A Look Back on "The Road Ahead"

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/02/08/road_ahead_billgates/1.html' target='_blank'>http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/02/08/road_ahead_billgates/1.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"When Bill Gates wrote his vision of the future back in 1995, titled 'The Road ahead', he made a number of outrageous (at the time) predictions about what the digital world would be like in 2006. How have his predictions held up? We take a look back at the book and see what Gates got right and what he got wrong. Turns out that Bill predicted DRM, pro-gaming, Media Center - although he also got a lot of other stuff wrong. Interestingly, a 300GB Maxtor hard drive would cost $63,000 today according to Gates' numbers!"</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/header.jpg" /><br /><br />Some of the predictions were eerily dead on while the ones that are off are pretty funny too. It is just hard to believe how far some things have come in 10 years. The next 10 should be just as interesting.

[kiwi]

Didnt he say something along the lines of that there will be "portals" that people would dial/login into to get their information? Kinda keeping along the lines of MSN Network and CompuServe etc?
I remember thinking, "Nah Bill, the Internet is where its at.." :)

[Felix Torres]

Didnt he say something along the lines of that there will be "portals" that people would dial/login into to get their information?

Kinda like Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Google...

[Jason Eaton]

Question is... how much of it was a self-fulfilling prophecy? Those with the power to shape, shape in their own image... or ideals.

[Chris Gohlke]

JohnSmith, I think you hit the nail on the head. That was his vision of what he thought the future would hold. Much of it was probably based on ideas they had in the pipeline already. Plus if he believed it was coming, he would have been stupid not to put some resources into getting a part of it and as a result directly influnce the fullfillment of the prophesy.

I never actually read this book, but just ordered a copy. It is only $0.01 as a used book on Amazon.

[Felix Torres]

Question is... how much of it was a self-fulfilling prophecy? Those with the power to shape, shape in their own image... or ideals.

Actually, it was *intended* to be just that. Sort-of. :-)

At the time the book was written, MS was under attack for a "lack of vision" just as MS was looking to expand into the large corporate datacenter market that was owned by UNIX OSes.

So the decision to have the Chairman "write" a book was an attempt to show that the company did, too, have a grand vision to go along with its marketing roadmap. And that they were too concerned about the sociological impact of the technology they were promoting.

Naturally, a lot of this vision was based on stuff MS had been working on or looking to get into. When you purposefully set out to do something (develop new technologies) you generally expect to succeed and that success to have some effect. So the future presented in the book assumed that MS had had a hand in shaping that future he was discussing.
Which it did.

As one example, 1995-96 was the period during which MS bought something like four tiny start-ups that were all working on digital audio and video streaming technologies and added them to the in-house group that had been working on their "Tiger" video server technologies for interactive TV. Out of this came Windows Media and MS TV and their IP TV tech that is starting to deploy now.

The ideas in that book were what guided MS actions of 1995 and the plans they laid out to come to fruition by 2005. How those visions (and the actions they engendered) matched up to the changing outside market is something that we can only *start* to judge now.

Some of the ideas in there are still far from fruition (the electronic wallet idea, for one) because the market wasn't ready for the first implementations or the tech wasn't ready or the market zigged while MS zagged. But it will likely take another ten years before we can really tell why those things haven't come to pass and just how sharp the Gates vision really was back in 95; as he pointed out once, people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technology and underestimate its longterm impact.

Even where he appears to have missed, he may yet be right.
That said, I ought to dig out my copy and give it a second reading...