It's always fun to read predictions that turned out to be completely wrong.
AOL News brings us the worst predictions for this year, and there are some real doozies in there.
There's Newsweek's prediction in December last year that US unemployment would head down over the next 12 months (it's now risen to 9.8% and there's no sign of things getting better), predictions that Twitter will fail, a new social network challenging Facebook (12 months later, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is named Time's Person of the Year and there are serious question marks over the future of rivals like MySpace, that gold is about to get cheaper (it has since hit record prices of above $1400), that the iPad will be a big flop and that Netbook sales will soar.
In a sense, we shouldn't be surprised. There have been all sorts of predictions over the years that have been wildly wrong. Like IBM chairman Thomas Watson's prediction in 1943: "I think maybe there's a world market for five computers". Or Decca's rejection of the Beatles: "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
As management thinker Peter Drucker famously said, trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
The best way to predict the future, as Drucker said, is to create it.
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