Really forward-thinking stuff, but then again that's why Microsoft succeeded. It seems like all of Gates' predictions were spot-on in this article.
Gates is famous for completely missing the success of the Internet. He thought that it had no consumer appeal and as a result MS was focused on Office and PC software when the dotcom boom started. His first version of "A Road Ahead" published in 1995 didn't have a chapter about Internet. It was added later.
To his credit he made complete 180 in his opinion in the same year and started to exploit MS monopoly power mercilessly to get ahead.
Gates didn't miss the Internet. The first verst of the book said that the 1994 Internet was not the Internet of the future, and he was right about that. The Web got big in 1995 after Netscape Navigator came out (and Internet Explorer came shortly after). MS was anti web because the browser concept threatened the Windows monopoly as a computing platform. Gates/MS spent they next 5 years desperately trying to lock the Internet inside Windows, with ActiveX etc
He was totally wrong. The future Gates was planning at the time did not include HTML, WWW or internet standards.
It was the Blackbird project and the first version of MSN, a closed subscription-based dial-up online service with Microsoft designed and owned content authoring tools.
Gates' vision of the internet was that people would connect to it once a day - maybe - to download their e-mail to read offline on a desktop PC.
It's why Microsoft went whole hog into Encarta. Gates believed the future of information was subscribing to encyclopedia CDROM updates by mail.
Windows didn't even get networking until 1992, almost a decade after the Macintosh had it.
Interesting. Got any references for that ?
Multiple overlapping windows not useful
They haven't really changed, although they have learned to be less obvious about it.
They set the software world back by 20 years. Before Microsoft, nobody thought computers should just randomly fail all the time. They got people to think it was perfectly normal, and not a reason to send the damn thing back for a refund.