6 ms·

I don't get it— do these people hit more often than they miss? Why do we still listen to them?

• jordan0day 15y ago
  Well, if you look at the rest of the list, Zuck's the only one who really stands out as a "they sure couldn't have got that more wrong".
  • Vivtek 15y ago
    Netflix.
    • redthrowaway 15y ago
      I'm not sure Torvalds should be there, either. Sure, Linux long ago outgrew the need for him as chief evangelizer, but when Linus speaks, the software world's ears perk up. He's still incredibly influential, if no longer the Atlas of the FOSS movement (with apologies to Dr. Stallman).
  • zoomzoom 15y ago
    i dunno. Linus putting out git and reed hastings with instant both seem pretty important these days.
    • SoftwareMaven 15y ago
      To the average reader of CNN, git is a piece of software they've never heard of, much less understand why it's better. Linus never stopped being important to the software community, but git doesn't make him more important to the non-software community.
      • ericd 15y ago
        I guess that just leaves starting the OS that powers most of the web.
      • pbreit 15y ago
        Github is more important than git so I guess that leaves figuring out how important linus or git was to the origin of github. Is here something about git specifically that made it more suitable for github than say mercurial or bazaar? Or was it timing or happenstance?
        • xilun0 15y ago
          It's debatable whether github is more important than git or not. Despite the impression a reader of this site could have that (hype and with an user interface copy pasted from the prototype hype fashion simple user interface of the moment, with Big Buttons tm included) hosted services are the best thing since sliced bread and will replace everything, the world is interestingly neither centered around that, and it's indeed very ironic to value importance of centralized services more than the decentralized tool it embraces and extend, given many of the advances in the source code management area and development workflow directly come from the decentralized aspects. That Hg also exist does not make git less important than github, no more than the fact that sourceforge exists make github less important than git.
          • pbreit 15y ago
            While I happen to think the Github UI is quite nice, it's a minor aspect of Gihub's importance. Github basically invented "social coding" which I would argue has been a genuine phenomenon unmatched by BitBucket, Launchpad, et al (or Sourceforge). Git (and Mercurial) didn't offer substantial advancements over Bitkeeper (save licensing) and Git's popularity was solidified with it being chosen for Linux. While reasonable people may disagree on the merits of Git, Hg and Bazaar, it's difficult to put BitBucket and Launchpad in Github's circle. While it may be ironic to value the importance of centralization on this topic, it's unwise to not to value it. Downvote? Really?
            • xilun0 15y ago
              How would you define "social coding"?
  • InclinedPlane 15y ago
    Netflix CEO, Linus. Both are as relevant or more relevant than ever. Netflix is getting to be as big a force, in revenues and viewership, as any big cable company. Linux is very much still relevant in the server world and in the mobile and tablet computing world (android). And Linus' Git is growing in popularity (github?) and influence. It's questionable whether the Vodaphone CEO is "relevant", but Vodaphone is definitely still a major competitor, they make more money than google and amazon combined.
    • Adaptive 15y ago
      Yes, plus Linus is relevant and important for both linux and git. Git has been hugely, positively disruptive in a way no Dvcs was prior. And anyone (cnn evidently) that thinks Linux developers are fungible misses the point of having a fierce, opinionated, blunt semi-dictator running the show. Great things can happen. He's the anti-steve jobs.
      • spitfire 15y ago
        "fierce, opinionated, blunt semi-dictator running the show." That doesn't sound like the anti-Steve Jobs to me. His complete lack of (aesthetic) taste might make him the anti-steve jobs though.
        • lurker19 15y ago
          He is the anti-Steve Jobs on the axis of closed/open systems. He is similar on other axes, which is what anti means for stuff like physic particles.
        • LaGrange 15y ago
          He has aesthetic taste, just for other things. He's the Steve Jobs of system internals.
        • apetresc 15y ago
          What gives you the idea he is missing aesthetic taste? You do realize that Linus (or any of the kernel devs) are not in any way responsible for the decisions groups like Gnome or KDE may make, right?
• InclinedPlane 15y ago
  They don't, not statistically anyway. Some people still listen to them because of confirmation bias, failure to understand statistics, and because there generally isn't a strong incentive for anyone to fact check such predictions after the fact. Given that in this case out of a list of 10 there were 3 very devastatingly bad predictions I think that's pretty damning. More so when you consider that it's rare for a company to matter, so picking 10 big CEOs that don't matter should be highly biased toward correct predictions.
  • krakensden 15y ago
    > More so when you consider that it's rare for a company to matter, so picking 10 big CEOs that don't matter should be highly biased toward correct predictions. You've got it backwards. His pool for picks isn't the set of all CEOs, it's the set of all CEOs who are well known, have mattered recently, and are still working. That's a very different pool, with a very different bias.
    • InclinedPlane 15y ago
      Fair enough. But without a good comparison against random picks from the same pool it's impossible to judge the quality of these picks. Given that there were a few gimmes in the list (slashdot and vonage for example), and given the notable absence of plenty of high profile CEOs in 2006 who foundered shortly after I'm not at all impressed with this list.
• pitchups 15y ago
  Experts and pundits are actually worse in their predictions than others. In fact, ironically there is an inverse relationship between how popular an expert is and their prediction accuracy. This article explains why - http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/02/13/why-pundits-get-things-wrong.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/02/13/why-pundits...
• katovatzschyn 15y ago
  I think there's the same dichotomy in tech journalism as there is in science journalism, perhaps other journalism as well but I'm not qualified to comment on other topic's veracity, namely, that the people who in fact understand the topics and are qualified to talk about them much more often actually work in the field and don't merely report about it. From that nature, I am more inclined to rely on journalism for facts and overview alone, and less inclined to rely on them for their opinion than I am actual professionals in the field.
  • lurker19 15y ago
    There is a middle ground for people like James Gleick and Neal Stephenson who are scholars (in the sense that they study a field intelligently and more deeply than an average layman) but do not push the field forward. Great students can become great teachers without being great doers.
  • dredmorbius 15y ago
    The other element is that a large portion (and probably the vast majority) of technology and business "journalism" is very thinly veiled boosterism and promotion. And this isn't a particularly recent phenomenon, it's largely always been thus, at least for values of "always" dating to the late 1970s / early 1980s. Idea (wo)men need to find money (wo)men, so recruit a PR agent to spread good buzz to churn up investment. There are the occasional hits, but a hell of a lot of misses. And if you're sitting on the churning dust cloud that is the expanding edge of the boom / development, there's a hell of a lot of noise and false leads. Truly enduring changes tend to be based in deep, deep technology, most are a minimum of a decade old, if not several, and the truly good concepts are decades to centuries old (there's a reason they keep emerging: they serve a real need). Fads are often fanciful, contrived, or serve a narrow set of interests. Unfortunately it gets really hard to detect the signal amidst all the sound and fury. Age and a solid grounding in history help more than the young might think.
• rfrey 15y ago
  Like most futurism, there's a strong incentive in this kind of journalism to publish long-shot predictions - Dow 5000, that sort of thing. If you're right, you're a genius, and if you're wrong, you're just one more wrong prediction in a very large pile. Bad strategy IMO to make a list, though.
• bedris 15y ago
  Speaking of tracking pundits' predictions, whatever happened to Maciej Cegłowski's website, Wrong Tomorrow? www.wrongtomorrow.com seems to no longer be up and running.
• adestefan 15y ago
  Pundits are like baseball players, if you go 3 for 10 you're pretty damn good.
• jonnathanson 15y ago
  In fairness, hindsight is 20/20, and it's very easy to look aghast -- or in smug condescension -- at the failed predictions of yesteryear. But how many of us would have called all of the shots on that list correctly back in 2006? Furthermore, it is human nature to suffer from an anchoring bias when looking at a list like this one. We immediately assign more weight to the 2 or 3 "disastrously wrong" predictions in the list of 10 than we do to the other 7. Hell, we probably assign 99% of the weight on that list to the Facebook prediction. It's the most visibly and obviously wrong. So it anchors our perception of the entire list. I doubt there's anyone out there who gets his predictions right 100% of the time. And I bet there are plenty of highly successful prognosticators with at least one or two hilariously bad calls on their track records. I'm not defending this list or its author, per se, but just pointing out that everyone gets it wrong sooner or later. Throw enough shots at the hoop, and you're going to miss a few of them. Granted, you could certainly argue that tech journalists should shy away from the predictions game and focus solely on reporting. But where's the fun in that?
  • lurker19 15y ago
    Which just goes to show the worthlessness of paying attention to prognosticators who put their mouth where their money isn't.
    • jonnathanson 15y ago
      Perhaps, but then, the expression "caveat emptor" comes to mind. As the readers of such predictions, we should be taking these things with a healthy grain of salt. That's the unspoken compact between the prognosticator and his audience. It's his job to make as good of a guess as he can; it's our job to keep in mind that he's guessing.
      • khafra 15y ago
        Actually, I'd be happier if I knew of prognosticators who did put their money where their mouth is. Predictions accompanied by bid/ask spreads would be vastly more useful than predictions intended for immediate entertainment (ie, all the ones the pundit is unwilling to bet on). As it is, though, there are just a few mildly popular websites that enable that.
• igrekel 15y ago
  Entertainment, it is just entertainment. No really, what difference does it make who they judge is relevant or not? Just see that as the same as comments from sport commenters who obviously don't play. Its fun and caters to the need people have to talk about it but it has little informative value. Its not an advisory service. If your business depends on the information you get through these channels, be very afraid or start building some expertise yourself.
  • lurker19 15y ago
    This this this. Part of my job is to do industry analysis to help my partner write blog posts to build our brand. After a few very painful months spent debugging crap data and models, I realized that the consumers have zero interest in accurancy or correct meaning, so we shouldn't have any either. It is all in good fun gossip.
• 555imon 15y ago
  They see traffic again on a list published back in 2006. Thats the target. Not to publish accurate stories.