Businesses Will Distinguish Themselves

I missed a Bill Gates blog post from last March. Fine. I was busy living inside the thing he was describing, which is a reasonable excuse for not reading about it.

The post is called "The Age of AI Has Begun," which — yes. Technically correct. The whole thing is smart in the way things written by extremely intelligent people with something to prove are smart — you can feel the rigor working in service of a conclusion that was already decided. But one sentence landed differently than the rest.

Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.

That's the line. Eight words. The whole prediction.

I've been going deep on early 90s internet coverage lately — trade press, enterprise newsletters, the famous Gates memo about the tidal wave — and I promise you that sentence exists in at least forty documents published between 1993 and 1997, with "internet" where "it" now sits. It was true then. Completely true. It's the kind of sentence that's always true about any technology that actually matters, which means it functions less as analysis and more as a weather vane — it tells you something is coming, tells you nothing about where you're standing or when.

There's a clip from the Today Show, 1994. Bryant Gumbel holds up a printout and asks his co-host what the internet is — specifically, whether the @ symbol is pronounced "about." He is not performing ignorance. He is watching the beginning of something his conceptual vocabulary can't hold, and he knows it, and the only thing he can do is read the symbol out loud and wait.

That clip gets passed around tech circles as evidence that we were once that naive. As a punchline.

Gates is doing the same thing Gumbel was doing — just from the opposite angle. Gumbel had no words for it. Gates has all the words and they keep collapsing back into that sentence. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.

True. Useless. Perfect.

It's 1993. We're doing it again.