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The Road Ahead

Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson

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Summary

Bill Gates’s 1995 book considers where digital technology could lead and how it could change daily life. Written with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, it explores connected computing and a future information highway. Its forecasts include video on demand and computers small enough to carry in a pocket. Gates later revisited the book to compare those expectations with what happened.

  • SourceBill Gates — The Road Ahead after 25 years · November 24, 2020; opening paragraphs, pocket computers and digital agents

Why read it Our view

Read it as a record of technology forecasts that could later be checked. The useful exercise is to separate an eventual direction from the time needed to reach it. Gates’s retrospective makes that distinction concrete: some changes came quickly, while digital agents fell short of what he had imagined in 1995. For founders, this can help frame assumptions about adoption and the time a market needs to develop.

Written about

  • Bill GatesAuthor
    Gates wrote this book with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson. In his November 24, 2020 retrospective, he discusses both successful forecasts and ideas that took longer than he expected.
    Source