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Concept
The Road Ahead (Gates book)
Summary
The Road Ahead is a book written by Bill Gates, co-founder and previous chairman and CEO of Microsoft software company, together with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and former Microsoft vice president and Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Rinearson. Published in November 1995, then substantially revised about a year later, The Road Ahead summarized the implications of the personal computing revolution and described a future profoundly changed by the arrival of a global information superhighway.
Gates received a $2.5-million advance for his book and money from subsidiary rights sales; all his proceeds were donated to "encourage the use of technology in education administered through the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education," a foundation created by the National Education Association.
The hardback edition saw the Internet as one of the "important precursors of the information highway...suggestive of [its] future" (p. 89); he noted that the "popularity of the Internet is the most important single development in the world of computing since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981" (p. 91) but "today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway": the information highway he envisioned would be as different from the Internet as the Oregon Trail was to Interstate 84. (p. 95)
After the book was written, but before it hit bookstores, Gates recognized that the Internet was gaining critical mass, and on December 7, 1995 — just weeks after the release of the book — he redirected Microsoft to become an Internet-focused company; in retrospect he had "vastly underestimated how important and how quickly the internet would come to prominence". Then he and coauthor Rinearson spent several months revising the book, making it 20,000 words longer and focused on the Internet. The revised edition was published in October 1996 as a trade paperback, with the subtitle "Completely revised and up-to-date.".
Both editions came with a CD-ROM that contained the text of the book and supplemental information.
Official source
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