The Road Ahead

In the mid-90s, Bill Gates saw the dawning of the "internet age", and put forth his predictions on what would happen. He also drew on his experience with the start of the microcomputer age and how some big companies failed, while small companies like Microsoft were able to succeed.

Some predictions seem to be spot on. He predicted that people would watch a lot of video once bandwidth increased. The success of Youtube, Netflix and countless other streaming services attest to that point. Others are not so accurate. He envisioned a scheme where people would be totally anonymous, but have ads tailored to them based on filling out surveys. Instead, companies have collected a lot of information about users without the need for surveys. This has led to privacy concerns, but may just be thought of as "automating" the surveys.

He was quite optimistic about education. We do have teachers grabbing clip art for power point presentations. However, education is still largely stuck in the past. Even in the time of covid-required remote learning, teachers largely taught like they did in decades past, just using a screen instead of a chalkboard. There are remote classes and sites like Kahn Academy. However, education has largely failed to reach its potential. Though desires for more information can be fulfilled by searching Wikipedia rather than a CD Rom.

He talked about how Lakeside school gave students emails and they use it to communicate. Free webmail services took over from that. Now kids hardly email because there are so many other services available. The "closed garden" of services rather than the open internet has an aspect that he did not foresee.

This book was written before Google, Facebook or Netflix were founded. OSX, iOS and Android did not yet exist. Some of the big early internet companies are just a shell of themselves (Yahoo, AOL). Others, such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are behemoths. IBM has largely left the PC business. Compaq is pretty much gone. Even Intel is struggling today. Big companies that were not able to pivot largely failed.

Gates did come close to predicting the rise of mobile devices. He thought of them as pocket PCs. He even envisioned a mobile boarding pass. Mobile phones were still largely a niche item. It was hard to envision them pivoting to becoming the primary computing device for people. However, many of the uses were similar.