ZDNet Review of Gates' New Book

Jerky McNaughty writes "The ZDNet review of Gates' new book is pretty harsh. Noteable quotes: "he can't write worth a lick" and "Faced with the prospect of rereading this book, I would rather have my brains ripped out by a plastic fork." Ouch. " Well, combine that with the asking price and you've got a winner, ladies and gentlemen. Update: 03/24 11:13 by H : Yeah, yeah, the price is for a 24 pack of books. But it's funny, anyway.

Comments

For all the good it'll do.

[sammy baby]

Anyone who took a peek at The Road Ahead, or has read/listened to interviews with Gates realizes that the guy just isn't the most scintillating thinker in the world. He's boring. No one with a reasonable number of clues on the topic is going to shell out cash to hear Gates say things like, "The key to the managers of the future is digital connectivity and computer aptitude." Haber's review on Amazon (sorry, I can't link to the exact page) sums it up pretty well: "I can hear the trees screaming in my dreams."

Unfortunately, I'm an elitist, and I believe strongly that there are a lot of people out there who are completely without clue. They'll make sure the book sells.

Gates and Gore

[mackga]

Who's stiffer and more boring? Nice review ripping Bill a new one! Maybe ol' Billy shoulda bought someone else's (more interesting) business bio and published it under his name, eh?

Business @ the speed of thought: SP1

[BiGGO]

All right,
They got a bad review,
what's now?

Now they'll sell SP1.
This fixes many typos,
and makes the book a little bit more interesting.

These fixes will be out on April and expected to sell at $10 a pop.
MS President Steve Balmer reports it will fix the "Snooze" and "Sleepy" issues.


---

Does Gates have any insights?

[Mart]

The reviewer assumes that the "real" Bill Gates has important and useful insights, but for some reason has decided to hide behind a bland persona and hand out a few platitudes. Another interpretation is that what you see is what you get: Gates doesn't have any insights, no vision of the future. Maybe he doesn't even have a clear idea of how he reached his dominant position.

No doubt the guy is smart. You have to admire the Microsoft Internet turnaround from a business point of view, even if you don't like the implications. But I don't think he teach us anything because his success is largely an historical accident.

It seems MSoft employees found the review too.

[Duke of URL]

If you take a moment and read the posted responses at the end of the article you can find a few people who hail from "Washington" -and they don't seem to like the review very much. Surprise.
One guy even said ZDnet was becoming a joke with their recent attempts to cover more of the Unix world and to occasionally knock the MSoft. I never did like ZDnet much because they used to seem to knock everyone except MSoft.

Did you ever notice?

[Obscure Images]

Is it just my imagination, or does Bill Gates seem to be transforming into a strange cyber-version of L. Ron Hubbard? I've been to a number of developer events, and with all the Microsoft love going on, I'm hard pressed to think that they view Bill Gates as something less than a messiah. Regardless, we might come to expect these periodic moronic books, much in the same way you do L Ron Hubbard books. (The man has been "dead" for over 10 years, yet there seem to be "new" works by him every so often.)

I think that if Bill Gates moves onto a boat we're all in trouble.

Wow! Does the book actually say this?

[Tim Macinta]

There are some reviews up at Amazon.com now and while I suspect most of them were written without reading the book, there was one legitimate looking one that said something which shocked me:

Most remarkable of all are the sections related directly to the earlier book and his revised thinking on the blueprint for the future which it contained. The reader meeting "The Road Ahead" when it was first released would hardly have guessed that Mr. Gates's next work would contain such direct acknowledgements that his corporation will not be a competitor for very much longer in the operating systems market, the area which has traditionally brought so much of its income. The frank discussions about the technical superiority of Open Source software development methods and Microsoft's planned funding of the Linux project and the Free Software Foundation will have historians talking amongst themselves for centuries to come.

Wow. If anybody out there has actually read the book, could you comment on how accurate this is? I really don't want to have to buy this book, but I'm dying to know exactly what Gates said that prompted these comments. It sounds like he's seen the light, but then again it also sounded like that when Microsoft desperately needed to license Java to give their fledgling IE a shot in hell at becoming widely used, so I'm definitely not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Bill Gates as a visionary?

[BadmanX]

One of the perplexing things about this review is the fact that the reviewer was expecting a baring of the soul, or some illumination of the genius Bill Gates used to become so rich and powerful.

Why is this perplexing? Because the man has no soul and no genius. He fell ass-backwards into a string of incredibly fortunate opportunities and merely had the presence of mind to act upon them. Most of Gate's success was laid at his feet with little effort upon his part. Is it any wonder that the man has no character?

He is shrewd. And perhaps a little clever. But he didn't earn much of his power. Power granted in this manner is never respected and usually lost.