Bill Gates Is Hip to Acceleration, Makes 10-Year Predictions
March 14 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Economics Year: 2018 Rating: 3
Bill Gates is publicly betting on accelerating change.
Changes in software and computing over the next 10 years will be “very substantial” and will permeate all facets of life, Gates told a crowd of about 1,100 people during a Northern Virginia Technology Council breakfast in Washington, D.C. Computers and software have changed how people take photographs and purchase music, but other industries will be affected just as much in coming years, he said. (source, IDG News Service)
Furthermore, the always smart but suddenly
super-progressive former Microsoft Chairman predicts that
internet TV, new interfaces, digital textbooks and virtual worlds
will see big growth and serve as major catalysts.
Television will be married with the Internet, allowing for personalized news and commercials. People will watch more of their home movies on their TV screens, and TV sets and computers will be increasingly connected. Television will be an “utterly different thing,” he said.
“Computer users will have more options for inputting information beyond the mouse and keyboard. Speech and handwriting recognition software will gain in popularity. Computers will move off the desktop, with speech recognition and motion-sensing cameras allowing users to control screens embedded into desktops or whiteboards.”
“More schools will ditch textbooks for tablet PCs that hold dozens of books. New types of textbooks will increasingly contain video and other media.”
“Companies and government agencies will embrace three-dimensional computing, giving users new ways of interacting with virtual worlds. Students will increasingly use software to simulate experiments.”
The fact that such a high-profile individual is backing the acceleration meme and supporting technologies lends clout to the notion that the phenomenon is very real and that more people are becoming hip to it. (Which may also have more than a little to do with Microsoft’s choice of the brand Singularity for a new operating system.)
“In a broad sense, we can say that information workers … are not yet empowered to collaborate in the way that they should,” Gates said. “I think the opportunity is stronger than it’s ever been.”
That’s quite a concession coming from the man who made a fortune beating down (and out-thinking) competition to the Microsoft OS and Office Suite for two decades, evangelizing the superiority of his products the whole way through. The market and innovation forces at work must be formidable indeed.
Gates agrees: “I don’t think anything will stop the rapid advances,” he concluded.
Comment Thread (1 Response)
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I actually just listened to a podcast where Glen Hiemstra relates a discussion he had with Bill Gates about the future in front of an auditorium full of High School kids in 1989. He said that Gates said that they didn’t strategically plan more than 36 months ahead but that he imagined what the world might look like in ten years and pointed his company in that direction. Seems like he had a decent feel for a bunch of stuff that would evolve. Hiemstra spends about 3 minutes relating the story about 25 minutes into the podcast .
Posted by: Jeff March 14, 2008
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