Henry Ford supposedly said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’ This quotation is often used as an argument against relying on market research in the pursuit of innovation. Bill Gates voiced a similar thought to Ford’s when he suggested that ‘people don’t know how to want
I was all set to write a scathing piece about Lord Carter’s newly published Digital Britain report (http://tinyurl.com/ksp9t7) when, in a break with journalistic practice, I decided to read it first. In fact many of its proposals make sense. For instance I now accept the case for the controversial 50p-a-month tax on phone lines in
Whenever you make an optimistic prediction, you risk being wrong twice. First there is the risk that the prediction itself is wrong: 1,000 Concordes by 1973; flying cars; food in pill form. More often, though, it isn’t the prediction that’s wrong but the optimism that accompanies it. The commonest failing of techno- optimists is to
It’s called Spotify. I don’t know why. And I have no idea how it can make money for the people who have invested in it. But this is the internet we are talking about, where all of us can enjoy good things for years while it falls to other people to work out how to
When I was a child, almost everyone I knew had a single telephone kept in a draughty hallway. Why the hallway I don’t know. Perhaps the bell was better heard from there or else they were copying the location from posher homes where once a butler would have answered it. Until recently, there was also
I have just passed a pub in Gosport. ‘Beer garden with free gas barbecue’, reads a notice outside. ‘Bring your own food.’ Perhaps the landlord has just been reading an advance copy of Chris Anderson’s upcoming book Free, subtitled Why $0.00 is the future of business. This book (an expanded version of a Wired article
Nobody fully realised the achievement of Sir Joseph Bazalgette until 70 years after his death. The size of the pipes he specified for London’s sewers was determined by calculating what diameter would handle the average daily flow and then doubling it to allow for natural fluctuation. Having arrived at the optimum diameter this way, Bazalgette
I had been expecting it for weeks: the announcement of the first Google Street View divorce. A lawyer speaking anonymously to the Sun now claims to have been briefed to start proceedings after his client was browsing the Google site and spotted her husband’s car parked outside another woman’s house. Although the Street View software
The strangest thing happened to me the other day. I went into a branch of PC World and found nothing to buy. I have left PC World empty-handed before, but only through an act of will. Occasionally I would steel myself not to buy anything before I went in, treating the trip as a test
When Professor Susan Greenfield warned last month of the damaging effects of new technologies on childhood, my first instinct was to dismiss it as another hand-wringing exercise. On one point, though, where she complains of the dangers of instant gratification, she might be right. I’m not even sure the problem is confined to children. One
David Young’s Spectator article ‘Health’n’safety everywhere, except in banking’ (14 February) was inspired. He might have added that bankers are occasionally made to pay for their excesses. Unlike regulators. For years the Food Standards Agency warned we should eat no more than three eggs a week. It now emerges that this figure had no evidential
Two years ago my father decided to try selling books on the internet. Since he had spent much of my childhood expatiating his theory that computers involved more work than they saved, this was something of a U-turn. But he quickly opened a seller’s account on Amazon where he listed for sale the 1,500 of
I try hard to like the new, darker James Bond, but I miss the camp insouciance of the earlier films. If you’ve grown up with the type of 007 who briefly interrupts a bout of exotic love-making to sabotage a Russian spyplane with a champagne cork, it’s hard to warm to a character who spends
Last month saw the usual spate of newspaper articles ridiculing the circular letters sent with Christmas cards. A series of books by Simon Hoggart now documents the worst of these. Funny as his examples are, he’ll be hard put to beat the instance sent in by a reader of the Daily Telegraph: ‘I suppose the
I’d like to start 2009 with a few words of thanks to everyone who has joined the Spectator readers’ lending team at www.kiva.org/team/spectator. So far we have lent money to over 100 small businesses in the developing world, a figure buoyed by the disproportionate generosity of the Spectator’s Australian readership (including a lady from Cairns
It’s not always a good idea to read certain books when you’re too young. At school it didn’t occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place — it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the
I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins — the brilliant geneticist Richard Dawkins, that is, not the amateur theologian of the same name. The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable are among the most mind-changing books I have read. I can’t say the same of the atheist stuff. Dawkins seems a much better evangelist
The most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed against a hostile establishment to make a presidential bid. In this he was rather helped by the simplistic American belief that race somehow trumps all other
An amazing piece of financial analysis has been circulating by email recently. If you had purchased $1,000 worth of AIG stock a year ago, you would have $44.34 left. With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000. With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left. But if you had purchased $1,000
Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. It worked happily for ten minutes and