When I worked for AT&T in the 1990’s we had a company meeting on the front lawn where the plant manager talked about all of the different challenges we faced from other, mostly foreign, manufacturers. I brought up the point that Microsoft had just come up with a product that let you make calls without using the phone company and asked if they were doing anything to address this. He pooh-poohed it as a gimmick that would never go anywhere because they owned the phone lines the Internet ran on. That plant, which employed over 7000 people at the time, is now closed.
Even I knew about broadband in the 90s and I was just a stupid kid. What is with the “pooh-pooh” instinct? Admittedly because a lot of new waves are false. People are more likely to be cranks than visionaries. More importantly because of laziness, a much underrated human motive.
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”
— Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter’s call for investment in the radio in 1921.