The Road Ahead

Due to the fact that I am so bored staying at home all day, I started looking into the old bookshelf which came into our house in 1996 when we moved in. Among the Chinese literature, cook books, dictionaries and my old textbooks, there is a copy of The Road Ahead, Chinese version by Willian H Gates III, copyright 1995 and printed in China in 1996. And I picked it up after watching 12 episodes of Friends on my computer today.

The translation is lousy, I have to say. The text feels like the work of a code generator rather than real human being. But they are forgiven since back then, 10 years ago, not many people know what Bill Gates was really talking about and aside from that, it was good enough to have someone working to bring interesting books to the Chinese people at a reasonable price. It cost me 20RMB (about $2.50) and that was an expensive book for me at high school. I did not read much of that immediately thanks to the translation of those programmers, and this book somehow made it to my small bookshelf in college dorm. But I did not bother to read it either. Finally it came back home.

Today I read it. Or should I say skimmed through it within half an hour. I did not dive much into the details bacause I do not want to be caught in the fuzzy translation. However, it was quite impressive.

I do not like this man by the name of Bill Gates whose company sells secondary-grade software at high price and makes my computer crash for no reason. But it does take some vision for anyone to describe your life to you ten years before it happens. This books covers quite some of the things that are happening in the digital life today and although the picture may not be exactly like reality, the prediction was in the right direction. It may had too much confidence in ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network or It Still Does Nothing) and ATM (Asychronous Transfer Mode), and failed to predict giants like google, but I wasn't expecting such a systematic yet real plan of what's gonna happen in the near future. It did miss something (see some more opinions from other people) but the Gates of Bills was just one person.

Now the question becomes: what's the revolution of our current times?