From the CEO of Palm predicting that Apple would fail at making phones to IBM’s chairman predicting that Walmart would crush Amazon, the history of technological upheaval is littered with the ironic dismissals of establishment executives predicting it would all amount to nothing.
There’s a couple factors at work here. The first is survivor bias: all startups raise money by promising revolutionary change; most startups fail. We don’t remember the executives who correctly predicted the failure of grandiose startup revolutions, because this is totally unremarkable. Every startup will be pooh-poohed by someone, and so you can work backwards from the minority of successes to find and embarrass their detractors.
The other factor is the business equivalent to Arthur C Clarke’s first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Successful people are good at figuring out how to go on succeeding the way they always have; they suck at figuring out whether something really different will fail.
Nevertheless, this collection of 33 quotes from senior execs at yesterday’s giant companies who predicted the failure of today’s giants are a fun bit of schadenfreude.
