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Review:Business@The Speed Of Thought
"From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it." - Groucho Marx
So Bill Gates has written a second book about the future of technology. It's called "Business @ the Speed of Thought", I'll call it B@TSOT for short. This is the most awaited media event since "Return of the Jedi". Oh wait. That's "The Phantom Menace". This is just another vacuous management technology book by a rich guy with nothing original to say. Sorry. My mistake.
First, in the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I didn't read the book, only the 23 chapter excerpts found at the www.microsoft.com web site. You might argue that you can't judge a book from its excerpts. My response is "Hey! You don't expect me to pay for this pap, do ya? I've got code to write!"
The thought of the number of trees that died an ignoble death just so an accidental billionaire could use an archaic technology to spread his ghostwritten pablum to the coffee tables of middle management boggles the mind.
One can almost hear the trees' psychic screams, "an O'Reilly book, a Jacqueline Susanne novel, but not THIS!"
So, if you want an in-depth review of all the details of the book, you'll have to look to someone with more fortitude than old Doc Technical.
The B@TSOT Web Site
Now, I know Mr. Gates didn't design the web site for his book, but the web splash page does provide an interesting service: it shows how to confuse a user.
It's not a visually unappealing page, I suppose, nice monochromatic scheme, pretty simple layout. A little box contains the words "click to enter", enticing me to delve deeper. I move to the box and click on the words.
And nothing happens.
I move the cursor around, looking for the little pointy-hand icon that indicates I'm over a link. I find a link over the book title and the author's name, but not over the words "click to enter".
Now that's good design.
The splash page takes me to - another splash page! So what was the first one for? At least page two has a few link options: site map, feedback, "getting @ solutions", "buying @ once", Terms of Use.
Hmmm. "Terms of Use" takes me to a lengthy license agreement that must have taken an army of lawyers months to boil down into legal tar. My favorite line:
"Microsoft reserves the right to terminate your access to any or all of the Communities at any time without notice for any reason whatsoever."
Ouch. I make sure I wipe my feet neatly on their digital doorstep, and wipe a speck of lint off my virtual shirt before entering the link "looking @ the book".
The web site has overviews and excerpts from all 23 chapters of "Business @ the Speed of Thought", including the Appendix and Glossary.
The Intended Audience
This book is aimed squarely at management, from CEOs down to middle managers. It's certainly not aimed at technical people used to reading concise, well-thought out material.
Your boss will read this book. Your boss's boss will read this book. They'll come to you in the days and weeks ahead, suggesting innovations they gleaned from this book. Innovations like... e-mail:
"Once in place, a digital nervous system is easy to build on. A good network, a good e-mail system, easy-to-build Web pages are everything you need for eliminating internal paper forms, too. You can add any number of intranet applications easily once this infrastructure is in place."
Welcome to the Future World of 1994. Mr. Gates has his fingers clutched firmly about the throat of the obvious.
This is the main problem I have with the book (well, the excerpts, at least). Gates prognosticates with all the insight of a sideshow palm reader. E-mail? Web pages?
Here's a good suggestion:
"Less developed countries may assume that a digital approach to government is out of reach, but countries without systems can start fresh with new systems, which will be less expensive than manual approaches."
Of course, if a developing nation is really short on cash, they could buy older, less powerful 486 and Pentium machines, and save a bundle in software costs by loading up Linux and open source software. I'm sure Bill was planning on getting around to saying that. He probably mentions it in the book, but it didn't make the excerpts.
Here's a prediction I found particularly ironic:
"We'll see a world in which fairly simple personal companion devices proliferate side by side with incredibly powerful general-purpose PCs that support knowledge work at home or the office. Life's going to be pretty exciting as these changes come about and within a decade it's likely that most of them will occur."
It's ironic because I read these words using AportisDoc on my PalmPilot from the webpages which I downloaded using a little perl script that I ran on my Linux box. George Jetson, eat your heart out. Doc is a radical bleeding-edge cyber-citizen. Envy him.
Gates on Privacy
Occasionally, we get an interesting text byte from the excerpts. Here's one that gave me pause:
"Many Web sites ask users for registration information, including name, address, demographic data and credit information. While this data enables businesses to offer better services and support for customers and do more targeted marketing, consumers should be able to approve in advance the use of any personal data and whether that data can be passed on to other entities."
One supposes that Mr. Gates wasn't aware of what his company has been doing lately on the privacy front. Of course those universal IDs that get embedded into OLE documents or transferred surreptitiously across the internet, well that's just for our own good. Trust Bill.
The Writing
Now Bill has gotten some flack from reviewers over his prose. What I'd say is that Gates' words had the uncanny ability to kick my brain into neutral every few sentences. Take this example:
"Among the challenges that data mining can help with are these: Predicting the likelihood of customers buying a specific item based on their ages, gender, demographics and other affinities. Identifying customers with similar browsing behaviors. Identifying specific customer preferences in order to provide improved individual service. Identifying the date and times involved in sequences of frequently visited web pages or frequent episodes of phone calling patterns. Finding all groups of items that are bought together with high frequency."
The prose in this book is almost impenetrable. Gates uses the english language like a blunt truncheon. Or maybe it's his ghostwriter. One must wonder whether the ghostwriter's going to put this little piece of detritus on his resume.
The Final Word
So, should you buy this book? I'll frame my answer this way: remember the scene in George Orwell's "1984" where the protagonist is confronted with his worst fear, rats, when his interrogators strap a cage to his face with hungry live rats separated from his flesh by a flimsy wire mesh gate?
I would rent the movie version of "1984" before I would buy B@TSOT.
Doc Technical is really a programmer who gets to work full time on Linux systems and get paid for it. Envy him. And he's still not a real doctor.
Review by: Jon Katz
There's an almost Orwellian quality to Bill Gates' new book Business@The Speed Of Thought, enormous stacks of which began appearing at chain bookstores last week, along with audio tapes and CD-Roms. Given Microsoft's much publicized troubles and challenges in recent months, the book seems especially timely.
Gates' beaming face is on the back cover of the book, over a publisher's note announcing that "Bill Gates has arranged for the author's share of the proceeds to be donated to charity." This note crystallizes what's so odd about Gates, whose outwardly genial, seer-like persona floats above his own life, that of his company, and most of the people who use computers, the Net or the Web.
Almost everything about this public persona is contradictory, if not hypocritical. He doesn't need the royalties, so why write a book at all? He could simply continue to give carefully orchestrated speeches and interviews to friendly reporters and audiences. Last week, his book was lovingly excerpted on the cover of Time Magazine (whose parent company Time Warner also owns Warner Books, Gates' publisher). Reading Gates brazen prescriptions for everybody else's digital future, it's almost possible to forget he's fighting for his own.
He uses the informal "Bill", yet is as stiff and elusive as any public figure in America.
He continuously puts himself forward as the embodiment of new thinking, yet at least so far, his authorship suggests he doesn't have many ideas at all, new or old.
He seems to cling to his public persona, but as the book makes clear, it's always on his own terms. We get no sense of his life, travails or real beliefs. This public Gates, the Millenial visionary so beloved by journalists and politicians and CEO's, seems to suggest an emotionless droid much more than a tough, dynamic business leader.
The theme of Gates' dry, ferociously detached book is his idea that the company of the future needs a digital nervous system to hire, communicate, operate and compete in the next century, that digital systems will replace their more cumbersome and expensive predecessors.
In fact, one of the very few graphics in the book sketches out this new system. At the heart is a box labeled "Digital Nervous System," and connected to it are other boxes, "Basic Operations," "Business reflexes," "Strategic Thinking" and "Customer Interaction."
For a book that presumes to guide commerce into the Millenium, Gates' ideas sound either obvious, or sometimes, even retro, more 50's than futuristic.
He sprinkles the book with self-serving anecdotes about how well-run Microsoft is, how employees are hired online, how they make their travel plans on the Net, how they avoid pointless meetings, how they use e-mail to collect and share information (the Justice Department has told us a lot more about Microsoft's e-mail than he does).
He advances the notion of the paperless office, not a new idea, and repeatedly calls for an integrated digital infrastructure companies for companies.
His ideas about creating the virtual corporation are cold and uninspiring. The book has the feel of one of those nightmare inspirational management seminars - "manage with the force of facts," is one of his shibboleths. This style invokes a Holiday Inn conference room where the captive sales force is held against its will while some motivational speaker holds forth cheerfully and interminably with graphs and charts.
Gates dispenses nearly 500 pages of digital wisdom without ever once mentioning the remarkable challenges, dramas and successes of his own company. Whether you're a friend or foe, hardly anybody would disagree with the idea that the company Gates built is at a crossroads, under pressure from everything from the federal government to IBM and Apple to Linux.
But the public Gates is like a disconnected head, floating above us like some videotaped image, relentless, bland and remote. Page by page, he seems less interesting, the book painfully tiresome and slow.
It seems almost incomprehensible that this is the man who built the most successful corporation on the planet today. How could he have done it, thinking like this? And if he is interesting and smart, why is he going to such extraordinary lengths to hide it from us? What is he missing? What are we?
For more than a decade, Gates has towered over the Digital Age, a symbol to much of America and the world of the wealth, brains and stunning growth of the computing culture. Now, as many are questioning whether Microsoft will survive into the Millenium in its current form, he writes a book that doesn't even glancingly refer to the reality of his company's life. Or his own.
Is if fun being Bill Gates? Painful? Is he angry about the government's challenge to his company? Is he bothered by Linux, open source or free software? Does he notice all those geek attacks? Does he like living in his digital castle, with all Leonardo Da Vinci and Napoleon's private stuff? Does he really wear computer chips to alter the climate and artwork of his house as he moves room to room?
The standards of the digital revolution, writes Gates - the PC, the microprocessor that will make other new digital devices possible, and the Internet - all give companies a way of implementing a "unified architecture without busting the bank."
The next steps, he adds, "are to connect these knowledge systems with existing business operations, to build new business systems on the new architecture, and, over time, to replace older business systems."
The interesting thing about these words - in fact, the only interesting thing about them - is that they end the book, usually the last chance for an author to make a final statement, leave an enduring vision.
Like him or not, Gates' ought to be one of the people in America we most want to read about. That there isn't a revealing, honest or compelling line in "Business" tells us more about him than anything he writes.
After all these pages, all those covers, all those interviews, perhaps it's finally time to take Bill Gates at his own word, and acknowledge the very remarkable fact that one of the most extraordinary companies in the history of business was built by an empty vessel, a disconnected, emotionless void at the right place in the right time with the right idea.
The paranoia, envy and anger swirling around Bill Gates and his company are all misplaced and misguided. Nobody has to break Microsoft up. It is, like him, is an illusion, the evocation of an idea rather than an idea itself.
For that comprehension alone, Businesss@The Speed Of Thought was worth the reading. But it's a sad book, after all. This is a nerd in massive denial, unwilling or unable to connect with the most compelling parts of his own life.
You can e-mail me at jonkatz@slashdot.org
And if you're a mascocist, you can purchase this book at Amazon.
I think Slashdot would be a much better place without making a fool out of Microsoft. They're good enough at it themselves. The only thing slashdot achieves with all this MS bashing is looking like a bigger idiot than Microsoft (well... almost).
Well, I look at it in two ways:
1) Slashdot is just displaying the foolishness that Bill Gates created by writing this book (hence, what NEWS is all about, IOW, reporting fact)
2) Most of us probably haven't even bothered to open our ears enough to listen to the announcement of the book, (I didn't know about it until this personally) or care to read the dribble that was going to come out of it. If anything, it would have been nice if Jon and Doc had cited some interesting philosophy in the book, but it seems from the review that they may have not had any examples to cite.
And on the Anti-MS attitude, these things don't just create themselves. No one has the dire hatred for Apple or IBM these days that people have for MS. I for one don't TRUST Apple and IBM to do anything slightly in the public interest, but I'm not going to condemn them in general either, like I would do to MS.
-Erik-
Hey, Bill, you mean we're supposed to to like, tell the truth when we register on websites?
I feel sorry for anyone trying to build up marketing information based on the crap I type in. Poor old Bob Flemming, born 7/6/1914, resident of, variously, Falkland Islands, Peru, Islands Of St Kitts And St Nevis, Estonia and (today's favourite) Serbia, who has worked for the Defence, Finance, Childcare and (this is the best one) Water Treatment industries. Bob must have a hell of a time dealing with all that junk mail I've signed him up for.
As for spam, I just create a new, unique, disposable email account for every registration. In fact it's quite fun spotting where spammers have got their addresses from.
FFS, if personal privacy worries you, Bill, don't type anything personal in- make it up!
Has anyone done a study on the reliability of website registration data? I think they're in for a disapointment.
By the way, Bill, you can stop sending TechNet update emails to microsoftjunk@cimmerii.demon.co.uk now...
>Many Web sites ask users for registration
>information, including name, address,
>demographic data and credit information.
>While this data enables businesses to offer
>better services and support for customers and
>do more targeted marketing,
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
All of what Katz said goes straight to the point about the difference between Microsoft and the rest of the technical world.
No one is passionate about Microsoft. Bill Gates is just freigtened that his reign might one day end. No one feels great allegience to any of his products. No one is thrilled about IIS or Exchange. No one lives or dies by Expedia, or WinCE, or IE or media player.
But, people live and die by the Linux kernel, their distro, any of the BSDs, there favorite UNIX. People literally live and die over KDE and GNOME. And that's good. That's why we're different. We have a passion with what we do, not just a fleeting whimsical notion that this stuff is nifty.
The reason that Gate's writing is so bland is because he has nothing new to talk about. The only thing to be done now is to design, to code, to build that future of networked devices, of improved user interfaces, or enhanced electronic services. There's no need to talk or to write or to type anymore, just more code to written, more chips to model, and more designs to be made.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Our ex network admin at work has an interesting saying:
"The paperless office will become a reality soon after the paperless toilet."
-Jeremy
Some of Mr. Katz's quotes show a high degree of either ignorance, confusion or stupidity about what the book is about. So much so that I am saddened that he would proport to write a review, when in reality he wrote propaganda.
Mr. Katz this book was about business, not about Bill's personal life as quotes like this would appear you think it is:
"Is if fun being Bill Gates? Painful? Is he angry about the government's challenge to his company? Is he bothered by Linux, open source or free software? Does he notice all those geek attacks? Does he like living in his digital castle, with all Leonardo Da Vinci and Napoleon's private stuff? Does he really wear computer chips to alter the climate and artwork of his house as he moves room to room?"
This isn't Bill's biography or autobiography its a business theory and strategy book (or lack thereof). It has nothing to do with the current problems of his company or any he may be having outside of it. I think that you apparently want to draw relations between Bills personal life and problems which you know NOTHING or very little about onto a book he wrote. It's a stretch and it shows what I have seen as a steady decline in the quality of the information posted on SlashDot. Articles and reviews like this and simply bashing anything that is NOT Linux is one of the reasons I find myself reading Slashdot less and less...
It seems to me that the main idea of the book is
"Among the challenges that data mining can help with are these: Predicting the likelihood of customers buying a specific item based on their ages, gender, demographics and other affinities. Identifying customers with similar browsing behaviors. Identifying specific customer preferences in order to provide improved individual service."
Money, money, and money. Sell, sell, sell... and make more money so you can make even more money... hmm It amuses me when salespeople think they know what I want or need.
Oh, did I mention the personal privacy:
"Identifying the date and times involved in sequences of frequently visited web pages or frequent episodes of phone calling patterns. Finding all groups of items that are bought together with high frequency."
Be careful - the "big brother" is watching you. Did you notice the frequent use of Identifying . I have an idea: how about a personal ID card with all personal info can be found. Seems pretty exciting.