Getting to grips with Gates

In imperial China wearing glasses was considered the height of attractiveness. It denoted breeding, intelligence and a good job. In our anglo-American culture, however, there is an ambiguity - a hangover from the gentlemanly gifted amateur of imperial Britain or the high school hero-turned businessman of the US - when it comes to brains.

Swot, nerd and geek are the sobriquets tossed with abandon around schoolyards and the attitude lingers in adulthood. When they prosper, it challenges our preconceptions.

When confronted by ferocious intelligence, allied to serious commercial success and leavened with a fair dose of eccentricity we get decidedly edgy. When confronted by Bill Gates we get scared.

His company, Microsoft, is the behemoth of the software industry. It is turning its attentions to the Internet in a big way and is dabbling in other media projects. To detractors Microsoft and Gates are like some super-Bond concoction hell-bent on world domination. To supporters, just a company in the right time with the right products and with the right leader.

However, it is how it arrived at this position that is at the nub of Wendy Goldman Rohm's Microsoft File and it makes interesting reading. It is an account of how Gates carved out this position by ruthlessly eliminating his competitors and acquiring a near worldwide monopoly. It is a litany of neutered opposition companies, broken deals and false promises as well as a testimony to Gate's fearsome ability and the elan and drive of his creation. It is also an expose of the unwieldy and torturously slow Federal forces marshalled against him as Microsoft and the US government clashed in a series of anti-trust (monopoly busting) cases.

One of the central themes running through Rohm's book is that Gates's personality has informed Microsoft's culture. Obsessive secrecy, personalising conflict with other companies, a rather immature approach to women and overweening desire to triumph. The other is that Microsoft's dominance was not perceived as a threat until too late and even then most people in the wider world didn't care as all they wanted was affordable software that worked and didn't care who made it.

Rohm compares Gates to Rockefeller, another capitalist pioneer of the last great commercial frontier - oil - and specifically to Standard Oil's attempt to corner the market. She points out that anti-trust concerns were much greater then, yet argues that Gates quest is much more threatening. He has achieved much more dominance than Rockefeller ever did in the new frontier of the knowledge industry.

One caveat is that it is written in that dense style beloved of the American financial writer and the bulk of the principals are completely unknown outside of the industry. That aside, The Microsoft File is a fascinating account of the Microsoft wars of the last decade.