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Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 47: The contractor's contractor -- migrant labor on steroids
By Thomas Scoville
[08/25/99]

Palestinian refugees get wired
What can the Internet bring to a culture that has been scattered across the world?
By Flore de Preneuf
[08/24/99]

We have computers. Why aren't we more productive?
Technology doesn't usually save companies time or money -- but in a competitive world, it often keeps them in business.
By Cate T. Corcoran
[08/23/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 46: Green tea and red ink -- Barry loses millions over breakfast
By Thomas Scoville
[08/21/99]

Six-packs, macaroni and software
Does stuff you like make for stocks you should hold? And why do companies offer "affinity groups" cheap stock when they go public?
By Mark Gimein
[08/20/99]

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Rivlin's premise that technology has become an industry where "everything seemed merely an asterisk to Microsoft" may be slightly tenuous, but he supports it with lots of juicy details of deals and the tempers behind them. Rivlin clearly spoke to a huge number of industry veterans and the result is a collection of titillating and nasty nuggets about these bigwigs.

We learn, for example, that Gates' secretary had a burger joint loaded into her speed dial; how Oracle's Larry Ellison would lead his minions into competition with the chant "kill, kill, kill"; that Sun's Java programmers spent so many idle months waiting for Sun to develop a strategy that they damaged their tendons playing arcade games; that there's a run on blue Lexuses among "Softies" because that's Gates' current car of choice. Rivlin, executive editor of the East Bay Express, the Berkeley alternative weekly, is a marvelous writer who has a talent for colorful description of people and events -- even those he didn't attend. Consider this passage about Steve Ballmer's speech at an Microsoft all-hands meeting in 1991:

"He stood on stage, punching a meaty fist into a palm, yelling 'Win! Doze! Win! Doze! Win! Doze!' at the top of his lungs for so long and so hard that he ended up requiring throat surgery afterward ... Ballmer was just getting warmed up. The veins in his temples swelled like ropes, blisters of sweat formed on his bald dome. His face turned the color of tomato bisque. There's no time for gloating, he warned, not while they're still getting lunch handed to him."

But Rivlin's book sometimes spends too much time lingering over these kinds of details, at the expense of developing a coherent argument about Gates. The structure of the book is baffling -- it jumps around in time, profiling Gates, then a competitor, then considering more dirt on Gates, jumping back to the valley, discussing Internet mania, then the role of venture capitalists, a history of the network computer and then back to Gates and on to describe the plethora of anti-Gates Web sites. It's as if Rivlin feels that, since all roads lead back to Microsoft, he has to cover all the major events of Silicon Valley history just to be safe. But this super-comprehensive approach means that almost every topic gets short-changed -- including the antitrust trial, which gets a hyped-up intro, but is glossed over at the end of the book.

If "The Plot" is about anything, it's about why, as Rivlin puts it, "A $40 billion nest egg means that we as a society need to knock you off the pedestal that we have put you on, to tame you, to fit you into an oddly shaped box." (That "we," as the book makes evident, includes Rivlin, who clearly doesn't like Gates much more than Microsoft's competitors do). It's about Gates's success and how it has led inevitably to his celebrity and his role as most despised despot. After all, he argues, who doesn't resent Bill Gates?

"The Plot to Get Bill Gates" works best when it focuses on the personal side of the business -- the characters and habits and foibles of the numerous male egos who run the tech industry and who seem sometime single-mindedly obsessed with Microsoft. And what egos they are: Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, Philippe Kahn, Ray Noorda, John Doerr, are all given equal treatment in this book, and all of them come off looking bad. After reading page after page about the self-important rich men who run the industry, you may never want to use a computer again.

Each has his own nasty habits -- Ellison's women, McNealy's frat-boy behavior, Noorda's monomaniacal obsessiveness -- but their common fatal flaw, Rivlin believes, is a sense of greed. This is a greed driven by jealousy -- a desire to overtake Bill Gates and his billions at the pinnacle of the industry. The quest to defeat Microsoft, Rivlin posits, has less to do with good software and more to do with a self-righteous feeling that the "underdog" needs to knock the big guy off his perch at the top of the stock market -- and step into his place.

Next page | How does Rivlin, an outsider, get inside Bill's head?