Bill Gates’ final speech at the CES conference in Las Vegas last week was the occasion for many tributes, but any fair assessment of his record for technology forecasting would have to show that his crystal ball has not always been clear over the years.

For the PC generation, Gates has been revered as a seer without peer. He has taken his honorary place as lead keynote speaker at innumerable conferences, backed by the immense power of Microsoft’s marketing army. But that does not mean he could predict the future.

In early 1990s speeches, Gates was on the stump for pen-computing but only Palm made sense of the paradigm, and slate computers remain a minority taste.

At the same time, he pushed the concept of “Windows everywhere”, foreseeing a time when Microsoft software would be at the heart of business and consumer appliances. Despite attempts at printers, wristwatches and even coffee makers, it still has not happened.

And despite Gates’ propagandising, mainframes, Unix and their associated applications remain at the heart of business computing.

Gates anticipated the dominance of the GUI, cheap computers and client/server, but his pronouncements were no almanac on the destiny of computing.