Summer 2000 → September 2026
In the summer of 2000, as an intern at the Delegation of the European Commission in Washington, DC, I wrote an 86-page report on the future of electronic publishing: document formats, mobile devices, e-books, electronic paper, digital music and video. Twenty-six years later, this page puts each forecast next to reality.
36 forecasts pulled from the report, each judged on one question: did the thing I said would happen, happen? No weighting, no scores — just a count.
Quotes are taken verbatim from the report (page numbers refer to the printed page numbers in the PDF), typos included. Where the report cited a third party (IDC, Adobe, Macromedia) the forecast is still counted, because I chose to repeat it.
The numbers the report used as its starting point, next to the equivalent figure today.
| Measure | Summer 2000 (as stated in the report) | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Dominant browser | Internet Explorer, 86% of users (StatMarket, June 2000). “Microsoft Internet Explorer seems to have won the so-called Browser Wars.” | Chrome, roughly 65% (StatCounter). Internet Explorer was retired on 15 June 2022. |
| Mobile phones | 117 million Europeans with a mobile phone; US penetration 30%; data at 9.6 kbps over WAP. | About 5.65 billion smartphone users, 68% of the world’s population (Ericsson forecast). Mobile is ~55% of web traffic. |
| Time to get one song | “For typical home Internet users (56 kbps modem), it takes approximately eleven minutes to download a high-quality MP3-encoded song.” | Instant. Streaming is 82% of US recorded-music revenue ($9.47bn of $11.5bn in 2025); 106.5 million paid subscriptions in the US alone (RIAA). |
| Storage | “Today a 20 gigabyte hard disk costs less than US$100. This can store approximately 5000 near-CD-quality songs.” | A 2 TB SSD costs about the same and nobody stores music locally anyway. |
| Flash Player | 277 million people could view Flash content; “distributed with every major browser, operating system, and Web-enabled appliance.” | Zero. Adobe ended Flash Player on 31 December 2020; browsers block it. |
| Acrobat Reader | “More than 110 million copies have been downloaded or preloaded onto computers.” PDF creation required paid Adobe software. | PDF is ISO 32000 (since 2008). Every operating system, office suite and browser creates and reads PDF for free. |
| E-books | “Only a few hundred thousand of their users have downloaded e-books.” Dedicated readers cost US$200–600. | Digital formats are 14.2% of US publisher revenue; print is still 50.6% (AAP, 2025). A Kindle costs about the price of two hardbacks. |
| Screens | “The resolution of the average laptop or desktop screen is only 72 or 96 dpi.” | A phone screen is 400–500 ppi; a Kindle Paperwhite is 300 ppi — on the electronic ink the report described. |
| Mobile internet in Japan | i-mode, launched February 1999, had 4 million subscribers by summer 2000. | NTT DoCoMo switched i-mode off on 31 March 2026, after 27 years. |
Grouped by the chapters of the original report. Use the filters to see only the hits, or only the misses.
Reading the report again, the errors are not random. They fall into three patterns.
MNG for GIF, JPEG 2000 for JPEG, XHTML for HTML, Microsoft Reader for the book. Each was the “obviously better” replacement backed by the standards body or the largest company. Each lost to something cheaper, simpler or already installed. Technical superiority was never the deciding variable — the report even said so on page 4, then ignored its own advice.
IDC said wireless users would outnumber wired ones by 2002; it took until 2016. Adobe said SVG would be in browsers by early 2001; Internet Explorer got there in 2011. The direction of every one of these calls held. The date was the analyst’s, and it was always the optimistic one.
Video-on-demand over the phone line was right; Enron and Blockbuster were not the ones who delivered it. Web office suites were right; StarPortal and ThinkFree were not the winners. The mistake was never the forecast — it was assuming the firm announcing it in 2000 would be the one still standing.