“Pipe Dream Driven by Greed”

I stumbled across another fun article from the NY Times about the mobile market tonight. Here are some choice quotes:

We are writing Chapter 2 of the history of personal computers.

This could be “the mother of all markets.”

Now guess who said them.

If you followed the recent Davos coverage, you’d probably guess that the first quote is from Google CEO Eric Schmidt who compared mobile to the recreation of the Internet. The second quote is almost verbatim what SanDisk CEO Dr. Eli Harari said during CES in January.

As you can probably guess by the set up, the quotes aren’t from Schmidt or Harari. They are from Nobuo Mii and John Sculley respectively. And they said them in 1992.

They got things right, but they were off on timing by a decade and half. By contrast, Intel’s Andy Grove called “the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is ‘a pipe dream driven by greed.'”

He was right about it being a pipe dream in 1992. 2008 is a different story. Intel itself has in many ways bet its company’s fortune on the expanding mobile market. The pipe dream is now reality.