The Wall Street Journal-20080128-Technology -A Special Report-- Predictions of the Past- How did we do the last time we looked ahead 10 years- Well- you win some- you lose some

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Technology (A Special Report); Predictions of the Past: How did we do the last time we looked ahead 10 years? Well, you win some, you lose some

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Here's what 2008 was supposed to look like: Millions of people would use cellphones embedded in their watches or necklaces; devices would translate languages so quickly and so flawlessly that nobody would study foreign languages anymore; telemarketing would be history, as marketers developed better forms of customer prospecting.

Never mind.

Back in 1998, The Wall Street Journal asked dozens of technology- industry executives, scholars and forecasters to guess what the world would be like 10 years later. They took leaps into the unknown, producing what turned out to be a fascinating blend of clever calls and maddening misfires.

Now that the results are in, it's clear that the prognosticators were on safest ground when predicting details about the raw capabilities of high-tech devices. But the seers had a harder time predicting how this fast-changing technology would alter people's habits at work and play.

The most elusive insight: the public's desire to move beyond passive consumption of digital technology, in favor of active creation and sharing of personally shaped content. Forecasters didn't foresee anything resembling the rise of YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and incessant blogging.

To their credit, some of 1998's forecasters correctly anticipated that social dynamics would be the hardest part of the puzzle to get right. As Ambuj Goyal, then vice president for systems and software at International Business Machines Corp., remarked a decade ago: "We have predicted the hardware speeds and feeds very well. We haven't done nearly as well in predicting how these machines will be used."

Bearing out Mr. Goyal's point, computer mavens astutely predicted that by 2008, the most powerful desktop computers would run at processing speeds of four gigahertz, while operating with eight gigabytes of random-access memory. Both of those capabilities sounded stunning: They were 100 times the norms of 1998.

No problem. On its Web site, Dell Inc. recently offered high-end desktop computers that run at three gigahertz, with four gigabytes of RAM. By the time 2008 is finished, it is a safe bet that the forecasters' full targets will have been met.

Futurists also predicted that wireless phone calls would get a lot cheaper (correct!) while overall mobile-phone penetration in the U.S. would rise to 51%, up from 20%. That second half of the prediction actually proved too timid. Researchers at SNL Kagan recently estimated that 84% of the U.S. population has mobile phones.

Give the 1998 panelists credit, too, for correctly predicting that Internet access would become ubiquitous, with people able to check their stock quotes from Borneo if they wanted.

When predicting what we would actually do with all that connectivity, however, the prognosticators stumbled. They got hung up, for instance, on ideas such as highly customized advertising, which hasn't made much headway in the face of privacy concerns, and online grocery shopping, which carries too many extra costs to pay its way in most cases.

The experts thought something big was coming in music, most likely new services from recording studios that would let consumers download music onto personal players. They were right about downloadable music -- but they couldn't foresee that intermediaries such as Apple Inc., with its wildly popular iPods, would become the preferred way that fans bought their music.

Meanwhile, forecasters in 1998 thought that electronic books would win sweeping acceptance. Old-fashioned paper tomes were supposed to vanish in the face of competition from downloadable manuscripts, viewed on hand-held screens.

What the forecasters didn't appreciate was how hard it would be for electronic books to match the high contrast and easy readability of traditional printed alternatives. Lots of screen-based book readers have been tried -- with Amazon.com Inc. introducing the latest version a few months ago. But public acceptance so far has been minimal.

In education, expectations were that distance learning would gain favor, that conventional campuses might atrophy, and that millions of students world-wide might flock to hear star professors' lectures online. Forecasters didn't distinguish between learning at prestigious universities and the nuts-and-bolts tasks of vocational training at companies; they thought trends would play out quickly in both settings.

In fact, online technology's impact on college life hasn't been nearly as revolutionary as expected. While lots of library resources are online and email is ubiquitous, full-time students still want the prestige -- and the social benefits -- of mingling in person with their peers and professors.

Instead, online education has had its biggest impact in the workplace. There, bosses and employees want to cover necessary ground with a minimum of fuss. In such situations, the faster and cheaper aspects of online tutorials have been irresistible.

The 1998 forecasters also flubbed their attempts to guess which countries would benefit most from the emerging digital economy. They nodded briefly at the idea that better online capability would encourage the outsourcing of tasks to cheaper-wage locations, but didn't foresee the rise of a high-tech service sector in India. Nor did the experts anticipate how rapid, cheap communications across the Pacific would help China align its fast-growing factories with the appetites of U.S. consumers.

Instead one guru argued that the Dutch would fare best. His rationale -- which didn't quite pan out -- was that their mercantile heritage would be well-suited to the information age.

Asked to pick areas that wouldn't change as fast as many people expected, some experts placed their bets on banking practices. They contended that personal checks would remain the dominant household payment mechanism, in spite of widespread fanfare about new payment systems.

Oops! A Federal Reserve study released in December 2007 found that more than two-thirds of all noncash payments were made electronically. Use of debit cards, online banking and credit cards vastly exceeded the volume of checks written. Even when people paid with old-fashioned checks, paper usually gave way to digital images partway through the settlement process, according to Clearing House Payments Co.

At times, the forecasters were simply too serious for their own good. One predicted that people would use the Internet to monitor their light bulbs and order replacements right away if a bulb burned out. We could do that, but why bother? It's nowhere near as much fun as circulating YouTube videos of crazy wedding dancers.

As Silicon Valley inventor and technologist Judy Estrin gamely conceded in 1998: "What technology can deliver and what people want are two different things."

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Mr. Anders is a Wall Street Journal news editor based in Palo Alto, Calif. He can be reached at [email protected].