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."

Comments

Microsoft best innovation.

[ls671]

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

Re:Microsoft best innovation.

[MickyTheIdiot]

DOS is not a great innovation. DOS, like most Microsoft products, is just a rework of someone's earlier innovation. If there is innovation there it's in how they adapted well established systems (like CP/M and, even earlier, BASIC) from Mainframe and Mini computers to much less powerful PCs and home computers. Bill Gates is good at that, but he by no means has been an inventor. At best he's dumbed down many of the best computer innovations so he can get them through the front door of offices and homes.

Re:Microsoft best innovation.

[harlows_monkeys]

So here we go slashdotters: What is the best innovation Microsoft has brought to us...

The "brought to us" part is the hard part. Plenty of important innovation has happened at Microsoft, but they aren't that good at turning it into products.

For example, Microsoft researchers developed a kind of help system that observed what a user did, and learned their use patterns, and was able to recognize when they were having trouble with something and offer suggestions. It worked very well, mostly only interrupting with suggestions when you were in genuine need of help.

When this moved from the lab to the product people, the marketing people loved it, but complained that it didn't show up enough. They wanted to advertise this great feature, but if the typical user only actually saw it do something once a week or so, that would suck (from the salesman's point of view). So marketing forced the people implementing to turn the thresholds way down, and make it pop up a lot, with often inane suggestions. And that's how Clippy went from being perhaps the most sophisticated automated assistant in the world when it was in the lab, to perhaps the most annoying automated pest in the world when it ended up in products.

Another good example is statistical spam filtering. Microsoft internally had one of the earliest, and best, spam handling systems. They also were the first (in a partnership with outside researchers at, I think, Stanford) the first to publish academic papers on Bayesian filtering. But it was others who picked up on this and wrote articles for the non-academic crowd that made outside programmers aware of these techniques, and so few realize Microsoft was one of the pioneers here.

Their spam filtering actually went far beyond just filtering for spam. At one time they had a system internally that could look at your incoming mail, analyze it, figure out what it was about, and rank the importance of it. This was tied in with other systems, such as the web cam on your computer and the microphone on your computer. The web cam could watch you, and the microphone listen to what was going on in your office. If it say and heard that you were meeting with others, it could see who they were, and hear what you are talking about, analyze that and figure out its importance, and decide if the mail you just received can wait or is important enough to interrupt you.

Aside from one or two articles in the press that mentioned this system as part of stories profiling research at MS, I've not heard anything about it since. It apparently never made it to any kind of product development stage. Someday, someone else will do it all the way through to product (Google's a good candidate), and no one will remember that Microsoft had it first.

Re:Microsoft best innovation.

[Chris Mattern]

What about Office?

Office is the sum of its parts, which were originally separate. Word was built on a prototype called Bravo that Microsoft bought from Xerox PARC. Access and Excel appear to be MS originals, though. Fun fact: Excel 1.0 was a Mac exclusive. Not until 2.0 (actually, 2.05) was there Excel for Windows.

Re:To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing

[spun]

You forgot, "never show empathy." And now we have a complete diagnosis: sociopath. Only sociopaths have what it takes to succeed in modern business, everyone else is just too weak. We used to shun or kill monsters, now we elevate them to the status of Gods.

Email...

[Knara]

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.

Re:So what?

[jedidiah]

No. When that book was written, it was already obvious that the Internet was going to kill off proprietary services like Prodigy and AOL. By the time that the net came along those services were OLD. They were an OLD model. They were long overdue for a disruption. Any technophile worth his salt should have seen this. More likely, Gates saw his interest lying in replacing AOL and wanted to push that idea whether he thought it was likely or not.

He simply wanted to try and push the world into his particular Walled Garden.

What a businessman tells you can't be taken at face value.

Ultimately he's going to want to sell you something.

Re:To Acknowledge One's Mistake Is One Thing

[RazorSharp]

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 think Microsoft with Gates/Balmer are a prime example of this. Their willingness to sink more resources into a project than it will profit for the sake of market-share demonstrates that they view business as a game of Monopoly. Look at the XBox, Bing, and IE. Gates cares more about his legacy than anything else. He cares more about having credit for modern technological achievements than actually contributing to society. Just look at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I know it's taboo to criticize, but as the Priest in A Clockwork Orange said, "What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?" Intentions and motivations matter, and Gates has demonstrated time after time that he is motivated by selfishness and arrogance. If he cared about technological progress he wouldn't try to beat the competition to the market with half-assed products, stagnate progress once he has a lock on a market, and make an enemy of open source. If he cared about helping people then he wouldn't insist on being given credit for it with interviews every time his foundation spends a few cents. He's a sociopath.

Well, Marvin Minsky was wrong too.

[dbuttric]

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...