I just finished reading Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America. The whole book, not just the title, although getting through the title is an accomplishment.
Actually, what I read was the uncorrected author's proof of the book, the book-publishing equivalent of beta software. The book is due for release early in 1993 from Doubleday. It's written by PC/Computing columnist Stephen Manes and Seattle Times reporter Paul Andrews.
From the title you might think that this was a how-to-get-rich book, and I suppose it does implicitly offer a success formula. Let me see if I can distill it. 1. Be smart. 2. Focus. But you don't need to read a 500-page book to learn that.
What fills the 500 pages are anecdotes. Lots of them.
My favorites are the coding-crunch stories. How Paul Allen wrote and hand-assembled the loader for Altair Basic on the flight to Albuquerque in 1975. Microsoft programmers knocking out the ceiling tiles to get some ventilation in the windowless, "secure" room IBM insisted on during the development of DOS. Richard Brodie's rapid programming on the original version of Microsoft Word, under some daunting constraints (write to Charles Simonyi's virtual-machine p-code, hedge the bet on the mouse by supplying a second complete, keyboard-only interface).
Most of the coding stories are about Bill Gates, though. Adolescent Gates sneaking out of his parents' house for late-night programming binges at a local time-share facility. Teenaged Gates skipping baths and sleep and eating Tang with his fingers one summer while testing software for the Bonneville Power Administration. Microsoft President Gates snatching away the text editor for the TRS-80 Model 100 and rewriting it overnight. (This was apparently Gates's last program to ship as a Microsoft product, and I dug out my Model 100 to marvel again at how much the Microsoft team, including its chairman, managed to pack into that 32K ROM.) Chairman Gates winning a 1986 Microsoft-sponsored programming contest, beating Jeff Duntemann and Ray Duncan, among others.
For my taste, there are too few of these coding stories in the book, and too many car stories. The authors appear to have catalogued every automobile and every ticket Bill Gates ever acquired. But that's a quibble.
Mostly the book is about Microsoft, because that's mostly what Bill Gates is about. I had already heard most of these stories while researching Fire in the Valley, my book on personal-computer history. In fact, replaying some tapes from 1982, I learned just how practiced Bill Gates had become in telling some of these stories. But there were surprises in the book even for as jaded a reader as myself.
I learned, for example, that if it hadn't been for Roland Hansen's insistence, Windows would have gone out the door under the name Interface Manager. It was Hansen who was responsible for what I have long considered an extremely effective ploy: the company-name-plus-generic naming convention for Microsoft products. Microsoft Chart, Microsoft Word.
And of course the story of Altair Basic is here. And how Microsoft got the contract to develop the operating system for the IBM PC, and why Digital Research didn't, and where the operating system actually came from, and how early IBM was making its plans to dump its software partner. And the always-tricky relationship with Apple, from the scuttling of MacBasic to the lawsuit over Windows. The story of the development of Windows weaves through half the book and, reading it, I got a clearer understanding of why it took so long and why the early versions were so lame.
Also present in more than half the book is the influence of IBM. Microsoft profited immensely from its relationship with IBM, but the book gives an idea of the cost, too. The essence of that relationship is perhaps captured in the acronym Steve Ballmer would like to forget: BOGUS. I'll let Manes and Andrews tell you what it stands for.
There are a lot of specific details in the book about system software and application development at Microsoft; enough to inform one's reading of the recent allegations that Microsoft hasn't kept a secure wall between the two activities.
Ross Perot appears in the book, too; with Gates and Perot both recounting Perot's attempt to buy Microsoft. The quotes from Perot evoke the man nicely.
In fact, the style of the book evokes the style of Bill Gates rather well. That, stylistically, is its strength and its weakness. Bill Gates is very bright and very knowledgeable about his company, the industry, and the technology, but he's not deep and he's not eloquent. Like many of the overage adolescents who surround him, he speaks a tiresome language of gratuitous exaggeration, superficiality, and jargon. When it's recounting anecdotes, the book holds closely to this style.
If, as I do, you regard this chiefly as a book of entertaining anecdotes, that's a weakness.
Copyright © 1993, Dr. Dobb's Journal
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