TELEVISIONARY

By the early 1990s, the Japanese had all but cornered the home-electronics market. But tech futurist George Gilder spied an opportunity for U.S. companies. “The home computer is becoming more like a television, the television more like a computer,” Gilder wrote in an October 14, 1991, Forbes cover story. “When these two appliances converge into a single box—smart TV, we could call it—a worldwide electronics market worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year will be at stake.” The Wall Street visionary was right about the rise of smart TVs (and even what we’d call them), but America didn’t capitalize—the market is dominated by Chinese, Japanese and South Korean firms.