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Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America | 
 enlarge | Authors: Stephen Manes, Paul Andrews
Publisher: Touchstone
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $34.94 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 85616
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Touchstone Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 560
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0671880748
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.7610053092
EAN: 9780671880743
ASIN: 0671880748
Publication Date: January 21, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Product Description
Gates reveals the guiding genius behind the unparalleled success of the Microsoft Corporation-- the biggest and most profitable personal computer software company in history-- and exposes the intensely competitive tactics that help it dominate the desktops of America. Chairman and co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates is the most powerful person in the computer industry and the youngest self-made billionaire in history. His company's DOS and Windows programs are such universal standards that more than nine out of ten personal computers depend on Microsoft software. Under the "Microsoft Everywhere" rallying cry, Gates intends to expand his company's worldwide dominance to office equipment, communications, and home entertainment. Vivid and definitive, Gates details the behind the scenes history of the personal computer industry and its movers and shakers, from Apple to IBM, from Steve Jobs to Ross Perot. Uncovering the inside stories of the bitter battle for control of the expanding personal computing market, Gates is a bracing, comprehensive portrait of the industry, the company, and the man-- and what they mean for a future where software is everything.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 If you really want to know September 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I loved this book because I'm highly interested in what leads a person down the road they travel in life, especially for top business thinkers like Bill Gates. This book takes you there, with every painstaking detail, which I thought was just great! Highly recommended.
 The golly-geewhiz boyscout version of the early Gates April 7, 2007
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is the version of Microsoft and the rise of Gates that you should read if you think that computers are utterly wonderful and fascinating things in themselves: it is full of breathless excitment, multiple exclamation points, and minute personal detail. The tone of the book would suggest that the development of software for the PC is as fantastic a technological achievement as putting men on the moon, or even, if you go along with the quote that precedes the introduction, as godlike as the creation of the universe. (I kid you not on that quote.)
However, if you think of computers as a flawed, though useful tool that you want to use, that you want to work for the task at hand and do not care to coax it through innumerable design flaws and bugs, that kind of ga-ga view is as preposterous as it is specious. I found reading this a dreary task of wending my way though a proliferation of silly adjectives and presumptions about the significance of what was being achieved. Don't get me wrong, I love my computer and its instant info access (particularly as a writer), but I do not equate it with anything as significant as the invention of movable type. If you never felt like a god while programming a hobbyist computer or shared kid geeks' excitment at telephoning a mainframe in the late 1960s - what these first programmers were achieving is never even explained, as the book assumes the reader should know - this gets pretty tedious after a few hundred pages of pure hyperbole. Unbelievable as it may seem, there are those of us who want their computers to work as reliably and simply as toasters (as an acquaintence, who is an employee at MS, characterised me).
That tone aside, you get a fairly good idea of how Gates did what he did up until the early 1990s. At building a great company, there is no question he was a genius. Moreover, it is interesting in that he understood and contributed to the early technology's development, yet had the guts, self confidence, and business smarts to do it all. Now that is something I deeply respect. He was lucky to be sure, but he was able to do what a lot of others couldn't. Gates made a huge number of path-breaking decisions about licensing, pricing schemes, intellectual property questions, etc., which are complex and extremely innovative and savvy.
Nonetheless, this book covers much of the same ground that "Hard Drive" does, and in fact offers much less than that book. In particular, this book does not question how Microsoft does business, i.e. whether it is unfair or unethical. As such, it is wholly admiring hagiography, even if it portrays Gates as an abrasive and very difficult person. You get virtually no insight into the FTC anti-trust case or the supposed unfair advantages the MS got from selling both the operating system and higher-level application which forces competitors to share their technology, while MS does not have to do so. Whatever your opinion, these are tough questions that need to be asked and debated.
As such, behind the florid razzle-dazzle rhetoric, this book fails to dig deeply. Indeed, I think they got a lot of what motivated Gates wrong: they imply that because he discovered people of equal talent in mathematics at Harvard and so went into computers and business instead. They explain little that you find in Hard Drive about his ruthless competitive spirit or how he incessently read about great conquerors as well as the hard core business press. He wanted to build an empire from an early age, and he loved computers in a way I will never comprehend.
With these criticisms in mind, I would not recommend this book for critical readers who want to understand the company. The authors, in my reading, unabashedly worship Gates and assume the reader shares their unbounded enthusiasm for software and computer technology. There is more to it than that, far more.
Not recommended.
Very informative and well written March 16, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you want to know more about Microsoft's early history, Bill Gates' life, and the history of personal computers, you will find this book highly appropriate for the job. Gates book reads more like a novel, as it's full of anecdotes, personal accounts, and photographs. This is a great book.
A Detailed History in the Making of a Monoply... June 4, 2003
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
I won't get wordy here but I read this book twice and enjoyed it both times. It goes into the life of Bill Gates; his thought process, his work ethics, his childhood and how Microsoft established it's dominance. It's a good read even though it's over 500 pages. I highly recommend this book along with the book "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire". This is the way it really happened. Not the way the movie "Pirates of SV" incorrectly portrayed it.
Great history of PC computing February 2, 2003
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I bought this book expecting to skim through it to find out a little more about what Bill Gates was like. But it's a wonderfully readable history of the growth of PC's, from the early days when the best a school kid (Bill himself) could do was to try to get access to a teletype time-share system, on through the first home "computers" that amounted to little more than a bunch of switches and LEDs (no keyboard or monitor), to IBM coming out with the PC and Microsoft's amazing good fortune at supplying the OS (great story! Bill just cared about programming languages, mostly BASIC, and saw the DOS manuever mostly just as a way to ensure that BASIC would run on the new IBM machine!), on thru the OS/2 vs. Windows battles.It even has a lot of inside detail on the development of the Apple Macintosh. I recently read "Accidental Empires" (the basis for the TV documentary "Triumph of the Nerds"), and found Gates to be a far better and more readable history of the PC's startup. The book is packed with interviews and amusing or interesting anecdotes. It's well written and well edited. One drawback for some people will be that it hasn't been updated since 1995, but for the two main things that have happened since then - the anti-trust suit against Microsoft and the rise of the Internet - there are plenty of other sources.
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