On 6 Aug 98, Barry Lee Brisco wrote:
> Gee, and I thought that when the first edition of Gate's "The Road Ahead"
> came out, it hardly mentioned the Net, and was rewritten for the second
> edition to include more about it. I didn't read it: anyone know the story
> on that?
Interesting. I have the second edition (1996) in front of me, and here's
what Gates had to say in his preface (edited for conciseness):
"On a recruiting trip to Cornell in late 1993, my technical assistant was
impressed by the way the academic community there was using the
Internet to communicate.... By the spring of 1994 Microsoft was betting
that the Internet would be quite important someday, and we were building
support for it into our products. But we didn't expect that within two
years the Internet would captivate the whole industry and the public's
imagination."
And in the afterword:
"In 1994 I thought that millions of Americans might be connected to
broadband interactive networks as early as 1997... what we actually got
was millions of people interacting on the Internet."
No doubt Gates and his minions will be able to produce documents and
affidavits "proving" that MS discussed browsers in some shape or form
back in '93 or '94 -- an octopus like Microsoft surely talks about how it
can dominate *every* sector of the software biz at one time or another --
but Gates' own words certainly imply that he and his company were
caught unawares by the boom of the Internet, and that they were making
mere baby-steps towards participation in it as of 1994 or so.
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte site: http://www.almonte.com/
Business site: http://www.federalweb.com
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