Bill Gates has often made appropriate predictions about the technological future. This applies equally for some of his employees. (Image: gatesnotes.com, wikipedia)
If we travel in the past for 32 years, a lot was different. Computers in private households were just slowly becoming more popular, Video On Demand was called to go to a video store and hardly anyone had internet access.
Nevertheless, at Microsoft you suspected where the trip would go once, although with a focus on the false horse from today's perspective: TV station and the television.
Nevertheless, the predictions from one proceed Contribution from the BBC from back then as remarkably accurate. These statements from Bill Gates already show this:
- Distribution of computers:
To conquer the home will be a greater challenge [als Unternehmen, Anmerkung der Redaktion]. But if you look into the future for 15 years or at most 20 years, I have no doubt that the vision of a computer is achieved in every household.
- Performance of computers:
From a certain point, they are certainly able to be as clever as people, in a way.
Also interesting: Like a mistake to a famous Windows key combination
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“It was a mistake”: if it had gone to Bill Gates, there would be no famous key combination
Gates should keep the most part
Already in 2022 Federal Statistical Office 92 percent of all Europe households at least one personnel computer.
The question of whether computers can be as intelligent today as people remains discussable.
However, it is clear that AI tools such as Chatgpt, Gemini and Perplexity have made enormous progress in this direction in recent years.
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My cell phone has now integrated Chatgpt: This is what it looks like in practice
More impressive predictions
Not only Gates hits remarkable predictions for the future in the BBC contribution, but also his employees.
- Video on Demand: Long before Netflix & Co., an employee described a solution for the growing video offer, even if his statement referred to the development of TV channels:
It is time to go to sleep by 500 stations. The solution is an interactive online program leader who uses computer technology to organize the transmitters, to display them according to topics, even learn what content you will be happy to see and then present you online directly on the television. The device can learn what you like to see because it can record the programs that you can actually look at or at least save its most important details.
- Shopping at the push of a button: An employee of Gates also brings up the advantages and disadvantages of being able to buy things with a blink of an eye that we have long since used to be used by online shopping on the PC and on the cell phone. However, she assumed that the remote control from TV would already happen at the end of the millennium:
I just think it is very important that people understand that each medal has two sides. That, if you enjoy the convenience in 5 years, to sit in front of your interactive television and to be able to order a little at the button on the remote control at the push of a button, this means that information about you is sent through a network. This means that everyone at the other end of this network knows what you are looking at, your credit card number can receive and a lot of things can learn about you that you may not want to know others.
- Teams & Co.: What Microsoft Teams & Co. enable today is also part of the BBC contribution. So it says there:
Everyone in the entire company is connected to email worldwide, creating an electronic village.
Interested praise for gates is also available, as the following quote finally makes clear:
The bandwidth is the amount of data on a computer, which can be transferred from one part to the other. But at Microsoft, people speak of the amount of information that a specific person can process, and Bill Gates has the greatest range of all people I have ever met.
The rapid growth of Microsoft was already shown in 1993: At that time, the company hired 50 to 100 employees a week and over 10,000 people worked for Microsoft in Seattle alone.
Today Microsoft employs over 200,000 people worldwide, around 3,000 of them in Europey, mainly at the headquarters in Munich.
