The Plot to Get Bill Gates [Hardcover]

Gary Rivlin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 29, 1999

To understand the magnitude of Bill Gates, one must first understand the people who hate him, most of whom suffer from an acute case of "Bill Envy."
The Plot to Get Bill Gates is the true, hilarious story of a loosely knit cabal of Silicon Valley's wealthiest and most successful leaders and their quest to defeat the richest man in the world. These leaders are known within Microsoft as Captain Ahab's Club for their self-destructive fixation with harpooning the Great White Whale of Redmond, all two hundred pounds and $50 billion of him. Acclaimed journalist Gary Rivlin tells their tale as a high-tech variation on Moby-Dick, and
by taking us deep inside the world of Gates and his enemies, he vividly reveals their consuming obsession.
Lead players in The Plot are Lawrence Ellison of Oracle, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, Ray Noorda of Novell, Marc Andreessen and James Barksdale of Netscape, Philippe Kahn of Borland, and Gary Kildall (the unsung programmer who could have been Gates), with special guest appearances by venture capitalist John Doerr, consumer activist Ralph Nader, zealous attorney Gary Reback, and the Fraternal Order of Antitrust Lawyers. The author describes each man's ill-fated attempt at besting Gates, who seems to become bigger, hungrier, and more dangerous after each attack.
Rivlin also conducts an in-depth investigation of Gates himself, examining each crucial step in the ascension of the slope-shouldered billionaire with bad hair and unearthing the most telling details to explain why Gates is so rich and we aren't. (The short answer: monomania.) Rivlin concludes with an illuminating analysis of Microsoft's latest upgrade of its CEO, Gates 3.1, which seems to be operating with fewer bugs than previous incarnations.
Gary Rivlin's reporting is irreverent and intellectually independent, free of the romanticized portraits and techno-hype perpetuated by many in the media. As an award-winning political reporter, he brings a fresh perspective to the avaricious, bloodthirsty behavior of these new icons. The result is a savagely funny morality play about big business at the century's end.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Money and success do strange things to people, especially when they're not their own. Perhaps no better example of this phenomenon is Silicon Valley's obsession with Microsoft and its leader, Bill Gates, an obsession that Gary Rivlin examines with great relish and in great detail in The Plot to Get Bill Gates. Rivlin discovers a "king-sized obsession among one-dimensional workaholics" that's known in the industry as "Bill Envy," a phenomenon that has destroyed companies, inspired dozens of jokes (e.g., "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None. Bill Gates will just redefine Darkness^TM as the new industry standard"), and for some raises the possibility of a wider conspiracy that pits Microsoft against everyone else--Silicon Valley, the Justice Department, even Ralph Nader.

From Gates's awkward adolescence to his position as the world's richest man, Rivlin takes a deep look into his character and uses him as a means to reveal the character of those that oppose him, a drama that he likens to that in Moby Dick. Unlike other books about Microsoft (The Microsoft File, How the Web Was Won, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates), Rivlin's tries not to take sides. Nevertheless, the Captain Ahabs (Ray Noorda, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, among others) come off looking less flawed, but certainly not as smart or as calculating or as dangerous as the white whale (Gates). While most of this material will be familiar to anyone who follows Microsoft and its competitors, Rivlin manages to keep the pages turning with dozens of entertaining anecdotes and stories about Gates and his enemies. The Plot to Get Bill Gates is a must for anyone who loves a good old-fashioned high-tech food fight. --Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly

Gates bashing has by now become an obsession in some parts of the world (at least in Silicon Valley, where rival tycoons resent him, and in the Justice Department, where antitrust lawyers burn the midnight oil). Though Rivlin (Drive-By; Fire on the Prairie) takes his shots at Gates, he also takes aim at his rivals, the heads of companies like Novell, IBM and Sun. He chalks up hatred of Gates and Microsoft to a "king-sized obsession among one-dimensional workaholics who'll do practically anything to win"Amaking Gates haters sound a lot like the tyrannical drone they themselves make Gates out to be. Rivlin has little tolerance for Gates's famous arrogance and explicitly takes apart Gates's reputation as a coding whiz. On the other hand, he is frustrated with Gates's complaining competitors, seeing them as doing little more than making business personal. Rivlin's writing, never less than lively, is sometimes truly funny. His thesisAthat the little guys banded together to slay the Microsoft dragon when they should have been minding their own businessesAis persuasive. He has succeeded in writing a disinterested account of the software wars of the 1990s: this is neither a defense of Microsoft nor a screed against Gates. But it is also a little uninterested, as well. Rivlin appears more concerned with repeating the epithets the moguls have flung at each other than with the substance of their business. As entertaining as the book is, many readers will find Rivlin's pox-on-all-their-houses attitude too smug by half. Author tour. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business; 2nd Edition edition (June 29, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812930061
• ISBN-13: 978-0812930061
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,523,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #52 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( G ) > Gates, Bill

More About the Author

I'll confess that in high school I was the type more likely to read the Cliff Notes than the assigned work. I was going to be an engineer; who cared about books? But for a requirement in college I took a literature course and I've been grateful ever since. I joke that I'm a self-taught reader, having pretty much started at age 19.

Politics and social issues propelled me into journalism. I felt like I had something to say so I started to write. In college I always enjoyed reading a great alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader. I began contributing to the Reader and eventually earned a staff job there writing about Chicago politics. That led to my first book, Fire on the Prairie, in which I tell the story of race politics at work in every big city by telling the tale of Chicago during the 1980s, a particularly brutal racial time in that city's history.

Youth violence was the subject of my second book, Drive-By. In that work, I introduce readers to the range of characters and issues at work in a single drive-by shooting that left a 13-year-old dead and put three teenagers in prison for murder. With my third book, The Plot to Get Bill Gates, I returned to my early tech roots.

I left the book world for about a decade. I started writing for a range of magazines, from Wired to the New York Times Magazine to GQ. At the start of 2004, I took a staff position with The New York Times. As terrific experience as that was, I'm very happy to be returning to books and talking about my latest work, BROKE, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. - How the Working Poor Became Big Business.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Down and out in Silicon Valley., December 3, 1999

By 

Jack Jalove - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Plot to Get Bill Gates (Hardcover)

This book contains the single funniest comment I've ever read. It's in the note at the bottom of page 260.

And oh yeah the rest of the pages are worth reading as well altho -- seriously -- I found myself getting depressed at reading how Gates and his company annihilate each rival like an army of ants devours enemies along its path. By book's end, Ellison's line about "the four stages of Microsoft" (p. 249) sure rang true.

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written "tell all" book, February 20, 2001

By 

B. Scott Andersen (Acton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Plot to Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World's Richest Man... and the People Who Hate Him (Paperback)

Reading this book makes me wonder if the climate around the "robber barons" was so intense. Without a doubt, Bill Gates has become the focus of admiration and ire throughout the computer industry. This book attempts to answer the question "why?".

Few come out of this work unscathed by the unflattering portrayal Rivlin gives computer industry heavys. Gates is scrutinized intensely in the beginning of the book, during the rapid ascent of Microsoft, but the vast majority of the book concerns itself with "the people who hate him." Leaders from giants Novell, Oracle, Wordperfect, and others are reduced to defining themselves by what they are not: Bill Gates.

For whatever reason, only two women discussed (Heidi Roisen and Kim Polese) are portrayed in a mildly positive light. Perhaps all this just comes down to testosterone after all.

The book contains an interesting history about products as well as people: OS/2, MS Word, Excel, NetWare, and, of course Windows. There is a particularly long description of the genesis of Java, perhaps the only thing Gates has not been able to either crush, co-opt, or corrupt. Java's story alone is worth the price of the book.

Tell-all books rarely deserve more than a middle-of-the-road rating. However, this one was well written enough and well researched enough to "sneak up" to a four-star assessment. For those interested in the subject, this book is well worth your time.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Accurate + Timely + Fast Reading = Winner, August 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Plot to Get Bill Gates (Hardcover)

You will feel like you were a fly on the walls for the past decade in the fast paced fields of computer software and the internet. While others have tackled this topic, Rivlin's strict attention to the details and facts, his unwillingness to be swayed by anecdotes, plus his ability to retell a story, make for a more enjoyable fast read on a variety of levels. These corporate leaders are not driven by altruistic pursuits for the betterment of mankind, these are businesses run by highly influential men driven by money, ego and power. I now chuckle at PR fluff stories about Gates, Ellison and McNeally in magazines and newspapers. This book is so timely it seems as if it was written days, not months ago - the author's conclusions are constantly being validated by the daily headlines. Can't wait for his next book! Enjoy it.