Crystal-ball gazing with Bill Gates

Love him or hate him, Microsoft's top executive saw many of his predictions come true, as evidenced by these choice quotes

-- "I doubt the print newspaper will look dramatically different 10 years from now than it does today. It will probably have more URLs. It will probably have more subscribers who are talking to you about what they want through electronic mail. You'll probably treasure the fact that you have the electronic mail addresses of a very high percentage of your subscribers, since most of them will be on electronic mail. I think you will have gotten to the point where your Internet revenues had better be funding more than just the Internet marginal costs. It had better be funding some part of the basic costs of the business as well, when you get to that point. But I don't think the print newspaper will be substantially different than it is today. Everything you create there you will be using in electronic form as well to make money." Newspaper Association of America, April 29, 1997, Chicago.

-- "Some time in the next 10 to 20 years, you'll actually be able to talk to your computer and have it understand what you're saying. So it won't just be the keyboard and the mouse." National Governors' Association, July 30, 1997, Las Vegas.

-- "Well, the future device you'll have in the living room, we'll probably still call it the TV, but it will be very different than what you have today. Today you receive broadcasts where you have to decide to watch them when they come on. In the future, because you'll have the Internet, you'll be able to go out and get video, and also because the cost of storage is so low, you'll be able to easily record things on a disk and go back and play them when you want. There will also be interactivity. If there's an ad that catches your interest, you can say, 'Hey, send me more information about that.' The ads will be more targeted, because the ability to insert ads for the right audiences will come really very inexpensively in this digital framework.

"So on your TV sets, the one in the living room that you sit far away from, you'll be able to play games, you'll be able to chat, and it will be connected up to the same network as the device in your den that you'll sit closer to. And so the technology between that TV and that PC will be very similar, even though there will be some differences in terms of the kind of screen and whether you have different peripherals; all the information common to both devices." -- Interview with David Frost, March 24, 1999.

-- "I'd say that the percentage of people operating in the Web workstyle or Web lifestyle is less than 10 percent, even in the United States. But it's my belief that this percentage will go up very, very dramatically. And over the next five years, the majority of people will engage in the Web workstyle and the Web lifestyle." Digital Nervous System - Enterprise Perspective, March 24, 1999, New York.

-- "There's nothing preordained that the computer has to be large in size. That's just an inconvenience. It's an artifact of the hardware. Eventually we'll characterize computers really by only two characteristics: the size of the screen and whether it's a portable device connected up through wireless networking or it's a connected device that gets the entire bandwidth you have by having a fixed connection. And so every size between something that just sends an image to your retina by being part of your glasses to something that is a wristwatch, or the pocket-sized device, all the way up to your entire desktop where you might have a screen that's 3 feet by 3 feet in size, every one of those will be a choice." MIT, April 13, 1999.