Measuring Prophetability: Which Net Predictions Have Endured A Decade Later

While the end of the dotcom boom was sobering for many American businesses, the promise of tech improvement couldn’t be denied. In 2001, the Internet was undeveloped compared to today’s standards…ISPs were slower, Wi-Fi functionally nonexistent, mobile devices rough and unsophisticated, and websites themselves recovering from the hangover of limitless profit potential.

Still, there was a lot to look forward to, and tech writers of the era proved reasonable soothsayers for some internet tech we think of as common today. Others? Not so much. Here are some predictions they got right:

• Smarter Homes: Back when automation was being pooh-poohed as networked toasters and other home frivolities (we’re looking at you, Roomba), the benefits of smart homes as tools to help regulate electricity usage and respond to consumer purchasing habits didn’t escape writers. These machine-to-machine efforts laid the groundwork for the ‘Internet of Things.’
• Better Phones: While desktop browsing was rapidly adopting then shedding better display monitors using faster machines, cell phone displays were pretty primitive in 2001. Nowadays, the phone as a display device is ubiquitous, but 2001 users were browsing on phones that were “not designed to hold and look at,” but “designed to hold to your ear,” and certainly not “designed to share cat videos.”
• Tech Obstacles: Even with the pace of tech capability doubling every two years (or less), use has struggled to keep up with new, high demand devices. Handheld devices and PDAs were criticized for using too much battery power, creating a real world tether on devices that were constantly outdoing each other. Anyone who has brought their cell phone charger with them to work knows that this problem hasn’t gone away.

But nobody’s perfect, especially fortune tellers. Here are some predictions or observations they missed out on:

• The Ad Ceiling: The heady promise of content + banner = revenue proved unsustainable in the dotcom’s early years, but rumors of online advertising’s death were greatly exaggerated. A graph of the top 20 revenue generating websites in an article titled “Not By Ads Alone” doesn’t even list Google which earned 96% of its almost $38 billion 2011 revenue from advertising, with online TV ads, social media advertising, and email marketing becoming increasingly more sophisticated and robust across the industry.
• An Advertising “Outernet”: The Outernet, for advertisers was supposed to become ubiquitous web ad portals, at the doctor’s office, sports arenas, convenience stores, and gas stations. Instead, web kiosk models floundered under high costs and low demand, smartphones made entertainment portals obsolete, and doctors mostly renewed their magazine subscriptions.
• Clickable Television: Heralded as a marketer’s dream, interactive in program ads were supposed to capitalize on product placement in TV series and sporting events to drive viewers to become users on websites in order to convert them to consumers and giving TV programs a quasi video game feel. Although interactive ads are common on video sites Hulu and YouTube, as well as music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, the (seeming) mecca of content-embedded ads never caught on with consumers who loathe encountering more advertising than before.

On the whole, tech writers weren’t especially good at reading the tea leaves of Internet business, even when guided by the trend of ever faster, ever more powerful computers. They generally made guesses based on their own industry wisdom that user behaviors and demands would remain very similar over time. Nothing has proven more correct.