Most things that succeed don’t require retraining 250 million people.
Predictor: Partridge, Waring
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Richard Rapaport goes to visit AT&T’s Bell Labs research scientists and administrators, interviewing Waring Partridge, AT&T’s vice president for multimedia strategy, and Eric Sumner, AT&T’s product development vice president for intelligent systems. Rapaport writes: ”[Partridge] believes that AT&T’s long-standing ‘plug-and-play’ credo, which eschews instruction booklets, will be the successful future technological research and development paradigm. ‘Most things that succeed,’ he suggests drolly, ‘don’t require retraining 250 million people.’ Waring Partridge’s point is also Eric Sumner’s. Sumner is demonstrating the Sage Project – recently rechristened the more commercial ‘AT&T TV Information Center’ – in a comfortable, gray- and cranberry-accented lounge area up the hill from the main Murray Hill complex, inside the sparkling new Consumer Lab. ‘It’s the AT&T way: no manual,’ says the product development vice president for intelligent systems, as he points a handheld control at a virtual remote flickering on the screen of a huge Sony television.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: What Does a Nobel Prize for Radio Astronomy Have to Do with Your Telephone? It’s Been a Decade Since the Break-up of AT&T. Has the Spirit Passed Out of its Bell Labs, as Some Charge? Or is it Still the Preeminent Technology Lab in the U.S.?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/bell.labs_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney