In the early 1980s, operator AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) dominated everything on the telecommunications scene in the United States. And he wanted to prepare for the future, to continue to master it. That future pictured cell phones—Motorola had launched the first in 1973—may finally become available.

What did AT&T do? To ask. As The Economist reported over two decades ago, those in charge hired the services of prestigious consulting firm McKinsey and commissioned them to do exactly what they thought they couldn’t do. Predict the future. AT&T’s question was straightforward: How many cell phones would there be in the world in 2000?

They researched the issue at McKinsey and came to the conclusion that these new devices had many problems. They were too heavy, their batteries didn’t last, mobile coverage was poor, and the cost per minute of calls was exorbitant. After calculating the numbers, they gave AT&T the answer. According to them, the number of mobile phones that would be on the world market would be few. How many of them would there be?

900,000.

This study convinced AT&T executives not to enter a segment with such a bleak future. And that estimate cost the company billions of dollars.

In fact, when The Economist published the story in October 1999, McKinsey’s estimates were very, very small. In 2000, there were 900,000 mobile line subscribers: 109 million in the US alone. And every three days, that number increased—de facto—900,000 new subscribers. In the article, they explained that in eight countries, more than a third of the population owns a mobile phone. “Among Scandinavian men in their 20s, this figure is almost 100%,” they explained.

McKinsey wasn’t the only one screwing up that prediction about the rise of the mobile phone. Motorola also believed that such a market was doomed, and attempted the same exercise in 1980. A November 1980 article from Electronic Business magazine was published on the website of Dyna, one of its subsidiaries at the time. AT&T would have 700,000 subscribers. The estimate was nearly identical to McKinsey’s.

These figures, which turned out to be very wrong in 2000, fell further twenty years later. More than 6,000 million people own these devices today. According to data from Pew Internet Research, almost everyone in developed countries has a cell phone: on average 85% have a smartphone, 11% have a basic cell phone and only 3% say they don’t have a cell phone.

But in 1980, of course, it was impossible to predict such a thing. At McKinsey, they made the grave mistake of ignoring how technological advances would solve many of the problems they pointed to—the battery still does, albeit a little less—and that cell phones would become a technological revolution in their own right. .

Considering the forecast cost AT&T dearly. Ten years later, when they wanted to enter the segment, they had to do so by buying a company. In 1994, they bought mobile operator McCaw Cellular. $12.6 billion. Smart enough to license the spectrum needed by cell phones in the early ’80s, this company would eventually become a protagonist in the US market and AT&T’s way of fixing this dreadful bug.

Image | museum-digital | Wikimedia

on Xataka | How did AT&T predict the future of technology in a 1993 ad campaign?