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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."
What is the best innovation Microsoft has brought to us?
The BSOD, of course. Bob and Clippy are tied for 2nd place.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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