'The Road Ahead': Gates' Microsoft image building

The Road Ahead By Bill Gates Hardbound edition and CD-ROM Viking-Penguin Books, New York, 286 pages Copyright William Gates III, 1995 Rp 177,598

JAKARTA (JP): Although the Australian media's advertising hype for The Road Ahead has not produced results as remarkable as the promotion that sold out Nicholas Evans's multimillion-dollar earner The Horse Whisperer, Bill Gates' treatise in hardcover and on CD ROM will no doubt catch on.

He writes: "I think that this is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been so many opportunities to do things that were impossible before. It's also the best time ever to start new companies, advance sciences such as medicine that improve quality of life, and stay in touch with friends and relatives."

At times, glimpses are also given -- unwittingly, I suspect -- about the upstart who is now one of the world's youngest billionaires. Putting a personal computer on every desk and in every home has driven Microsoft's corporate mission from the time it was a "two-man, shoestring operation to a company with 17,000 employees and more than US$6 billion a year in sales."

Bill Gates actually succeeds, through inevitable glimpses of his personal life, in humanizing the nerdish image the media has built of him.

While his books and tuition were provided by his parents, he needed cash to cover computer time, which was then very expensive. The summer programming job, he recounted, paid handsomely: US$5,000 per student each summer. Once, when he wrote a program scheduling students in classes, he "surreptitiously added a few instructions and found myself nearly the only guy in a class full of girls. As I had said before, it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could unambiguously demonstrate success. I was hooked".

An insight Gates strongly believes in is that the information highway will "transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages". Already, he continues, more than 100 million personal computers all over the world have altered work habits but, as yet, have not changed our lives much.

However, he foresees that when tomorrow's powerful machines are connected to the highway, people, machines, entertainment, and information services will all be accessible, revolutionizing every manner of business, work, play and entertainment.

Already, the Internet facilitates information exchange among subscribers around the world through electronic mail. The World Wide Web allows "browsing" over graphical pages of information. The Web has actually brought into being interactive books and hyperlinks which were predicted decades ago.

Improvements in technology and more "killer applications" of familiar appliances, such as televisions, telephones, and personal computers connected to the highway will give us incredible tracking capabilities and great convenience. He explains that when the information bandwidth capacity of such appliances is multiplied many times over, and when these communication systems are fused into a single digital information utility, the information highway will have arrived, providing access to hundreds of libraries and to all types of merchandise and services.

Both television and PC screens will continue to get smaller and improve in quality, mostly as flat panel displays. He describes one new form, which will be digital white boards, large wall-mounted screens that will run movies, and other visual materials as well as text and will first be used in conference rooms, then private offices and even homes.

Telephones will be connected to the same networks as PCs and television screens, facilitated by PC-interface equipment. Notebook computers will continue to get thinner until they are nearly the size of a tablet of paper.

A wallet PC will take over many of the functions of a checkbook, an address book, an appointment book, a note pad, reading material, a map, a compass, a calculator, an electronic entry card, photo pockets, and store many other forms of information and data, including the holder's medical history. It will also do away with keys and magnetic cards.

It can connect you to the information highway, monitor digital traffic reports and let you know how best to get to your destination, overlaying your location on a color screen with whatever you need to know.

In fact, he believes that in the next 10 years, as more powerful hardware and software are built, conversation with a computer can be quite human-like, way beyond today's simple commands.

The system will also allow us to set up filters so that we will only receive information that we want or need, thus preventing information overload. Computers will also progress from working with only first-day instructions to building up applications, acting as an efficient assistant or agent 24 hours a day.

Spatial navigation, already used in some software products, will eventually allow us to explore boundless sources of information and destinations, zooming in and out and panning to different locations very easily. Hyperlinks on the information highway will let us find answers to questions as these occur.

Consequently, much of what we used to see in science fiction films will become real workplace and household conveniences, once the information highway is functional. Video conferences will no longer be the expensive modes they are now. Long-distance X-ray and surgical procedures will promote longevity.

Genetic and biotechnologies will know boundless frontiers. Gates' private experimental "space" station, Gates' own house, will be among the first to showcase what, for many of us, will remain as space-age wonders.

A guest wearing an electronic pin will hear music that the fully-computerized system knows he likes, be offered his preferred drinks, and, whether he notices it or not, lights turn on as he walks into rooms, while spaces he leaves automatically fall back into darkness.

He can extend the uses of the electronic pin with a handheld remote. In the reception hall, big enough to hold a hundred people, he can activate 24 video monitors, each with a 40-inch picture tube, stacked four high and six across, to watch whatever he pleases. If he is traveling the next day and he wants to see his destination and learn as much as he can about it, all he needs to do is tell the monitors. Music will follow the guest. It will seem to be everywhere.

Each room will have a console for specific controls. If there's a phone call for him, only the nearest handset will ring. When it is cold outside, the temperature inside the house will be warm enough for comfort. Conversely, the house will be pleasantly cool when it is hot outside.

Gates will be the first home user of a database of more than a million photographs and reproductions of paintings that can call up portraits of presidents, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiing in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965, and reproductions of Renaissance paintings on screens throughout the house.

Somehow, what remains appealing to me, personally, is the rustic environs of the house, a sport court in a wooded area near the water's edge, behind a dock for water-skiing, which is one of Gates' hobbies. A small estuary fed with groundwater, seeded with sea-run cutthroat trout and the prospects of seeing sea otters. The vision of the house unfolding as you descend three floors down the hillside, layer by layer, sharing a view of fir-shrouded mountains and Lake Washington.

Although The Road Ahead is neither autobiographical, nor is it about Microsoft's history, Gates' personal experiences figure prominently in catalyzing the evolution of computer technology. His values -- professional and otherwise -- reflected in the manner that he structured the company for growth, dictate the kind of radical management dynamics that at once encourage peak productivity and prepare for industrial demands well in advance.

He respects talent, excels in harnessing it, and is always on the lookout for it. This way, Microsoft has amassed in its two decades probably one of the industry's most daunting group of innovators -- young, talented, and unafraid -- much like their mentor.

He explains that a "big part of the fun has always been to hire and work with smart people. I enjoy learning from them...some are a lot younger than I am...extraordinarily talented and will contribute new visions".

His apparent lack of hierarchical posturing, which generally afflicts men of dubious stature, sets the atmosphere at Microsoft conducively for the highest possible creative and professional achievements. The vision that built the company is further highlighted in a policy that would make lesser corporate builders shudder: "In recent years, Microsoft has deliberately hired a few managers with experience in failing companies. When you're failing you're forced to be creative, to dig deep and think, night and day. I want some people around who have been through that. Microsoft is bound to have failures in the future, and I want people here who have proved they can do well in tough situations."

The Road Ahead is an excellent piece of corporate image building for Microsoft and a discreet public relations approach to prepare for even closer cooperation with giants in the computer and software industry as we face the challenges of the year 2000.

Gates has indeed positioned himself and Microsoft quite beautifully for what could be a worldwide emergency of getting computerized systems -- especially of banking and financial institutions and other entities involved with dates and figures -- to cope with the chaos that current computer logic will create as the 20th century ends on Dec. 31, 1999. It is estimated that between 85 percent and 90 percent of all programs will be affected by the date change, considering application interdependencies.

But then, since none of this was mentioned in The Road Ahead, it becomes a completely different matter. Or, does it?

-- Linda Miraflor