Some famous authoritative pronouncements from the past:

1998 Folks, the Mac platform is through - totally. (John Dvorak - editor of PC Magazine)

1991 By the end of this decade, I foresee massive unemployment among the ranks of American programmers, systems analysts, and software engineers. (Ed Yourdon - recognized pioneer in the software engineering methodology)

1984 The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a mouse. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. (John Dvorak)

1983 No one knows what to do with seven windows at one time. (PC Week Magazine)

1981 640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates)

1977 There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home. (Ken Olson, president, chairman & founder of Digital Equipment Corp.)

1962 "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." (Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles)

1962 Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition. (Dennis Gabor - British physicist, 1971 Nobel Prize winner)

1960 Few things seem to lie so far beyond the ordinary human ken than computers. To most people the notion that computers can be understood and operated by anyone other than a scientific genius seems wildly improbable. (The Times)

1959 Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail. (Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General)

1949 Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics)

1939 The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen: the average American family hasn't time for it. (The New York Times)

1927 Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? (H M Warner of Warner Brothers)

1865 Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value. (Boston Post)

1825 What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches? (Quarterly Review)

10AD Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments. (Roman soldier, politician, engineer and author - Julius Sextus Frontinus)