Peter Rinearson

It took me a while to get to this book...had it on my shelf for 15 years before the library was lost last year...but in this case, the lateness afforded a hindsight check on his predictions. Unlike Ray Kurzweil's wild imaginings, Gates was pretty spot on. He didn't anticipate the power of the smartphone, but he hinted at corollaries.

I've read three books by three of the big four (Jobs, Gates, Woz & Allen), and Isaacson's bio of Jobs, and Jobs was by far the least of them all - in intellect show more and ability, though Gates treated him with respect (even admiration!) throughout this book. Jobs was the least human as well. Anyway, this was well written and would have been a prophetic read when it came out, though the wait was worth it in confirming the prophesies. show less

I had found this book very inspiring. I liked the vision Bill gates shares in this one, namely "A computer running Microsoft Windows on everyones desk". This book, I believe, from the early days of Microsoft and had really thought on future world with ubiquitous computing. I liked to so much that I inherited some of his thoughts on future home design and tried it at my house while building (wherein there would be phone on all rooms and only phone near the person would ring (this was before show more cell phones)). show less

In any case, the book had to be extensively re-written to make Bill appear to be the visionary. Hard to be a visionary when your vision is only good for a year. But his second bite at the apple was much more accurate. You can definitely see him working with blinders on to a significant degree. He still hypes video-on-demand and producers of content like MSN and AOL. But he missed such innovations that were already in progress at that time, such as portals (Yahoo gets a brief mention as a show more directory service). His vision of computers and networks in education is woefully lacking in any real ideas. But he seems to have understood the dynamics of paying for content and shopping on the internet, long before it generally understood.

All in all, it’s a pretty decent, if somewhat general, set of prognostications. Overall, it’s not too far off. As for his writing style, there is more self-promotion and patting himself and Microsoft on the back than I would prefer to read. One of the reasons I generally don’t read the book of the month by the latest fad business leader.

(Full review at my blog) show less

This book is the non fiction that Gates looks back on his life and it is concerned with the future of computer.
In cover of this book,Gates stands at the road.The road is stretching,and probably I think he is thinking that it is not goal,but it is the things that he should do now.This book is described about computer's advantage and disadvantage,and about computer's progress.Although this book is about ten more years ago,but you are worth reading it.