The road not taken: Seven wrong tech predictions by Bill Gates

When you title your first book The Road Ahead, as retiring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates did, then it's clear you fancy yourself a bit of a futurist. And why shouldn't he? Over his 33 years at Microsoft, Gates has had more influence on the IT industry (read: monopolist) than any other person. Being in a position to shape the future of technology should automatically give you a leg up over the Philip K. Dicks and William Gibsons of the world, right?

As extreme hindsight shows, that wasn't always the case. Here are some (fairly verified) Gates predictions for which his crystal ball seemed to have clouded over on the day he uttered them (each prefaced by some Dubious Achievement Award-style commentary).

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And Gates decreed: 'A nerdy yellow smiley-face called Microsoft Bob will be the future of user interfaces for... everyone!'

"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time," wrote Gates in the preface to 1987's OS/2 Programmers Guide. Microsoft at the time was helping IBM develop OS/2. But when sales of Windows 3.0 took off in 1990, Microsoft jumped ship. Beaten by Windows, IBM stopped actively marketing OS/2 in the late 1990s.

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I'm with Allchin -- if I didn't start this company, I'd buy a Mac, too.

Gates told BusinessWeek in November 1984 that "the next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC."

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So can you explain why I'm stuck in the office rebooting ten thousand PCs every Patch Tuesday?

"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed," Gates told the German Focus magazine in 1995.

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And by last format ever, I mean you won't need to upgrade for, oh, 3 more years.

On the Blu-ray Disc format, Gates told the Daily Princetonian college newspaper in 2005 that "understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be." While Blu-Ray has triumphed over HD, researchers are already busy working on its successor, including multi-layer discs (LS-R), 3D discs that may hold up to a terabyte of data, discs read by short wavelengths such as UV, and others.

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I also predict that people will stop eating Little Sizzlers sausages, Dinty Moore stew, and anything else made by Hormel.

"Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time," declared Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2004. According to one security vendor, Marshal Ltd., spam continues to represent between 75% and 95% of all e-mails.

Eliminated by year 2006? Hardly.

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PC monitors will remain amber and no bigger than 9 inches, and Moore's Law will unravel if Andy Grove ever becomes Intel's CEO.

"We will never make a 32-bit operating system," said Gates, at the early-80s launch of the MSX PC in Japan. Ten years later, in 1992, Microsoft released the beta to its first hybrid 16/32-bit operating system, Windows NT. And today's XP and Vista both come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

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The Bill Gates Show is doing *very* well in the ratings.

"It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me," mused Gates to Time magazine in January 1997. "If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit." Three years later, a U.S. court ruled that Microsoft was a monopolist and that it should be split up into two companies (the latter decree was, of course, successfully appealed by Microsoft).

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Any other Gates predictions that were spectacular flame-outs? And where was he eerily spot-on?

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For more Gates retirement coverage, see here.