I worked at AT&T / Bell Labs when those commercials were flooding every show on TV.
Bell Labs was upset because AT&T made those commercials without consulting us. A PR company thought up all the ideas. We had zero projects internally working on such products.
That's why those products came from EZPass, not AT&T; Skype, not AT&T; Apple iPad, not AT&T.
Even thought it wasn't AT&T that brought those things to market, nearly all of them do exist today. It is a beautiful thing. I feel lucky to be living in what my co-workers call 'The freakin Buck-Rogers-would-be-jealous future'.
Tom
PS. Oh, and the one where they guy has a Dick Tracy-style video-phone on his watch? Well, soon after AT&T bought McCaw Cellular my friends in the cellular phone communications research area were asked to work up an explanation of why such a thing can't exist and isn't likely to exist any time soon. It turns out that after AT&T bought McCaw they (McCaw) was very unhappy to learn that the wrist-phone was a figment of a marketing person's imagination and not something actually being developed at Bell Labs. Ooops. I hope they didn't let themselves get bought by AT&T just because they thought we had that product in the wings.
Tom:
I was also at the Labs (Research @ MH) when these spots
were made.
We were consulted by the PR people before they were shot.
As far as I know, most "predictions" in those spots were
based on real technologies and demos that were running in
the Labs at that time. My dept was directly responsible
for two of them.
I do not recall the Dick Tracy watch but the
projects behind the books on-line, video-on-demand and
"EZ Pass" were being done at HO and MH.
Others were products or concepts in the pipeline
(e.g. fax from a tablet -- remember GO/EO?,
tickets from a cash machine -- NCR ATMs).
Some things shown were straight line
extrapolations from core technologies that had existed
in the Labs for some time (e.g. driving across the country
without needing a map, video telephony, packet
voice/video, etc.)
Much of the really interesting work from Research at the
Labs never made it into real products from AT&T
due to various political, business and regulatory issues.
Many things later got "reinvented" by other firms
that were better able to capitalize on the innovation.
It has been said that any company that can afford an
organization like Bell Labs Research will ignore it.
That was definitely the case for Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.
> That's why those products came from EZPass, not AT&T; Skype, not AT&T; Apple iPad, not AT&T.
Fascinating explanation. I never understood the relationships between most of the ideas in those commercials and AT&T. It's actually awesome to see these commercials again and realize how many far fetched ideas have come true. I remember thinking that most of the things in the commercial were nonsense!
Looking back it's more interesting how little AT&T has had to do with any of those things. I wonder how influential these commercials were on the engineers today who actually built those things (EZPass, Skype, iPad) or are the presence of these technologies an inevitable extension of the direction technology was going to go anyway?
I was at a distance learning software company that had AT&T as a client. I always wondered if there was a connection to the commercial. We were connecting classrooms with video and shared multimedia content. I even made a "Jazz" course but I think it was later.
Around 1998, "The Internet" changed our market so we rushed to rewrite the software to work on it. Up until that point, it wasn't really on our radar.
But does anyone have the spoof version of this made internally at Microsoft? They paid Tom Selleck to do the voice over. One scene depicted a woman walking in the surf along a beach. She's wearing a white dress and a big straw hat. Selleck says: "Have you ever received a fax in your hat?" Cut to fax appearing from slot in her hat. Then he says "You will".
There were others IIRC and I saw them in Redmond in the mid 1990s.
I can't decide what gave me more amusement: the stuff they got right (ipass/ezpass idea, video conferencing and skype like stuff), the stuff they got wrong (phone booths!, tablet pcs being more than a gimick) or the stuff they claimed they would do, which they now actively oppose (skype like stuff).
I remember these commercials fondly, as they were a big push to get me into programming when I was a boy -- such cool and endless possibilities. Of course back then they were so futuristic, and now they look rather quaint -- who would want devices that are so big and bulky?
or the stuff they claimed they would do, which they now actively oppose (skype like stuff).
Remember that AT&T isn't actually the same company it was in the 90's. Depending on whether you're talking about hard lines or mobile, it's either SBC or Cingular.
To be fair, I think there's a million or so iPad customers who would dispute that tablet computing is merely a "gimmick" (though even as an iPad owner, I'll admit that's not a done deal yet).
I probably won't be using mine to send faxes though :-)
That's the interesting thing about this type of predicting: they usually fail to account for certain technologies being pushed out by others. You probably won't send a fax because faxing is nearly obsolete. Everyone uses email instead. And you probably will use your tablet to send email.
It's the same as with the phone booth. The same technology that lets the guy send a fax from the beach allows him to make calls from almost anywhere, (even video conferencing if you have an Evo or similar phone) pushing the phone booth out of common use. And, when everyone has a computer with an internet connection, why would someone have to go to a cash machine to buy concert tickets?
It is almost impossible to get everything right, and if there are certain key technologies that aren't predicted correctly (like desktop computers, high-bandwidth cell signals, internet everywhere, etc), then it has a cascading effect of invalidating many of the other predictions.
if there are certain key technologies that aren't predicted correctly (like desktop computers, high-bandwidth cell signals, internet everywhere, etc), then it has a cascading effect of invalidating many of the other predictions
Which is why it's better to work on something truly innovative and disruptive that has the potential to become one of those key technologies. Elon Musk type stuff, rather than think X for Y to get buzzword soup and series A projects.
Though Apple may be one of the companies that will 'bring it to you,' they will not be bringing all of those things to us, even if the iPad/iPhone is the hardware that some of those things are/will be running on.
You really think Apple made a 3+ year exclusivity contract with AT&T? Even in view of the explosive possibilities of the device? Hmm, it's possible, but it doesn't seem likely. It's probable that they are continuing to choose to do business with them for some reason or another.
Shows what I know. :P Why is everyone speculating that they might come out with a Verizon phone then? Surely this is basically a broken leg on the possibility of that happening until 2012?
There was speculation that because the original agreement did not include the iPad, Apple was under no obligation to give AT&T exclusivity on the iPad, and that they renegotiated the contract when the iPad was released. Such a renegotiation could have included an earlier end to exclusivity.
It will take another court case to confirm if that is true, since neither party comments on the terms of their agreement.
Because of the controls that were in place with the carriers at the time, and the fact that Apple didn't want to operate under those controls, it was not easy for Apple to find a company to work with. On top of that, there was no guarantee the iPhone would be a success, and it also required significant change to the software operating the cell towers, for things like visual voicemail. And also, Apple was asking for a lot of money.
ATT was supposedly not Apples first choice, but it was the one that accepted the conditions Apple bought to the table.
One ad in particular that later struck me as prescient was the ~1999 Quest ad of the guy asking what movies a hotel had: "All rooms have every movie in every language, anytime, day or night."
At first I took that in as a funny statement. Then after a few seconds in just became sad. Damn media companies suck. Where would they be without Napster and The Pirate Bay showing them where the pent up demand is/will be?
No, seriously. They don't care about fulfilling consumer demand; whatever they predict will be most profitable is naturally what they will do. They are a company after all.
Imagine a video library with every movie you've ever watched cataloged, searchable, and instantly viewable on any device you own. Then imagine that video library being smashed to bits by DRM and the DMCA.
I'm a lot more cynical now than I was in the early nineties, so my ideas would focus mainly on forced biological modifications imposed on us by the ruling class. (Think stalkers at the end of Half-Life 2, except replace the Combine with Halliburton.)
"Have you ever been stripped of agency by intrusive mind-control and body-modification technology and sacrificed any biological dignity you had to serve at the behest of an omnipotent AI god for the benefit of a handful of plutocrats? You will..."
The whole 'the future is now' hit me last week when we got to the theater, saw the 5-10 minute line we didn't want to wait in, and purchased the tickets from my iPhone instead. What hit me was that a) I didn't event really break mu pace as I was walking into the theater, and b) it didn't even seem that exceptional a thing to do.
And we have 3d hologram without glasses with 3DS and OLED TV's as thin as a paper and 1gbp/s Google broadband letting you download Blu-Ray movies in less than 10 seconds yet we live with them today like it's nothing.
Bell Labs was upset because AT&T made those commercials without consulting us. A PR company thought up all the ideas. We had zero projects internally working on such products.
That's why those products came from EZPass, not AT&T; Skype, not AT&T; Apple iPad, not AT&T.
Even thought it wasn't AT&T that brought those things to market, nearly all of them do exist today. It is a beautiful thing. I feel lucky to be living in what my co-workers call 'The freakin Buck-Rogers-would-be-jealous future'.
Tom
PS. Oh, and the one where they guy has a Dick Tracy-style video-phone on his watch? Well, soon after AT&T bought McCaw Cellular my friends in the cellular phone communications research area were asked to work up an explanation of why such a thing can't exist and isn't likely to exist any time soon. It turns out that after AT&T bought McCaw they (McCaw) was very unhappy to learn that the wrist-phone was a figment of a marketing person's imagination and not something actually being developed at Bell Labs. Ooops. I hope they didn't let themselves get bought by AT&T just because they thought we had that product in the wings.