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Gates
Manes S., Andrews P., Doubleday, New York, NY, 1993. Type: Book (9780385420754)
Date Reviewed: Jan 1 1994

The shelf of books about the life and career of Bill Gates keeps growing. The reasons for the fascination with Gates and Microsoft are not hard to discern--they are the same reasons that for many years there was a torrent of books on IBM. Microsoft dominates the personal computer business today and, as these books all agree, Bill Gates dominates Microsoft. This volume in many ways resembles the other books, only it is much more detailed and comprehensive. Both the authors have a talent for digging out little details and assembling them into a bigger picture, while Manes’s understanding of the technical subjects helps keep the book focused on the technology of writing software.

As they point out, Bill Gates cultivates the image that he is able to stay on top of the technical issues in developing new software. That is what sets him and his company apart from his competitors, which are run by technically illiterate “suits” and other unspeakably lower forms of life. Unlike most other writers about Microsoft who take this myth at face value, however, Manes and Andrews analyze it critically and dissect it. Their conclusions are provocative. As everyone knows, Gates never graduated from college, and his Microsoft empire was constructed largely by self-taught programmers who knew how to hack out workable code under a tight deadline. And Gates does keep abreast of the technical work done at his company. At the same time, Microsoft has a reputation for products of only middling quality, lagging behind Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, and Borland in specific applications.

The authors hint that the two facts may be related. Though Gates’s genius as a businessman is not disputed, his technical knowledge, of which he is so proud, may be hobbled by his lack of formal training in computer science. He (and, by extension, the people he gathers around him at Microsoft) can produce code, it is true, but not elegant, terse code that wins the envy of his fellow programmers. At one point, the authors toss out an anecdote about how Gates ruined an expensive new car because he “forgot” to check the oil in the crankcase. For them, it is an indication of his intense focus on Microsoft to the exclusion of everything else; it also reminds us just how wealthy he is. But for me, this story reveals perhaps more than the authors intended: in some important dimension, Gates is not a technologist. Could you imagine, say, Jack Kilby letting that happen?

Manes and Andrews hint at this connection but do not do much else with it. As the subtitle of the book makes clear, they prefer to concentrate on Gates’s talent for making money and outwitting his competitors, especially IBM. In that he is without peer. But I wished for more about the software itself--what is the relationship of what Microsoft does to what is taught in the universities? Computer science is continually surprised by the computer, as the late Alan Perlis once said; should it be surprised by the PC software industry as well? Perhaps that will be the subject of another book.

The book is thoroughly researched and covers the founding and emergence of Microsoft well. The crucial moments, such as when Gates delivered BASIC for the Altair computer, and when he crafted an agreement with IBM to provide an operating system for the PC, are as dramatic and full of tension as anything a novelist could write. In the later chapters, though, the book founders in a mass of details, with long passages that contain little more than who said what to whom at a Comdex meeting somewhere. I doubt that many readers will care much about that. The book is a little longer than it had to be, but on the whole it is worth getting. Even as it adds to our collection of books about this important man and his company, however, the need remains for a critical and objective history of the development and spread of personal computing, including its software.

Reviewer:  P. E. Ceruzzi Review #: CR117350
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