This was super interesting, and it would seem Bill Gates absolutely predicted the effect that not Java, but ultimately interactive web apps in a broad sense would come to have by making it less important to have one operating system or another.

Interesting that the reply mostly implied that there wasn't much reason to worry, and that the future and dominance of web apps was still uncertain. But we are reading this email exchange now I think largely because of how well placed Bill Gates's worries were. I wonder how many technologies he and other executives lost sleep over that did not amount to anything in the long run.