The Road Ahead by Bill Gates

This paper reviews The Road Ahead by Bill Gates. One of the individuals most responsible for the computer revolution that put personal computers into widespread use, Gates is now concerned with the building and establishment of the information highway and its impact on modern society. The Road Ahead is an attempt to predict the new technologies needed to make the highway a fully-realized part of daily life and to show the ways in which these technologies will change business practices and everyday activities. Partly a utopian guessing game, the book also provides interesting insights into the areas in which Gates is focusing his company's research and development activities.

When Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to drop out of school and invest their futures in their belief in the potential market for personal computers, "We set off down a road that was headed in the right direction" (Gates, 1995, p. 18). The two had been fascinated by computers ever since their first encounters with what were then bulky, plodding, expensive machines capable primarily of performing complex calculations and playing rudimentary games. Gates describes the machine for which he wrote his first program as "huge and cumbersome and slow and absolutely compelling" (p. 1). The two created a company, Microsoft, which was instrumental in igniting the computer revolution, creating machines and the accompanying software that have grown dramatically smaller, faster, and cheaper, allowing computers

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ll eventually enable customers to connect directly and immediately with the specific individual designated by a company as able to handle the customer's particular need or complaint. For instance, a company which manufactures and sells hiking equipment might have an expert on staff in the construction and use of ice axes. Current telecommunications technology would allow a customer to contact that expert directly and ask detailed questions about the appropriateness of a particular axe in climbing a particular mountain. However, Gates' suggestion that the two human beings involved in this conversation would eventually be able to interact in real time at any moment of the day convenient to the customer does not take into account international time differences and the fact that the expert might be asleep or out climbing a mountain when the call was placed. Gates admits that many of his specific predictions may soon appear to be completely off-base. He is at his best when he is concentrating on the larger questions that the information explosion poses and the lessons that can be learned from the past. He argues, "The relevant question is, 'What if communicating were almost free?'" (p. 18). Many of his predictions are attempts

Category: Business - T