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The Vision Behind: The Future By Bill Gates.

GatesPredicting the future is no easy task. Why would a sane person attempt such a foolhardy task? Bill Gates did it 10 years ago with “The Road Ahead.”

How did he do? Can you say, “Popular Mechanics 1962?” Do you remember the family helicopter? How about nuclear power for the home?

Gates, silver spoon and all, prefaced his own book with plenty of the necessary qualifying statements to the folly of predictions.

Then he went and predicted the future anyway. Here we are 10 years or so later. How did Gates fare as a visionary? It’s a mixed bag.

Geoff Richards, writing for Bit-Tech, compares the present with Gates’ version of the present and recent past and recent future (it’s hard to pin down a futurist).

Storage. Hard drives are getting faster and hold more. On a per gigabyte basis, cheaper, too. Gates was excited over the low cost of a 1.2GB drive back in 1995, but missed the even lower cost per gig today.

“A quick scan of Newegg.com reveals that hard drive prices have dropped as low as 40 cents per gigabyte, meaning you can now pick up a whopping 300GB for just US$120. At 1995 prices, this Maxtor Diamondmax would cost US$63,000, or in other words, Bill’s US$250 would buy him 600GB today - a 500-fold increase.”

Fortunately, I didn’t spend $63,000 on a Maxtor Diamondmax.

Gates invisioned holographic storage to be the thing of the future. It still is, Star Trek notwithstanding.

Music is today’s big deal, though video is getting hotter very fast. Apple struck gold with the iPod and iTunes Music Store while Microsoft was embroiled in security fixes for their mainstay applications.

Gates never talked about music in “The Road Ahead.” Instead, his focus was on TV and movies.

“Television shows will continue to be broadcast as they are today for synchronous consumption. After they air, these show – as well as thousand of movies and virtually all other kinds of video – will be available whenever you want to view them. You’ll be able to watch the new episode of Seinfeld at 9:00pm on Thursday night, or at 9:13pm, or at 9:45pm or at 11:00am on Saturday.”

No offense is intended, but I think I could have figured that one out. Why it never showed up on Star Trek is beyond me.

Gates did a good job of predicting the DVR/PVR now showing up in homes nationwide as cable TV provides more services for more money. His own Windows Media software hasn’t taken off.

Maybe it has something to do with the 40-odd buttons on the remote and the requirement to have an engineering degree to set it up.

What do you carry in your wallet or purse? Keys, credit cards, and the like? Your iPod? A cell phone? Uh huh. Gates was thinking ahead.

“You’ll be able to keep all these and more in another information appliance we call the Wallet PC. It will be about the same size as a wallet, which means you’ll be able to carry it in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and also let you read or send electronics mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, and play both simple and sophisticated games.”

We’re not there. Yet. But Blackberry, Moto, and other devices are moving in that direction.

Richards points out Gates’ and Microsoft’s efforts on handwriting recognition. Apple’s Newton and InkWell notwithstanding, that hasn’t gone very far, either.

We’ve had better success with voice recognition on cell phones and voice mail systems.

Then there’s the dreaded “DRM.” Digital Rights Management. Gates predicted such a future. Fortunately, his vision was cloudy.

“The information highway will enable innovations in the way that intellectual property, such as music and software, is licensed. Record companies, or even individual recording artists, might choose to sell music in a new way…. For example, a song could be made available on a pay-per-hearing basis… We may see digital entertainment that has an expiration date or that allows only a certain number of plays before it has to be purchased again.”

Pay per song listened to? I hope not. Microsoft wants Microsoft to be the center of the entertainment module in the living room and hasn’t had much success controlling the entertainment content providers.

Herding cats seems to be something Jobs can do.

Back in 1995, Gates didn’t really predict spam (the email you don’t read), though he offered speculation on direct marketing (spam) changes in the future.

This is a quote from the book that I love.

“You won’t be drowned by the deluge of unimportant information because you’ll use software to filter incoming advertising and other extraneous messages and spend your valuable time looking at those messages that interest you. Most people will block e-mail ads except for those about product areas of particular concern.”

Life should be so easy.

Gates’ “The Road Ahead” was a fun read back then, and a fun look backwards (and forwards) today. Interesting, too, is the use of first person throughout the book.

It’s filled with “I think this...” and “I feel that...” even though the book was really authored by Bill Gates, Microsoft’s then CTO Nathan Myhrvold, and Peter Rinearson (probably there for sentence structure).

To be remembered is the fact that “The Road Ahead” came before the Information Super Highway, which began in late 1994 and early 1995 for most of the public.

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Classy Mac360 PhotoBy Tera Patricks | Tera Patricks co-founded Mac360 in early 2004 with Bambi Brannan, Alexis Kayhill, and Ron McElfresh. Tera died in the summer of 2006 following a long bout with cancer. Her legacy site is Tera Talks.

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