Customer Reviews

Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an in-depth account of Microsoft's "early" (i.e., pre-1995) days. First, let me say that I wish the authors had updated the book, since the computer business has gotten VERY fascinating since the launch of Windows 95, as the Internet seized the day and also as an intrusive DOJ started an effort to dismantle a 20-year-old company that had suddenly become America's Public Enemy No. 1.

That said, this book provides excellent accounts of Bill Gates as a person and Bill Gates as Microsoft. The emphasis is on how Bill Gates ran Microsoft as a business, how he interfacted with his employees, business allies and competitors. If you are looking for information on how Windows 3.0 or Flight Simulator was designed, this is not the place. But if you want to know how Microsoft really got started, how Gates allegedly "screwed" Apple, or how Gates started dating Melinda French, you'll find it right here.

Stephen Manes has been a long-time critic of Microsoft's producty quality (and rightly so, IMHO), and the book comes across as quite critical of Gates' business tactics ("bullying", "anti-competitive", etc.) and personal idiosyncracies (both selfish and selfless, intolerant, etc.). At the same time the authors show admiration for the Gator as a technical and business genius. But because the authors evidently believe that Microsoft has done lots of evil, every conflict Microsoft had with a competitor would be Microsoft's fault.

In summary, this book is easy to read, generally objective (Gates was interviewed extensive for this "unauthorized" biography), and informative. I highly recommend it to anyone fascinated by Bill Gates and Microsoft.

I am on my fourth copy of this book, my favorite among six accounts of Bill Gates and Microsoft. When confronted by young professionals who know only today's politically correct and somewhat unfavorable characterization of Microsoft's founder, I press this book upon them and urge them to dig a bit deeper into this fascinating personality.

Other newer books of course are more complete in chronicling the growth of Microsoft, but none covers Gates' boyhood and early Microsoft years so well. You do not know Gates or Microsoft unless you know what both were like during the first years of Microsoft's existence in Albuquerque from 1975 until the relocation to the Seattle area in late 1978.

After reading this book I felt I understood the essential Bill Gates. He never is going to quite grow up, and he is always going to be a bit of a mystery to those who did not become forever fascinated with computers by age thirteen.

If you are not a Gates fan now, you may like Bill Gates (privileged son of accomplished but non-technical parents, congressional page, avid water skier, college poker player) a bit more after reading this. If you are an aging hacker like me, you will smile many times at the accounts of Bill's early fascination with a timesharing computer terminal and his amazing success following on Microsoft's original products, adaptations of the Basic computer language for microcomputers beginning with the Altair.

I guess you will have to be a techie to love this book as much as I do, but it is at least essential reading for all students of the history of computer technology. Check the index and almost all of the early pioneers are there, from Altair's Roberts to Xerox's Metcalfe. And the photos are great!

This is by far the most personal look at Bill Gates I've ever seen. It gives an insider's view of what it was really like to work for Microsoft in the early years. This includes everything from Bill's temper tantrums to his personal hygiene and old girlfriends. A must read for any Bill Gates follower!

This very readable book provides a candid overview of the rise of Bill Gates and Microsoft. I found it interesting and insightful. Like much of the material about "billg", I find it a little sycophantic -- but it is not over the top. Key success ingredients: early signs of selfishness, million dollar trust-fund from his grandfather (which no doubt provided safety and leverage at the start), an early passion for an incredibly important technology at the critical period and a shrewd, single-mindedness. I suspect Bill is not a particularly compassionate, polite, happy or fair person -- however I bet he is really efficient!

The book was well written, informative and unbiased. However, it had too many characters and too many jumps across the space time continuum. This is a good primer to Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System.

Having read most of the "histories" of Microsoft and Bill Gates and having been around the PC industry for a couple of decades, this was the only one of the books that triggered more "I remember that" reactions than "Wait a minute, that wasn't what happened" reactions.

I bought this book expecting to skim through it to find out a little more about what Bill Gates was like. But it's a wonderfully readable history of the growth of PC's, from the early days when the best a school kid (Bill himself) could do was to try to get access to a teletype time-share system, on through the first home "computers" that amounted to little more than a bunch of switches and LEDs (no keyboard or monitor), to IBM coming out with the PC and Microsoft's amazing good fortune at supplying the OS (great story! Bill just cared about programming languages, mostly BASIC, and saw the DOS manuever mostly just as a way to ensure that BASIC would run on the new IBM machine!), on thru the OS/2 vs. Windows battles.

It even has a lot of inside detail on the development of the Apple Macintosh. I recently read "Accidental Empires" (the basis for the TV documentary "Triumph of the Nerds"), and found Gates to be a far better and more readable history of the PC's startup.

The book is packed with interviews and amusing or interesting anecdotes. It's well written and well edited. One drawback for some people will be that it hasn't been updated since 1995, but for the two main things that have happened since then - the anti-trust suit against Microsoft and the rise of the Internet - there are plenty of other sources.

I first read "Gates" back in 1993. Many books about Bill Gates have been written since. But "Gates" by Stephen Manes and
Paul Andrews is still by far the best book about Bill Gates.

When, coming from UNIX, I decided to explore the PC platform in Jan 95, I was first an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft), thus following the buzz. When, two years later, I investigated personally into this, I discovered with great surprise at which point all the mediatrics were twisting the facts, mostly in the same official buzz word, "lynch Microsoft". Mostly, but not always - which made hard to be sure of anything.

In about every article or book I checked, I found factually false statements (in either camp's favor); this "Mogul" book was the only that at the same time contained a lot of precise facts and dates, and none that I could find in error.

The writing and its index are very good, offering an optimized combination of fun reading, fast finding, accurate checking.

michel_merlin@yahoo.com - Paris, Fri 22 Jun 2001 14:02:20 +0200

Great reading for all propeller-heads. Excellent history of the ultimate "right place at the right time" scenario. I give it three thumbs up....