I just don’t know about Bill Gates sometimes, or as me and several of my cohorts in the Amiga non-revolution called him, “Uncle Billy”. This euphemism was ascribed to gates more or less as a way of labeling him Big Brother, minus the Slashdot Borg Photoshop getup. But I just don’t know about the guy.
I mean, futurists are supposed to be exciting and excited, and Gates seems neither. He’s always been this way. He’s talking about Internet television now, but with such a sense of library-book boringness that it’s no wonder he can’t motivate his troops to get OS updates out on time. Gates appeared on the Jon Stewart Daily Show, and poor old Jon himself was so infected by Gates’ nerdy aura of boredom that the guy couldn’t even quip any funny one-liners, raise his eyebrows, lean over his desk, and make his audience laugh.
Yawn city.
Me, I prefer the futurism of guys like Stewart himself, who wonders when we’re all going to get jetpacks. Bill says, in response, something like, “we aren’t even working on that.” Well why not, Uncle Billy? Because there’s no model of monetizing flying cars and Jetsons skyrise living that suits Microsoft’s revenue engine. Same thing for transporter beams and x-ray goggles. Hey if it aint licensable on a per-seat basis, it ain’t Microsoft.
Yet it’s things from the realm of Asimov and Clarke that get our heads thinking. Do we really care about digital rights or data synchronization or interactive olympic events? I don’t think so. I really don’t. We care about life-changing, revolutionary futurism. And perhaps that’s why the more incremental, refined vision Gates is presenting today falls flat when compared to the sky’s-the-limit optimism of the early eighties and late seventies, when everybody knew processing power would eventually give way to an onslaught of revolutionary software technologies, that, as Clarke might say, are indistinguishable from magic.
Gates isn’t preaching that sermon any more. Steve Jobs may be more charismatic, but even his delivery of things like multi-touch and Internet-downloadable movies reeks of “okay, that’s cool, what’s next?”. The shock value in information technology died soon after Psygnosis got bought by Sony, I swear. It’s no longer about doing things differently or about doing entirely new things; it’s just about doing the same things, only faster.
And when that happens, and when you’re boring one of the funniest guys on television straight into a joke-free zone, it might really be time to hang up the hat. Bill, thanks for the memories. Now go sit on a sailboat and drink microbrews.
