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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."
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
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.