Reception
The Road Ahead occupied the top spot on The New York Times' bestseller list for over seven weeks in late 1995 and early 1996, and sold 2.5 million copies.
A reviewer at The Seattle Times (and coauthor of Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America, a 1993 biography of Gates), called Gates' coverage of the Internet "weakest of all" the topics Gates covered, saying the "World Wide Web receives just four index citations and is treated as a functional appendage of the Internet (rather than its driving force), and both come off as a subset of the Information Highway, a term Gates uses with abandon despite its disfavor among digerati."
The New York Times review called the book "bland and tepid" and reading "as if it had been vetted by a committee of Microsoft executives"; it is "little more than a positioning document, sold in book form with accompanying CD-ROM and designed mainly to advance the interests of the Microsoft Corporation." It also said that Gates "has been caught flat-footed by sudden emergence" and saying the book is "part of Mr. Gates's extensive effort to force his way back into the game before it's too late."
Time magazine, in a December 1995 article about Gates in general rather than his book, said:
Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenet and the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open—that is to say, nonproprietary—standards, none of which were set by Microsoft. Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft's long arms around it.
Read more about this topic: The Road Ahead (Bill Gates book)
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