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Silicon Follies
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Rivlin has attempted, as the subtitle puts it, "an irreverent investigation of the world's richest man ... and the people who hate him." Not content to be just another profile of Gates and his business tactics, this book hopes to gaze into the psyches of Gates and his enemies -- the Scott McNealys and Larry Ellisons of the world -- who would love nothing so much as to watch Microsoft die a slow, painful death. The "plot to get" Gates is essentially the ambition of those foes, most suffering from a really bad case of Bill Envy, to succeed him in his throne.

The Plot to Get Bill Gates By Gary Rivlin Times Business 360 pages

It's pretty tricky to get into Gates' psyche without access to the man himself. But Rivlin has managed to build a pretty comprehensive profile, using an army of secondary sources. In fact, he must have collected a veritable library of Redmond exposés. The index of "The Plot to Get Bill Gates" lists his sources, including "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire," "Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace" and, of course, "Gates: How Microsoft's mogul reinvented an industry -- and made himself the richest man in America" plus "Accidental Empires," "microserfs," "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" and a host of other exhaustively titled tomes. Plus, there are features from every conceivable news outlet from Barbara Walters to Playboy to the Wall Street Journal to the MicroSucks Web site. One thing you certainly can say about Gary Rivlin is that he did his homework.

Unfortunately, Rivlin's list of references is indicative of one of the flaws of "The Plot to Get Bill Gates." The Microsoft canon is already so voluminous, that it's difficult to find much new to say about the company or its leader. We know from endless profiles, cover stories, investigative reports and so on, that Gates is odd, childish, geeky, a ruthless capitalist whom the rest of the industry loathes -- and lately, a devoted husband and father. We've heard about the battles between Netscape and Microsoft and about the Justice Department versus Microsoft, so many times already that Gates as a subject just smacks of staleness.

Next page | Who doesn't resent Bill Gates?