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Comment by discordance | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious as to why this doesn't affect the credibility of the writers that publish this sort of garbage? Matthew Lynn, the author, has continued on over the years to publish stories for the WSJ and HuffPost.

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Do you expect to get fired from your job if you make a single wrong decision or prediction? I can't speak to this particular writer but a lot of very intelligent, insightful people have been very wrong about important things and still managed to maintain their credibility by being right about other things (and for being wrong for credible reasons).

The big thing that helped the iPhone take off, the App Store, wasn't out yet. Things changed rapidly.

They don't get paid to be correct, they get paid to get hits on the site. At the time a computer company making a phone was a very easy thing to look at and say it wasn't going to work.

Credibility or marketability? The publications only want pageviews. Articles like these get them, whether they end up being right or wrong.

At the time they may have been right, but the truth involves a time element. At closer look, it shows how immensely popular and desired what Apple was bringing to market was to overcome opinions like that. Back then that was the reality.

I think when you go back and look at changes, many time it focuses on mainstream people who were wrong. But it was really everyone in the industry was wrong at that time, and shows how amazingly time and innovation through research and development can unseat the current reality.

I know I realized how big it was the moment I read OpenGL ES and the announcement of the SDK at the Keynote in that it was a new handheld gaming market. However I thought it would be a smaller market like the current social/casual game market at the time. It turned into engulf and change the entire thing and has the biggest player population of all now while putting the other companies in defensive positions (Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft).

The general public has short memory. The 'analysis industry' take advantage of that.

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