It's easy to make fun of Bill Gates's predictions, especially the "speech interfaces are five years away" prediction that he's been making regularly for the past decade. But then again it's easy to make fun of most futurists' predictions. Gates gets mocked widely not so much because his score is so bad (everybody's score is fairly bad) but because he's such a high-profile target. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though, and I for one think Gates is more or less right in his recent prediction that Asian software piracy will be largely under control in another decade. "In India and China it will be a decade before we get that level," Gates told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "But as long as there is year-by-year progress, it holds a great opportunity for us in terms of scale, which helps us do more, and it's a great place where we have people working for us." Gates said sales of the company's software in both countries were increasing every year and he was optimistic that China and India would eventually adopt proper licensing practices, just as Taiwan and South Korea had done. The reasoning behind Gates's prediction is economic. India and China, the two biggest piracy havens, are rapidly developing their own nascent software industries. The minute piracy stops helping the Chinese and Indian tech scenes (at America's expense) and starts seriously hurting it, the countries' governments will start to crack down. The hue and cry that Asian software firms will raise over piracy will get their governments moving, and at that point piracy will start to descend to the levels that it's currently at in other regions with advanced software industries, like the US and Europe. Lighting a fire under the government and getting them to clamp down on piracy is something that Gates knows quite a bit about from personal experience. Microsoft has been at the forefront of pushing the same kind of tightening of software intellectual property laws in the US and Europe that Gates now foresees happening in Asia. Gates is enthusiastic about the prospect of local Asian competition tightening up IP protection, but he should be careful. India and China are graduating a lot more engineers and programmers than the US, and those guys will be filing for a ton of patents that they will expect the West to respect. The very same questionable patents on software and "business methods" that companies like Microsoft are pushing right now could come back to bite them in a decade, when the Chinese are racking such patents up by the truckload and are either refusing to share or are demanding exorbitant licensing fees. At that point, we may all have the ironic pleasure of watching the West do and about face and argue that such patents are bad for innovation.
I don't like Bill Gates. Everyone thinks he is the man. But I think if it was not for all of his colueges he'd just be another person.
all M$ is good for is market domination and forcing me to play games on one OS while wishing to use another for everyday use.
People who call bill mad are mad themselves cuz its bill gates who owns the Microsoft Corporation so he does as he wishes
theres just somthing about him i dont trust weather priacy will be controlled in under 10 years i am quite doubtful but we will see .
