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Review:The Plot to Get Bill Gates
Aside from Daddy Warbucks, billionaires aren't very popular. Beyond the obvious reasons - envy and resentment - they tend to be a strong-willed, arrogant lot. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan - don't generally get to be billionaires through sensitivity and thoughtfulness.
Still, even by billionaire standards, Bill Gates seems hard to warm to. For one thing, he's the richest billionaire ever, topping more than $50 billion at last report. He seems almost lug-headedly arrogant, building a shockingly ostentatious digital place outside Seattle, practically mooning the judge during his recent anti-trust testimony, and of course, bludgeoning, acquiring, cutting down and stream-rolling innumerable competitors over the years.
Almost nobody seems to love him, not even other rapacious, slash-and-turn tycoons.
Gates is also personally elusive. He is not charming, charismatic, or appealing. His best-selling business books are vapid and cold. The carefully orchestrated interviews he gives - always in friendly, even adoring environments -- are banal. They reveal little vision or daring.
And for the many entrenched individualistic, Libertarian elements of the Net and Web, he is a nightmare: monopolistic and greedy and the purveyor of over-priced, ever obsolete, buggy software that exploits consumers and promotes computing ignorance.
Yet there he is, firmly atop the digital heap, a colossus who engulfs, devours, co-opts or buries wave after wave of competitors. Who now has so much money and power that he's become an icon rather than a CEO, capturing our imagination no matter what his gargantuan conglomerate does. Gates has nothing left to prove. And it's way too late to cut him down to size.
According to Gary Rivlin, author of the new book "The Plot to Get Bill Gates," (Times Business, $US 25), the people who hate Gates and are out to get him - the likes of Scott McNealy of Sun, Marc Andreessen and James Barksdale of Netscape, venture capitalist John Doerr, various anti-trust lawyers and government officials have become a culture all their own.
This book is the story of these idiosyncratic, sometimes rabid cabal of Silicon Valley muck-a-mucks known within Microsoft as "Captain Ahab's Club" for their obsessive pursuit of Redmond's own contemporary version of Moby Dick. (And that's not counting the nerds and geeks working in the open source and free software movements.)
For many of these people, says Rivlin, Gates has become an obsession. They talk and think about him constantly. He is always looking over their shoulder, the invisible man at every business meeting. What would Gates do? What does he think? What is he up to? They dump on him behind his back, then swoon at the sight of him.
At some point, writes Rivlin, Gates ceased to simply be a powerful computer industry figure, and instead, "infiltrated the world's dream life." A small universe of talented, driven people are working night and day to cut Gates down to size. But Rivlin's book suggests it may be too late for that.
Instead of tracking Microsoft software, Rivlin's mission is to track the various reincarnations of its CEO, "Gates 3.1", and the grievances - some substantial, some frivolous and ill-informed - that so many have against him.
This is fertile ground. Media coverage of Gates has been shallow. Gates is typically demonized or lionized, and neither stereotype seems quite right. Rivlin's notion - to understand Gates through his many adversaries - may offer the most telling insights yet into the reasons he's so successful, perhaps the best insight into Gates that we're ever going to get.
Rivlin presents a fair, intensely researched and direct account of the people who have taken Gates on, the generally losing struggles they've waged, and the insanely overheated business climate in Gates and his foes have been operating.
Gates inspires much stronger emotions in his adversaries than among the general public. Many of plots against him not only fail, they sometimes do more damage to the plotters than the target.
In fact, "The Plot To Get Gates" is as much a business history about the rise of Microsoft and the computing industry as it is a conspiracy story.
Amid much Gatesian hype and hysteria, it's refreshing to encounter some history and facts and a linear account of Microsoft's intricate battles and strategies.
Gates has prevailed mostly because he is a monomaniac, concludes Rivlin, because he believes he can and must win every time. He believes he is smarter, tougher than anybody else. He might be right.
According to Rivlin's chronicle, Gates is an indestructible life form: Chop off one leg and three more grow back; knock him over and he get gets up taller. Every effort to best him seems only to make him stronger, richer and more ferocious. Even the most savage assaults seem mostly to annoy him, like the original Godzilla swatting down those pesky jet fighters.
If you can judge a man by his enemies, Gates looks better. Rivlin doesn't show us anyone more agile or noble.
Still, this account comes at an odd time in Microsoft's history which may finally be doing to Gates what all of his many determined detractors couldn't.
While there's no sign that his company will totter and fall anytime soon, one has the sense that the history of the Net and the Web are moving past the man. Microsoft and its software are still pre-eminent, but the company no longer seems to be at the heart of the action.
The open source and free software movements - the literal antitheses of Microsoft and it's business philosophy -- have gained a strong foothold on the Net, demonstrating at a minimum that one can live digitally without turning over money to Microsoft, presenting the business world with its first real alternative. And stunningly successful new business platforms -- eBay, MP3, e-trading sites, ICQ and Hotline messaging systems - have sprung up entirely apart from Gates and Microsoft.
His company's many expensive lunges into the media world - Slate, MSN, MSNBC, the Sidewalk sites - are all struggling, sold, or on the block. It isn't Gates? new ideas that keep him so flush; it's the old ones, so durably profitable.
Rivlin's saga of the many, mostly unsuccessful efforts to challenge Gates and Microsoft are compelling for what they reveal about the man, especially since he (despite the media that swarm around him) has revealed so little about himself.
Gates is ferociously tenacious, competitive and - at least when it comes to defining his own role --- fleet-footed. He has an amazing capacity to re-engineer himself - thus his company -- no small skill in so fluid and brutally competitive a marketplace. Like the late Chairman Mao, he does business with a revolutionary fervor, zero tolerance for competition, and a continuous sense of (sometimes brutal) upheaval and renewal.
There is, nonetheless, an unyielding blandness about the man that makes it as difficult to hate him as to like him.
If we know more about Gates than we do about Onassis, Rockefeller or Morgan, it's sometimes tougher to care. Stacked up against history's billionaires, we have to struggle not only to understand him, but to remember why we want to.
Buy this book at Amazon.
You guys remember when bill got hit in the face with a pie on videotape for all the world to see? I think in some ways, we should feel some pity for bill. From what was said after the incident, he didn't take it very well. Now, many of us, myself included, would probably feel some embarassment if we were hit in the face with a pie, but could probably laugh it off. If I was the type of person that couldn't laugh that off though, I think despite having tons and tons of money, the world would seem like a much more bleak place. And while Bill sits looking over his shoulder for his enemies to plot his downfall, and while his enemies sit and watch over thier shoulders for him to come along and try to destroy them, all of us here in the opensource community can sit on irc and laugh and code and just have a merry old time. :)
With all that in mind, I think in some ways you and I, here, where we can benefit from everyone else's work for free, and with the ability to give freely back to those around us, have it better than bill with his stacks of money, paranoid friends and enemies, and life of coldness and business.
And why is this a problem? After all, Gates has done nothing the prevent those who would make something better for themselves from doing so: [GNU]/Linux is proof of this.
Of course, the screams go up, you can't make money "selling Linux" (without something else on the side, like support). You can't buy a Linux distribution or get it pre-installed with the same ease. Finally, Billy-G's got all the distribution mechanisms sown up tight pushing his garbage around.
All true. But, all irrelevant.
The world doesn't owe you a profit -- if people value what you make (even if it is garbage) you will make one.
The world doesn't have to bend to your desires or make your life more convenient. In short, the world doesn't owe you the ability to get a Linux distro the way you might want to. There aren't any Indian restaurants close to where I live and I like Indian food. That's my tough -- I can buy a cookbook and prepare Chicken Vindaloo myself if I want.
If you want something better than Windoze, build it yourself. The freedom to do that, and to cooperate with others to the same ends is the only thing the world "ows" you.
Clearly, enough people thought it worthwhile to improve and expand on Linus Torvalds' personal operating system itch. They (we) did it not to "get rich" but to build somethibg better for ourselves. That this goal was achieved, beyond anyone's wildest dreams, serves to prove that Billy-G is no impedement what so ever to personal and collective effort.
Those who despise him for his wealth are just envious bastards who would think nothing of stealing if they could get away with it.
Of course, he still flogs useless garbage, IMNSHO, but if people are willing to buy it, who am I to interfere?
In Liberty, Rene
I don't like Microsoft for their technologies, just like I don't like Macdonald's food or Hertz customer service. But unlike Macdonald's or Hertz, avoiding Microsoft is becoming very difficult, no matter how poor I may think their products are. It's that monopoly position, that to me mostly seems to be the result of network effects and monopolistic practices, that bothers me.
I wonder what it is in Rivlin's background that causes him to see this as an epic struggle of hero versus villain, rather than as the technical and economic issue that it is. To the degree that Gates matters at all, he is simply the current figurehead of Microsoft. If he resigned and got replaced by someone else, nobody would care much about Gates anymore.
The failure for technical people to "bring down Gates" is probably a result of the fact that it isn't about bringing down Gates--it's about open protocols, open access, and choice. And it seems to me the technical community has been quite successful there, and there is enormous momentum in that area. If Gates and Microsoft prosper in an open, non-proprietary world (and I see no reason why they shouldn't), all the better for them.
Scott McNealy, Marc Andreesen, The guy at Novell (Noorda?), Larry Ellison, these are men that spend so much time looking over their shoulders and trying to beat bill Gates that they'll always lose. If Netscape had spent a fraction of the time on their product that they spend whining about IE and bundling they would still be the number one browser. Gates is too saavy to fall prey to a direct attack. He has consistenly and successfully flanked his opponents every time they attack him directly. If you want to compete with Bill Gates you need to compete with him, not fight him.
The only reason that Linux has been successful is that Linus et. al. do not care in the slightest about what Bill Gates is doing. They put their modest resources into a product, not a figght. If Sun, Oracle and AOL would just learn.
Although you'll never unseat Gates from the top of the heap, There are a number of people within striking distance of the Microsoft monopoly. If they would just work on their products and services rather than squabbling with Gates they might have a chance.
-Rich
While I agree with the conclusions, I'd just like to nitpick out a few historical facts.
1) Basic began life at Dartmouth. I don't know if a corporate contractor made it (is that who Computer Sciences is?). The BASIC interpreter is the only thing that (AFAIK) Gates ever actually wrote. Even then he knew the way to make money was to control the OS. He wanted BASIC to be *the* user interface to computers. He made arrangements with a number of hardware vendors to get MS-BASIC in the ROM on their machines. Captive consumers!
2) MS-DOS used to be known as 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. It was written by Tim Patterson to make it easy to port CP/M applications to the new 8086 processor. The 640k limit was imposed not by MS-DOS but by the IBM-PC architecture. The physical memory limit of the 8086 was 1MB. MS-DOS was available for other hardware (the Zenith Z-100 leaps to mind) where it could address more than 640k just fine. I'm not praising MS-DOS, jut trying to put the blame wth IBM where it really belongs...
3) Here I won't argue. I bought Windows 1.0 (how much will some of you pay me for a copy of the 1.0 manual? I've got it, you want it? I don't think I have the 5-1/4 floppies any more, but I might. I can look. I fired it up, played reversi a few times, erased it from my 10M hard drive and never ran it again). I will, however, point out that Digital Research was the arrogant corporate giant. They overcharged big time for CP/M-86 and they really did not keep up. No heirarchical file system (of course, neither did MS-DOS v1), no forward motion on the core system (but look at GEM later and at DR-DOS, once their lunch got eaten, they got innovative again). MS-DOS v1 reeked compared to CP/M, but MS-DOS v2 added some critical stuff and CP/M was too expensive and didn't move. I can't blame MS for CP/M's death. It killed itself. I *can* blame them for killing DR-DOS, however, with their bogus 95 "no more DOS" baloney. As for all the other products they've killed, each of those companies also rested on their laurels. Word 2 caught up with WP and Word 6 kicked its butt (and I *hate* Word!). MS actually made better (if fatter) apps. Borland? I don't know why people went to MS from Borland. As a guy who writes software for a living, I found the Borland stuff to be consistently far superior to the MS tools. I don't know why Borland lost. MS really started being abusive IMHO with DR-DOS and with Netscape. In both of these cases they used their OEM licensing agreements and thus their control of the distribution channels to crush the innovator.
So, while I dislike MS software, I don't think MS is wholly to blame for the demise of every defunct ISV, nor do I think that every sucky thing about PCs is due to them. IBM deserves a lot of blame for building and designing well below their capabilities.
One last thing. Would we have been stuck with the cruddy architectural heritage of the IBM PC design (which we still fight around to make good computers) if all software had been open source? Hell, no! We could have moved to new architectures with little effort if we had so desired. It is that "base of applications" sold binary by closed-source companies that have us locked on that set of legacy design crud. Those companies cannot cost-justify moving to a new platform ("why when there are gazillions of PCs?") but when you have the source, you can do it yourself. It is a chicken-and-egg thing. With the source, you just clone the d--ned chicken!
Ramble mode off...