Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Correct. You’re already getting this picture of Microsoft’s business strategy, which is until we know exactly what the future looks like, start placing bets that approximate, so that we’re in the mix even though we don’t know exactly what the future is. Which as we talked about in part one had always worked so well for the company. And it’s going to work really well here, too. Bill actually decides at this point that he needs to write a book for the public to evangelize this information superhighway thing. Embarrassingly, given how long the book world takes to actually publish a book, it doesn’t come out until November 1995 after the Netscape IPO has already happened and Windows 95 has shipped. In this book called The Road Ahead—I have two copies of it here on my desk—the hardcover copy and the soft cover copy which was revised and came out in 1996, the hardcover copy is all about the information superhighway, or as Bill likes to call it, information at your fingertips. Then when the soft cover version comes out later, basically they control left every instance of information superhighway and replaced it with the Internet and the web browser.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.