

The Prophecies of Bill Gates (15 years later) - grellas
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/bill-gates-more-profit-than-prophet/56982/

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mattmaroon
They 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.

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TrevorBurnham
The 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.

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mattmaroon
But it is pretty damn common, just maybe not on Facebook.

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thisduck
The 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.

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rbanffy
This 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.

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lawn
When 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".

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rbanffy
It'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-
Indu...](http://www.amazon.com/Dvorak-Predicts-Insiders-Computer-
Industry/dp/0078819814)

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stuff4ben
heh, 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.

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sstrudeau
I 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.

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tjmaxal
I 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.

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neilk
Ebert 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.

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tjmaxal
I'm a HUGE fan of Microserfs

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bitwize
_Electronic 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!

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RyanMcGreal
Email replaced meetings in the same way that desktop computers replaced paper.

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Ygor
Do 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?

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dpritchett
William Gibson?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_them...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_themes)

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frisco
That's different. A generation of engineers and scientists grew up on science
fiction of authors like Gibson and deliberately went out to create it.

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tjmaxal
deliberately? Maybe subconciously

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frisco
No, 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).

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tjmaxal
man it's been a long time since I heard anyone use the phrase "killer app" it
just seems so 90s

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talleyrand
what about the phrase "information highway"!?

