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 to become an integral part of virtually every aspect of modern life.
The Road Ahead attempts to explain and predict the next major technological revolution, an interconnected, inexpensive global network called the information highway, the precursor of which is the Internet. Gates argues, "The information highway is a mass phenomenon, or it is nothing" (p. 256), a low-cost (but not free) means of sharing information among the majority of people around the wo...