Article
🔮 Bill Gates Is Worth Listening To. But He Is Not an Oracle.
Great leaders don't win by predicting the future, they win by correcting course quickly. What Jim Collins' Great by Choice and Gates' own track record say about AI forecasts.
Bill Gates deserves to be listened to. But he is not an oracle.
I was reading a reflection by Jacopo Perfetti on Gates' recent statements about AI when one detail struck me: Gates says he has been truly amazed by a technology only a handful of times in his life, and two of those times came in recent years, with the progress of AI. If someone like Bill Gates is that impressed, I listen.
Right now, though, I am reading Jim Collins' Great by Choice (if you have never read Collins, you don't know what you are missing). Putting the two together made me think.
One of the most interesting ideas in the book is simple: great leaders don't win because they predict the future better. Especially in times of great change, the future is not predictable.
Gates' own story shows it well:
- 1990: OS/2. Gates was convinced OS/2 would be the future of the PC. Microsoft had built it with IBM and invested heavily, and he expected it to overtake DOS within a few years. It didn't. OS/2 stayed marginal, Microsoft bet on Windows, and the rest is history.
- 1991: "Our nightmare … is a reality." In a famous internal memo, Gates described a concrete threat: IBM could beat Microsoft in operating systems, Novell in networking, and other competitors in Windows applications. In essence, Microsoft risked a simultaneous attack on its core businesses. Then came the decade in which Windows conquered the PC and Microsoft became one of the most dominant companies in the world.
- The Internet. Here too, Microsoft initially underestimated its reach.
What Gates did was far more important than predicting the future: once he understood the world was heading in a different direction, he changed course fast.
This is where Collins is useful. The best managers are not fortune tellers. They are disciplined, empirical and a little paranoid. They don't look for certainty about what will happen. They prepare for what might happen and correct course when new evidence appears.
Maybe this is the right lens to read Gates today. If AI impresses him that much, to me it is an important signal. I remain far more cautious about what will happen, how much, and above all when. Not because Gates isn't good enough, but because nobody is an oracle.
Perhaps Gates' real talent was never predicting the future. It was being ready when the future turned out different from what he had expected.