Profiling the success of technology's giants

The trillion-dollar computer industry is now dominated by impossibly rich nerds, many of whom started their companies in garages. Now publishers are trying to cash in by producing a stream of books about these rags-to-riches stories.

Mr Tim Berners-Lee is, of course, an exception: he's British rather than American, and poor even by the standards of Microsoft programmers, thousands of whom are multimillionaires.

Still, Mr Berners-Lee's name will go down in history as the creator of the World Wide Web and to help history get its facts right, he's written it all down in Weaving the Web with Mr Mark Fischetti, published by Orion. It's not Homer but it's well worth reading.

Another innovator to tell his own story is the multibillionaire founder of Dell Computer, Mr Michael Dell - with a little help from Ms Catherine Fredman, who has also collaborated with Intel's Mr Andy Grove. Again, Direct From Dell: Strategies that Revolutionized An Industry (HarperCollins Business) isn't a thrilling read, but it does build a rounded image of a very effective businessman. Would-be entrepreneurs should be able to pick up a few tips.

Ms Karen Southwick's High Noon: The Inside Story Of Scott McNealy And The Rise Of Sun Microsystems (John Wiley & Sons) is a different matter, partly because Mr McNealy is a far more colourful character. As cheerleader for Silicon Valley's anti-Microsoft brigade, he's never short of a well-honed insult.

The problem is that there's little about him in High Noon. He declined to be interviewed for the book.

Instead, Ms Southwick provides an account of the rise of the company that currently dominates the Unix server market. She devotes far too little space to the "Unix wars" (1988-93), when Sun tried to take over the industry, and far too much space to the overhyped Java language. But that's probably what the IT industry wants.

At least Mr McNealy gets an easier ride than the characters in Mr Michael S Malone's huge Infinite Loop (Aurum Press). Its lengthy subtitle - "how Apple, the world's most insanely great computer company, went insane" - does not mislead.

Mr Malone grew up alongside Apple's co-founders, Mr Steve Jobs and Mr Steve Wozniak, and reported on the company for the local paper, the San Jose Mercury News. He does a thorough job of debunking the mythology Apple has spent millions of dollars fostering, and provides enough detail to keep trivia quiz compilers happy for decades.

Like the PC software market, the publishing industry seems to be increasingly dominated by books about Microsoft and its nerdy cofounder, Mr Bill Gates. Mr Gary Rivlin leads the pack with The Plot To Get Bill Gates (Quartet Books). It's a racy read, which captures the essence of the story while skipping much of the detail. And while Mr Rivlin frequently dishes the dirt on Mr Gates, he doesn't spare his envious enemies either.

Mr Paul Andrews - co-author of the best biography, Gates (Simon & Schuster) - has returned to the field with How the Web Was Won (Broadway Books). This brings the story up to date from the time of the earlier book, published in 1993.

Like Mr Gates, it's meticulously researched and very readable. There's no obvious bias, but as a reporter for the Seattle Times, Microsoft's local paper, Mr Andrews doesn't take the kind of potshots that Mr Rivlin enjoys.

Microsoft has also come in for some serious study, particularly in Winners, Losers & Microsoft: Competition And Antitrust In High Technology (Independent Institute) by two US professors of economics, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. It's an important book, if sometimes heavy going.

It looks as though it started as an examination of the economics of technology industries. Some of this material was published in journals in 1990-96 when Microsoft provided a useful case study, and the US government's antitrust cases made it a crucial one.

Prof Liebowitz and Prof Margolis put a lot of effort into showing that some popular stories beloved of journalists - "alleged market failures" like the adoption of the QWERTY keyboard, and the victory of JVC's VHS video cassette format over Sony's Betamax - are simply myths, repeated by people who have not researched the facts.

The authors then test their theories against various personal computer software markets, comparing specialist magazine reviews with market shares. Their conclusion, briefly, is that good products win, whether they're from Microsoft or not.

Of course, Microsoft is just one of a string of companies that technological developments have thrown into remarkable prominence. Mr Jeffrey Young has written extended essays about many of them, and they're collected in Forbes Greatest Technology Stories: Inspiring Tales of the Entrepreneurs and Inventors Who Revolutionized Modern Business (John Wiley & Sons).

Mr Young covers the development of the first computers, the mainframe (IBM), microprocessors (Intel), personal computers (MITS, Apple, IBM), Windows (Microsoft) and so on. Some of the essays are stunning, and only a couple are duff. In sequence, they provide an entertaining and informative, if very gappy, history of computing over the past 50 years.