Bill Gates Predicts Web 2.0 in 1994

… and fails to capitalize on it!

“Say you want to watch a movie. To choose, you’ll want to know what movies others liked and, based on what you thought of other movies you’ve seen, if this is a movie you’d like. You’ll be able to browse that information. Then you select and get video on demand. Afterward, you can even share what you thought of the movie.

But thinking of it only in terms of movies on demand trivializes the ultimate impact. The way we find information and make decisions will be changed. Think about how you find people with common interests, how you pick a doctor, how you decide what book to read. Right now, its hard to reach out to a broad range of people. You are tied into the physical community near you. But in the new environment, because of how information is stored and accessed, that community will expand. This tool will be empowering, the infrastructure will be built quickly and the impact will be broad.”

~Bill Gates, Playboy 1994

I love reading old predictions and seeing where people went right, and where people went wrong. Interestingly, we have a dead-on prediction that Microsoft has failed to profit from. The community-driven Web 2.0 phase has come, and Microsoft still has not figured out a great way to make money from the web community, even though they had a 10 year ideological head start on everyone else.

To use his movie example, IMDB, RottenTomatoes, and Amazon pretty much run the market on movie reviews.

Microsoft even had all of the pieces to do AJAX in place six years before anyone else, but nothing came together until it was too late.

The lesson? Predicting the future is hard, even when you get it right.

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