It's possible that he or whoever said that believed the computers would be limited to a niche market and that the calculators and tabulators would continue to have the largest part of computing market share. IBM had the largest part of the pre-electronic computer tabulator/calculators market and really those were computers themselves, just in a very limited way. The market for electronic computers would have been greatly limited if the best switch continued to be a vacuum tube. In that case, calculator/tabulators would have continued to rule the business world and most of government calculation too and he would have been right. And then, the transistor.