“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.”(markbrenneman.com) |
“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.”(markbrenneman.com) |
This is my favourite of the lot, for two reasons:
a) Gates said it on COMDEX in 1994, the same year when Amazon.com was founded.
b) I would dare say that he wasn't that much off -- he said little (and not "none"), and one could argue that Internet's commercial potential is still to be fully realized. At the very least, Amazon.com itself reached its first profitable quarter in 2001, making Gates' forecast much more accurate.
I would love to see what else he said around this sentence, maybe he did recognize the huge non-commercial potential but this is the only sentence that got attention.
Robert Goddard was ridiculed for most of his life for having such lofty ambitions, chiefly building a machine that had even the possibility of ascending to Mars. Yet we owe it to him (and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) that we have now sent machines and human beings to many worlds. I can't think of a better example of "don't listen to the haters."
Moral of the story: never claim that someone can't do something, no matter how unfeasible it might look. They might actually do it, and you will look silly.
That is what makes it so tough. As an entrepreneur you are hearing criticism often, sometimes it a super helpful and you need to change direction, other times it means you are onto something HUGE. It is difficult to decide which one it is.
To be fair the computers he was referring to were behemoths with a small army of engineers maintaining them. How many of those are there today? Probably not that much more than five.