Gallery

The ten worst IT predictions of all time

Posted on 26 Sep 2006 at 17:50

Having spent $300 billion globally on fixing the problem, events were actually embarrassingly low-key. A Japanese nuclear installation hiccupped, the odd website displayed the wrong date and, outside Saffron Walden, Mr Musgrove's programmable toaster burnt his crumpet due to an embedded software glitch - a bad start to the new millennium for anyone.

Cynics claim the whole concept was a hoax, and that nothing would have happened had the $300 billion been spent on one enormous party, citing the fact that schools and the third world suffered few problems despite not spending a penny on the Y2K fix. Supporters say we'd have been finished if it wasn't for all the hard work.

In case you missed the excitement, more fun and games are expected in 2038, when the Unix timestamp rolls over. Then there's the five-digit 10,000 problem, but frankly, who cares?

6 1.5 ton computers

Just goes to show what teeth-sucking mechanics know. We've come a long way in the digital dieting stakes since 1949 when American magazine Popular Mechanics made its infamous prediction, and what seemed impossible half a century ago is laughable in a day when specialist servers will fit into your shirt pocket. Simple computers are now smaller than the eye can see - IBM claims that when carbon monoxide atoms are arranged in a precise pattern, "nudging" one of them with a scanning tunnelling microscope moves others in a fixed pattern. The researchers have lined up the atoms in such a way to create a three-input sorter, a simple circuit, which measured 12 x 17 nanometres. Easier to operate is the A-Listed Sony VAIO VGN-TX2XP, which weighs in at just 1.24kg.

7 E-government

Back in 1999, when the prime minister Tony Blair promised 100% of government services would be online by 2005, it sounded like groundless bluster, yet now, a year after the deadline, it sounds like, well, groundless bluster. Some good work has undoubtedly been done, and the government claims an impressive 97% of services are now online. Yet go to the driving licence application pages, and you'll discover that online means a website that provides information - not actually a way of processing citizen requests. According to the official "Better Connected 2006" report, just 13% of local government sites are transactional, offering such luxuries as "more than one type of online interaction such as payment, applications, consultation, bookings". And if you're disabled, forget it; the Cabinet Office says 97% of official sites are unusable by disabled people. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that after a £10 billion investment, central government admits only 12% of adults have visited a local authority website. The problem? "People don't know what e-government is," says Angela Smith, the new minister for local e-government. "I didn't know myself until I got this job."

8 Microsoft overvalued

A classic case of the one that got away. IBM might have considered buying Microsoft when Bill Gates still had pimples, but clearly didn't see the potential of the company, which at the time employed just 128 people and had revenues of $16 million. This despite the fact that the year before, the IBM personal computer debuted running MS-DOS. For the financial year ending in June 2006, Microsoft reported revenues of $44 billion and is currently worth £248 billion. Oops. For the sake of even-handedness, the boys behind Apple met the same scepticism in their formative years. "Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we're not going to buy your product," the president of Atari allegedly told Steve Jobs when he was trying to drum up interest in his concept of the Mac.