If Nick Robertson and Quentin Griffiths, the founders of ASOS, had read the report from the ‘Virtual Society Project’ on December 5th 2000 they may have thought, “What are we doing?”. The report proclaimed that the internet was just a passing fad. It said that teenagers were using it less, and the opportunities for online shopping were considered very limited. Apparently whilst we’d all been energised by the promise of what the ‘net’ could do for us, we had started to realise there’s more to life in the real world, and we’d gone back to it. To top it off for the forward thinking retailers, S Club 7 topped the UK charts at that time with ‘Never Had a Dream Come True’. The internet was over, before it had begun.
But misguided predictions about innovation are commonplace. In 1966, Time Magazine reported that “remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop”. In 2005, the CTO and Co-founder of YouTube expressed concerns about his company’s long-term viability by telling us, “there’s just not that many videos I want to watch”. And in 2007, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer claimed that there was no chance iPhone was going to get any significant market share. Strange that the last one is more or less what IBM told Microsoft about the chances of PCs being in every household, just before giving them the DOS operating system.
You really would think that these people, and those before and after, would know better. But the thing about predicting the future of technology is that it is perilous. Let’s drop back to 2000 and consider why the somewhat ironically named ‘Virtual Society Project’ may have made the claims they did about the Internet.
Getting online from home in 2000 was via a dial-up connection into your chosen ISP using the telephone modem. This was slow, noisy, and it meant your telephone line was tied up, rendering voice calls a no-go for the duration of your ‘surf’. When you did finally get there, loading web pages, downloading data and completing searches took a long time. Add this to the limited online content, frequent disconnections and high costs, and you might forgive them for coming to the conclusion they reached.
But what we can’t do when considering the future is base our opinion on a short-term perspective. Too often people fail to fully understand the technical or sociological aspect of the innovation before them, and instead of thinking about and anticipating how something might evolve, they focus their attention on the challenges and limitations of what they can see at a point in time. It is also true that innovations can be disregarded because early adoption rates are low. In 2000 when the internet was light on content, even if connectivity had been better, users wouldn’t have got much out of the experience.
The thing to consider is the butterfly effect, where one seemingly irrelevant action sets off ripples that cause things of significance to happen. In the case of the internet, those butterfly’s wings led to the creation of e-commerce only businesses like ASOS and Amazon, a new world of social media and a global platform for education, information sharing, and entertainment. Had the naysayers prevailed, we might still be struggling with paper maps, cassette tapes, and encyclopaedias. Now, we navigate with GPS, stream music, and access a vast sea of information with a few clicks. Without the internet, none of this would exist, so did this come into the thinking of those who said it was a passing fad in 2000?
When we consider the technologies of the future, we should remember there will always be sceptics and enthusiasts. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a perfect example that is currently splitting opinion. The impact it will have in fields such as healthcare, automation, and retail are massive and we can’t ignore it. But we must handle its obvious power with care. Yes, it has the potential to reshape our world for the better, but we must protect the values, ethical considerations, and privacy concerns too. AI must serve humanity, not dominate. As we venture into this AI-driven future, we should remember the cautionary tales of the past, such as the underestimation of the internet. We must approach all new technology with an open mind, and thoughtful considerations.
So, the next time you hear someone dismissing a new technology, remind them of the ‘Virtual Society Project’ report. Who knows what marvels the future holds, perhaps, as you’re reading this, someone is underestimating the potential of a technology that will shape the retail sector in ways we can’t yet imagine. Embrace the unknown, and you might just find yourself on the right side of history, like the ASOS founders Nick Robertson and Quentin Griffiths.