Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter 3: Lessons from the Computer Industry

It’s been nearly fourteen years since Bill Gates resigned from his position as Microsoft CEO. He was succeeded by Steve Ballmer, who recently announced his own retirement. In the intervening years, the computer revolution opened a new front: mobile and connected devices. The Road Ahead was published nearly five years before Gates would pass the …

Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter 2: The Beginning of the Information Age

The first time I heard the term “Information Age” I was tantalized. I knew about the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, periods of history named for the new materials men used to make their tools and weapons. Those were specific eras. Then I read academics predicting that countries will be fighting over the control …

Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter One: A Revolution Begins

When Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead he looked back on the previous twenty years of his life, Microsoft, and the history of computing, while considering where that path would take society. Windows 95 was a new revolution in computing, the Internet was still in its infancy, and the original Pentium processor was king of …

Microsoft and the Surface RT: Can’t Touch(Pad) This?

Last month Microsoft took a massive $900 billion writedown on the company’s disappointing Surface RT tablet inventory. Microsoft’s biggest hardware initiative since the original Xbox more than a decade ago, the Surface line of devices – both the RT and Pro models – were designed to bring Windows into a new age, an age of …

Sundar Pichai Solves Microsoft’s PR Problem

With Google I/O coming up later this week, Google OS chief Sundar Pichai sat down for a short interview with Wired’s Steven Levy. For the most part, it’s what you would expect, no huge storylines before the company’s biggest conference of the year. The head of Chrome and Android lowers expectations a bit by saying …