This addition to the apparently unending stream of books about Microsoft contributes some new material and a little improved insight to our understanding of Bill Gates and his creature. It falls short, however, of reaching its stated goal of answering the question “What accounts for Microsoft’s place in the cosmos?”

Stross takes up five themes: the business practices and corporate culture that Microsoft developed before 1990 and continued to apply afterwards; how Microsoft used the advent of CD-ROMs to dominate the consumer software market; the series of changes in Microsoft’s strategic direction as it turned from denigrating the Internet to embracing it; whether Microsoft is a monopoly and whether this is bad; and, in an afterword, the meaning and implications of Gates’s great wealth.

Each part is a thoughtful but wandering academic essay, almost overloaded with journalistic detail, including names, numbers, dates, and quotations, that reflects the unimpeded access to Microsoft records and people that Stross was given. He repeatedly calls up subthemes that are important to him: Is Gates a Ford or an Edison? Is Microsoft an evil empire? Is Gates an anti-intellectual? Other subthemes include Moore’s law, world conditions, world opinions, the Encarta encyclopedia, Nathan Myhrvold, the Gates puff-piece The road ahead [1], and many other topics currently fashionable in Silicon Valley and the academic world. Unfortunately, Stross has not successfully integrated all of this diverse material into a coherent whole. The resultant scramble gives me the impression that it was written as a set of separate essays and then, with the magic of word processing, hurriedly assembled. The haste may be reflected in the fact that the numbering of the five parts in the introduction does not correspond with the parts as printed.

The book is, at best, only part of the real Microsoft story that its subtitle claims, and only a partial analysis of Gates and Microsoft and their place in American history. In some ways it resembles those highly hyped software products that promise much and deliver little, and where even what is delivered, although useful, is not what was promised.

The book is not without merit. There are many gems of information about Microsoft and Gates that future historians will find and use. Stross’s explanations of the details of Microsoft’s history are often superior to those of the paid publicists and eager journalists who surround all success. I was particularly pleased by his explanation of the stock option system.

I can recommend the book to those who so much seek a little more understanding of its linked subjects that they are willing to force their way through a jungle of words that a determined editor could have chopped in half.