Response Essay on The Road Ahead by Bill Gates

Bill Gates is a person who requires no introduction; yet, it is far less known that, in addition to his activities as a programmer and a businessman, he has also wrote several books, one of them, The Road Ahead, published in 1995, was a kind of summary of his thoughts and predictions concerning the further evolution of technology, mostly, of course, the digital one.

I have read this book only recently and was quite amazed due to two reasons: first, because a lot of things predicted by Gates have come into being in the form that is very close to what was proposed by him; and second, because there is also a lot of things that are not even close to reality.

It is fascinating to read how far and how fast the computer technologies have developed within such a tiny period of time – things that Gates considered to be due in several decades’ time have already been around and replaced by something even more perfect; some ideas may seem to be ridiculous to anyone who reads about them now; but in general, the prediction is rather accurate, albeit the terminology used by Gates is very often not the one that is widely accepted – for example, he always uses the self-coined term “Information Highway” to denote the World Wide Web and the Internet, and is known to be still using it, however, it is very much disliked by the public.

It was interesting reading; however, not as a prediction of the future, because the future has already came and it is often quite different from what he supposed it to be like.