These kinds of future looking ideas are always terribly wrong in the small details, so its important to look at what the general prediction was. The thinkers be

These kinds of future looking ideas are always terribly wrong in the small details, so its important to look at what the general prediction was. The thinkers behind these things had to settle a vague predictive idea like "video phones" on some kind of physical representation in order to ground it enough to make the advertisement, but didn't know enough about the small bits the future would hold to make it exactly what's come to pass. So you can sort of score how good future predictions are based on these broad ideas even if the particulars didn't work out. "People will generally start to commute on personal flying vehicles" is one that hasn't really come to pass in any form, so the it's a bad prediction. But these ones are really stellar. I think even more importantly, these ones were so provocative and the grounding in the particulars was so plausible that an entire generation of engineers grew up remembering these video and trying to make the prediction self-fulfilling. Thus these videos were both drivers of innovation as well as prophecy. There's an overly academic book on this topic with a great title that I think captures this well: "The Dreams our Stuff is Made of" The biggest prediction here that underlies all of these predictions is that there is going to be a global communications capability that enables most of the things in the ads -- and it was going to be so ubiquitous, commoditized and possess so much bandwidth and low latency that anybody could use it anywhere. In 1993, this wasn't a forgone conclusion -- Windows 95 didn't even ship with a built-in TCP/IP stack. The obvious thing they missed was miniaturization and device convergence. Most of the activities here involve people still going to fixed or installed devices -- the smartphone was never considered.