Sir Alan Michael Sugar, the founder of Amstrad, in Feb 2005: “Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput.”
Steve Chen, the co-founder of YouTube in March 2005: “There’s just not that many videos I want to watch,” At the time YouTube featured about 50 videos. Today it is 3 Million videos Per Second!
Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp, in 1977: “(There’s) no need for a computer in the home,”
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM reportedly in 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, in 1990 called PC “a ridiculous device”
Darryl Zanuck is an Academy Award-winning producer, in 1946: “TV won’t last because people would, “soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night”
Lee De Forest, an American inventor in 1926, about TV: “While theoretically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”
Boeing engineer, in 1933, after the first flight of the Boeing 247, a plane that could hold ten people, said, “There will never be a bigger plane built.”
Similarly in 1904, Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre: “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
Bill Gates in January 2004: “The problem of spam e-mail messages will be gone within two years”.
Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, in 1962: “Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.”
Western Union Co internal memo in 1879: “telephone” has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
IBM in 1959 to founder of Xerox: “The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.”
Editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, in 1957: “I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
