One of my speaking gigs last week was EDM08 in London. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for long, but I did catch a very interesting presentation by O2’s Mike Short, currently VP of R&D. I first met Mike back in ZagMe days and he’s always good value.
In his presentation, he showed a couple of really fascinating slides, which had been produced by O2 back in 2000. While I’m sure you can do the math(s), it’s worth emphasising that this was only 8 years ago, which is a gnat’s heartbeat in historical terms. And yet, they demonstrate all too well just how difficult it is to predict the future. Just to be clear, this isn’t a reflection on O2’s forecasting ability in any way and I think that it’s great that Mike was prepared to share them.
Here’s the first slide, which is O2’s remarkably prescient view of the future for mobile.
Apart from what they did get right, it’s interesting to see what they missed. The one that struck me most was, perhaps not surprisingly, advertising. Maps was another identified by the audience. Can you spot any more?
At the same time, this was O2’s view of how we’d need to be equipped to do all this new stuff.
Doubtless, this was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but remember that the Nokia 3310 was pretty much state-of-the-art, with its black-and-white screen and running Snake II. But casting my mind back, I reckon that most of us would have agreed with this vision and certainly, we could never have foreseen just how much conversion has happened into the tiny devices we carry around today.
Bill Gates wrote in The Road Ahead “People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years, and underestimate what will happen in the next ten” and this is a great example of that tendency.
A little known fact is that Mr Gates’s thought wasn’t entirely original (who would have thought it?) and was predated by something Joseph Licklider wrote back in 1965: “A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years…”
I saw Mike present these same slides at an event in Glasgow recently. They are, as you say, remarkably prescient.
A missing items is camera, because the photographs entry was meant to be looking at them, not taking them.
I’d also say that “Money” hasn’t advanced as far as we might have expected.
Games aren’t mentioned here, nor is bluetooth as a sharing mechanism. Also, ringtones aren’t on this list or maybe they’re included as ‘music’ although they’re more about personalisation and fashion IMHO.
It was interesting to hear Mike speak about all this though and he’s always good value.
No, true, money hasn’t advanced as far as we’d expected. However, not surprisingly, the very same network operator that Mike works for (in that ‘overestimating’ kind of way that we’re all so familiar with) stated in a categorical way that “we’d all be using our phones as an NFC wallet within 18 months”. I almost stopped laughing long enough to choke.
[...] Russell Buckley has a wonderful post that points to a presentation from 2000 that forecasts the future of mobility. Some of the [...]
[...] Šis paveiksliukas buvo padarytas prieš aštuonis metus specialiai vienai konferencijai, per kurią buvo kalbama apie technologijų progreso perspektyvas keletai ateinančių metų. Taip turėtų atrodyti dabartinis žmogus. [...]
A lot of the things mentioned haven’t surfaced in a big way, as they are still way too expensive to use. Did he mention flat rate data during the presentation?
Also, some areas like chat are not owned by the operators, but third-party application providers. There are still few phones supporting MSN, AOL etc natively. Not that I understand from what those companies get revenue, as they don’t even use advertizing. Waiting to be acquired by Google?
[...] article that it takes 6 years to become an overnight success. Just yesterday I read an article by Mobhappy who quoted Joseph Licklider that “People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to [...]
[...] Šis paveiksliukas buvo padarytas prieš aštuonis metus specialiai vienai konferencijai, per kuria buvo kalbama apie technologiju progreso perspektyvas keletai ateinanciu metu. Taip turetu atrodyti dabartinis zmogus. [...]