Burlingame , Calif — Bill Gates was well aware of the perils of future-telling when he wrote The Road Ahead in 1995. Early in the book, Gates says, "What I've said that turned out to be right will be considered obvious and what was wrong will be humorous." His book was criticized for being bland and unsurprising at the time, but it nevertheless became a best-seller.

It turns out that Gates was right about hindsight. Though the book is still packed with prescience, most of it reads 13 years later like a litany of gimmicky prophecies. Yet this speaks to one of the book's strengths: Gates managed to describe in simple and precise terms how the Web would impact our everyday lives.

He envisioned a "wallet PC" for settling accounts. This exists, more or less, in online bill payment systems that can run on BlackBerries. He also thought you would be able to watch Gone with the Wind with your own face and voice replacing that of Vivien Leigh or Clark Gable. We're not there yet (and I'm not sure why we'd want to get there).

Gates also predicted a revolution in the music industry. "Record companies, or even individual recording artists, might choose to sell music a new way," he wrote. "The music will be stored as bits of information on a server on the highway." That came true--but it was thanks to Gates' nemesis Steve Jobs at Apple, not the aces at Microsoft.

Even at the 10th anniversary of The Road Ahead, one of his predictions sounded far from reality, like a yet-to-be-seen, trippy version of Mapquest: "You'll be able to jump into a map so you can navigate down a street or through the rooms of a building." Today, both Microsoft and Google offer street-view map systems, though neither will fly you through buildings.

Gates was one of many to envision a vast network of interconnected machines. But he dismissed the notion, popularized by Al Gore, of the Internet as an information superhighway. "It implies distance between two points... one of the most remarkable aspects of this new communications technology is that it will eliminate distance," Gates wrote.

The Road Ahead was published a year late, but one very big thing happened during that delay: Netscape debuted in public markets. The Web browser company was already described as the highest-profile start-up to hit Silicon Valley in a decade. Some 16 million people were online, and AOL chat was already buzzing with activity.

In the book's foreword, Gates gave himself a big task for today: "Anyone expecting an autobiography or a treatise on what it's like to have been as lucky as I have been will be disappointed. Perhaps when I've retired I will get around to writing that book."

Looks as if it's time for The Road Ahead, Take Two.