At the beginning of the primary election season last year, a friend here in Alabama asked me what I thought of an obscure Republican gubernatorial candidate. The guy was a state legislator and physician who I’d never heard of before he announced he was running for governor.
“Robert Bentley?” I asked. “Who’s he? He has no real campaign experience. He’s never done anything that anybody’s heard of. He has less chance of getting elected governor than my dog Lucy does.”
Six months later, this obscure guy was elected governor in a landslide. Lucy still hasn’t announced her candidacy for anything.
I spent most of two decades working in Alabama politics among Republican campaigns. I was just as qualified as anybody to be considered an expert about who had a shot. But I was absolutely, positively, 100 percent wrong.
The iPhone is pretty darned ubiquitous these days — including the iPhone 4 that’s with me pretty much 24 hours a day — but many experts predicted its failure when it was announced early in 2007. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer certainly hoped Apple’s new phone would flop, but he sounded as though he was absolutely confident in April 2007 when he said the following:
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.”
So why do so-called experts get things so wrong so frequently. Was I less informed about state politics than I thought I was? Was I just an idiot who was falsely sure of his opinions? And what about Ballmer? He’s a very successful head of one of the world’s largest companies. How could he have been so wrong about the iPhone, as compared to his own failing Windows Mobile platform?
As I grow and learn, I have to leave more of my ideas behind
Time and maturity should change what we believe we need in mates
Can’t we all get along? Why is the liberty movement so fragmented?
‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’
Corrupt Trump isn’t even hiding half-billion dollar bribe anymore
Father who I saw as Mr. Morality turned out to be a liar and a thief
A year after first seeing doctor about cancer, how much have I learned?
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