I get a huge kick out of this because I remember what tech.life was like in 1994. Everyone rebelling against Barry Cunningham’s pronouncements has very detailed ideas about future portents — and each one of those ideas is almost certainly hugely wrong.
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Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Brian Brady says:
file done
April 10, 2008 — 11:33 pm
Joe Hayden says:
That video makes me seriously contemplate how one day our tools will be viewed as painfully slow and inadequate.
Still…”Page him!”…Pretty dang funny!
April 11, 2008 — 12:08 am
Late Night Austin Real Estate Blog says:
That is freaking awesome. I had almost forgotten about the dark days of AOL.
April 11, 2008 — 2:51 am
Chuchundra says:
I’ve seen this in various places around the internets over the the past couple months. It’s funny, but the hardcore geek in me rails against the inaccuracy of it. I guess that’s even more funny when you think about it.
Briefly, there were plenty people with cell phones in 1994. Motorola made a nifty little flip phone that was the lusted after tech object of the day. They were expensive and had no color screen, games or internet, but they made phone calls just fine.
Additionally, the real internet (not AOL, Prodigy, etc.) had spread pretty far in 1994. I had a regular dialup account and, of course, the government institution I worked at had multiple T3s. Mailing a 150K file might have been a bit of a pain, but certainly doable.
The real funny thing is that the technology in the actual version of 24 we watch today has almost no connection with real technology that anyone could…you know…have. Magic PDAs, cell phones that never lose service, the schematics of every building ever constructed available with a few keystrokes. If you’re looking for more computer-related humor, you might try this
April 11, 2008 — 6:37 am
Glenn says:
That was hysterical. ROFL It does remind me of maybe early 1992 and not 1994.
Good old – america off line. LOL
April 11, 2008 — 9:48 am
Mike says:
I lost it when she was ripping the perforated sheets and ripped the whole thing. And then again when they lost the connection because someone picked up the phone. Great stuff.
April 11, 2008 — 10:04 am
Greg Swann says:
Remember, though, that my point in posting this video was to highlight how much things will change in the years to come — and how amazingly wrong our predictions about those changes will be.
April 11, 2008 — 10:11 am
Glenn says:
Greg – change is inevitable. One thing in life is that there will also be change. Sometimes, predictions are correct many years in the future. Now, if we can get Dr. Gray to improve his hurricane predictions, well maybe even the local meteorologists, we might accomplish something. 🙂
April 11, 2008 — 10:41 am
Spencer Barron says:
There will be changes to the business in the future, I for one welcome it, but either assumption could be wrong.
It’s far more likely that future predictions of the near term removal of agents from the equation are incorrect. These predictions are likely to look like the retro-futurism ideas found on Boing Boing once we have the benefit of hind-sight.
Real estate evaluation is as much an art as it is a science (pardon the cliché) and you know how good computers are at creating art. Look at Zestimates, what more information would they need to be accurate? They’d probably have to be able to feel, see and smell before they were even within 10% in a consistent manner. Removing some form of representation from the equation would simply increase the risk to the consumer. Not saying it’s not possible for consumers to go it alone (I highly recommend it, it’s a good life lesson either way) but you could assume that people are likely to be as skilled as whole at real estate transactions as they’ve proven themselves to be at trading stocks. After all, this isn’t just buying books online or booking your hotel room for a night.
Apparently, scientists believe that by 2030 computers might be as smart as people. Darn, I was hoping they’d be smarter than that. Until then, I wouldn’t be too worried about being supplanted.
April 11, 2008 — 2:52 pm