How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

Again and again people were caught out by the speed of the fall in cost of computing and communicating, leaving future commentators with a rich seam of embarrassing quotations to mine. Often it was those closest to the industry about to be disrupted who least saw it coming. Thomas Watson, the head of IBM, said in 1943 that ‘there is a world market for maybe five computers.’ Tunis Craven, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, said in 1961: ‘there is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States.’ Marty Cooper, who has as good a claim as anybody to have invented the mobile phone, or cell phone, said, while director of research at Motorola in 1981: ‘Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems. Even if you project it beyond our lifetimes, it won’t be cheap enough.’ Tim Harford points out that in the futuristic film Blade Runner, made in 1982, robots are so life-like that a policeman falls in love with one, but to ask her out, he calls her from a payphone, not a mobile.