

A prescient footnote - jplewicke
http://blog.oddhead.com/2010/07/15/most-prescient-footnote-ever/

======
lambda
Those footnotes have a mix of prescience and just plain wrong. For instance,
there's one about how a good open source browser can fundamentally change the
industry; and Firefox has in that time gained much ground and helped spur
innovation in IE and across the web (as have WebKit and Chrome). However,
Firefox was already underway by the time he wrote this, so that prediction
isn't necessarily so forward looking.

His opposition to client-side software, though, is less prescient. He says
that JavaScript may not be available when you can browse the web on your
phone; but JavaScript support is now one of the distinguishing features of new
smartphones. He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the
popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong. Mostly, Java
applets themselves were a bad technology, but client side code that integrates
with the Web is a popular idea, in the form of Flash and JavaScript.

So yeah, there's one prescient quote in there, but some more that are wrong.
And many people were hoping for an Apple iPod/phone for quite a while; see,
for example, <http://technologizer.com/2009/12/28/iphone-rumors/> (the first
list of collected iPhone rumors I found in a google search).

~~~
gruseom
Hold on a second.

 _He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of
client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong_

What's the original quote? I bet that in "client-side apps is a bad idea", he
was talking about desktop apps as opposed to web apps. Client-side JS is very
much a web app thing, so far from refuting the prediction, it confirms it. And
indeed the prediction turned out correct, if not so prescient as to be
newsworthy years later.

Assuming I'm guessing correctly, that brings us to 3 correct predictions vs. 1
incorrect one, quite a bit better a record than you're implying.

Edit: Also, since you allude to "some more that were wrong": care to say what
they were?

~~~
lambda
"In 1995, when we started Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be the
technology everyone was going to use to develop server-base applications.
Applets seemed to us an old-fashioned idea. Download programs to run on the
client? Simpler just to go all the way and run the programs on the server. We
wasted little time on applets, but countless other startups must have been
lured into this tar pit. Few seem to have escaped alive."

p. 227, from scrolling around a bit from the Google Books links in the
original post:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&pg=PA228&#...](http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=ipod+cell)

Also, pp. 228-229:

"I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn't. Most of the
Javascript I see on the Web isn't necessary, and much of it breaks. And when
you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or
toaster), who knows if they'll even support it."

Note that this is just from reading a few of the footnotes from that link; I
haven't read the rest of the book, so I can't speak much on it. All I'm saying
is that he got some things right, some wrong, and that other people were
talking about an iPhone before he did.

And I should have said "a few prescient quotes, and a few that are wrong." The
"one prescient quote" that I wrote was a mistake on my part, as I had just
discussed two prescient quotes (iPhone and open-source browser innovation);
not sure why I wrote "one."

~~~
philh
>I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn't. Most of the
Javascript I see on the Web isn't necessary, and much of it breaks. And when
you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or
toaster), who knows if they'll even support it.

I read this as being advice for the then-present, not a prediction.
"Javascript isn't necessary, doesn't work well, and it's not guaranteed that
it will work in future."

~~~
lambda
The part about "when you start to be able to browse actual web pages" sure
sounded like a prediction; and by the time mobile web browsers caught up to
the point where you could reasonably browse the open web on them, they were
perfectly capable of running JavaScript just as well as desktop browsers.

This book was published in 2004, the same year that Gmail was released making
heavy use of JavaScript to provide a much better webmail experience than
previous competitors. So, it wasn't even that great a description of the
present, other than the fact that he probably actually wrote it before the
release of Gmail.

My main point is just that if you look at the one quote about an Apple phone
with a web browser, out of context, he does look fairly prescient; but if you
look at the rest of them, and the history of iPhone rumors, he has about as
good a track record as anyone reasonably bright and paying attention to the
industry.

------
bitwize
Alan Kay was heard to have said something along the lines of "Give this a
9-inch screen and you'll take over the world" when he first saw an iPhone.

My _favorite_ one of these was from my favorite music band, The KLF, who after
the success of "Doctor in the TARDIS" decided to write a book called _The
Manual, Or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way_ , which explains, as it says
on the tin, how to go about producing a hit record without any money or
musical talent.

One of the most impressive things about this book is this bit, from the
section on coming up with a good catchy chorus for your smash hit, something
people will remember:

 _Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that
go straight to the emotional heart of the 7" single buying girls in this
country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line
which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will
obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of
the chorus on his debut single it was all over - the Number One position was
guaranteed:

"I'm never going to give you up"

It says it all. It's what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to
hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

"I'm never gonna let you down I'm never going to fool around or upset you"

GENIUS._

Amazing. By two decades these guys anticipated mashups and the Rickroll.

~~~
gabrielroth
_By two decades these guys anticipated mashups and the Rickroll._

No. The people who bought the single in 1987 were responding to the song very
differently from the people who turned it into an internet meme 20 years
later. The passage you quote describes the former; it doesn't predict the
latter.

~~~
bitwize
True, but if the song weren't as singularly, brilliantly catchy as it is it
probably wouldn't have legs as a meme.

~~~
Tichy
I thought it has become a meme because it is so annoying.

------
alain94040
Very impressive. In 1994 (I think, I can't be sure of the date anymore), I
wrote an article in MacWorld France where I said the combination of Apple's
GUI with the Unix kernel had a promising future.

I didn't know it would take another 10 years...

~~~
moxiemk1
Something to that effect had been around for a while by then:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX>

Apple has a wealth of fascinating abandoned projects.

~~~
rbanffy
When they fail, they fail with style.

I'd love to have an A/UX box.

Edit: didn't think of it this way when writing the above, but a unix kernel
with an actual, Apple designed, Mac GUI on top was actually a failure... Go
figure.

~~~
chronomex
I've got an IIsi with A/UX on it. It's pretty neat, though a bit slow--9M of
RAM isn't quite enough. I'd love to give you a hand setting up your own
machine, let me know. :)

~~~
rbanffy
Sadly, I have no MMU-equipped 68K Mac. A/UX required one. :-/

------
motters
In hindsight if you do enough searching you can always find people who
predicted, or appeared to predict, future events.

~~~
Alex3917
It depends how specific the predictions are. Anyone can make some vague
Nostradamus type prediction. Whereas I actually take pride in my spring '07
analysis of why cell phone software was broken:

[http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_...](http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_soft.html)

(Which isn't phrased as a prediction, but is basically equivalent in that it
can only be proven or disproven by future events.)

The funny thing is that the post sounds completely banal today, but at the
time there were several hundred comments about how wrong I was and all sorts
of industry insiders calling me dumb.

~~~
isamuel
A lot of your analysis applies with equal force today, and so has been
falsified by intervening events. For example, you say: "Let's say that against
all odds you get a few early adopters. To everyone else it will look like they
are just sending text messages. Unlike the iPod, your software is invisible.
Invisible software isn't viral." This is still true today (no one can tell
what I'm doing while I fiddle with my phone).

You also say that "the next generation of WiFi will make your product obsolete
in two years anyway." Well, it's been three years, and the next generation of
WiFi hasn't made anything obsolete.

You also say this: "Cell phones don't fit into girl's pants. Remember how the
women you asked said they would only use your software if it had a vibrate
mode? Oops." I don't know if this is a prophecy that women won't use cell
phones or what exactly it is.

~~~
Alex3917
The WiFi part I was clearly wrong about, it ended up being Apple and not a
shift in communications standards that was the key disruptor for the industry.
But I disagree on the other two points. If someone is playing a game on their
iPhone today then it is pretty obvious, or at least much more obvious than the
pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes. And as for
the thing about women, women used to store their cell phones in their purses
and not in their pants until phones like the iPhone and the razor came along.
Without this shift it would have been very, very difficult for services like
twitter to have taken off.

~~~
jarek
> the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes

Uh.

------
austiniteye
Ha, this made me search the web for things PG said recently. I didn't find
anything _that_ specific although I wonder what he thinks of Google/Facebook
or Android/iPhone standoffs

Come to think of it, I wonder what is going to happen to Microsoft? Something
is obviously coming (they won't just fade into background), but what would it
be?

People say that oh, don't worry Microsoft will become just like IBM, but I
don't buy it. IBM does a lot of different things, and it did even more in the
past but stopped. Microsoft, on the other hand, really does just one thing
well: Windows/Office and, assuming those _are_ going to fade away, what does
it leave them with? That's why I believe there's going to be a major
shift/transition in Microsoft business model.

~~~
gabrielroth
The closest record of his current predictions would presumably be the YC
roster.

------
patrickryan
PG also made this statement in May 2009 (iPad released April 2010):

What would be your dream setup?

 _I'd like it if the Air was about half the size. I don't know why Apple won't
make something in between the Air and an iPhone..._

Source: <http://paul.graham.usesthis.com>

~~~
lenni
That's what he looks like? I don't know why I imagined PG to look a lot more
like a bearded Unix-type ...?

~~~
SwellJoe
pg is not the UNIX-type. He avoids systems-level stuff like the plague, as far
as I can tell. rtm and tlb did the UNIX work at Viaweb and, I believe, rtm
does the UNIX stuff for HN. pg is a smug lisp weenie (and I mean that in the
best possible way). He's also a serious Apple fanboy, which the right and
proper UNIX beards tend not to be.

------
stuff4ben
Heh, I made the same prediction one year before Apple released the iPhone.
<http://stuff4ben.blogspot.com/> Oddly enough, it was the last post I made on
my blog. Wish I could have capitalized on my foresight.

~~~
isamuel
Your blog post reads more like a wish than a prediction. "I want my Apple iPod
to make phone calls for me, play video's for me, play J2ME games for me, be
WiFi enabled so it can login to my corporate network and check my email on
Exchange, take 5MP pictures for me, allow me to IM people and surf the net,
and play MP3's all in an iPod-like fit and finish. Why is this so hard?"

~~~
stuff4ben
Read a little further: "Once Apple figures this out, their record iPod sales
from 2005 will pale in comparison." and "I'd rather carry one sleek iPod-ish
device that does everything for me."

You see wishes do come true!

~~~
dockd
There had been talk of "convergence" for years, where the digital camera,
digital music player, digital phone, PDA, etc. would be combined into one
device.

However, that's not exactly an earthshaking prediction. I mean, really, did
anyone think that this wouldn't eventually happen? It's more of a question of
when. In fact, when I read your quote, you're not predicting something, you're
asking for it.

------
presidentender
Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on
it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action
available?

~~~
tlholaday
Sell the stock of its competitors short.

~~~
francoisdevlin
What happens when the entire market segment balloons? APPL might beat out
MSFT, but if everyone is more profitable, your short failed.

~~~
zackattack
Are there publicly-available financial instruments that account for this?

~~~
francoisdevlin
A put order would work well for this, IIRC.

------
celticjames
Bad reasoning: Remember the hits, forget the misses.

~~~
todayiamme
The hits are impressive nonetheless. I think that there is a lesson to take
away over here; perhaps pg is good at this because he has the combination of
common sense, practical knowledge and experience?

It's quite easy to detract from/criticize something, but to learn something
from it is everything.

~~~
nollidge
A given prediction can only be considered impressive in relation to the
predictor's track record. If pg's made a thousand similar public predictions
and this is the only one to come true, then it's not impressive. There is
insufficient evidence presented in TFA to judge whether or not this prediction
was "particularly prescient" or not.

------
clemesha
What about the 2nd comment on the post, by "Sean O"?

Javascript/Ajax has been fundamental to "new-age" tech giants. See Google's
Gmail.

~~~
seldo
A lot of JS on the web does still break all the time, to be fair. It's not
like he predicted it would never improve.

------
kul
I'm pretty sure PG bought a lot of Apple stock in 2001-2003

------
stcredzero
A conversation several jobs ago, well before the iPhone:

Engineering Manager: Well, mobile is obviously a next big thing.

Me: You know what would be hot? If you could be listening to your MP3, then
you get a call and the music fades out into your call. Then when the call
ends, it fades back in. That would sell like hotcakes.

Engineering Manager: [Looks at me like I'm an idiot]

------
code_duck
So, the key to being seen as prescient is to make sure you get it in writing.
John Doe of Hoboken could have said the same thing, but it wouldn't be
possible to quote him on it since he only told his barber. Good reason to
start blogging, I guess.

------
CUViper
Perhaps Apple reads pg, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy...

~~~
mcantor
Does Apple read Hacker News?

If Apple gives me a free iPhone 4, Microsoft will be in big trouble...

~~~
Timothee
Nowadays, they probably care more about Google than Microsoft. Nice try
though.

------
coliveira
Everybody has opinions. Some of them become true, most don't.

~~~
5teev
Yeah, no disrespect to Graham, but oatmeal-against-the-wall....

