brainwagon

Metafilter had a link to Bob Metcalfe’s 1995 article Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996 (InfoWorld). It’s always incredible to look back on historical predictions and see how they panned out.

For those of you who don’t know who Bob Metcalfe is, he is the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com.

Metcalfe predicted a dot.com collapse in 1996, but despite his assertions to the contrary, companies appeared to be able to find greater fools to fund their ideas for a few more years until they were finally exhausted around 2000. Similarly, measurements have proven that web based advertising isn’t particularly effective, and the ridiculous rates for web advertising have mostly collapsed into reasoanble levels. Security is still a huge issue, but is one what we continue to ignore at our peril, hoping that the virus scanners will keep ahead of the virus writers and that we are smart enough to avoid identity theft and scams.

And of course, there is no problem finding pornography on the web.

Brace yourself folks: I think that Metcalfe was merely just ahead of his time.