Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace

Citation

Farkas, Z. (1999), "Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace", Internet Research, Vol. 9 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.1999.17209caf.004

Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace

Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace

Wallace, J.John Wiley & Sons Inc.New York, NY1997307 pp.ISBN 0-471-29106-4$14.95Available: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012.

Although this book is an update, or sequel to Hard Drive, the previous book on the success story of Microsoft and of its CEO Bill Gates, that J. Wallace co-authored, the reader need not be familiar with that one to enjoy reading Overdrive. And although Microsoft has been receiving much publicity (in fact, far more than any of its competitors), this book has a lot of new information and tiny but important details on how Microsoft and other software companies were affected by the Internet Revolution.

The book is divided into seven chapters (plus prologue and epilogue) that are put together as a mosaic or as a video clip rather. The prologue, titled "Prelude to War", takes the reader back in time to August 23, 1995 ­ a day before the official launch ceremony of Windows 95. As an opening scene of the video clip we see how Microsoft and Bill Gates himself are busy with the arrangements for the show. Not too many details though, the reader is soon dragged on to the next scene ­ after all, that's how clips work. Chapter one, The Road Ahead summarizes what happened to Microsoft (in terms of revenues and market share at least) up to 1993. This part of the story is well known ­ two digits growth for the company and the billionaire status to Bill Gates personally.

However, as Microsoft is busy coding Windows 95 and designing its own proprietary online service, Netscape Communications is set up and the Internet Revolution is about to flare up. One of the strengths of the book is that it makes clear how unready Microsoft and its competitors were to catch up with the new trends ­ but more on that later.

Chapter two is a major jump in both topic and style. Titled The Trustbuster, this chapter is a very detailed description of the legal battles of Microsoft ­ and of the parties and people involved in the many cases against the software giant. Characterizations are very vivid throughout the book but perhaps they are best in Chapter two. "Trustbuster" refers to Anne Bingaman, the Clinton administration's head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division whose office got involved in one of the cases after the Federal Trade Commission had failed to decide on a federal injunction against Microsoft. Although details of the legal battles may be interesting for some of the readers and they definitely help understand the present antitrust trial (and the motives behind it) better, they are of lesser importance concerning the rest of the story ­ the race to control cyberspace.

Returning from the legal battlefields, chapter three, Internet 101 takes on where chapter one left ­ how Microsoft imagined the future of computers and electronic communications, and how some bright men at the company realized that this vision was actually false. For a reader interested in how research and development was (and probably is) carried out at Microsoft and how strategic decisions were (are?) made, this is definitely the most interesting chapter of Overdrive. Even if it sounds nonsense now as Microsoft's dominance on the consumer market is unquestionable, after reading this excellently written chapter of the book the reader realizes that Microsoft hardly made it to the Information Age.

The company's great luck was that its competitors made the very same mistakes ­ instead of watching and analyzing the trends, they tried to set them based on the visions of a few people. This was a mistake and they paid a great price: by the time Microsoft finally "got wired", they were "ages" behind newcomers like Netscape. This is not established so simply in the book, instead, the reader is free to put two and two together.

For most people the word Microsoft and the name Bill Gates mean just the same, and a book on one of them is necessarily a book on the other as well. Overdrive is no exception; author J. Wallace correctly realizes that understanding Gates' personality is of primary importance in explaining the success story of Microsoft.

Chapter four, Bachelor Tycoon Takes a Wife is intended to serve this purpose; using his road to the wedding ceremony as a framework the author tries to tell as many details about Bill Gates as he could collect. Since neither Microsoft, nor Gates cooperated with the research, this was a difficult task and it is clearly observable on the quality of this chapter. While Wallace is very successful in describing Bill Gates through his deeds in other parts of the book, this chapter does not contribute as much to the final image as is was intended to. Nevertheless, readers interested in biographical and personal details will like this chapter.

Chapter five, The Davids vs. Goliath deals mainly (though not exclusively) with the competition: how Novell, Borland, Lotus and WordPerfect fought a double-front war against Microsoft and against each other and what mistakes they made. This chapter benefits a lot from the enormous amount of research the author did when collecting materials for the book; he made interviews with almost all the then-prominent leaders of these companies and with a lot of anonymous insiders as well. The part of the chapter that deals with the negotiations among these companies leaves no questions unanswered. Chapter two ended in the middle of an antitrust case and the reader must wait until the end of this chapter to see how the case was finally settled without a trial.

As the title: The Sleeping Giant Awakens suggests, chapter six, along with chapter seven, Nothing but the Net, tells the rest of the story: how Microsoft fought the Browser War with Netscape (along with some other minor battles), and how it transformed itself into the no.1 Internet company, as we know it today. Since most readers remember the Browser War quite well, the story itself is not new, but the author collected so much background and/or previously hidden information (and organized them so well) that it's like reading an old second hand thriller for the zillionth time and then realizing that someone inserted a previously missing chapter into it while we were not looking. Many things just got clear...

Writing a book on software industry today is a risky project, to say the least. The very same day the book goes into publication the companies featured in it might simply cease to exist. Although this was quite unlikely in the case of Microsoft, author James Wallace was careful enough not to make any predictions. And he was wise to do so: the word Linux does not appear in his book ­ would he (and could he) leave it unmentioned if he was writing Overdrive today?

Zoltan FarkasDepartment of Information SystemsUniversity of Veszprem