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Bill Gates's The Road Ahead, 15 Years Later
smooth wombat writes "It's been 15 years since Bill Gates wrote his book The Road Ahead, in which he talks about how technology would shape the future. In the intervening years, technology has changed many aspects of our lives for better and worse. So how did Bill do on his predictions? The Atlantic takes a look at the hits and misses of some of his prognostications. Overall, it appears Bill let optimism guide his thoughts, except when it came to the Internet — his biggest miss of all."
I feel like Microsoft has never developed a key software innovation and is not that good at predictions. I guess a lot of people feel the same as me. They are excellent at marketing their products and at keeping a healthy business although.
I searched Google with the terms "Microsoft innovation" and "Microsoft best innovation" to try to prove myself wrong but I did not find anything. Try it for yourself.
The best innovation from Microsoft I could think of is DOS, but it was originally written to IBM specs then Microsoft recycled it into MS-DOS which is more a profiting after the fact attitude.
So here we go slashdotters: What is the best innovation Microsoft has brought to us and/or which Microsoft prophecy turned out to be the best prediction ?
http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Gates's notion that the Internet would play a supporting role in the information highway of the future, rather than being the highway itself, was out-of-date the day The Road Ahead was published. Even Gates realized it. Shortly before his book hit the stores, Gates reorganized Microsoft to focus more on the Internet, and he made major revisions to a second edition of The Road Ahead, adding material that highlighted the significance of the Internet.
Never admitting fault or that you were wrong is one of the hallmarks of a successful businessman. You never have to acknowledge a weakness, you never have to assume responsibility, your image never falters and when your mistakes are too great, you can bail like a rat on a sinking ship instead of playing the part of the captain. It's this draconian mentality that will ensure your less intelligent employees view you as an immortal deity and flawless leader while the smarter employees exit your ship the next time it docks.
My work here is dung.
Does anyone really work for an organization that 1) has people who regularly don't get emails and 2) is encouraging people to use email less?
Seems like workflow problems, not email problems.
They made Gates' book into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen and with the shortened title: The Road.
And I agree that it is entirely too optimistic.
It's easy to make fun of Bill for his predictions, but I'll admit my own haven't worked out so great either. Here from 1995:
- By 2010, as many as 1 out of every 25 people will have an email account, causing massive slowdown of the FidoNet.
- I'll never be that old guy who gets his video-game ass handed to him by 13 year olds.
- Register sex.com? Nah, that'd be a waste of $100.
- Being a programmer will be a totally safe field -- it's not like people in India will suddenly all get computers and start coding.
Ouch.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
...predicting the future of technology is always a difficult thing to do. Just 30 years ago, the current state of the Internet was almost unfathomable. Think about it: in just 30 years, we've gone from cell phones being prohibitively expensive and the size of briefcases, to cell phones that fit in your pocket and allow you to access the whole of human knowledge in a matter of seconds. In 50 years, we've gone from computers being the size of rooms, to the iPhone, or Android phones.
My cell phone, an HTC Ozone, is more powerful than my computer from the late 90's. Aside from the video card, my cell phone is technically powerful enough to run Deus Ex...and my cell phone is far from the best one on the market.
Living With a Nerd
The book is as irrelevant as Bill Gates and I suspect Bill understood and that is why he left for something he was fully qualified to do: give away money.
Well, Clippy of course! How else would people ever have figured out how to write a letter?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Quote: Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. It was an improvement of the CP/M operating system.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." (p.265)
The author of this retrospective was dead wrong. I know plenty of people who chat on facebook and then meetup in real life. Its generally for dating purposes. Not to mention craigslist, and the multitude of online games, fourms and other avenues to connect your real life to the internet. Infact, I think gates was more prescient than the author is giving him credit for. If you had asked me 15 years ago, I would have said that was unlikely as everyone uses pseudonames and tries hard to hide their real selves.
This is clearly no longer the case, so I think gates was correct that the "superhighway" has led to more face to face interactions.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I seem to remember a cool CD / DVD that had a walkthrough of his house.
I disagree with the networking assessment. Even the fastest "home" wireless is still significantly slower than consumer wired ethernet. Higher end wired networking is faster still. Also, while wireless might seem at least barely adequate at home, it can quickly become unusable outside the home. 3G coverage is spotty and often completely unusable. Wireless still has a ways to go. Although of course there are always some that push technology and those that don't.
Although the main problem with wireless is security, not speed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bill Gates missed on a few points. So what? What am I supposed to infer from this?
This book was a snapshot of Bill Gates's thoughts at that particular moment in time. Beyond being mildly interesting it's completely irrelevant. His expectations were based on what he was seeing around him. His predictions were based on the state of technology at the time and colored by his own work. Clearly has ideas have evolved in the intervening years. Microsoft likely would have been out of business by now if he hadn't changed his expectations.
Technology has so many interdependencies that it's impossible to accurately predict the future. The internet was just beginning to see somewhat mainstream use 15 years ago. Services like Prodigy and American Online were still big. It's only a matter of time before something comes along that dramatically changes the way we browse the web, rendering today's predictions just as meaningless.
The framework made writing PC games relatively easy. Direct 3D did away with propriety 3D drivers. Direct Sound did the same for sound cards.
Without Direct X gaming on the PC would not mean "Windows Games".
Maybe that's not a good thing, but DirectX has had more effect on the PC Games industry than any other product.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
The Steve Ballmer developer jam. Although not foretold in Gates' book.
He could easily have predicted, "In the future, I'll still be filthy rich" - not one to be careless with money.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Another book from 15 years ago that biffed it.
Best Slashdot Co
No, he hasn't. He has been giving away Warren Buffet's money. Stop lying. If you look deeper than the headlines, you'll see that the Foundation is more like a Political Action Committee than anything else.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Especially in the same sentence. Social Networking : Hit and Miss. You can't be correct and incorrect. These people writing this article are really stupid.
Gates never said you'd have more Privacy, he said you could have fewer interruptions if that's what you chose. Just because people refuse to turn off their CrackBerry does not make his prediction wrong. In fact, every one of his predictions were correct.
It's not like his predictions were genius. It's pretty simple to make the prediction today that video conferencing will be more prevalent 15 years from now and it will be cheaper and higher quality.
It appeared to me that the book The Road Ahead was heavily edited so that it included NO useful information. The book was, at the time, utterly boring. The "predictions" were unimportant commonplace thinking.
There are two co-authors, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson. It is possible that Bill Gates did none of the writing, or almost none. Why does the Slashdot story say, "Bill Gates's The Road Ahead"?
It seemed to me that the book was deliberate fraud. They knew that any book by "Bill Gates" would sell. They knew most editors at the time would not have enough technical knowledge to detect the fraud. So people would buy the book believing that they had gotten something useful.
They are still practicing that fraud. Patents are obtained using the name Bill Gates. Publications are still fooled. Do a Google search: Bill Gates patent. This is the truth: Bill Gates' Name Surfaces On Patent Applications. His name is "surfacing". Possibly he had little or no involvement.
If you have ANY way of showing that Bill Gates has technical knowledge, please comment. There is no evidence that I can find. Supposedly Bill Gates wrote the original (very buggy) Microsoft Basic in assembly language. After that there is no evidence that he has an interest in technology.
The real Bill Gates is socially backward and abusive. For example: Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm.
...the "Microsoft has never innovated" crowd is that they don't know what the word innovation means.
Hint: Innovation is not a synonym for invention.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I was in the AI lab at MIT, testing my wits against LISP. In walks Marvin Minsky.
I asked him if he could give me a tip or two about atoms.
His response to me was: "Well, why dont you wait until the computer speaks your language... Then program it in that?"
That was alot longer ago than 15 years...
1) Email - Seems to me that his statement is a "hit". Email does alleviate the need for as many meetings and does allow my collegues and I to show up more informed. You really have to question the author's judgement if he doesn't think this was the biggest "hit" of all. Email has definitely changed the way I collaborate. This author wants us to believe that he never reviews documents that were emailed to him before a meeting?
2) Social Networking - Again, what planet does this person live on? Not the planet earth where facebook gets more daily hits than google? This is so ridiculous he would call this a miss in any way. I definitely interact with people I would've otherwise lost contact with daily. I've also met several people online and then in real life.
3) Online Shopping - Here the author is relying too much on Gates's exact words, and not the spirit of his statement. The internet has definitely revolutionized online shopping. Every book I buy, I first explore inside on amazon. When I was looking for cars, I find many online videos about it. When I rent a hotel, I can take a 360 view tour to make sure it is as swank as I would like it to be.
4) The Internet and The Web - Again, I just don't see how Gates was really wrong here. The Internet is just part of the "information superhighway", albeit a large piece. I connect with private market data feeds from all over the world at work. I watch tv on my sprint cell phone. I use gps signal from satellites. I send text messages on my phone. I watch tv on my cable tv system. I play games against my friends over Xbox Live. I have a private network at home that I share video and music on. I buy quicken at best buy to manage my finances which also connects to my bank accounts. I also of course browse the web and send email.
I could probably go on. The point is that this article either biased or wrong, maybe both.
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Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Surely if he could predict the future he'd be rich. Oh, wait...
See RenderMorphics for details.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
The best use ever for that book
http://web.archive.org/web/20021206093049/http://www.spies.com/ToadHead/
pffft...AT&T (of all companies) nailed the future in 1993! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8
The article seems to miss the bit that says mobile devices in that quote, seeming instead to infer the quote was about networks inside a house rather than across the country.
Maybe America's different, but over here in the UK I can't say I've seen anybody actually use a mobile phone to download videos (other than the odd "look at this!" clip). It's simply too slow and/or expensive. Even those who have iPhones seem to restrict themselves to the odd app and general browsing.
As for Internet bandwidth, my choices here in the countryside are: ADSL, 7.15Mbps, wireless broadband, 2Mbps, 2G mobile phone, ~56kbps. My wired home network runs at a nominal 100Mbps and is much faster than the wireless signals I get from my router - I only get ~30% signal strength at the other end of the house from the router. Maybe it's all the lead-based paint!
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough [to break modern encryption] would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."
-- Bill Gates, in "The Road Ahead," p. 265
Uh huh.
It's always tempting to bash Microsoft and Bill G, with this thread being no exception. Nevertheless, what is notable about Microsoft is how little they have been able to accomplish in the last ten years, despite having a huge workforce of bright, talented people backed up by enormous financial resources. The reason for this, IMHO, is that Microsoft, the corporation, as established by Bill, primarily looks at new technology as an opportunity to collect tolls. They try and be first to spot the stuff that everyone is going to have to use or do and then they set themselves to collect tolls on the technological bridge that everyone is going to have to pass over. In that sense, they are more cunning than creative and that, ultimately, has been their downfall. Bill Gates book is more of a view of where he thought the future toll collecting opportunities were than it is of the potential for technology to improve lives. The best innovative tech entrepreneurs seem to think in terms of 'what is it possible to do with the technology? rather than 'how can we make money from the technology?' even though the latter question always becomes important in the later stages.
He simply wanted to try and push the world into his particular Walled Garden.
- and again, he failed in a mediocre way where the greatest Jobs has succeeded.
You can't handle the truth.
I remember in 97/98 writing an Intranet (a buzz at that time) app for Coke Canada to do some sort of internal accounting and I needed a way to submit data and bring it back to the browser without a refresh. Figured out a way to do it with parent/child frames and some javascript to communicate between them (top.function or parent.function something like that).
Then, not too long from that time, I learn that MS has come up with a way of doing it through Javascript without a Frame: XML HTTP Request and then something like AJAX was born that way. It's an easier approach than using frames, so there you go, that's an innovation though sort of obvious if you are a browser author and ever wanted to do something like that, but still.
You can't handle the truth.
Wireless Networks
Prediction: "The wireless networks of the future will be faster, but unless there is a major breakthrough, wired networks will have a far greater bandwidth. Mobile devices will be able to send and receive messages, but it will be expensive and unusual to use them to receive an individual video stream."
Sounds about spot on, especially if you consider HD video. Sure wireless is getting better but so are wired networks. I get 30+Mbit on my cable modem, and 10Gbit on my LAN. I can stream full 1080p HD quality compressed content over the internet without a second thought. I haven't seen to many wireless (ignoring 802.11g/n) networks capable of that, in fact its hard to stream any kind of video on any of the phone networks with any reliability.
They called this a miss. Tell me, how much does it cost for a phone and the service charge to have the 3G performance required to stream video? I call it expensive. I might see someone streaming a video on his phone once a month. That being said, we're probably only a year or two away as rates are falling in the USA.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Moore's Law will continue in memory and bandwidth for the same cost, adding another thousand to both of these aspects. I supect CPU speed will not grow as fast the next 15 years. What more can we do with all that extra power?
Video will continue to move into any conceivable niche, large or small. There is still room for video quality to improve however. I've seen monitors with contrast & color nearly indistinguishable from looking through a window at SIGGRAPH. I dont know if we want to grow that way.
There will be a generation of adults in elective office who have always had the InterNet, smart phones and social networks in their lives. Will that change the way the world is run?
Something I have been hoping for decades- a practical voice interface- has eluded us so far. I suspect their could be a revolutionary jump in natural language understanding and generation coming from the search side of things. NL has been essentially "procedural" so far, explicitly elucidating the rules of sound, vocabulary and language. A "search" approach matches actual sound with its text interpetation and builds a corpous of correllations. Language translations using large archives of existing translations along with search works reasonably well.
Speaking of "search", full multimedia recognition and archiving may be around the corner. Google "goggles" tries to match a smart phone photo with an archive of photographs. Imagine if you track a person's visage or voice through all of public cameras and telephony. That could redefine privacy.
When Bill Gates was in charge of the Microsoft empire, his goal was to serve the empire. Once he quit and started thinking full time about how to make the world a better place, he has become a hero of mine. I don't mean that in any ironic sense; there is no other prominent voice in the world which is advocating for all the right stuff the way Gates is. If you want to see Gates at his best, watch his 2010 talk at TED. Almost never do I hear a talk like this, where I am prepared to endorse pretty much every word, down to his enthusiastic advocacy of traveling wave reactors.
Someone had changed the book title to "The Load Ahead" and cut and pasted a huge dollop of sh*t into the road behind Gates on the cover.
I used to have a copy of the image somewhere, it always made me smile but I appear to have lost it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Seriously.
I've been a *nix user since 1996. I'm a fan. I try and turn people to the light side every day. Linux rocks seismically.
But I'm fed up of too many idiots dissing the researchers at Microsoft. Sure, the company makes dumb-ass decisions. What do you expect? Their responsibility is to shareholders, whose interest is clear and short-term by and large.
Check out their research.
Here's their latest sidebar snippet:
Understanding the Rainforest Ecosystem
http://research.microsoft.com/c/1101/en-us/news/features/rainforest-051910.aspx
The company, with its billions, employs some of the most productive and interesting research in applied Information Theory in the world. Yes , they suck at implementations for end users because they're committed to some daft User Interface decisions. But fuck, do they hire and fund well.
My favorite is Haskell. Guess who funds Simone Peyton-Jones? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones). Microsoft.
Microsoft is a company. It's an independent personality in law. Its responsibility is to its owners. And that would all be evil and everything except that _lots_ of fine upstanding pillars of the academic community take Microsoft's shilling to pay the bills and still work on AMAZING technology.
We /.ers love to praise Google, dis M$, scorn Apple, and worship *nix. Dumb. It's an ecosystem. We all contribute. Sure it's competitive. We all win.
Or am I just an idiot?
science in government
lets review:
E-Mail: Miss
Who the hell doesn't use email to avoid having to hunt someone down to discuss something?
Even when it's a conversation over the phone this is still a 'meeting'.
What the author doesn't understand is the meeting in the traditional sense.
Having to physically have a bunch of people in the same room.
Real Verdict: Hit
Wireless Networks: Miss
Wireless networks are faster.
Wired networks do have far greater bandwidth (guess what most wireless networks eventually connect to?)
Mobile devices can send and receive messages.
The only thing wrong was receiving video would be unusual (people saying it's not expensive are on 'unlimited' data plans which the mobile carriers are agonising over how much it's costing them)
Real Verdict: Partial Miss
Social Networking: Hit and Miss
Yea, I'm sure the tens or hundreds of people have on facebook / twitter are really "friends".
The author doesn't know the difference between a "friend" and an "aquaintence".
I meet up with "friends" in person. "Acquaintances" I don't really care about.
Real Verdict: Hit
Online Shopping: Miss
Because of online "visualisation" (rather than video) I can often see what I've ordered.
I reckon we'll get to the point that you could do a live feed of "custom" orders.
Even now you can customise orders and shops will send an image of the expected result.
The main mistake the author makes is expected a shop to wear the cost.
But it's like a car. If you want it customised, it's gonna be extra
Real Verdict: Partial Miss
The Internet and the Web: Miss
Author had his own conclusion on that one before he even had read the book.
They went into this with the generalised idea that microsoft missed the 'internet' as the next big thing.
Even with what he's quoted, "_todays_ (1995) Internet is not the information highway".
My guess is the author has no idea what the net was like back in 1995 with any number of difference protocols being used to connect to information rather than the situation we have now where everything is pretty much converging on good ol' port 80.
And as it turns out we still have things that run outside the internet (eg. cable tv, satellite radio, etc)
Though most of that is starting to converge on port 80 as well.
Real Verdict: Sort of hit but unclear
Privacy: Little Hit, Big Miss
So let me get this straight. The author thinks by submitting a tonne of their private information to a public website where it's known the public is able to search it, that privacy is a casualty?
I bet this person provides their name, address, date of birth, credit card details, and any other piece of info they have to anyone that calls them saying they're from company X.
The reality is we do have a decent amount of privacy. Not as much as we used to, but that's more to do with other people.
Overall the majority of people are too stupid to realise you shouldn't be throwing your private info at anyone that asks for it.
Plus there's always the choice to take on a different online 'persona'.
Real Vedict: Hit and Miss
EMail:
How can you ever say his prediction on email and meetings was a miss. It was spot on. We do so much of collaborative stuff on email and tools like live meeting and net meeting that even a dispersed team has to meet only once a while for a F2F. And meetings too are more efficient because the agenda and ppts are sent out in advance. The very fact, that many people can work from home is because of ubiquitous email
Wireless Network:
For when was his prediction on wireless network? If you ask me, till 3 years ago, it was still very costly to send data on wireless mob phones and it is only now that we have started to do it (and it is still costly compared to a wired network). Just like someone in the comment asked, how often do you do a wireless video call. On the other hand I keep doing skype video calls on my laptop all the while
Social Networking:
Thats a MISS? He was spot on with what he said. See Craig's list. Most of the singles meet on the web in the US. Flash mobs are formed on the web, hobby people meet on the web, jobs are got by networking on the web etc etc. He was so right here
Online Shopping:
Prediction: "Because the information highway will carry video, you'll often be able to see exactly what you've ordered
Which is so true. Maybe the example he gave is way off, but I still do 360 degree rotations on stuff that I buy on amazon...
Privacy:
Predication: "A decade from now, you may shake your head that there was ever a time when any stranger or wrong number could interrupt you at home with a phone call
OK, not shake of your head, but swipe of your finger..
REAL HARDWARE THAT WORKS is coming, (android, iphone, Google TV Box), much
faster now than Microsoft can keep up with by using VAPORWARE and LAWYERS.
And his IT department is off shore.
Somebody get the fork.
Bill is done.
Prediction: Gates's 286-page book mentions the World Wide Web on only four of its pages, and portrays the Internet as a subset of a much a larger "Information Superhighway." The Internet, wrote Gates, is one of "the important precursors of the information highway," along with PCs, CD-ROMs, phone networks, and cable systems, but "none represents the actual information highway. ... today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway."
Verdict: Miss. Gates's notion that the Internet would play a supporting role in the information highway of the future, rather than being the highway itself, was out-of-date the day The Road Ahead was published. Even Gates realized it. Shortly before his book hit the stores, Gates reorganized Microsoft to focus more on the Internet, and he made major revisions to a second edition of The Road Ahead, adding material that highlighted the significance of the Internet. In many ways, Gates's cloudy crystal ball regarding the Internet amounted to wishful thinking.
^^^ I think the reviewer is the one who missed this one. Bill Gates was right--the Internet we see today is only the beginning. 25+ years from now we'll look back on these days and laugh at how things were back during the caveman days of the Internet. "'User interface protocol'? Bah, damned kids and your blinding ignorance! Back in my day, we had Flash, AJAX, IE6, and HTML and WE LIKED IT! Fie on your abominable makeshift semblance of a protocol. Righteous men use HTTP as God intended. Now off my lawn with your rigamarole and damned technological harlotry."
After reading a few dozens posts with people breaking down any innovation into so small pieces and so old history, and completely dishing out any work done since those two "brilliant" and "original" lines of code - I've come to the conclusion that by Slashdot standards there are no innovations. Ever. And I agree.
You know something: you are not living alone. Every fkin idea "you come up with" has some its roots into other people vision or work they have published. And one more thing: everyone and they sister have a "genius" idea every day. Get to work and put the long working hours to transform that idea into something that somebody else can use it. After you wrote those 100,000 lines of code and fixed your first 1000 bugs, you will finally realize that the original idea was bullshit, and all that mattered is that huge effort along the way to make it happen.
The only reason the big leaders are pumping and praising this stupid word is because the populace are mesmerized by the magic of innovation. Because everyone wants to believe that coming up with this great idea will not require you to work another day in your entire life. Stop dreaming about your "Jump to Conclusions" mat and wake up.
Screw innovation!
Again this is not off-topic another case where people can't use the -1 mod
...who is now out to buy respectability for himself. And he's paying for it with the ill-gotten gains created by the monopolistic practices of the company he ran for over two decades. It makes me sick that people fawn over him for it. Would you feel the same about someone who mugged people, and then donated the proceeds to a homeless shelter?
Think of the billions of man hours wasted fixing the horrible abortion known as Windows-- made a standard not for technical superiority, but through illegal trade practices that penalized OEMs who wanted to give their customers choices. Think of the companies that Microsoft snuffed out in their infancy because their products were perceived by Gates and his underlings as threats to Microsoft's cash cows. We could have had viable tablet computing 20 years ago, for example, but the OS made by GO Corp was purpose-built and not made by Microsoft-- so Microsoft made sure it was killed and then spent the last 20 years trying to convince us that Windows with some bolt-on extensions, shoehorned into a tablet form factor, didn't suck total ass.
What the Atlantic fail to mention is that on #2, The Wallet PC, which they rate as a HIT, it was Microsoft who Bill wanted to see supply the smartphones . . . I call this an Apple-flavoured fail
http://coletti.co.uk/?p=1005