in fact i invested in avantgo right before the crash. i like to think it was the $500 or so i invested that truly precipitated the original year 2000 dot com bubble crash.
I think his vision of smartphones has held up well. From page 74 of my hardcover copy of The Road Ahead:
What do you carry on your person now? Probably at least keys, identification, money, and a watch. Quite possibly you also carry credit cards, a checkbook, traveler's checks, an address book, an appointment book, a notepad, reading material, a camera, a pocket tape recorder, a cellular phone, a pager, concert tickets, a map, a compass, a calculator, an electronic entry card, photographs, and perhaps a loud whistle to summon help.
You'll be able to keep all these and more in another information appliance we call the wallet PC.
Great comment and I guess he really did see more of it coming than I was aware of. It seems like the main thing he miscalculated, ironically, was how people would use these devices -- it turns out that all that functional stuff is totally dwarfed by being a Facebook zombie, in terms of total eyeball hours.
It's like we all had this innate drive (or susceptibility?) to zombification that we weren't aware of until the smartphone actually appeared
reply