It looks like Bill Gates has been reading my column. Surely it was my wise words about the future of browsing in IT Week’s 10 December issue – rather than the staggering success of the iPhone and iPod – that have got Bill excited about touch-sensitive displays and gesture recognition.
These interface innovations, along with Bill’s woeful Guitar Hero work, were the talk of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, and not a single blogger out there has linked back to me. Don’t I deserve some recognition for my prescience? I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago? No one? Mum?
If only I had been there – curse that ban – I could have hollered at Bill and asked for credit. Oh well, it’s not the first time that I’ve kind of, almost, got something right and not been credited. I once wrote about my dad’s habit of loudly complaining whenever a science fiction film or TV show comes on that the makers never come close to predicting the future accurately.
Take television remotes. Dad recently watched a show from the 1960s in which someone used a remote control the size of a paving slab and acted as though this was an incredible innovation. I felt the makers deserved points for at least seeing the need for such a device, but dad was not having it, because as we all know the first remotes were more the size of a brick, and wired. This meant that early remote controls were harder to lose than the ones we know and love-and-lose today. It also leads me to how I became an uncredited futurologist.
Back in the 1970s, when I was about four years old, I got hold of my parent’s first remote and removed its wire, rendering it useless. I was told off by my dad, because he could not see the genius behind my actions.
The now wire-free remote wound up in our dustbin and – I’d like to think– the annals of innovation, because I am convinced that some up and coming television engineer stumbled across it and realised he was gazing on the future of home entertainment.
I think that when it comes to predicting future technology, most people tend to err too far on the side of feasibility, for fear of looking like an idiot. We are, essentially, too conservative.
There once was a time when you couldn’t pin that label on Gates. But other than some references to Microsoft’s table-top Surface interface, his speech was low on anything vaguely futuristic.
Worse still, according to bloggers out there, his keynote was boring. Could the same be said about Microsoft these days? Has it become a follower, rather than a leader, in all areas other than those in which it feels safe?
