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The Road AheadThe future of technology - according to Chairman Bill The youthful multi-millionaire chief of Microsoft Corporation gives his predictions for the future of IT and its application to everyday life. This is an unashamedly populist book, written to bring his notions of the digital revolution to a mass audience.
It's tempting to observe that a sound guru should have been able to see all this in 1994/5 - but then we are often reminded that the most fruitful advances are made not by inventors but by those who build on their work. He [now] takes a positive and optimistic view of the benefits the Internet can bring to commerce, to education, and even life in the home. The trouble is that after a bracing an instructive start, where he touches on some instructive examples of IT developments in the 1970s and 1980s, too much of what he offers in the latter part of the book keeps slipping away into business strategies and corporate management practice. There's also far too much overlap and repetition, as if he's forgotten in one chapter that he's already described 'The Office of the Future' in another. This is an encomium for the digital age which will have most effect on fence-sitters and those still in doubt [shurely shome mishtake!]. But those people who have been hacking code and creating major Web sites in their back bedrooms might find Bill's super-enthusiasm the breast-beatings of a Johnny-come-lately. Still, he is the richest man in the world. © Roy Johnson 1998 [more articles on IT and society] Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, New York: Viking, 1996, pp.332, ISBN 0140260404
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