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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."
Quote: Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. It was an improvement of the CP/M operating system.
I met my wife on a dating site.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
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!
"Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
"The idea of RPC (Remote Procedure Call) goes back at least as far as 1976"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_procedure_call
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I will have to disagree. The side bar have been in various beta states on Google for over 2 years, That is before Bing even went public.
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.
errr.... Microsoft didn't develop DOS either. They bought it.
Another book from 15 years ago that biffed it.
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I think you misunderstood me. Gaming has, by and large, moved to consoles. Microsoft has largely exited the PC gaming market--period. They axed the Flight Simulator team, and I can't recall a PC game produced by Microsoft within the last few years. They've concentrated their efforts on the XBox family.
And no kidding, they don't make money on the consoles. They still collect money for every game sold, plus the XBox Live subscription fees, plus download sales. It's a far more profitable model than developing and publishing PC games.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I can factor large prime numbers really easily.
...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.
See RenderMorphics for details.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
Outside the US in countries that actually built out decent 3G networks, coverage is pretty good and usable. Here in New Zealand we have two networks providing 3G coverage to 97% of the population. All the cities have near-complete 3G coverage. I understand the situation is similar in many other Western countries (especially in Europe and Australia) with the obvious exception of the US. In some areas 3G wireless is actually faster than ADSL wired.