On the contrary, data has always been the cause, not the effect. What’s largely been missing is data on data, on what drives the growth of all of these digital entities and what drives new businesses and business models and innovation and change.” Data has been eating the world and the world has been shifting from analog to digital from just about when Vision 2020 was published but data has been viewed (if viewed at all) as a by-product of other tech developments. ![]() As I wrote last year, “the most astute and influential observers of the tech landscape have been counting and reporting on the number of devices, the number of users, the volume of eCommerce, the number of online ads, the number of apps, the number of images and videos, and so on. Speaking of data and the data explosion, that is another dimension of the road not taken, of focusing on the end-result, in many predictions-ignoring an underlying trend, the most significant trend driving all others. Which meant Amazon, and Google, and Facebook, and billions of new users, and myriad of new uses for “IT.” It also meant data overload, a term I used in 1991 when I made this prediction: “With the destruction of both human and systems barriers to access, users may find themselves facing an overwhelming amount of data, without any means of sorting it and capturing only what they need at a particular point in time.” I’d like to think that I predicted Google in the next sentence–“It is the means of sorting through the data that carry the potential for true Enterprise Integration in the 1990s”-but the truth is that there were no Web and no consumers in my enterprise-focused predictions. Most of these pre-Web predictions got some of the details right, even if their timing was off, but they failed to envision the road that led to many of the new uses and devices they foresaw, the road paved by the Web. Which bring us to the second principle of cloudy crystal balls : We focus on the end-result, not on how we may get there. Originally developed as three software standards running on top of the internet, it rapidly exploded into a vast global, commercial market, with billions of customers, totally eclipsing the “enterprise IT,” business-to-business market, the only meaningful IT market until the early 2000s and the IT market at the center of previous future visions. This 1987 “concept video” was Apple’s Knowledge Navigator, the brainchild of master marketer John Sculley, its CEO at the time, who used it as motivational and recruiting tool.Įven with their different emphases, all of these late 1980s and early 1990s predictions basically shared the same view of the future, of “let’s-use-a-heavy-duty-access-device-to-find-or-get-costly-information-from-centralized-databases-running-on-top-of-an-expensive-network.” This vision was thwarted by one man, Tim Berners-Lee, and his 1989 invention, the World Wide Web. ![]() But like the ones from DEC and IBM and AT&T, it promoted the agenda and business focus of the company producing it. It was unique in showing the future from the point of view of a knowledge worker and highlighting knowledge applications. ![]() That’s the first principle of cloudy crystal balls: We extrapolate from the present and, often, predict a desired future (as in extensions of existing business models).Ī great example of this principle is another one of the “future visions” produced by a tech company that were so popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The future, we all agreed-at DEC, and IBM, and AT&T and all the other large tech companies at the time, and all the analysts and forecasters following them-belonged to “robust,” commercial, closed and proprietary, existing networks.
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