Fourteen years ago, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates gave a keynote address at a Las Vegas technology show known as Comdex. In a speech entitled “Information at Your Fingertips — 2005,” he offered a vision of how Microsoft would reshape computer technology a decade into the future.
“By the year 2005,” Gates said, “people will use technology to make it easier to learn, work, shop, socialize, and even consult a doctor. Kids at school, parents at the office, cops at the crime scene — everyone will benefit from the wealth of tools and information available at our fingertips.”
Yesterday, Gates gave delivered a new keynote — this time at the Consumer Electronics Show, which, in the intervening years, displaced Comdex as the biggest tech show in the U.S. — and offered an upbeat assessment of both computing’s history and its future.
“The trend here is clear,” Gates said. “All media and entertainment will be software driven. The first digital decade has been fantastically successful. There’s nothing holding us back from going much further and much faster in the second digital decade.”
A Cloudy Future?
Many of Gates’ early predictions have come true, but not necessarily in the way that he imagined all those years ago. When he walked onto the stage at the Aladdin Hotel in 1994 for his Comdex keynote, the World Wide Web was just beginning to enter the public consciousness.
Since that keynote, the Internet has become a major economic and social force that is reshaping entire industries, and, in the process, making it possible for people to communicate in all the ways Gates once predicted. But unlike the personal computer, Microsoft is not at the center of this revolution, and its role in the future is unclear.
In his keynote address yesterday, Gates conceded as much. “The second digital decade will be…