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PLAYBOY: Besides finding documents, what will we be able to do?
GATES: Say you want to watch a movie. To choose, you’ll want to know what movies others liked and, based on what you thought of other movies you’ve seen, if this is a movie you’d like. You’ll be able to browse that information. Then you select and get video on demand. Afterward, you can even share what you thought of the movie.
But thinking of it only in terms of movies on demand trivializes the ultimate impact. The way we find information and make decisions will be changed. Think about how you find people with common interests, how you pick a doctor, how you decide what book to read. Right now it’s hard to reach out to a broad range of people. You are tied into the physical community near you. But in the new environment, because of how information is stored and accessed, that community will expand. This tool will be empowering, the infrastructure will be built quickly and the impact will be broad.
"Bill Gates in Playboy in 1994 talking about what was not even then the internet. Scarily prescient.
It’s interesting that this is so much a prophecy of the social web: if you want to choose what movie you’ll like, you’ll choose based on your friends’ opinions and then share your opinion of the movie. You will discover people you like. Throw Twitter in there and this could have been said today.
Today we talk about how Facebook is changing the way people buy things and we solemnly nod at the oracle’s punditry, but what’s shocking is that it took so long.
(via pegobry)(via pegobry)
