Throught for the Day
1 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Monday, November 17 at Monday, November 17, 2008.
"We always overestimate what we will achieve within two years, and underestimate what we will achieve in ten years"
He's spot on with the time thing. In 1998, would you have guessed that you could book a ticket to outer space on a commercial flight in less than ten years? For the right amount of cash, you can now book a ten-day holiday to the international space station. Would be have guessed that the world's largest music retailer would be Apple?
On the other side, we always think that short-term trends will take off much faster than they actually do. The internet is only now starting to approach what a lot of the late 90s dotcom businesses thought it would look like in just a couple of years; it has taken a decade to get serious amounts of people buying things online, watching web television, browsing the internet from their phone etc...
Doesn't this kind of short-term optimism and long-term skepticism apply in a lot of different areas?
And yet I still don't have a flying car...