At the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit yesterday morning Bill Gates dropped some future knowledge on the assembled ad men and tech types. A few of those nuggets we found particularly interesting and insightful:

Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Prediction #7: There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.

Alright, those actually came from a list of predictions for the year 2000 from a 1900 issue of The Ladies Home Journal that's been going around lately. Here are some of Gates's actual predictions:

On the printed page vs. the screen: "Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It's up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant

On television: "This is a subject I think about a lot, because it was actually about a little over 10 years ago that Microsoft first got involved in this idea of changing TV from being a simply broadcast medium to being a targeted medium (through its IPTV initiative). ... In order to have this be targeted, you cannot send it over the airwaves. There's just not enough capacity to broadcast thousands and thousands of different video feeds. And that's where the Internet comes in. The Internet is now cheap enough that the idea of having every household in America watching a different video feed has become practical. There's some infrastructure improvement that that implies. Actually, that's very much under way. ... It's a dramatic change in TV. ... Broadcast infrastructure over these next five years will not be viewed as competitive. The end-user experience and the creativity, the new content that will emerge using the capabilities of this environment will be so much dramatically better that broadcast TV will not be competitive. And in this environment, the ads will be targeted, not just targeted to the neighborhood level, but targeted to the viewer. ... We'll actually not just know the household that that viewing is taking place in, we'll actually know who the viewers of that show are, and so it's a very rich environment."

zzzzzzzzMy hair! Oh, sorry, we drifted into a little slumber there. Whenever someone tries to itemize future innovations it invariably descends directly into jetpack and monorail territory, but we found ourselves pining for a single jetpack or airship when looking over Gates's future-view. The future according to Bill is boring! At least the The Ladies Home Journal managed to get close to the internet in 1900--something that Bill Gates couldn't predict ninety-five years later.

Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.