Gallery

The ten worst IT predictions of all time

Posted on 26 Sep 2006 at 17:50

The Pew Internet Project report claimed people were cutting back on email because their inboxes contained 80% spam. For most people, however, such a head-in-the-sand approach would have been an impossible luxury, especially when Forbes magazine called email the fourth most important business tool available at the time, pushing the telephone into fifth place.

With so much importance given to the medium, it was inevitable the companies would step into the breach and stem the flow of "erection problem" adverts into inboxes.

"There are simply too many companies, with too much at stake, with too much capital to invest and too much reward to be gained, to permit obsolescence," Matt Blumberg, CEO of email company Return Path said a year later. "Many companies that sell direct to consumers online are generating upwards of 25% of revenue via email. Those aren't exactly the signs of a sick medium."

The problem certainly existed, but to say it would kill the internet is almost as daft as internet companies claiming they'd kill spam. And surely only the most naive of computing "experts" would claim that.

3 Death of spam

Not since he banged on about the "Mira" Smart Display has Uncle Bill been so wide of the mark. Figures vary, but a wave of spam still sluices around the web, with some 50 billion tempting offers circulating daily. Thankfully, better filtering at ISP and IT department level means we see fewer nuisance emails in our inboxes, but the problem hasn't gone away. Microsoft's plans called for better filtering and authentication, but these plans ran into trouble in the courts, scuppering Gates' great hope for the digital equivalent of stamps for email. "In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant," the Microsoft supremo predicted, perhaps aware that as the largest software supplier in the world his company might be able to skim off any price tag placed on sending email. The rest of the industry thinks authentication is a better solution, with Microsoft's own Sender ID and Yahoo's DomainKeys at the fore.

4 Death of the PC

Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, might have been right about the PC being "a ridiculous device", but his massive investment in a replacement turned out to be ill-judged at the least. Instead of fully functioning computers, his diskless "network computers" were supposed to be easier to use and far cheaper than anything the Wintel combo could put together, but by the time they launched in 1997 the prices of PCs had tumbled and people had even begun to understand how to use Microsoft programs.

Ellison's idea owed much to earlier mainframes of the 1970s and 1980s, where relatively dumb terminals relied upon servers for data and applications. Ellison apparently overlooked a couple of critical flaws in his cunning plan, mainly that the idea was ahead of its time. Given that the vast majority of web users at the end of last century were on dial-up, the low bandwidth was insufficient for transferring executable content. Oh, and it turned out people wanted to use computers for more than just word processing.

5 Millennium bug

Prince's classic lyrics "tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999" might have been an anthem for the industry that sprung up around the hyperbolic fretting over the Millennium Bug.

Programmers believed software would fail when computer clocks rolled around at the start of the year 2000, because code-conscious early programmers had included only two year digits in date-related calculations. Good work, except computers would surely confuse 2000 for 1900 and suffer a silicon hissy fit. Computer scientist Edward Nash Yourdon and others whipped up a storm of panic-buying public anxiety, suggesting electricity supplies would fail, banks would collapse and planes would fall from the sky when onboard systems realised they hadn't been invented yet.