The authors of this book are Seattle journalists who have covered the spectacular rise of Microsoft in the past few years. It is based mainly on an extensive set of interviews with most of the major players, although neither Microsoft nor Gates personally cooperated with the project. The interviews are supplemented by some references to the secondary literature on the subject.

The authors claim that they present in this book a more accurate portrayal of many events that unfortunately have been distorted by mythmakers. One such event was the famous day when IBM executives went to Gary Kildall to discuss using CP/M for their personal computer. The legend has it that Kildall was off flying his airplane somewhere, so IBM turned north to Seattle. Wallace and Jackson do not say they have found out exactly what happened, but they did interview nearly everyone involved with that day, and they reconstruct a plausible sequence of events based on the never-perfect memories of those who were there. Readers who follow such minutiae will certainly want this book. It is a useful companion to books like Ichbiah’s The making of Microsoft [1] and Freiberger’s Fire in the valley [2].

The book’s thesis is simply that Bill Gates, like some others in the field blessed with a talent for the technical issues of programming, is different from the others by virtue of his obsessive drive and ambition. The authors give plenty of examples to back this up. They are not so sure whether his actions are praiseworthy, though. They quote liberally and equally from one group of people who praise Gates’s sure grasp of the technical issues and credit him for creating a vibrant industry and from another group who call him an evil man, a blight on the industry, and worse. The authors cannot decide which picture is correct.

At times they seem flustered in their attempt to resolve this dilemma. They note his astrological sign (Scorpio); people born under this sign are said to be “aggressive and stimulated by conflict” (p. 10). They recount a trip to an amusement park, where the boy Gates played bumper cars: “Although he was barely big enough to see over the steering wheel of the cars, he took particular delight in slamming into adult drivers” (p. 16). The book has a few minor but irritating errors: the authors seem to have trouble locating Armonk, New York, for example. They put it at first “across the Hudson” from Manhattan; later on, they say it is “about an hour’s drive north of New York City in the Hudson Valley,” which better describes Poughkeepsie. This confusion is a minor detail but maddening just the same, as it leaves the reader unsure just how much to believe the authors when they say they have ferreted out the facts from confusing legends about Microsoft and Bill Gates. With that as a warning, I recommend the book for those who enjoy keeping up with the volatile and unpredictable world of personal computer software.