Customer Reviews

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

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The authors have done a pretty good job at guessing what the future might hold, as we look back from several years after its publication. (As some gifted souls have so insightfully noted, the computer industry does actually change fairly rapidly, thus a book from the early-mid 1990s might be sort of dated in 2000.) What is impressive is how well it's held up over the years.

The analysis of Gates' psychology, the corporate culture of Microsoft and its evolution, and the various spasms of its early years are all right on the money, and particularly interesting in light of the current DOJ proceedings. The material about Ballmer will be of interest to anyone keeping current with his rise in management at the company. It also paints an irresistable picture of the IBM that once was certain it could tell us all how we would use computers.

Strongly recommended.

Should I Buy This Book?

The story is starting to get a bit dated but the book still has 95% of the Gates story warts and all. He is one of the most compelling and admired and maybe feared business leaders today.

Unlike Jack Welch, another great leader and manager, he started from zero or near zero in a new field and (largely) owned the company. I remember seeing the personal computers for sale in the 70's - just pre Microsoft - that did not come with anything other than a very rudimentary software. He was one of the first people to recognize the dollar value of the software and to charge for its use in the hobby market. Since then he has dominated the market. Now there is a computer in virtually every office and home using his (expensive high margin) software. Now he has the resources to buy anything he wants, or to support any charity or university, or buy a sizeable portion of the stock in almost any company that he wishes. And of course he has no debt. He used no risky leverage or tricks. He took the software and generated billions of dollars in cash and securities on hand. It is quite the story.

This is a relatively short book and an easy read. Frankly it is a must read for anyone running their own business and or in the Tech field. Gates is the statistical anomaly who sits at the very pinnacle. He is perched even above Warren Buffet the financial guru who is at least 20 years older than Gates. But Gates was astute enough to buy DOS for $50,000. and then had the business smarts and drive to market and sell the product. He was a hands on manager working long hours and a technical leader. He was (is) as smart or smarter than anyone else in the field. He did not invent any major new invention but he had the practical ability to take the product to market and make it work, make it better, and build a winning business. He hired great people and built a team that literally crushed the opposition including IBM and all foreign competitors in that area. It is only now two decades later that people are (seriously) starting to consider alternatives such as Linux, and these still have a lot of catch up to do.

Still a great book and a great yarn. A must buy 5 stars.

Provides a pretty balanced look back on Microsoft's history up until 1994-95. It's really cool to read this now, given what has transpired since then. Gives great insight into just how driven Bill Gates is, and what he gave up to achieve his success. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is fascinated with the early stages of the micro-computer revolution.

This is really a story of how Gates led Microsoft to its apex, ending in about 1992. It is well written and a good balance bewteen criticism, an explanation of the business model, and historical detail. The story is, to put it mildly, remarkable no matter what you think of MS and Gates.

While a student at Harvard in December, 1974, Bill Gates III and Paul Allen informed Ed Roberts by telephone that they had invented a BASIC computer language for the MITS Altair 8080, which was the first "personal computer" kit for hobbyists. Could they license it along with each Altair kit, Gates asked, to customers for a royalty fee? It was an audacious proposal, because not only had Gates and Allen invented no such thing, but they neither owned an Altair kit nor did they even know the technical specifications for the Intel 8080 chip. Skeptical of their claim, Roberts replied that whoever demonstrated a working BASIC would win the account: Gates and Allen were in competition, he told them, with 50 other "geeks" who already had made the same claim. Gates and Allen then hunkered down for 8 weeks to write the first BASIC for a microcomputer. The resulting "software", which immediately won over Roberts, was the first application of what would become Microsoft BASIC. Gates was 19.

As the company founders, Gates and Allen shared a vision that virtually every home and every office desk would eventually have a PC on them, all operating with their software. To run Microsoft full time, Gates dropped out of Harvard in January, 1977. Their business quickly expanded beyond the Altair as competing brands of personal computers emerged, including the Tandy from Radio Shack and the Apple II computer; they were also called upon to program BASIC into a number of other electronic devices. All along, Gates' goal was to gain market share, in effect setting the software standard for most, if not all, PC users. As a true believer who intimately knew the product, Gates was the principal salesman, while Allen concentrated on technical development.

During this formative period, Microsoft's corporate culture was established. Perhaps as a result of hiring many of his programmers straight out of university, Microsoft's offices (and later the campus in Redmond, Washington) took on the look and feel of a college campus, that is, an informal and a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere with "late hours, loud music, walls full of junk, anything goes dress, Coke, adrenaline, unbuttoned behavior." Employees tended to be very young with a programmer or engineering mentality; they designed their products for tech-savvy customers - male in their early 20s - like themselves, a kind of fellowship for computer adepts. Like Gates, they loved to play with and program electronic gadgets.

Microsoft hired the brightest programmers with demonstrated practical abilities. Employees were also expected to work extremely long hours as a team toward a common goal, not as strident individualists. Gates encouraged them to develop their entrepreneurial passions, forcefully advancing their own ideas of useful products for new markets. Overseeing it all was Gates, who gained the reputation of a harsh and challenging critic with a relentless drive for excellence, whether to beat the competition or out of fear of falling behind in such a fast-changing industry. As the sole remaining founder after Allen's departure in 1983, Gates remained deeply involved in both technical and business details as well as the general direction of company strategy. Nonetheless, as the principal revenue generators, Microsoft's product groups increasingly became the seats of decision-making power, in spite of Gates' active engagement.

At the end of 1979, Microsoft had $US 4 million in sales. Most of these revenues came from BASIC, which enabled programmers to create applications, such as word processing and accounting spread sheets. The level below BASIC and the other languages under development at Microsoft was the computer operating system, which performed the most elementary tasks required to run computers. With the prospect of providing software to IBM for the basic PC it was planning to market for a reasonable price, Gates and Allen began to acquire the rights to, and then develop, software for a computer operating system. Known later as DOS, it again set an industry standard that would enable Microsoft to efficiently develop languages and software applications in a single engineering environment rather than painstakingly customize them for a variety of incompatible operating systems. This would immensely simplify Microsoft's programming process as well as enhance its efficiency.

As Gates foresaw, this was a near-ideal position to occupy at the moment that the PC market was poised to grow explosively with the introduction of the inexpensive IBM PC, which was made of off-the-shelf components and hence easy to copy, or "clone". With the dual ownership of DOS and several major programming languages, Microsoft became one of the fastest growing companies in the world. By 1985, just prior to its IPO, on revenues of $US 140 million, Microsoft had a pre-tax profit margin of approximately 34%, no long-term debt, and cash reserves of $US 38 million. By 1987, the company surpassed Lotus to become the world's largest software vendor for PCs. Gates was on his way to become the richest man in the world, at least for a time.

However, the ownership of DOS and the programming languages would also, critics later claimed, confer an "unfair advantage" on the company. First, the Microsoft applications groups were accused to obtaining "inside information" from the operating systems group, which enabled them to design their products to function more quickly and smoothly than competitors could. Second, because each change in DOS required competitors to supply their latest products to Microsoft programmers to ensure compatibility, critics charged that this amounted to an inside peek into their strategy at the cutting edge of their capabilities. It was a symbiotic relationship that made many outside vendors - independent companies developing applications to run on Microsoft operating systems -uneasy and resentful. Third, DOS programmers were accused by rivals of inserting "hidden bugs" into the operating system in order to hinder the function of competing products, such as the Lotus spread sheet, damaging their competitive position and brand. The resulting negative publicity did a great deal of damage to the Microsoft brand, which began to be seen as the industry bully.

While Gates insisted that he had erected a "Chinese Wall" between Microsoft's applications division and its Operating System's Group, it was not enough to deter the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from opening a probe into the company for anti-competitive practices that purportedly hurt consumers. By 1991, when the FTC probe became widely known, Microsoft controlled one-quarter of the applications market and dominated the operating systems market with Windows. There was speculation about the imminent breakup of Microsoft into separate companies for these markets, similar to the dismantlement of AT&T. For their part, defenders of Microsoft argued that it was winning because it was better and smarter, presenting its customers with superior products at bargain prices.

This a pretty much where the book stops, which badly dates it. Not only is the story of the anti-trust law suits left untold, but subsequent business developments - notably the internet - are not even mentioned. Thus, this is an excellent early history, but the reader must look elsewhere for more detail. Of the shelf of books on MS, in my opinion this is one of the best, and it was most useful to me for a research project. Recommended.

Although this book was written at a time when the authors found it necessary to explain what 'electronic mail, or e-mail' was, the insight into Bill Gates' life, methods and extraordinary success is timeless. It is hard to imagine much in this book is out of date, other than the estimate of Gates' wealth at the time ($4b). This is a well-written book and a fast read.

This book is an excellent biography of Gates and that little startup company called Microsoft. The book is well written, the story flows chronologically, detailing Gates' childhood in the 1960's, his fascination--bordering on obsession--with computers, and his relentless focus on starting Microsoft.

It is a fascinating story and full of parallels and insights for anyone starting a business in the technical field. Nobody is perfect, we all have flaws, including Gates, but he did almost everything right. He was focused, he had ambition, intelligence and he applied himself relentlessly. When it came time to take risk, he stepped up to the plate more than once, and when the pressure was on, he didn't buckle under.

His detractors say he got lucky. Well as a famous athlete once said, "the harder I practice, the luckier I get." That phrase is applicable to Gates.

This book gives a fascinating insight about Microsoft and how the two buddies Gates & Allen transformed the way we live, learn and play today.

More important is, the book gives us a glimpse of an often misunderstood genius, Bill Gates himself. Read this book and you'll get the idea what makes him tick. Really, he is not as bad as some people would like us all to believe.

Bill Gates is by far the most successful man of our time and probably of all time. This book explains gates earlier life in depth. Who was Bill Gates before the billions? This is all explained in this book. Gates' incredibly driven personality was always present even in his earlier years. Gates is today undoubtedly the most feared man in the industry and thought of by many as the most powerful man in the world.

This book shows both sides of the man behind it all. Enemies and Allies alike are all shown in this book. He fought wars with Apple and IBM and had peace with people like his friend and partner in success Paul Allen and his mother. Is Gates really the "ruthless" billionaire as many consider him to be or a giving loving and gentle man as few people know? Well he's a little of both and the great insight that can be gained by many can be found here in this book.

I previously read a book about Bill Gates by Johanthan Gatlin and this book is far less indepth and much more for a quick read. HARD DRIVE is a book I highly recommend to those of you who are interested in knowing all about Gates. A little out date, this book was released before the release of Microsoft Windows 95 which in many ways brought Bill Gates up in power almost twice as much. At the time this book was written he was the richest in America. Presently he is the richest in the world. I reccomend going out and buying the sequal to this book "Overdrive" which I am about to do. VERY GOOD BOOK OVERALL. Go out and get your self a copy today.

This is the first "big" biography of Gates and is written by local reporters with a feel for Seattle and the indigenous industry which has been guaranteed a place in world history all because Bill Gates decided to jump in his Porsche one day and get out of Albuquerque as fast as he could drive. Home to the ancestral Seattle, with Mom-very-rich-family and dad respected-lawyer with connections all over the place: None of which would have been worth anything unless Bill was obsessed with software, starting with Lunar Lander, traffic light control programs, and then of course the big IBM success.

The intensity of Gates comes out clearly here. Wearing the smae shirt forever, paying some lady to do his laundry and pay his bills, ripping the radio out of his car so he can think more intently, sleeping under the desk. And lots of foul language. This strain of the book does not come out as clearly in later books, now that Gates is married, a major philanthropist, and under the gun of all of the politically connected Utah software Republicans he defeated in the business wars. The book has a funny scene where Gates refers to the 70 year old head of Novell as "Grandfather from Hell."

When Judge Stanley Sporkin read this book over a weekend (hoping to develop more obsessive behavior like his anti-hero Bill?), it caused him to try to quash the DOJ consent decree negotiated with Microsoft in the first antitrust case. Sporkin saw something evil in Microsoft and Gates as a result of reading this book. Microsoft got Sporkin's judicial spike of the consent decree reversed by another court, and got Sporkin dumped from the case (I seem to recall).

The childhood portions of the book are revealing. There are the usual recitations of how smart Bill was as a kid, but also a hint that he had to change schools because of adjustment problems. Prior to junior high.

The early years in N.M. are recounted with a sense of drama, and in that sense, reading this book prepares you to understand more completely the details in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (e.g., the scene in the diner where Bill successfully argues Paul Allen into a larger equity chunk for Bill, less for Paul).

Bill going "legal" early to protect the I.P. rights to Microsoft's software is also key to his later empire, and the authors cover it early, along with the court battles with the MIPS guy over rights to Bill and Paul's work.

My reaction to reading this right after it came out was to buy stock in MSFT, which Judge Sporkin may have also done, I guess. I must have skipped over the rabid anti-Microsoft stage of my development. ... Bill owns it and stole it from Patterson? So what, he bought it.

Gates seems to have the qualities of an inventor, a construction foreman, and a broker. This puts him in Henry Ford's league, and he seems to be a lot smarter, as well. Go Microsoft.

This is a decent book on how Bill Gates and his business team built the Microsoft empire. The good aspects of this book include the following:

* The emphasis on how Microsoft was not built in a day but with many, many long days and lots of innovative thinking. This book illustrates how hard Gates worked.

* The portrayal of how relentlessly competitive and ambitious Gates is, be it at efficient programming, dominating the various software markets, studying higher mathematics or playing poker with his buddies.

* The specific details of the growth of Microsoft, as a company, up until the time of the book's publication.

* The implicit theme of how Gates never stops thinking.

Unfortunately, there are several aspects of this book that I disliked. These include the following:

* The writing is repetitive and often very stream-of-conscious. This book reads like a 250-300 page book diluted into a 400 page book.

* There is a lot of negative commentary about Gates' personality. First, this negative illustration seems to be done without providing the proper context. Gates is often portrayed as very immature. In this book, Gates is described as frequently issuing direct attacks on the intelligence of his employees during meetings and in private communication. He is also portrayed as immature through negligence, such as when he, presumably inadvertently, left his dirty laundry thrown about on a hotel floor for a top executive of his company to collect.

Although these incidents may be true, the authors should have emphasized that Gates is an enormously successful executive who is *only* in his twenties. While this does not excuse the described behavior, it does provide context for it. Needless to say, these immature outbursts would be appalling if they were committed by a seasoned executive in his early sixties.

More generally, this image of Gates conflicts with the image I gathered of him through other means. A friend of mine who worked at Microsoft described Gates as routinely hosting interns in his mansion for dinner, magnanimously forgiving a new employee who accidentally dented his car and graciously answering a personal e-mail concerning the artwork in his home. The Gates I have heard of through my friend, and the one who runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, does not fit the mold of the Gates described in this book.

I am not challenging the veracity of the information contained within, I am just surmising that the negatives sound like a few bad habits that Gates may have grew out of.