The Plot to Get Bill Gates - Hardcover

Rivlin, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812930061 ISBN 13: 9780812930061

Publisher: Crown Business, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Gary Rivlin is the author of two acclaimed works of nonfiction, Drive-By and Fire on the Prairie: Chicago's Harold Washington and the Politics of Race, winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Nonfiction and the Chicago Sun-Times Nonfiction Book of the Year. He has reported on city politics for The Chicago Reader and the East Bay Express. His work has appeared in many publications, including The Nation, Upside, In These Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1993, he received the San Francisco Bay Area Media Alliance's Print Journalist of the Year Award for his reporting on urban violence. He lives in Oakland and is editor of the East Bay Express.

From the Back Cover

"What a sweet book this is---so shrewd about the larger-than-life personalities who rule the world of computer software; so joyously written; so filled with both rollicking tales of the software wars and powerful insights about the nature of high-tech competition. I learned far more than I thought I would from reading The Plot to Get Bill Gates. And I had an awfully good time doing so."
--Joseph Nocera, editor-at-large, Fortune

"In gripping, fast-paced style, Gary Rivlin takes us inside the business battle of the new century, the relentless pursuit of Bill Gates by his powerhouse rivals. With meticulous detail and keen intellectual independence, Rivlin takes us on an amusing and provocative trip inside the world of Gates and various anti-Gates conspiracies. Rivlin is a resourceful reporter, a passionate writer, and a marvelous storyteller who offers a fresh and exciting look at today's cyber-barons."
--Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize--winning
columnist for the Chicago Tribune

"Gary Rivlin does for the nineties what Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers did for the sixties, memorably chronicling the pretension and foibles of era-defining individuals with a very sharp quill. The Plot to Get Bill Gates combines impressive reporting, original analysis, and a keen eye for telling details that illuminate a larger story of mass obsession. This is Melville updated for our times, with a Politically Incorrect twist of humor."
--Randall Stross, author of The Microsoft Way

From the Inside Flap

d 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."<br>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 <br>by taking us deep inside the world of Gates and his enemies, he vividly reveals their consuming obsession. <br>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),

Reviews

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.

In a world of high finance and sometimes large egos, it's easy to hate the richest man in the worldAand many in that world have no trouble passionately hating Bill Gates. Bay Area journalist Rivlin has covered this world for several years, and he draws on this experienceAincluding a press visit to Gates's homeAin this account of how Gates has drawn attacks from obsessed competing executives, users of his products (and adamant nonusers), consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The book's scope is broader than the title implies; it treats a number of Microsoft's competitors in some depth and provides some recent history of the computer industry. Throughout, Rivlin entertains with a light writing style and the promised irreverence, concluding with a brief set of jokes about Gates and Microsoft. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.AA.J. Sobczak, Covina, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
CAPTAIN AHAB'S CLUB

Back in 1993, a halcyon time when it was still possible to read through an entire magazine without coming across the name Bill Gates, Novell CEO Ray Noorda and Gates engaged in one of those public sneering matches that both antagonists might come to regret, but only later, long after the verbal stilettos had done their damage. The Utah-based Novell had devised a clever means of connecting groups of freestanding personal computers so that coworkers could share printers and computer files. This was in the early 1980s. Since that time, Novell had been drawing billions of dollars from this single product in a market that Microsoft had never quite managed to crack.

Life was torture for the Microsoft team charged with conceiving and then marketing a rival product to Novell's. First it was Microsoft Net; then, after five years of futility, it was LAN-Man (LAN for "local area network," Man for "manager"). Gates used the carrot with his minions and also the stick. Microsoft rallies were held and milestones celebrated--and then when that failed, as inevitably it did, Gates would scream. "I've never met a stupider, more inept group in my fucking life!" he'd yell in a tweedling whine. "How fucking hard can it be?" Despite everything, Microsoft could barely dent Novell's market share. By the early 1990s, Novell would rank fourth on a listing of the largest high-tech companies, behind only Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.

Twice Microsoft approached Noorda about buying his company; both times Gates later claimed a change of heart. Not without reason, Noorda felt taken--felt that Gates and his minions were cozying up to Novell only to learn what they could with the kimono open. Noorda could live with Gates's yearly boasts at COMDEX (the computer dealers' trade show) that this would be the year Microsoft overtook Novell. Long ago he had made his peace with Microsoft's penchant for bad-mouthing Novell in meetings with Novell's largest customers and its practice of offering deep discounts on other Microsoft products if a big company would switch to LAN-Man. But what Noorda believed were phony merger talks proved to be too much. Noorda told anyone willing to listen--fellow computer execs, federal investigators, and eventually journalists working for the country's top business publications--that the boy wonder was really a monster in the making.

The first Noorda quote that got everyone's attention appeared in Business Week in 1993. "To have a heart-to-heart," he said when asked about his short-lived merger negotiations with Gates, "you have to have two hearts." In response, Gates puffed out his concave chest and charged that Noorda was growing "increasingly paranoid." Gates's number two, Steve Ballmer, a bull of a man with a megaphone voice, decried Novell as a "dirty" competitor selling a packet of "lies" to the press. And from there the fight escalated. "Bill Gates's behavior is an insult to the industry and to the world," Noorda said in another interview. He dubbed Gates "Pearly" and Ballmer "The Embalmer" and then proudly explained his little joke to anyone who asked. Gates was Pearly because he promised you heaven, while behind the scenes Ballmer prepared you for burial.

Noorda organized meetings with executives from Lotus, WordPerfect, and other companies selling software products so successfully that Gates seemed to take it personally. "We're all a bunch of sissies," Noorda declared. "Let's stand up to that little squirt!" Feature articles about Noorda, a man well into his sixties when most of his counterparts were still in their thirties, tended to use terms such as "avuncular" and "grandfatherly" to describe him, but Microsoft let it leak to the press that it tended to call old Ray the "grandfather from Hell."

Noorda has gotten so personal, Microsoft's executives would cluck. They'd shake their heads and talk about the toll Noorda's outbursts were taking on Gates. Poor Bill, they'd say to one another with tight frowns. Business is one thing, but saying Bill has no heart? That's just plain cruel. Ballmer is Gates's best friend, but it was Nathan Myhrvold, the company's chief technology officer and Gates's alter ego, who turned to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick during a high-level Microsoft staff meeting, hitting on a metaphor that allowed the group to transcend the sting of Noorda's insults.

"Sometimes I think Nathan sees his job as making everyone laugh inside our meetings," says a top chieftain who has witnessed countless episodes of the Bill-and-Nathan show. Another Microsoft employee described the relationship between the two as "an old and complicated marriage that no one outside the relationship can hope to understand." The two make an unlikely match. Whereas Gates is a furrowed-brow pessimist, Myhrvold is the cheery optimist. Myhrvold is so well rounded it's almost frightening, Gates so monomaniacal about business and technology that it makes one shudder. Every time Gates loyalists hailed his ability to discuss a wide range of topics, not just technology and business, I'd press them for examples. They would mention genetic engineering, physics, world economics, artificial intelligence, satellite technology--every example offered fell under either the hard sciences or business. Myhrvold is every bit Gates's intellectual match, but by contrast he's an accomplished chef (with a first-place finish in the worldwide barbecue cook-off held in Memphis, Tennessee), an amateur photographer, a fly fisherman, a race-car driver, and a bungee jumper.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812930061
• ISBN 13: 9780812930061
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360