Watch this video – you will get a kick out of this:
“…And the company that’ll bring it to you: AT&T”
Well, AT&T did help transport the 1’s and 0’s on their fiber optic lines.
But… AT&T didn’t bring us these things.
They didn’t cash in. They imploded.
Google, Motorola, Skype, Paypal and Apple brought us these things, and cashed in.
QUESTION FOR YOU:
What technologies are we going to have in 2033?
Do you think they will be brought to us by… Google, Motorola, Skype, Paypal and Apple?
Or will it be a new crop of companies nobody’s ever heard of?
Post your comment below.
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
12 Comments on “Scary Accurate: AT&T Predicted The Future 20 Years Ago”
N.N.Taleb says that the most important changes (those that have had the biggest impact on our lives) are hardest to predict. He calls them “black swans”
No idea what the future will hold.
But I have a list of wishes, of course.
As we grow older it becomes harder to stay flexible, nimble and open minded which is why just like us the corporations of today may still be around in 20 years time but its highly unlikely they will be the cool companies to work for or hang out with. Marlon Sanders is of course the exception to this rule :)
I enjoyed the video and remember some of those commercials from 20 years ago. Amazing insight by AT&T yet also sad (for them) that they did not follow through on their vision. Great lesson there.
Also, as I write this on April 28, 2013 it is exactly 10 years today that iTunes sold its first song. And, we all know what that has done to the music industry.
So, what does the future hold?
Perhaps – as a parent – a more important question is: where do we point the younger generation in their quest to educate themselves? Most tradtional schools fall woefully short in preparing our children for their future.
Hopefully we’ll start to see alternatives such as “Planet Perry Universities” and/or “Dan Kennedy’s Future Entrepreneur Academies” :)
Hmmm, new technology you say?
Well there is the Electric cars being produced by many companies around the world like Renault, Mahindra (Indian Co.) etc. Then there is the ‘Quadski’ i.e. Quad Bike + Jet-Ski produced by the automobile co. Gibbs.
All those features aired on the AT&T campaign were previously envisioned by people other than AT&T. One has to admire their publiclty and marketing specialists for seizing or so dynamic a concept. AT&T however got no further with this concept than using it for their publicity purposes, then they carried on, doing what they were doing, selling what they were selling and servicing their core business. Research and development of the concept was never on their radar.
The moral is, if you want to be on top in twenty years time, you’d better be acting today on something you or someone else has already envisioned.
I believe George Orwell saw what was coming also. I didn’t care much for his vision of the future in the book “1984.” Some of what he said is reality, but not nearly as bad as in the book, at least not yet. (:
Not to be negative, I just like a place to put my link.
Thanks for the entertainment Perry,
Randy Felts
I remember how IBM and Microsoft were simply “too big” and everyone wanted to work for them. It seemed just too dumb to even try to get into business against those “giants”.
Now… well, we have new giants that will probably have the same fate…
(BTW, 20 years? Boy, I’m really getting old…)
Great post as always!
Best regards
As I was reading your post and watching the “You Will” ad videos, I thought of your newsletter entitled “Straight Talk About YOUR Business Education”. I believe the technologies the world will have in 2033 will be created by those entrepreneurs who continue to invest and re-invest in their own “business education”!
You know, I remember those AT&T ads – but I didn’t realize they were aired so long ago! Time does fly. I find it interesting that someone had the vision to see what was coming, but AT&T didn’t step up for most of those solutions. YouTube and NetFlix duke it out for video on demand, Garmin, Magellan and TomTom for GPS. Google for much of the rest. (Mind you, AT&T is still a major player in the Internet Backbone that carries all that data.)
A few years ago I found myself feeling like I’d “missed the boat” by not being an Internet Billionaire yet, though so many others had become one by then. Then out of nowhere, Facebook came around. Zynga, the gaming company came in and became a billion dollar entity living INSIDE Facebook. Twitter and Pinterest exploded onto the scene even since then.
I came to the conclusion that no matter advanced our technology, there are still farther advances to be made. Even AT&T didn’t predict I’d be taking HD video of my kids using my pocket phone – but now that we have that as our baseline, what will someone else think of to leverage this into something even more useful?
Meghan, my 13 year old daughter, will never remember a time when you couldn’t curl up on the couch with a laptop and access the whole world. It’s not amazing to her – it’s just the way her world has always been! For her, this reality not a destination, it’s a starting point. What will she and her generation see that is missing or can be enhanced, transformed or even transcended?
Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Larry and Serge of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook were all in their 20’s when they started their companies. It is always the up and coming generation which brings us the newest innovations – the prior generations’ innovations not being novel to them.
Issac Newton famously said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In this technological age, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. It is our young people who see the farthest, and as they march technology forward, shall carry us all upon their shoulders.
AT&T did NOT bring it to us:-) because they did not keep on renewing, researching and redesigning and re-inventing – They had a great concept, which came to pass but did not invest in their concept monetarily, so other companies CAME IN, bought the existing technology, continued to develop the concept realistically – as AT&T should have done – and they skyrocketed to wealth and success. The only company which was there alongside AT&T is Motorola. Google, Skype, & Paypal did not exist but appeared in recent years and made AT&T’s several concepts real. Apple was in its infancy at the time of these Ad’s by AT&T. but was doing OK already. I believe there will be new companies in 2033, some not even born yet and companies like Google and Apple will still be around if they continue doing what they are doing. Paypal will have many competitors. The lesson here is to stay competitive by investing in invention and re-invention and also taking advantage of the technology already existing and developing it to service the needs of the millions of customers and the special needs of the wealthy 20percent & 1 percent.
YouTube, I’m thinking, might just be the (worlds) God of the future. Unless God decides He’s seen enough… lol
I remember when I was a young kid in the early ’90s growing up in New York there was a museum in the bottom of the AT&T Building. It was a sort of “museum of the future” brought to you by AT&T. It seemed sooooooo cool at the time.