Science & Tech Quote by Chris Anderson

Anderson’s line is a neat piece of post-bubble jujitsu: it takes the smugness of “they were wrong” and flips it into a subtler indictment of how we measure being right. The 1990s internet boom produced forecasts that were directionally accurate but catastrophically mistimed, and that mismatch mattered because markets don’t reward eventual correctness. They reward liquidity, patience, and runway. In that sense, “wrong in time” isn’t a minor accounting error; it’s the difference between a visionary and a bagholder.

The intent is to rehabilitate big-tech optimism without excusing its excesses. By separating truth from timing, Anderson offers a comforting narrative to entrepreneurs and investors: the future still arrived; the only sin was early arrival. The subtext, though, is sharper. It implies that our culture treats prediction as a binary (right/wrong) when it’s really a logistics problem: infrastructure maturity, consumer habits, payment systems, last-mile fulfillment, bandwidth costs, ad markets, regulation. The dot-com era didn’t misread desire; it misread readiness.

Context does a lot of work here. Coming out of the crash, the easy story was moral: hype, stupidity, fraud. Anderson’s framing is more evolutionary: bubbles act like expensive R&D for society, pulling forward experimentation, laying cable, training talent, normalizing behaviors. You can hear the quiet defense of “productive irrationality.”

There’s also a warning buried in the generosity. If timing is the real killer, then today’s confident forecasts may be “right” too, and still lethal to anyone who can’t survive the calendar. The future is not just a destination; it’s a schedule.