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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.
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?
One common theme in literature is the question of whether oracles predict the future, or create it. Would Oedipus have killed his father had the Oracle at Delphi never prophecied that he would and thus his father never sent him to die in the wilderness? Had the witches not said that Macbeth would not be harmed by any of woman born, would he have gone down the path that led to him being killed by the C-section-birthed Macduff?
Which relates to what you said in that Gates is trying to be the non-supernatural form of seer -- the one who tries to create the future with their prediction, instead of predicting some future that is destined to happen. Now, one of the common traits of literary oracles is that they are extremely wise and clever, such that truly distinguishing whether they can actually see the future or merely guide it meticulously is extremely difficult. They also tend to have unclear motivations, which also clouds the issue. This is what makes it interesting.
Gates' motivations are patently clear: Guide the direction of the industry in a way favorable to Microsoft. He also isn't supremely wise or clever. Though in the comparison I'm making he doesn't fit precisely because he's also the executor of whatever real path his company takes into the future. Somewhat like if it was Macbeth who predicted that he was to be king, hoping that saying so will help cause it to become true. Strangely that doesn't work as well.
The enemies of Democracy are
Please go read the "Logo" section in the wikipedia Article. It was a tribute to Newton... Even, I, a non-Apple users knew that.
"..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.