DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years: Bill Gates

AFP ^

[YoungHickey]

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FRANKFURT (AFP) - DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years at
the latest, Microsoft boss and founder Bill Gates
(news - web sites) predicted.

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Asked what home entertainment would like in the future,
Gates said that DVD technology would be "obsolete in
10 years at the latest. If you consider that
nowadays we have to carry around film and music on
little silver discs and stick them in the computer,
it's ridiculous," Gates said in comments reproduced
in German in the mass-circulation daily Bild.

"These things can scratch or simply get lost."

Gates' vision of television of the future was: "TV that
will simply show what we want to see, when we want
to see it. When we get home, the home computer will
know who we are from our voice or our face. It will
know what we want to watch, our favourite
programmes, or what the kids shouldn't be allowed to
see."

[GOPrincess]

Along with DVDs and CDs, I still have cassettes, Beta movies and a Beta player (!), and...LP record albums! :) Other than getting rid of Beta movies as I upgrade them to DVD - as good as the Beta picture was, DVD is better -- I am keeping all of my "old media." Some of my records have been duplicated on CD, allowing for "portable" play, yet I still like to listen to the LPs, right down to the familiar spot where the needle skips in MY FAIR LADY.

I think one thing that Gates misses is that people like to *own* things and touch them. Part of the thrill of the DVD format is all those neat little boxes lined up on the shelves (so much prettier than video boxes!). Being able to access a movie from some nebulous "great beyond" doesn't work for me by comparison...

[GOPrincess]

"I still have a BetaMax."

I do, too! I didn't get VHS until 1995 (grin). On the other hand I got a DVD player pretty early on in the game as, unlike VHS, I loved the format.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Mr. Gates has a gift for stating the obvious.

[this_ol_patriot]

The problem with a completely computerized home is what happens when the computer crashes? How do you reboot home when it's locked you in the bathroom and locked all the faucets on ultra-hot?

The worst is what happens when the power goes out while you are sitting on the pot.

[herkbird]

The first Main Frame Computer System I learned how to maintain and repair was composed of a master and slave Honeywell 516 computers tied together. The slave computer had 16K of memory, while the master had 24K with extended memory. we also had two hard drives that were 30Kb. The OS was machine language that cycled at about 120 msec. per instruction cycle. A hard wired delay line was used to set the max clock speed for the two Honeywell 516 Computers otherwise they would eventually load a buffer everytime a transfer failure happened. When the buffer became full, the sign bit would get set and crash the system. That was a really interesting problem to figure out.

That Honeywell mainframe system would run forever between crashes when it was set up correctly. The magnetic core memory was really the only weak link of the system.

[nutmeg]

Hah! Yeah, that's what they said about my 8-Track player. Fools...

LOL! ;-D

[bootless]

Great post.

And why am I reminded of Harrison Bergeron?

[P-Marlowe]

Yeah, that's what they said about my 8-Track player. Fools...

They have 8 track players now? Darn. Will they take a trade for my 4 track player?

[Nowhere Man]

Now imagine how much better this would be if the Federal Video Recording Agency had picked the standards. They would probably have tried to put video on vinyl disks.

Already been done, from the late 1920's to the 1930's, there have been efforts to record the early mechanical TV signals onto 78 RPM records. Here's the site, it's pretty interesting:

http://www.tvdawn.com/

[sevry]

Mr. Gates has a gift for stating the obvious.

When it comes to technology, I think he has the peculiar gift of getting it wrong - or at least of predicting futures that never happen.

He's hoping, I believe, to accompany this feat of the missing DVD with a similarly absent desktop computer, for many of the same reasons - no micro-pay portal to M$.

With security issues, Bill should be worrying about his core components and product line, before more consortia, and more standards groups, and competitors begin to render M$, itself, irrelevant.

That's one thing he's always been right on - fear the competition. But it's too big for him to buy-out or intimidate at this point. Now what does he do? Compete?

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

His best predictions have come after the fact. His company has been terrific at marketing, but they have been very lousy at predicting what the next hot technology is going to be. Remember the browser wars? He predicted that browsers would be a flash in the pan. Ever since that time, I've taken his predictions with a grain or two thousand of salt.

[eleni121]

The DVD format has made my life so much easier. I can show what I want and the image/info is easy to get to.

I am still unsure what kind of DVD recorder to get...I have satellite. Any ideas?