Predictably, Gates misses spam prediction and password prediction outlook not good either

customer adventures, Tablet PC, spam — by TDavid @ 8:13 am PST

Two years ago at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland Bill Gates was reported as predicting that spam would be dead in two years, then one year ago I pointed out that 80% of experts said his prediction was unrealistic. Yesterday, Todd Bishop from the Seattle PI points out that the time is up and — surprise, surprise, not — the prediction came up short.

Although some media reports interpreted Gates’ 2004 World Economic Forum comments as portending the absolute death of spam, the Microsoft chairman tried to adjust expectations in subsequent interviews, saying that spam would still exist, but be much less common.

Let me get this right, the truth is that Bill Gates never really predicted the death of spam, he predicted the reduction of spam? Ahh yes, much easier prediction. This all sounds very Clintonesque to me. What is the meaning of getting rid of spam? How is this determined? The Seattle PI post makes it clear that the definition of reducing spam is in the eye — and technical aptitude — of the beholder.

To be fair, Microsoft and others over the last couple years have put the hammer to several larger spammers legally and monetarily and have made improvements on their Hotmail service in spam filtering, so there was some movement toward Gates’ vision. For those still feeling the spam pain, in February 2004, I posted 9 user email survival tips that are still fairly relevant.

We also found out in December 2004 that Bill Gates received about 4 million emails a year, down from the Steve Ballmer erroneous estimation of 1.4 billion emails per year.

In February 2004 Gates also predicted the death of the password. Though he gave no timetable on that prediction, Gates said: “There is no doubt that over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords. People use the same password on different systems, they write them down and they just don’t meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure.”

Wrong again.

At least in my case, I’m still using the same password management system I was using two years ago on every computer except for my Tablet PC which has biometric (fingerprint) security built-in, but even there it is required to drag and drop a key on the password field to tell the OmniPass system to remember the password. And what if the OmniPass system gets corrupted somehow? I still would need to know what passwords are there. Though the biometric system has been pretty good, it hasn’t worked flawlessly. Strangely, sometimes the system boots up and Omnipass doesn’t run so I need to type in passwords manually anyway.

The password zombie still walks among us.

Bottom line: marginal improvement on the the spam front in two years and needing to track and remember passwords with some system are still in every day use. In Gates defense, he has also been quoted as saying that his predictions don’t always come true as quickly as he’d like. Bingo.

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