The Road Ahead
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For the album of the same name by Bradley Joseph, see The Road Ahead (Bradley Joseph album)
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The Road Ahead, a book written by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson and published in November 1995, summarized the implications of the personal computing revolution and described a future profoundly changed by the arrival of a global interactive network. The hardback edition, which was top of the New York Times bestseller list for seven weeks in late 1995 and early 1996, did not foresee that the then-nascent Internet would evolve into the interactive network that Gates predicted. Indeed, Microsoft intended that MSN would become the dominant network. After the book was written but before it hit bookstores, Gates recognized that the Internet was gaining the critical mass needed to drive it to dominance, and on December 7, 1995 -- just weeks after the release of the book -- he redirected Microsoft to become an Internet-focused company. 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. Both editions came with a CD-ROM that contained the text of the book and supplemental information. The hardback was published by Viking, and the paperback by Penguin, an affiliate of Viking. Numerous publishers around the world produced translated versions of the book, which was particularly popular among university students in China. One of Gates' coauthors, Nathan Myhrvold, was a computer scientist and Microsoft vice president who for a time oversaw Microsoft's research efforts and later co-founded Intellectual Ventures, a company that holds patents. The other co-author, Peter Rinearson, was a Pulitzer Prize winner and entrepreneur who would later found and sell an Internet company and become a Microsoft vice president.
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[edit] Quotes
- "Anyone expecting an autobiography or a treatise on what it's like to have been as lucky as I have been will be disappointed."
- "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."
[sic; a prime, by definition, has only itself and one as factors, a trivial calculation; he probably meant to say the product of large prime numbers]
[edit] Reception
The Road Ahead occupied the top spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for over seven weeks and sold 2.5 million copies.
