"The Seattle PI"s Microsoft Blogger Todd Bishop asks "How does Gates shape up as a seer?" None strike me as particularly clairvoyant, but the missed ones are winners: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time." and "Two years from now, spam will be solved." But in fairness to Gates, for many years Microsoft"s tagline was "a PC on every desktop and in every home.""
Another example, Comdex, 1996: Speaking about newspapers, Gates predicted that the Web would ultimately create a "substitution effect," shifting readers away from print and onto Web sites. Of course, that has proved to be true, with many people now getting their news online, not only from newspapers but from many other sources.
In fact, Gates" comments back then were downright mild compared with his remarks about the newspaper industry at a conference two weeks ago.