Does anyone remember the book that Bill Gates wrote, "The Road Ahead"? I'm surprised Gates hasn't been mentioned in the Futuring and Innovation course I'm taking yet, even though he is famous for his vision of a "computer in every home".
Back when the book was published in 1995, Gates wrote about how HDTV was available but was not even popular in Japan yet. Yet he was optimistic at the time that HDTV would catch on. 10 years later, he was right.
In "The Road Ahead", Gates also predicted phones (he calls them "wallet PCs") with flat screens, cameras, GPS capability, Internet access, and even the ability to use it as an airplane ticket. Our smartphones today have all these capabilities plus much more.
Bill Gates himself was probably a force that affected the success of some of his visions. Before smart phones, Pocket PCs were available for a number of years which ran predominately on the Windows CE Operating System. Microsoft was already driving the mobile computing market. They just didn't get a hold of the phone market fast enough before Apple, Blackberry, and of course the major cell phone manufacturers and networks.
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