Nathan Myhrvold and the 1993 Blueprint for Corporate Road Kill

By Miriam Adler · September 10, 2026

Bankers, journalists, and broadcasters were marked for obsolescence in a 25-page internal roadmap that later landed in the files of the national security state.

Millions of workers in the American middle class—bank tellers, print journalists, and broadcast technicians—spent the 1990s believing their industries were evolving. In reality, they were being mapped as casualties in a corporate conquest. The cost was not a sudden crash but a decades-long erosion of labor power and the consolidation of the American economy into a handful of digital fiefdoms.

What survives of this record is a curated archival description rather than the pages themselves. This summary captures a September 8, 1993, interoffice memo authored by Nathan Myhrvold, who served as the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft before later co-founding the patent-holding firm Intellectual Ventures and the nuclear energy startup TerraPower. He was the architect of the company's long-term technical vision, tasked with seeing the horizon before the competition did.

Writing from the halls of Microsoft, the largest software company by revenue and the dominant force in the personal computing revolution, Myhrvold did not write a neutral forecast. He wrote a hit list. The record describes a 25-page, single-spaced document that categorized entire swaths of the economy as "species of road kill" on the way to a digital future.

Species of Road Kill

Myhrvold’s memo identified the specific victims of the coming upheaval. The record lists subsections dedicated to "communications carriers, retail banking and financial services, print-based media, broadcast television networks, and personal computers." To Myhrvold, these were not partners in a new economy; they were obstacles.

By categorizing these industries as "road kill," the memo establishes a predatory logic. The record notes that Myhrvold envisioned a world where "markets meet their makers" and "your life [is] on line." This was the early internal language of disruption—a term that would later be sanitized for venture capitalists but which, in 1993, was framed as a slaughter. When a software giant decides that retail banking and print media are merely road kill, the goal is not to improve those services for the public, but to absorb their functions into a proprietary operating system.

This is where the line is drawn: the memo does not describe a technological inevitability, but a strategic choice. By identifying the vulnerabilities of the financial and media sectors, Microsoft was not predicting the future so much as it was drafting the blueprints for its own expansion. The "computer on every desk" was the beachhead; the "road kill" were the territories to be annexed.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Information Highway

The timing of the memo is not a coincidence. In 1993, the Clinton-Gore administration was aggressively promoting the "Information Superhighway," a policy initiative designed to modernize American telecommunications and cement U.S. dominance in the digital age. Myhrvold used the same lexicon.

The pattern suggests the memo served as a bridge for aligning Microsoft's product roadmap with the administration's policy goals. By adopting the state's language of the "Information Highway," Myhrvold positioned Microsoft as the natural utility provider for that highway. If the government was building the road, Microsoft intended to own the toll booths and decide which "species" were allowed to survive the journey.

This alignment created a feedback loop between corporate ambition and state policy. The public record shows that the 1990s were defined by a deliberate blurring of the line between private software development and public infrastructure. The desk's reading is that this memo was a strategic justification for predatory market positioning. It framed the destruction of competing industries not as a corporate crime, but as a necessary byproduct of national progress.

A Corporate Signal in a State Archive

The most startling fact about this record is not what it says, but where it lives. This internal Microsoft memo is housed in the National Security Archive, juxtaposed with records of CIA operations during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Defense Department task forces on 21st-century military superiority.

There is no logical reason for a corporate interoffice memo about retail banking and print media to be filed alongside records of Cold War sabotage and Rwandan coups unless the state viewed this corporate forecasting as a primary intelligence source. The connection is clear: the U.S. intelligence community in the early 1990s did not just watch the private sector; they integrated its strategic visions into their own national security planning.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the government was treating Microsoft's internal roadmaps as a proxy for state intelligence on economic warfare. The "road kill" Myhrvold identified were not just corporate competitors; they were vulnerabilities in the national economic fabric that the state needed to understand—and perhaps facilitate—to ensure that the dominant digital architecture remained under American, and specifically corporate, control.

The Gap in the Record

Despite the memo's length, the archival description reveals a glaring omission: there is no mention of risk assessment or regulatory retaliation. A 25-page analysis of industry upheaval would normally include a section on how the "road kill"—the powerful lobbies of the banking and media worlds—would fight back. The absence of this analysis is the most telling part of the record.

The desk's reading is that the withheld portions of this correspondence, or the missing companion memos, contain the "counter-move" analysis. These are the pages where Microsoft would have detailed how to use regulatory capture to neutralize the retaliation of the industries they intended to destroy. The vision was the public-facing (or at least high-level) layer; the execution was the operational layer that dealt with the messy reality of lobbying and law.

This suggests that the "Information Highway" was never a public utility, but a private enclosure project. The government didn't just allow the monopoly to happen; it used corporate forecasts to plan the environment in which that monopoly could thrive. The state provided the highway, and the corporation provided the list of who to run over.

Ultimately, the pattern suggests that the "road kill" of 1993 were the first casualties of a new kind of state-corporate synthesis. The intelligence community's interest in Myhrvold's vision indicates that the monopoly of the 1990s was not a failure of antitrust enforcement, but a feature of national security strategy.

What a full release of these files would show is a coordinated effort to transition the American economy from a competitive market into a managed ecosystem. The still-withheld pages are protecting the specific mechanisms of that transition—the deals made in the shadows to ensure that when the "road kill" began to pile up, the regulators would be looking the other way. The people who paid for it were the millions of workers whose livelihoods were treated as mere noise in a Chief Technology Officer's signal.

Nathan Myhrvold and the 1993 Blueprint for Corporate Road Kill

Species of Road Kill

The Information Highway

A Corporate Signal in a State Archive

The Gap in the Record

Sources