I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years
Unverified — credited to Bill Gates, never documentedNo verified speakerCredited to Bill Gates (b. 1955), Microsoft co-founder
?Attribution status: Disputed — endlessly repeated, but traceable only to a single second-hand Danish book; no transcript, recording or contemporaneous report has been produced.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
No transcript, recording, interview or press report from November 1994 has ever been produced for this sentence, and it appears in none of Wikiquote ↗’s sourced sections for Gates. Its one standing citation is a Danish festschrift about research libraries — a second-hand mention in another language, not a record of the event.
“I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years” Unverified. "I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years" is credited to Bill Gates at COMDEX in November 1994, but no transcript, recording or contemporaneous report has ever been produced. Wikiquote files it under "Attributed," citing only a second-hand Danish book. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Bill Gates. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
Evoking the themes of doubt and change. Theme: "I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
What the 1994 keynote actually left behind
Alleged occasion
Remarks at COMDEX, November 1994
Only citation offered
Kommunikation erstatter transport: den digitale revolution i danske forskningsbiblioteker 1980–2005
What that book is
A 774-page Danish festschrift for Karl Krarup, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005 — Wikiquote dates it 2009 and lists Krarup as its author
Status
Unverified — filed under Attributed on Wikiquote, absent from its sourced sections
Personal computing will soon shift away from the desktop and notebook-sized machines that are common today to devices of all sizes that draw much of their power and information from advanced communications networks.
From the same keynote, 1994
What a contemporaneous report of that COMDEX keynote actually quotes Gates saying — a Chicago Sun-Times piece dated 14 November 1994, archived by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet ↗. The famous dismissal appears in no transcript or report of the event that anyone has produced.
November 1994 — Gates keynotes Fall COMDEX with a vision of networked devices; the Chicago Sun-Times report of 14 November 1994 quotes him on machines drawing power from “advanced communications networks,” and carries nothing resembling the famous line (Elon University ↗).
4 October 2010 — a Wikiquote editor posts the sentence on the talk page, saying only that it “has been seen in a book,” with a link to one Google Books page (Wikiquote talk page ↗).
The book — that Google Books volume is Kommunikation erstatter transport, a Danish festschrift on research libraries edited by Erland Kolding Nielsen and three colleagues and published in 2005 — not a 2009 work by Karl Krarup, as Wikiquote ↗ states (Google Books ↗).
3 May 2011 — Computerworld lists the line among premature predictions of tech failure while warning that “some debate now exists over whether he actually said them” (Computerworld ↗).
No rights status can honestly be asserted for a sentence with no identified speaker, no documented occasion and no authored work behind it. The materials quoted alongside it — a 1994 newspaper report, a 1995 Microsoft memo and a 2005 Danish festschrift — all remain the property of their publishers; they appear here only as the short excerpts needed to document the trail.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
A forecast with no forecaster
The line is always placed at COMDEX in November 1994 and never at a transcript. Every trail leads to the same single second-hand citation — and that citation does not survive being checked.
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The alleged occasionBill Gates at COMDEX, November 1994 No transcript
Gates did keynote Fall COMDEX that month, and the keynote is well documented — a Chicago Sun-Times report dated 14 November 1994 quotes him predicting that personal computing would shift to “devices of all sizes that draw much of their power and information from advanced communications networks” (Elon University, Imagining the Internet ↗). No transcript or report carrying the famous sentence has been produced.
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The only citationA Danish library festschrift Second-hand
Wikiquote’s Attributed entry cites “Kommunikation erstatter transport (2009) by Karl Krarup et al.” (Wikiquote ↗). The book of that title is a 774-page Danish volume on the digital revolution in Danish research libraries, edited by Erland Kolding Nielsen, Niels Christian Nielsen, Steen Bille Larsen and Sofie Lene Bak, published in 2005 — and Karl Krarup is the librarian it honours, not its author (Museum Tusculanum ↗).
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Where the citation came fromA 2010 Wikiquote post One page
The entry traces to a talk-page comment of 4 October 2010: “At comdex 1994, it is seen that he said ‘I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least 10 years’, at least this has been seen in a book” — followed by a link to a single Google Books page (Wikiquote talk page ↗).
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The wordingQuote aggregators Two versions
Wikiquote prints “for the next 10 years”; the aggregators print “for at least ten years” with no source at all (AZQuotes ↗). A sentence with a real source does not drift like that.
✓Best available verdict: unverified. Wikiquote keeps the line out of its sourced quotations, and Computerworld — one of the outlets that spread it — concedes that “some debate now exists over whether he actually said them” (Computerworld, 3 May 2011 ↗). What Gates is documented as saying about his own slowness is milder and later: the Internet was “a fifth or sixth priority” until it outran Microsoft’s strategy.
Context
Why this one gets repeated
It is the respectable member of the family. The cruder versions credited to Gates — that the Internet was a passing fad, that Microsoft was simply not interested in it — are obvious enough to make people suspicious. This one sounds like a considered forecast: a specific claim, with a horizon attached, of exactly the kind an executive actually makes. That plausibility is doing all the work, because the evidence is not.
And Gates really was slow. The first edition of The Road Ahead, published on 24 November 1995 by Viking Penguin, was criticised for exactly this: a Seattle Times reviewer noted that the World Wide Web received “just four index citations” and was treated as a functional appendage of the Internet rather than its driving force, and the book was overhauled for a revised edition in October 1996 (Wikipedia ↗). A real lag exists in the record. This quotation is not part of it.
Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance.
What Gates is actually on the record saying
In his 1995 internal memo The Internet Tidal Wave, Gates wrote: “Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance,” adding that it was “even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI)” (National Constitution Center ↗).
Speaking at the University of Washington in 1998, he conceded the lateness in his own words: “Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority… But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.” Wikiquote files that one among his sourced quotations, citing a CNET News report of 2 July 1998 (Wikiquote ↗).
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
b. 1955 · Microsoft co-founder, software developer and philanthropist
Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and was running it through the years this remark is supposedly set in — the era of MS-DOS, Windows 95 and the proprietary Microsoft Network. He was genuinely late to the open Internet, and has said so himself: the Internet sat at “a fifth or sixth priority” until Microsoft realised it was moving faster than the company’s strategy assumed. That documented admission is what makes the sharper, undocumented version so easy to believe — and so hard to source.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available citation
No primary source exists. The standard citation is Wikiquote’s Attributed section, which gives “Remarks at COMDEX (November 1994), attributed in Kommunikation erstatter transport (2009) by Karl Krarup et al.” The book of that title is Erland Kolding Nielsen, Niels Christian Nielsen, Steen Bille Larsen and Sofie Lene Bak, eds., Kommunikation erstatter transport: den digitale revolution i danske forskningsbiblioteker 1980–2005: festskrift til Karl Krarup (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005). No transcript or contemporaneous report of the 1994 keynote containing the line has been produced.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-see-little-commercial-potential-for-the-internet-for-the/