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Comment by motters | Hacker News Reader

In hindsight if you do enough searching you can always find people who predicted, or appeared to predict, future events.

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It depends how specific the predictions are. Anyone can make some vague Nostradamus type prediction. Whereas I actually take pride in my spring '07 analysis of why cell phone software was broken:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_...

(Which isn't phrased as a prediction, but is basically equivalent in that it can only be proven or disproven by future events.)

The funny thing is that the post sounds completely banal today, but at the time there were several hundred comments about how wrong I was and all sorts of industry insiders calling me dumb.

A lot of your analysis applies with equal force today, and so has been falsified by intervening events. For example, you say: "Let's say that against all odds you get a few early adopters. To everyone else it will look like they are just sending text messages. Unlike the iPod, your software is invisible. Invisible software isn't viral." This is still true today (no one can tell what I'm doing while I fiddle with my phone).

You also say that "the next generation of WiFi will make your product obsolete in two years anyway." Well, it's been three years, and the next generation of WiFi hasn't made anything obsolete.

You also say this: "Cell phones don't fit into girl's pants. Remember how the women you asked said they would only use your software if it had a vibrate mode? Oops." I don't know if this is a prophecy that women won't use cell phones or what exactly it is.

The WiFi part I was clearly wrong about, it ended up being Apple and not a shift in communications standards that was the key disruptor for the industry. But I disagree on the other two points. If someone is playing a game on their iPhone today then it is pretty obvious, or at least much more obvious than the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes. And as for the thing about women, women used to store their cell phones in their purses and not in their pants until phones like the iPhone and the razor came along. Without this shift it would have been very, very difficult for services like twitter to have taken off.

> the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes

Uh.

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