On: Bill Gates in Byte Magazine: The Future of Softwar...

[lonelappde]

_The_ Road Ahead. Gates wasn't so modest.

Gates didn't miss the Internet. The first verst of the book said that the 1994 Internet was not the Internet of the future, and he was right about that. The Web got big in 1995 after Netscape Navigator came out (and Internet Explorer came shortly after). MS was anti web because the browser concept threatened the Windows monopoly as a computing platform. Gates/MS spent they next 5 years desperately trying to lock the Internet inside Windows, with ActiveX etc

[reaperducer → lonelappde]

Gates blew it on the internet. It's OK. There's a lot of revisionist history surrounding him on HN these days. Time does that.

Gates' vision of the internet was that people would connect to it once a day - maybe - to download their e-mail to read offline on a desktop PC.

It's why Microsoft went whole hog into Encarta. Gates believed the future of information was subscribing to encyclopedia CDROM updates by mail.

Windows didn't even get networking until 1992, almost a decade after the Macintosh had it.

[nabla9 → lonelappde]

> The first verst of the book said that the 1994 Internet was not the Internet of the future, and he was right about that.

He was totally wrong. The future Gates was planning at the time did not include HTML, WWW or internet standards.

It was the Blackbird project and the first version of MSN, a closed subscription-based dial-up online service with Microsoft designed and owned content authoring tools.