world. It no longer exists. The homes, meanwhile, filled with computers, and then so did the pockets.

The verdict: He could see the computer clearly. It was the human being he could not picture — the one who would want one for no reason an executive would ever approve.

“Tired of Staring at a Plywood Box” — Darryl Zanuck, 1946

The head of 20th Century Fox reassured the film industry that television was a passing fad: “people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” Humanity has since stared at the box, then a flatter box, then a box it carries everywhere — with an endurance that ought to genuinely alarm us.

The verdict: He fatally underestimated the one human appetite never once reported as satisfied: the appetite for staring at a glowing rectangle.

“A Permanently High Plateau” — Irving Fisher, 1929

Fisher was the most celebrated economist in America when he announced that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” He said it days before the Great Crash, lost his own fortune in the wreckage, and spent the rest of his career as a cautionary tale told by other economists.

The verdict: The word “permanently,” in the mouth of a confident expert, is the most reliable sell signal ever discovered.

“No Chance” — Steve Ballmer, 2007

Asked about a just-announced phone, the CEO of Microsoft laughed: “There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” He was running the most valuable software company on earth, laughing at the device that would become the most profitable product in the history of commerce.

The verdict: The laugh is the tell. It is the exact sound an expert makes in the instant before the future relieves him of the joke.

The Man Who Ate His Words — Robert Metcalfe, 1995

Metcalfe — no fool, the inventor of Ethernet — predicted in print that the internet would catastrophically collapse in 1996. When it conspicuously failed to, he stood before an audience, blended a copy of the column into a pulp, and drank it, honoring a promise to literally eat his words.

The verdict: He earns his place here not for the wrong prediction — everyone makes those — but for the one thing almost no expert ever does about it, which remains, decades on, the only known cure.

Notice the pattern, because it is the most useful thing in this newspaper. The error is never made by the ignorant; it is made, every single time, by the reigning authority — the one person credentialed, paid, and positioned to know. Expertise tells you how the world is. It is nearly useless, and frequently dangerous, at telling you how the world is about to be — because the thing about to replace you looks, from the summit of the field, exactly like a toy. Remember that the next time someone very important explains, with a laugh, why something is impossible.