Billing It Astutely

The Road Ahead has all the qualities required to be the Bible of the Information Age. It has come off the laptop of the world's richest businessman (and two co-authors, but we needn't really concern ourselves with them, since their names don't even appear on the book's cover), the supernerd who is the most powerful man in the global infotech business. If Bill Gates doesn't know the way ahead, who would, right? Well, yes and no.

First, the yes. Of all the numerous volumes that have appeared over the last decade on the brewing infotech-telecom revolution that threatens—or promises—to transform totally the way we live, learn, play and work, The Road Ahead is definitely the most comprehensive. As far as the technology-terrified are concerned, it is also the most easy-to-understand. Every technological concept, however abstruse—from telecom protocols like asynchronous transfer mode to encryption techniques like one-way functions—is explained with a clarity that is little short of brilliant. Gates reveals an often startling ability to rip through complex megatrends and home in on the simple principles that lie underneath. He traces Microsoft's total domination of the world's software business back to a question that a teenage Gates and his friend and partner Paul Allen asked: "What if computing were nearly free?" Similarly, today, Gates reduces all analysis of the new info-revolution to its fundamental question: "What if communicating were nearly free?" From this kernel query, Gates builds his future history.

This is a history peopled by 'wallet PCs' which store unforgeable digital money; personalised 'intelligent agents'—software that will pick up your interests and idiosyncrasies and search the world's databases for information that helps you live a happier life; 'tactels', tiny spots on virtual reality bodysuits that will replicate every touch sensation in its finest detail; all leading up to 'friction-free capitalism'—nice piece of jargon, that—where the manufacturer (or service-provider) is in direct contact with the customer, all middlemen, distributors, agents, retailers having been made totally redundant. Corporations will be far smaller, hierarchies will wither away, and no one will ever have to search for a plumber on weekends. This is the world of, as Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) terms it, "ubiquitous computing", where infotech gadgets are so much a part of life that you don't even notice them, just as you look at a road sign today and absorb the information without consciously deciphering it.

All very visionary stuff, the only problem being that this vision has been articulated ad infinitum already. Nowhere in the book does one find one new idea that has not already appeared in half-a-dozen Newsweek cyber-revolution cover stories over the last five years. If you're pressed for time, read any of those, and you'll be on par with any Road Ahead reader. And if you also want to have fun, read any William Gibson novel, starting with Necromancer, which coined the term 'cyperspace'.

But wait, it's not really right to say that Gates has done no value addition to the mass of material already available on the info-revolution. Gates always adds value. At the age of 19, he bought an operating system dirt-cheap from a Seattle company, and managed to sell it—after some changes—to IBM as MS-DOS, the operating system that today runs 80 per cent of all PCs on the planet. The first graphical user interface was developed at PARC and popularised by Apple. Gates borrowed the concept, got armies of manic programmers to build on it, and used humungus ad budgets to create the monstrously successful Windows. Gates is no software guru; he is the shrewdest businessman on earth, who creates huge marketing successes out of other people's inventions. In The Road Ahead, Gates has used the vision of hundreds of scientists little known outside the field, especially from PARC and the MIT Media Lab, coalesced them into a carefully structured pseudo-treatise, and negotiated the biggest book deal of the century.

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann once remarked that in the twentieth century, representations of ideas are replacing ideas themselves. At least, as Gates has demonstrated, representers of ideas can definitely make more money—and be far more famous—than originators of ideas. Of course this book will be the Bible of the Information Age.