​1. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”

Steve Ballmer has always been one for hitting his competition hard, but not necessarily for making accurate statements. His 2007 prediction on the future of the iPhone, for example, was a little off base.

Ballmer also had disparaging things to say about Android’s complexity compared to Windows Phone’s simplicity back in 2011, but market shares tend to contradict his confidence in his own mobile platform.

​2. "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication."

Western Union had good cause for downplaying the telephone in this internal memo–it cut into its near monopoly on communication through telegrams. The wire giant finally gave up the telephone vs. telegram fight in 2006, but it still exists in the much less glorious role of a money transfer service.

Unfortunately for Western Union it’s unlikely to maintain dominance in that realm either, especially with the growth of platforms like Venmo and other decentralized money transfer services.

​3. "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad."

Had Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, followed the advice of the president of Michigan Savings Bank and not invested in Ford Motor Company he would have been out a lot of money.

Rackham ignored the warning and bought 50 shares of FMC in 1903 for $5,000. By 1919 the Fords bought back Rackham’s stock, which had exploded to $12.5 million in value.

​4. “Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years.”

I don’t know about you, but my vacuum still isn’t powered by a Fallout-like fusion core. I plug mine in two prongs at a time just like the rest of you.

Alexander Lewyt, founder of a door-to-door vacuum sales company called the Lewyt Corporation, was definitely a man of the atomic age. He made his radioactive claim in 1955, but unfortunately nothing has come of it.

​5. “The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.”

Charlie Chaplin, who initially made his name on stage in Vaudeville productions, was skeptical of film when he said it was a fad in 1916. By 1917, however, he was building a film studio at the corner of La Brea and Sunset Boulevards.

​6. “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”

In another case of people trying to dissuade an investor from making a big bet, David Sarnoff’s associates had some bad things to say about his desire to get into the radio business.

Sarnoff was an early proponent of point-to-mass radio broadcast and was initially ignored by superiors at the newly formed Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Sarnoff went ahead with his plans anyhow and made one of the first mass radio broadcasts of a boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in July of 1921. By winter of that year the public was demanding in-home radios, and Sarnoff’s future was secured.

​7. "When the [1878] Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.”

Sir Erasmus Wilson, an English surgeon and dermatologist, was a skilled and well-known medical professional of his era. What he wasn’t was a technological oracle.

The very next year Thomas Edison invented a long-lasting filament bulb, and by the 1880s electric lights starting appearing around the globe.

​8. "There's just not that many videos I want to watch."

CTO Steve Chen didn’t seem to know what was to become of YouTube when he said that in 2005. Just one year later the company sold to Google for $1.65 billion.

Now you can’t go two clicks without seeing a video, either from YouTube or elsewhere.

​9. "I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."

3Com found Robert Metcalfe was a few years off on the supernova of the dot-com bubble and was totally off on the catastrophic collapse of the internet. Imagine if it had gone bottoms-up in 1996–the world would be a very different place.

​10. “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.”

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was definitely a brilliant man. He was a leader in the early study of electricity, helped formulate the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and even helped turn the mariner’s compass into a tool that was actually reliable.

What he wasn’t right on, however, were x-rays.

​11. “The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous.”

The early 20th century was a turning point in warfare when an explosion of technology turned the battlefield upside down. High-powered weapons led to hiding men in trenches, which led to heavier-than-air gasses to flush them out, which led to the gas mask … and then there was the tank.

It was hard to get horses over trenches, but massive tracked vehicles traversed them with ease and transported infantry safely toward enemy lines. Field Marshall Haig’s aide-de-camp clearly didn’t see the future of warfare when he saw tanks demonstrated in 1916, but it’s undeniable that they changed the course of modern warfare.

​12. “The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most.”

IBM was doubtful of the success of Xerox copy machines in 1959, leading to this statement along with their declination of a business deal.

Oops.

​13. "Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet -- which there isn't -- the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."

In another example of “stick to what you know,” astronomer Clifford Stoll waved the idea of ecommerce away in a 1995 interview with Newsweek. Flash forward a little over 20 years later and here we are putting retail stores out of business around the world.

​14. "Two years from now, spam will be solved."

Not only was Bill Gates off the mark when he predicted the end of spam in 2004, but spammers have become even more savvy in their fraud attempts. Modern phishing is a problem unlike anything that existed 13 years ago, and while filters may have improved it’s unlikely the problem will ever go away completely.

​15. “Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”

The Postmaster General in 1959 was Arthur Summerfield, and boy was he optimistic. We’re just now learning to land rockets for reuse instead of dumping them into space or the ocean.

But rocket mail? I don’t think that would ever have been practical, even if Elon Musk had invented it.