You can’t really BLAME people for being shortsighted. We’re all shortsighted in one way or another. But you can LAUGH at the poor shortsighted sap who wrote: “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little” on the notes for Fred Astaire’s first screen test in the 1920s. Like: whoops!!! Everyone wants to be the one who knows BEFOREHAND that something is going to be huge. Or to recognize at the very moment it’s happening: This is going to be HUGE. NO ONE wants to be the one who has NO imagination or faith when faced with something new. Or … you just don’t want to be flat out WRONG about something.<\/p>\n
I came across this wonderfully entertaining collection of quotes all in this theme.<\/p>\n
I think a lot of this is just evidence of people who are afraid of change … who don’t want to believe that things are changing right before their eyes … They feel threatened by the change, they can’t get their minds around what their lives would be like if … such and such happened … It’s hard to know right in the moment what will take off.<\/p>\n
I remember when I was bummed out about the advent of CD!!! I did not embrace the new technology. I resisted. I was still a cassette-tape girl … and I felt like: Oh God … no … what is this CD nonsense?? Why won’t it just GO AWAY??<\/p>\n
“The information superhighway is a dirt road that won’t be paved over until 2025.” — Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom\/Blockbuster.<\/i><\/p>\n
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” –H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927<\/i><\/p>\n
“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” — An internal Western Union memo, 1876 <\/i><\/p>\n
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — IBM chairman Thomas Watson, 1943<\/i><\/p>\n
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, founder, chairman & president of DEC, 1977<\/i><\/p>\n
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” –Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949<\/i><\/p>\n
“Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” – Kristin Wilson, Nintendo, Inc., 1989. <\/i><\/p>\n
“A rocket will never be able to leave the earth’s atmosphere.” —The New York Times, 1936<\/i><\/p>\n
“The only thing I’d rather own than Windows is English. Then I’d be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T.” —Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, Inc.<\/i><\/p>\n
“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.” —The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957<\/i><\/p>\n
“But what … is it good for?” —Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip<\/i>.<\/p>\n
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” —David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.<\/i><\/p>\n
“There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.” —Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken, 1923<\/i><\/p>\n
“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” —Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M “Post-It” Notepads<\/i>.<\/p>\n
“So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.'” —Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer.<\/i><\/p>\n
“Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” —Producer Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946<\/i><\/p>\n
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy!”
\n—Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859<\/i><\/p>\n
“Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.”
\n—Boston Post, 1865<\/i><\/p>\n
“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” —Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.<\/i><\/p>\n
“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.” —Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872<\/i><\/p>\n
“The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.” —Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873<\/i>.<\/p>\n
“By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.” —Visionary and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, 1966<\/i><\/p>\n
“You ain’t going nowhere, son. You ought to go back to driving a truck.” —The Grand Ole Opry’s Jim Denny to Elvis Presley, 1954<\/i><\/p>\n
“Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive.” —The winning entry in a “What were HAL’s first words” contest judged by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY creator Arthur C. Clarke<\/i><\/p>\n
“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.” —A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)<\/i><\/p>\n
“That rainbow song’s no good. Take it out.” – MGM memo after first showing of The Wizard Of Oz<\/i><\/p>\n
“You’d better learn secretarial skills or else get married.” – Modeling agency, rejecting Marilyn Monroe in 1944<\/i><\/p>\n
“Radio has no future.” “X-rays are clearly a hoax”. “The aeroplane is scientifically impossible.” – Royal Society president Lord Kelvin, 1897-9.<\/i><\/p>\n
“Forget it. No Civil War picture ever made a nickel.” —MGM executive, advising against investing in Gone With The Wind<\/i><\/p>\n
“Television won’t matter in your lifetime or mine.” – Radio Times editor Rex Lambert, 1936<\/i><\/p>\n
“And for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all, safaris in Vietnam.”
\n– Newsweek magazine, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s<\/i><\/p>\n
(found via The Freeman Institute<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can’t really BLAME people for being shortsighted. We’re all shortsighted in one way or another. But you can LAUGH at the poor shortsighted sap who wrote: “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little” on the notes … Continue reading