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20 Years of Bill Gates Predictions
NewsCloud writes "The Seattle PI's Microsoft Blogger Todd Bishop asks "How does Gates shape up as a seer?" None strike me as particularly clairvoyant, but the missed ones are winners: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time." and "Two years from now, spam will be solved." But in fairness to Gates, for many years Microsoft's tagline was "a PC on every desktop and in every home.""
Bill Gates doesn't seem to be much of a seer in the development of his software, either. From what I've seen his comments correlate well with the way Microsoft works: they make some fine products, but seem to be continually behind the ball on everything. All the major innovations of Windows et al were done somewhere else first, and often much better. Like the web that Gates keeps alluding to. They bolted that functionality on to Windows back in the day (let's not even go there) and to this day the overwhelming body of evidence is that Microsoft doesn't really get the web.
So no, I don't think Bill is a particularly insightful seer. He may be an evil genius or something when it comes to the minutiae of building an empire, but future-aspected he is most certainly not.
You want a seer? Try Jules Verne. Now that guy was pretty damn amazing.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Reminds me of The Secret in that its a self-fulfilling prophecy. People involved in the Secret claim following it will lead to success. People believe them and give them money, making THEM successful. If people hadn't bought into it, they wouldn't have given them their money and they wouldn't have become successful. Same with Gates. He says "this will happen" and people believe him so they give him money to make sure it happens.
Gates says whatever is most likely to make himself more money in the next year, without losing money.
And since making his kind of money means we all do it his way, his "predictions" are self-fulfilling prophecies.
How's that speech recognition and DB filesystem working out? Just fine, because the convincing promises sold several $billion more Windows installs on servers and desktops.
Bill Gates is the self-fulfillingest prophet ever, measured by the age old question "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
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make install -not war
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Amusing aside: my first experience with Steve Jobs' famous "reality distortion field" was a talk he gave at MIT in the early eighties around the time of the Fat Mac. I remember him saying something to the effect that "it turns out for networking all you need is about 150K/sec." He was trying to tell us that Appletalk was adequate and that ethernet was overkill. So powerful was the reality distortion field that nobody even called him on it!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Some of the usual culprits I see are
(1996-2007) is definitely the year of Linux on the desktop. (Apparently if you recite this one enough times it will become true)
XXXX product from MS is doomed to failure for no particularly logical reason despite the fact we really know nothing about it but we love unfounded speculation.
MS is on the verge of collapse because little bobbie just started a project in sourceforge and although it has not released anything yet it will be an XP/Exchange/Outlook/SQLServer etc etc etc killer when they do and so the MS Evil Empire will crumble.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
/me can't believe nobody mentioned "640k" yet
Gates' promotion of OS/2 was an act of deception, not prediction. He mislead WordPerfect into developing for OS/2 instead of Windows so that Word would have the advantage.
... Bill Gates is still the richest man in the world, check. ... Microsoft is still the dominate OS, check. ... Microsoft revenue increases every year, check.
I don't see what this has to do with news at all. Just another Microsoft rant this place has become so famous for.
Some Windows CE games were made; AFAIK only one of many games I own runs on CE (Armada). It's the least reliable game I own, and just removing and reinserting a controller can crash WinCE.
I believe the web browser also runs on WinCE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Gmail has "solved" the *easy* half of the spam problem. Indeed, I never get spam in my Gmail mailbox. On the other hand, about 1-3 non-spam messages get marked as Spam every week. I'd rather the filter erred in the opposite direction -- I'd much rather see 10 spams a day but be ensured that there are no false positives.