Microsoft’s Bill Gates is a pretty smart guy, but a lousy fortune-teller. He’s predicting that the printed page will be toast in five years.

Why? For one thing, the advertising is better online, Gates says.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog quotes Gates as saying:

Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant.

Is Gates predicting the demise of physical books too? It seems his comments were directed at newspapers and magazines, and he didn’t address “e-books.” But he did say “reading is going to go completely online.”

That didn’t sit very well with most of the people who commented on the blog. Here’s a sample from Monty McCoy:

While no one can argue about the right calls Mr. Gates has made in the past, his technology calls recently have been more than suspect. “Reading is going to go completely online. We believe…” Who is this “We”? The same “We” who predicted that the Zune would give the iPod a run for their money? The January 2004 call of his that “Two years from now, spam will be solved” leads this reader to be highly skeptical of his biased, pro-MS approach.