Feb 26, 2010
Newsweek on Why the Internet Will Fail (1995)
Every word from this 1995 Newsweek article on Why the internet will fail is gold. EVERY SINGLE WORD. I can't wait to read their 1951 article on why television will never work.
Via Eric Andersen
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Via Eric Andersen
[...] thing is NEVER going to take off I was reading Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek article (via Unlikely Words) in which he calls the Internet “trendy and oversold,” and I was [...]
There is one sentence in that long pile of crazy-wrong that I think rings true:
“While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth.”
In my opinion this is 100% correct. The rest of the article was 100% incorrect.
Not sure I agree completely. I think the internet might lure us to surrender our time outside, but not necessarily on earth. And even that… I can now lay in a meadow internetting if I want to.