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WSJ: Future of Technology Is Hardly Ever What Anyone Has Predicted
Wall Street Journal

Apr 14, 2003


WHEN APPLE COMPUTER introduced its first laser printer in the 1980s,
its sales material made the strongest case the company could make for the
device. Put a laser printer in your office, said the brochures, and it
will be a lot quieter than the daisy-wheel or dot-matrix printers you are
probably using now.

The new Apple printers did indeed print very quietly. But they did something
else, too, that ended up being vastly more important. Unlike existing printers,
which were essentially computer-powered typewriters, the laser devices
could print both text and graphics, and in any layout imaginable. Someone
soon wrote a program called PageMaker and the field of desktop publishing
was born. Apple prospered.

Technology companies are often described as "inventing the future." Maybe
they do. But they aren't very good at predicting it. That's how it is with
the future: You never quite see it coming.

Last week on this page, Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle, made
his predictions for Silicon Valley. He saw a mature computer industry in a dreary state of monopoly maintenance, marked by meager innovation and tepid growth.

I DON'T DISAGREE with the outlook; the notion that Silicon Valley's rah-rah days are behind it has been something of an organizing principle of this column. But let's not discount out of hand the idea that something unforeseen might appear on the scene to change things. Just don't expect to recognize it for what it is right away.

People in the technology world are forever searching for the "killer
app" -- the must-have sure thing that the whole world will want to buy.
Invariably, though, they never find the killer app; it finds them. You
wake up one day and realize that you can't remember how you ever got along
without, say, search engines.

That's one irony of Silicon Valley: The more hype something gets, the
less likely it is to amount to anything.

Several themes run through such famous letdowns as the Apple Newton hand-held
gizmo of a dozen years ago, the "data superhighway" of the mid-1990s, Mr.
Ellison's own anti-PC "thin client" computer and Microsoft's recent ".Net"
reworking of online commerce. All involved wishful thinking passed off
as prognostication. All involved the assumption that the most important
new technologies are handed down fully formed to us mortals from Olympian
heights. All got a lot of attention, but not much use.

It's a problem for technology companies. Most of the really transforming technologies bubble up in unexpected ways. More often than not, they require some sort of existing infrastructure, which they gently nudge in the direction of additional usefulness. The Internet, for instance, would never have happened without a vast and efficient telephone network, not to mention tens of millions of powerful PCs.

And these technologies are almost never envisioned in advance, but instead are appreciated after the fact, like the laser printer. Name your favorite technology. I'll bet it wasn't introduced with a big product launch. The typical pattern is that by doing something useful, simple and slightly new, it attracted customers and programmers who then began investing it with ever-more uses, many of them utterly unforeseen.

WIRELESS NETWORKING, for example, started as something of a hobbyist's
experiment to find a use for a deserted part of the computer spectrum.
Now, people are talking about using Wi-Fi to solve cheaply the "final mile" problem of bringing fast Internet access to every home. There was a time when people thought broadband access to every home would take billions of dollars worth of fiber-optic cable laid everywhere. In the end, we might get it free.

While all predictions are problematic, we should be especially wary of
those that don't contain a healthy sense of respect for the way people
do things now. Consider the business-to-business Internet craze of a few years ago. These were dot-commers who wanted to set up online exchanges to replace the way Detroit auto makers ordered their supplies, for example,
or the way the steel industry unloaded its surplus capacity. They mocked
the nonwired state of Old Economy enterprises and promised all manner of
stunning new efficiencies through the simple addition of a few Internet
browsers.

In the end, the exchanges went nowhere, largely because most businesses
were already managing their affairs pretty well; after all, they had been
at it for years. "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,"
said Thoreau. If he were alive today, he might have added "or new software."

People who believe the stock market is largely unpredictable are called
"random walkers." They say that nothing in the history of a stock price
is of any use in estimating its future value. It would be hard to be so
rigorously agnostic about the future of technology, if only because it's
so much fun crystal-balling about which new gizmo will be hot. The trouble
starts in taking the predictions too seriously