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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.""
that he will stay rich, but leave his wife for Steve Jobs.
The problem is, Gates made most (if not all) of these comments in order to push efforts that Microsoft was working on at the time. As a CEO of a major software company, part of his job was to make comments in public that would try to influence the industry to move in the direction that would align with what his own company was doing (or at least attempting) already.
These sorts of comments can often be successful at moving the industry because people automatically equate wealth and power with wisdom. In this way, they take what is basically a marketing statement and turn it into some sort of prophecy. Gates was right on some of these because his own company took the industry in that direction. Where he was wrong, it was because his own company failed in its efforts in that area, or (in the case of OS/2 especially) they decided to go in a different direction.
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
Two points here. First, he was selling the product when he said this, and secondly he was actually right in the idea of it. It just happen to be Windows and not OS/2. Microsoft attacked the general market. IBM only knew about dealing with businesses. Once Microsoft moved away from OS/2 and went full bore on Windows, OS/2's days were numbered even though OS/2 had a lot of things going for it over Windows.
So now we are going to be fair to him ?
> . . for many years Microsoft's tagline was "a PC on every desktop and in every home."
Wasn't that Apple's idea? As I understand it, that's why they called the company "Apple" - it was supposed to be something every kid should have on his/her desk.
He could go the other direction and predict really mundane stuff. Sort of like that old Christopher Walken skit on SNL in which he plays a "Dead Zone"-like guy, but says stuff like, "You're going to get an ice cream headache. It's going to hurt real bad...right here for eight, nine seconds."p pearances_on_Saturday_Night_Live
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Walken#A
Business man makes business predictions about the future. Some are right... some are wrong!
And in related news.... critics choose to focus only on the predictions that were wrong!
* Personally, I really loved OS/2. It's wasn't the best piece of software *ever*, but it was truely remarkable for it's time. I wish MS would have stol^h^h^h borrowed more ideas from it.
In the article... "You'll watch a program when it's convenient for you instead of when a broadcaster chooses to air it." I wonder if he'll soon say... "You'll watch a program when it's convenient for your broadcaster to decipher whether or not by you watching it, it is not pirated, the operating system pushing your media center is not pirated, it has passed the then behemoth MPAA/RIAA/DoJ/DHS joint task force aptly named NOMIND or "National Oversight on Mentally Intergrating National Deficencies" benchmark tests which include:
1) Methods to ensure proper copyrighted procedures (RIAA)
2) Methods to ensure proper filtering and re-programming the American Apple Pie way (MPAA)
3) Methods to ensure political correctedness (addenDumb to new DoJ/Christian Law "Thou shall not criticize thine government" doctrine)
4) Methods to ensure Osama is not in your living room and or you are not exporting crypto to him or his terrorist via any methods including telekinesis.
Infiltrated dot Net
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?
Read the article. Most of the quotes aren't either right or wrong; most of them are simply mundane, and were mundane when he made them. Read every single quote and see if you don't say, "Well DUH!" in your head a bunch of times.
Maybe the article sucks, or Bill's holding his crystal ball close to the boardroom, but it's all pretty standard stuff.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
At any rate, only a person with truly innovative and revolutionary approach has the insight to guess how technological advances will influence societies. Gates' approach has been to buy out companies he can't compete with, and then re-branding the acquired products. It was true with PC-DOS v1.0, and it continues to be true to this day.
You know, when you're the richest person on earth, it's not that difficult to make what you say become fact. I mean, if Gates had really wanted spam eliminated, he could spend some of the $56 billion he has to put out hit contracts on the world's most wanted spammers. Or, more realistically, fund something like the X-prize, but for spam elimination instead.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
Spam HAS been solved, it's just that most people aren't implementing the fix. Use Gmail if you don't want to set up your own filtering system.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
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?"
--
make install -not war
Given that OS2 and Windows NT were the same product before the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", given that after the divorce, Microsoft shipped NT 3.5.1 with a Bootloader that still said "OS2" (hexdump the boot sector on an NT 3.5.1 drive, if you still have a copy - You'll see it). Given that OS2 evolved directly into Win NT and therefore has a heritage that reaches all the way into Longhorn... He was right!
The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.
Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
If you are laughing at that, you need to brush up on your operating systems. It is one thing to laugh at something because the other guy is wrong. It is another thing to laugh at someone because YOU don't know what you are talking about and think he is wrong.
NT4, win2000, XP, win2003 and vista are descendants of OS/2. The win 9x line is dead and all we have are the bastard sons of OS/2. I would say that win2000 and XP were pretty significant operating systems for good or for bad.
Dont laugh Gates was right.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
"Pioneers get the Arrows, settlers get the land". Gates has always been a settler. They take proven technologies and ideas, copy cat them, and then try to inflate them to one way standards (embrace and extend). Settlers are useful. Microsoft created the low end PC vendor market by taming all sorts of diverse bios, video cards, disks and peripherals.
Gates would not look like such a stogy inept prognosticator if it were not for a few brighter lights and pioneers like Jobs and the Google boys. Even Michael Dell gets some credit for being a sort of henry ford at one time but that was sort of a one time flash.
Sure you can say Jobs did not invent Postscript or the WIMP interface or word processing in full-time graphic or music players or any number of things. But he was such an early and wholehearted adopter of nascent technologies that he is a pioneer. Pioneers did not invent the conastoga wagon or canoes they set forth in but they used them to blaze trails and set up the future.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
in its early years before Windows even existed Microsoft indeed said "A PC on every desk and in every home" At later points in time they added bit about windows, and even later said they wanted a server in every home.
"When wallet PCs have become ubiquitous, we can eliminate the bottlenecks that plague airport terminals, theaters and other places where people queue up to show their identification or a ticket."
He really missed this prediction in multiple ways.
For ticketing, the internet allows people to pre-purchase tickets for just about anything, allowing a very quick scan of a printed-at-home ticket for entrance.
For identification, RFID is revolutionizing that arena, and it does not require an actual computing device ("wallet PC") on the end user.
These "wallet PCs" turned out to be PDAs, and although latecomer Microsoft currently dominates this area with their mobile OS, the real revolutionary and cutting edge advances were made by other companies, like Palm.
The queues we see today are not because of the reasons he suggests, but due to the security required to prevent mass murder.
The ironic thing with his predictions is that his company actually has the resources to make a lot of them come true. I just wonder why other companies are the ones bringing us the gee-whiz technology and software. Internet search, iPhone's slick touch-based PDA interface, input devices like the Wii's. These are all arenas Microsoft compete in directly, yet others take the lead. Why can't MS make these kinds of things happen?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
for differing values of "quite"
Get the EULA T-shirt
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.
That's a goal, not a prediction. A prediction requires that you have no ability to affect the outcome.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
... 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.
The Mafia is a myth and legend, for one. It's a bunch of otherwise independent crime organizations that sometimes scratch each other's backs and other times claw at each other's eyes. The most cooperation one can usually expect is that it's mutually beneficial for both sides in a dispute to avoid the ire of the authorities and that it's sometimes convenient for two crime lords to split rackets on geographical or crime-type boundaries.
The MafIAA is much more organized. This is partly because they haven't yet been proven to be doing things illegally, which allows them to communicate and plot as openly as they do. Many of the tactics do seem like racketeering, and there's chatter in the courtrooms and the press that some counter-suits are trying to make a point of that.
More directly to you question, though, protection payments, strong-arm tactics, threats, trying to bar outsiders from competing, and divvying up markets among member organizations are all time-tested mob tactics. If "The Mafia" is upset about anything involving the comparison, it's probably that the MPAA and RIAA are less romantic of a notion.
People, you really need to check your history! Microsoft may have borrowed from their co-development of OS/2, but they developed with a different kernel. I can't believe how many times this MYTH got repeated!
IBM made OS/2 a much better product after the split. If you ask for recommended versions, you'll get OS/2 1.3 for the command line version and post OS/2 2.0 for the graphical version.
Microsoft leaving OS/2 was the best thing that ever happened to OS/2 from a technical standpoint, but not from a marketing standpoint.
"..You want a seer? Try Jules Verne. Now that guy was pretty damn amazing..."
You want a seer who was right? Try H G Wells.
Monsieur Verne suffered from a lack of vision. He just looked at current technology and 'expanded' it. He knew no physics, and didn't see the need to be accurate, so things like his 'From the Earth to the Moon' ignore the obvious acceleration problems of being shot out of a gun. Or the practicalities of being 'snatched' by an earth-grazing comet!
Much of his minor stuff is frankly incomprehensible - 'Master of the World' says that travelling at 200 mph makes you invisible, for instance. And he was so tied to the mid 1800s politics - Germans were alternately good (when they were in competition with the British) and then bad (after 1871!). Everyone was a stereotype.
Wells, however, had his physics dead to rights. He invented whole new genres of Sci-Fi - Time Travel, The Invisible Man, amazingly accurate social predictions in 'Anticipations' and 'The Shape of Things to Come'. When he did space travel he invented the 'warp drive' with his 'Cavorite' material which rejected gravity.
The 'War of the Worlds' invented the entire 'alien battle' genre that America loves so much. Did you know that his predictions of the 'Atomic Bomb' inspired Szilard to invent the 'chain reaction? Wells' description really was that close!
He did Bio-engineering with 'The Island of Dr Moreau'. Really there was no limit to his vision. But I presume I hardly need to list the rest - Slashdotters must all have copies of all of his books off Gutenburg. If they haven't, I don't think you can see any SF movie which doesn't relate back to his work in some way.
If Gates were really a great seer, he would have written the Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1990, not after the wave rolled onto the beach in 1996.
I am wondering why all this effort over the past year to pump up Gates' reputation? Has his illegal activities so ruined his reputation that there is an active effort in place to clean Gates' reputation for the history books?
He's not a seer in any way, he's more an influencer, i.e. when people like him talk about the "future" of computing, they really mean what they would like to see happen, not what they "know" what will happen. And so many people just hang on these people's every word and believe what they say that when they hear these "fortune telling" sessions they start working towards achieving that "future" to not be lost in the big march led by these people, so eventually these "visions" become reality to an extent. And tada, then you can write articles about how "seers" these people were in the first place :)
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
and a Zune in every pocket....
Oh wait...
'Master of the World' says that travelling at 200 mph makes you invisible, for instance.
Have you ever seen me traveling at 200 mph? Perhaps it is because I WAS invisible...