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The Prophecies of Bill Gates (15 years later)
- stuff4ben 16y agoheh, about that same time I was a sophomore in college and was just exposed to the Internet and the World Wide Web by way of a Mosaic browser running on some Sparc station. I predicted to several of my friends that it was pretty useless and wouldn't go anywhere. 15 years later this is how I make my living. I also made the same prediction about Facebook back in early 2005. However, I was right-on about smartphones back in 2005 and that Apple would be the one to create it. Exactly a year later they did. So I'm 1 for 2.
- sstrudeau 16y agoI had almost the exact same experience at about the same age (seeing Mosaic on a friends' machine, in high school) -- but came to the opposite conclusion; I knew this would be hot! Having had tinkered with gopher, irc, and a little bit of text-only www, seeing the hypertextual web rendered with images blew my mind.
- tjmaxal 16y agoI remember in college how all the English professors we certain that hypertext novels with interweaving plot lines would replace the novel as we knew it. Even with the adoption of ebooks it still hasn't happened.
- neilk 16y agoEbert has a good explanation of that. In the days when people told stories around the campfire, at any time, the storyteller could have asked the audience what should happen next. But they didn't because that would have ruined the story. Douglas Coupland was more prescient in Microserfs, written about the same time. He said that interactive multimedia wouldn't be like books, it would be more like sports.
- tjmaxal 16y agoI'm a HUGE fan of Microserfs
- neilk 16y agoThe moment for me was the first time I was browsing Yahoo, back when it had a stanford.edu address. I found a webcam in a computer lab in Japan. Someone had set up some stuffed animals in front of the camera. The lab was deserted. And in the window beyond, dawn was breaking, even though it was night on the east coast of North America. That's when the world changed for me.
- Ygor 16y agoDo you now of any highly accurate predictions, famous or not, of that time (or any other time for that mather)? Did anyone anticipate today's state of the Internet, Computers or Technology in general?
- dpritchett 16y agoWilliam Gibson? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_themes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_them...
- frisco 16y agoThat's different. A generation of engineers and scientists grew up on science fiction of authors like Gibson and deliberately went out to create it.
- tjmaxal 16y agodeliberately? Maybe subconciously
- frisco 16y agoNo, deliberately. I'm one of them. A lot of my friends who are grad students are the same way. Gene Roddenberry, Stephenson, Gibson, and maybe like 5-10 others have probably had more effect on the development of modern technology than Washington has over the past 25 years (ignoring the fact that DARPA has financed a lot of it).
- bitwize 16y agoStephenson got closer to the mark; the world described in Snow Crash is more accurate, more believable, and more fun than Gibson's self-absorbed, nihilistic works. In addition to various technical details (like showing effects of latency and jitter over real-world network links in the Metaverse), Snow Crash presents a confluence of the culture of technology, the culture of the arts, and punk/skater culture that is a reasonable extrapolation of what we see today. It is a marvellously prescient work, especially when you take phenomena like Second Life into account.
- rbanffy 16y agoIt's always fun to read predictions like these. One of my favorite books in the library of an ad agency I worked for long ago is this one: http://www.amazon.com/Dvorak-Predicts-Insiders-Computer-Industry/dp/0078819814 http://www.amazon.com/Dvorak-Predicts-Insiders-Computer-Indu...
- thisduck 16y agoThe hit and miss analysis seems a bit off. Gates talks quite a bit about what people will be _able_ to do rather what they _will_ do. Most of the things he said are possible and highly available now.
- rbanffy 16y agoThis is one trick you can use to make a prediction future proof. He misses mostly when he says something won't be possible. I am quite sure a lot of stuff will be possible in a couple decades. I am not sure people will be doing them.
- lawn 16y agoWhen you're saying this I'm thinking about Nostradamus, this 2012 phenomena and the bible. Things you can interpret in many different ways so that if one thing fail, you can reinterpret it and say "oh no the world shouldn't end in 2000, now it's obvious the year should be 2012".
- stcredzero 16y agoThe hit and miss analysis seems a bit off. Seems downright biased to me. Bill was as prescient as one could expect with many of these points. Of course, his vision isn't perfect, but he does have a general gist of what would happen. Where he's been really wrong is how Microsoft and Windows would fit in, but he's bound to be biased about those factors!
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoEmail replaced meetings in the same way that desktop computers replaced paper.
- mattmaroon 16y agoThey had to dig pretty hard to justify calling many of these incorrect. The social networking one in particular, apparently the author has never heard of meetup.com.
- TrevorBurnham 16y agoThe author isn't saying that no one ever meets new people online and then decides to meet them in person; he's saying that it's not as common as Gates' vision would suggest.
- mattmaroon 16y agoBut it is pretty damn common, just maybe not on Facebook.
- tjmaxal 16y agoman it's been a long time since I heard anyone use the phrase "killer app" it just seems so 90s
- talleyrand 16y agowhat about the phrase "information highway"!?
- bitwize 16y agoElectronic mail and shared screens will eliminate the need for many meetings. This is totally coming to pass, now that we can Pass the Ball™ with WebEx!