As George Osborne confounds the economists who doubted his austerity measures, we look at confident predictions through the years that turned out to be spectacularly wrong.
iPhone
Mere months before the first iPhone was released in 2007 Steve Ballmer, CEO of
Microsoft, said, "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any
significant market share. No chance." Apple has sold more than 116 million
iPhones this year alone. Ballmer has soldiered on at Microsoft but it was
announced last month that he is to retire within the year
Y2K bug
For years before the stroke of midnight heralded in the new millennium,
analysts were convinced it would cause destruction. The American deputy
Secretary of Defence John Hamre said it would be the "electronic equivalent of
the El Nino." The mass hysteria stemmed from the fact that computer systems were
built to record dates using only the last two digits of each year so they could
recognise '77' as '1977' but '00' would set them into a tailspin. Hundreds of
billions of pounds were spent on making software 'Y2K compliant' but all fears
were unfounded with very few recorded malfunctions.
Internet shopping
In 1966 Time Magazine imagined what the world might look like in the year
2000. Among other prediction it said: “Remote shopping, while entirely feasible,
will flop – because women like to get out of the house, like to handle
merchandise." Online shopping has not turned out to be a flop- men and women
flock to it. Currently UK online retail sales stand at approximately £586.6m per
week
