Ever since LBJ’s “Great Society,” laws have been enacted and government programs established on the belief that we (politicians, bureaucrats, “stakeholders” in government, etc.) are smart enough to fine-tune life. In other words, experts will save us. Witness, for example, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), by which the federal government (and to a much lesser extent, state governments) will overhaul one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Now, experts are great. We need them. But we should be wary of letting politicians turn our lives over to them. For one thing, they’re fallible.
Witness, for example, the iPhone. Apple sold more than 37 million of these computers/radios/phones in the first quarter of 2012 alone.
But what did the experts predict about the iPhone? Some, I’m sure, said the future was bright. But here is what some other experts had to say:
Todd Sullivan, at Seeking Alpha: “A $599 phone will not gain mass acceptance no matter what it does, especially when people can still get its functionality from their existing devices.”
Matt Rosoff, at CNET: “I don’t see it having the same cultural impact or market penetrationas the iPod, or the original Macs.
Matthew Lynn, writing for Bloomberg News, said “The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant.”
Al Ries, writing in Ad Age, said “A stock-market analyst says, ‘The iPhone has the potential to be even bigger than the iPod.’ I think not. An iPod is a divergence device; an iPhone is a convergence device. There’s a big difference between the two. In the high-tech world, divergence devices have been spectacular successes. But convergence devices, for the most part, have been spectacular failures.”
Ries was far from alone in expecting that what was true in the past (people don’t like devices that do more than one thing) would hold true in the future. That illustrates just one challenge to making predictions: People change.
If experts can be so wrong about something as inconsequential as consumer gadgets, why should we expect that they can plan our plans to stay healthy, acquire financial stability, or do anything else in life?