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Bill Gates's The Road Ahead, 15 Years Later

Posted by kdawson on from the answer-unclear-try-again dept.

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."

23 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing by eldavojohn · · Score: 3, Insightful
    To edit what you wrote to correct your predictions is another. From the article (and my memory):

    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would play a supporting role in the information highway of the future, rather than being the highway itself, was out-of-date the day The Road Ahead was published.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.
    1. Re:To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "To edit what you wrote to correct your predictions" for a new edition of a book is not unethical as you imply, it is the usual manner in which one adds value to a book to make the new edition more useful. Some Slashdotters might remember what we used to refer to as "textbooks" that we used in conjunction with classroom instruction. Textbooks used to be revised frequently, primarily so the textbook publishers could sell more books, but the normal method of enticing people to buy the revised version was to correct them and add material.

    2. Re:To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing by spun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would say rather, it has changed, to a high water mark in the 1950s, when the top tax bracket was 90%, but has changed back as the monsters fought back. Of course, I'm sure we all agree that we need to stop them at all costs. One can not bargain nor reason with monsters.

      That is the true purpose of government, the people banding together to protect themselves from those who would oppress and abuse them. It is our duty, as individuals and citizens, to do everything in our power to stop them.

      In any case, whether I am right or you are right about what has come before, I hope we can agree that being led about by monsters is not the optimal state of affairs, and we need to change things so society does not favor sociopaths. Sociopaths do not deserve the freedom to oppress others without consequences. No one does.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    3. Re:To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing by spun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yet government, just like fire, is essential to modern society.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    4. Re:To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You're right. I remember reading a study in a psychology class about how sociopathic CEOs tended to be. If not a sociopath, they tend to be obsessive compulsive. Think about it: most people, if paid as much as a Fortune 500 CEO, would retire after one year. Being a CEO is extremely stressful and most will never utilize the vast amounts of wealth they acquire. For them, business is a game that they just can't put down.

      I would put it this way: a sensible person doesn't really want that much power, because (to steal from Stan Lee) with great power comes great responsibility. Having lots of responsibility is extremely unpleasant; it's impossible to be sure that you're doing everything you can, and people will inevitably get hurt. There are reasons to take on responsibility, such as financial reward, satisfying some compulsion to achieve something, or satisfying a perceived obligation. However, it's still unpleasant, and a sensible person won't seek to continue to hold responsibility for longer than is needed. Therefore, that sensible person also won't seek extreme amounts of power.

      The exception are people who don't really care about fulfilling their responsibilities. If you don't care about whether you're doing everything you can, and if you don't care about other people getting hurt, then having responsibility isn't unpleasant. If you don't care about the ramifications of your actions and you are entirely self-serving, then the only thing that will matter is the accrual of additional power.

      So that's my quick and dirty explanation of why psychopaths keep getting themselves into positions of power: they're the ones who really want it. The only solution is to keep power dilute.

    5. Re:To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing by nine-times · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I would have thought the same way once. Then I grew up.

      Spend some time "in charge" of anything even moderately important, and you will make decisions that will upset people and even hurt people. Either you'll find that extremely unpleasant, you won't notice because you're arrogant and self-absorbed, or you won't care because you're a sociopath.

      Now I'm not saying that no sensible person will accept power under any circumstances. Like I said, a person might want to achieve positive things, or might have a sense of obligation. However, what I'm trying to argue against is the childish idea that having power is awesome fun, and it allows you to simply do what you want without drawbacks. Having power often means that you can't do what you want because the more power you have, the more obligations you have. And you will make mistakes, and you will fail to meet some of those obligations.

      Someone once said, "Man has a right to do whatever he can, and his only real responsibility is to live with the consequences.". The more power you have, the more you can do. But also, the more power you have, the greater the consequences.

      So when you talk about a position like the PotUS, I don't envy that power. To take on that job, you either need to be a moron, a sociopath, or a saint.

  2. Yeah, but in his defense... by Pojut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...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
  3. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by c++0xFF · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What is the best innovation Microsoft has brought to us?

    The BSOD, of course. Bob and Clippy are tied for 2nd place.

  4. face to face by citylivin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "But friendships formed online don't regularly lead to face-to-face meetings."

    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
  5. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Visual Studio per se probably isn't innovative, but it's a really stable product and better than anything else on the market. Microsoft also used to publish great and also innovative games (why not anymore?)

    You hit VS right on the head - it's not really anything new, but the features that they add to each version are usually pretty rock solid in their implementation. Not a whole other suites were offering LINQ - but they were there. Microsoft just made it easier to use those kinds of features.

    As for the games, its a lot like their web content. Most of the games Microsoft has made have been other dev studios being purchased or bought out or simply backed by Microsoft. Microsoft put their name on Halo, even though it was Bungie's work. They also have their name on the Age of Empires, though that was ensemble studios. Perhaps the only one I can think of that was MS was Microsoft's Flight Simulator.

    As for innovation, perhaps people shouldn't be expecting it from these large companies. In essence, a lot of the newer technologies today come from some super intelligent geek who has a dream to make it real. So once they get out of MIT or wherever, they start their project, demo it at TED or some festival, than they either get picked up by one of these corporations or their idea gets stolen.

  6. Gates Miss on Networking actually a Hit. by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:Never Seen a Quote from Bill's Book by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I love that this has been modded insightful.

    Bill Gates not relevant? Really? Look, I get annoyed by MS products as much as the next guy, but Bill Gates has done a LOT of good with his and his wife's foundation. A lot of good. Troll post should be modded troll.

  8. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by jedidiah · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > EVERYTHING is like that though.

    Except some people have a habit of denying this. Microsoft is notorious for this.

    That's why Slashbots give them so much sh*t. They deserve it for being such plagarists.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  9. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by negRo_slim · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Considering Direct X is the foundation upon which their gaming (and increasingly home entertainment divisions) are built upon I find the idea 'got out of PC gaming' absurd. Also consoles are not profitable, it's the software that run on them where the money lies.

    --
    On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
  10. How are these misses? by digiplant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by elrous0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No, Apple are, without a doubt, the jedi fucking masters on that front. Listening to a Steve Jobs keynote is like being the head catcher at a bullshit tossing contest. Every product they release is REVOLUTIONARY, every new line is the light bulb and Steve Jobs and is Thomas Edison himself. Listening to him intro the iPhone, you'd think there was no such thing as a mobile phone before the iPhone came along. If the audience wasn't filled with such fawning admirers, he would get openly laughed at for some of the outlandish hyperbole.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  12. Microsoft is a toll collector for progress by dtjohnson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I'm in the anti-M$ camp, but it really sickens me to see a bunch of zealots that can't even be honest or fair; it makes our side seem whiny. It would be like a Microsoftie uttering some hyperbole like "no successful company is running Linux." See how stupid and detached from reality that sounds?

    Hey, look! I put the words "Linux innovations" into some search engines...
    http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1017183/linux-innovation-missing
    http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/paytonbyrd/linux-lacks-innovation-13721
    http://www.zdnet.com/blog/murphy/is-linux-innovative/972

    See, no innovation --these results prove it! Wow, it sure is easy to have a ridiculous opinion. Maybe we could try to appear just a little fair-minded and actually put 10 seconds of real effort into our assertion the M$ has never innovated?

  14. and predictions of 15 years from now? by peter303 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  15. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bing itself was innovative from Microsoft, even so far that Google copied Bing's sidebar from them,

    I keep hearing about this sidebar, mostly from people who hate it, but I've never seen it, either at work in IE6 on XP or at home on Firefox on Win7 (wish I could figure out how to install Mandriva on a netbook). I can't figure that out, either. Is the sidebar an iGoogle thing? At any rate, what good is an innovation everyone seems to hate?

    and Bing was the first one to demonstrate and introduce real-time 3D video mapped into street view.

    I not only didn't know Bing had anything like street view, I can't even find it on Bing. Googling "streetview" on Bing gives me only satellite images and links to Google Streetview.

    Google isn't really that innovative either. They're different, sure, but any larger "innovation" they've done has come from smaller companies they have bought

    You must be new here -- to the internet, I mean. Google's biggest innovation was their pagerank, which actually gives meaningful results. Before Google, Infoseek was the best search engine, and we didn't even realize how badly it sucked until Google came along. And infoseek was head and shoulders above MS's search (yes, MS had search before Google existed. It just wasn't any good).

    I think Courier was quite innovative.

    Vaporware isn't innovation.

    Visual Studio per se probably isn't innovative, but it's a really stable product

    So what's your point? You were responding to a comment about MS's lack of innovation, not its lack of stability. What makes you such a MS fan? Yes, I like Excel and consider it the best spreadsheet I've used (better than Quattro, Lotus, or Open Office spreadsheet), but so what?

    Microsoft still spends millions into R&D while Apple does nothing like that.

    What you spend on R&D isn't important, the results of that R&D are. They spent millions on Vista alone, and even Ballmer says it was a dog. As to Apple, I think the iPod and iPhone prove you wrong even though I don't have one of either, or for that matter any Apple product (I think all of Apple's stuff is way overpriced). You think they didn't expend any money on R&D for those products?

    Large companies cant afford taking that kind of risks and losing.

    They can and they do. Streetview was an incredibly expensive risk no startup could possibly have accomplished, and the iPod was certainly a risky and expensive endeavor. Not to mention the Prius, SpaceShip Two, etc. The Edsel didn't bankrupt Ford.

    What division of MS do you work for? If not, why are you so gung-ho about Microsoft? I like a few of their offerings, but by and large most of the stuff I've had the displeasure of using sucked badly and were in no way innovative.

    --
    Free Martian Whores!
  16. Bill Gates today is a truly heroic person by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  17. I'm tired of this dissing of Microsoft by rigorrogue · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  18. Re:Microsoft best innovation. by hansede · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Also consoles are not profitable, it's the software that run on them where the money lies.

    Whoever makes the console rakes in the developer fees. Consoles are uber profitable.