Getting it wrong big time
Clearly in the early days of The Boidem optimism primarily reigned. Not too much later, however, other voices started being heard. Almost twenty years ago, in the December 2007 column, I offered up some of those criticisms. I quoted Elton John, for instance, who told us:
The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff.
Undoubtedly the star of that column was Clifford Stoll who in 1995 had published one of the first highly critical books about the internet - Silicon Snake Oil. Stoll made numerous predictions about the problematic future of the internet, but one in particular stood out:
Whether yo-yos, books, records, or insurance, there are good reasons why business doesn't work over the Internet. As we'll see later, there's no way to send money across the network.
It's a very good guess that there are more monetary transactions on the internet today than there are actual searches for what we might call "information". On the other hand, to his credit, in 2010, when an article from 1995 reappeared with that and other predictions that clearly didn't materialize, Stoll commented:
Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.
A bit of similar humility on the part of today's technological leaders couldn't hurt.
Go to: A long way, and the wrong way, or:
Go to: So the writing was on the wall?, or
Go to: Sometimes the tie-in is obvious, or
Go to: It was thirty years ago today