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The Executive Computer - 'Mother of All Markets' or a 'Pipe Dream Driven by Greed'? - NYTimes.com

There’s a fascinating article int he archives of The New York Times. It’s from July 1992, and it’s all about the future for “personal wireless communicators” or what we now call “smartphones”. While John Sculley, then head of Apple, is enthusiastic about the coming “mother of all markets”, the idea is poo-pooed by Andrew Grove, the chairman of Intel, who called the idea of a such devices in every pocket “a pipe dream driven by greed”. Now, while it’s always fun to go back and find important, clever people making predictions that turned out to completely wrong, what’s more interesting to students of paleo-futurology is why they were wrong and what we can learn from that so our own strategies can me made more robust. I found the issue of software raised in the article particularly interesting in that context.

Personal communicators for the mass market raise the possibility of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of different designs and functions and operating standards, each tailored to a different need.

From The Executive Computer - 'Mother of All Markets' or a 'Pipe Dream Driven by Greed'? - NYTimes.com

We’ve ended up with, basically, Apple and Google. A quarter of a century after that article was written, one generation after that predication of chaos, we now find that almost all (in fact 99.6% at the start of 2017) smartphones run iOS or Android.

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