World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies. By Ken Auletta. Profile Books. 436 pp, £17.99 in UK
Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era. By John Heilemann. Harper Collins Business. 240pp, £16.99 UK
In The New Oxford Thesaurus of English, the word hubris prompts the following: arrogance, conceit, conceitedness, haughtiness, pride, vanity, self-importance, self-conceit, pomposity, superciliousness, feeling of superiority; French hauteur; informal uppitiness, big-headedness.
It would be tempting to attach many, if not all, of the above to the world of Microsoft, its master and the Microserf culture he created. Reading through these enthralling, almost forensic, examinations of the war which has brought Bill Gates's company to the verge of its nemesis, these words crop up repeatedly. And yet, like the truly brilliant boy in the class who just never gets the streetwise joke, one has to feel a little sorry for him. To get so much by getting so much right only to lose it by getting so much wrong is the price of arrogance.
Microsoft has never been popular with competitors or people in the software industry generally, frequently being described as "The Great Satan". It wasn't that it won all the time, it was how its victories were achieved. Time and again it was said that Microsoft played hardball and beyond to get its way. The company said this was just sour grapes; its behaviour, it claimed, with some justification, was nothing more than the way of the technology world. Windows was the dominant operating system on all PCs because it was superior. No, it protested, we don't cajole, lean on, or pressurise PC manufacturers to use our software. We are not a monopoly.
In the early years of the last decade, Microsoft survived an inquiry about its competitive practices with a gentle rap on the knuckles, but then along came the Internet. Initially, Gates said that the Web was interesting but not the future. He believed that closed dial-up services such as Compuserve and his MSN would win out. He was wrong and, in 1994, an upstart Silicon Valley company called Netscape, with its Navigator browser software, rubbed his nose in it.
Realising his mistake, Gates rallied his company around a new strategy and thus started the browser war. Microsoft's offering was Explorer, initially a weaker product, but by bundling it in free with Windows he could get it on the desktop of every new pc. At a stroke, Netscape's business plan was in shreds. The company charged for its software. It couldn't compete with free. The US Justice Department was not amused. This was anti-competitive, they reasoned. Microsoft said no, this was good value for the consumer. The stage was set for the mother of all antitrust battles.
For a country which prides itself on its free market, the US is mighty touchy on anti-competitive practices. At the turn of the last century, the US Congress put in place legislation which was aimed at stamping out anti-competitive and monopolistic practices which hurt the consumer and inhibited innovation. The most famous case involved the break-up of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil conglomerate. That was before the Justice Department, led by anti-trust division chief Joel Klein, took on Bill Gates and the might of Microsoft.
THE United States v Microsoft was seen as a battle. It became a war. And the war, as all wars do, had a number of key personnel on each side and a number of key moves and strategies. At the outset, all the Justice Department required of Microsoft was to uncouple the Explorer browser from its Windows operating system. Impossible, said the (mostly) men from Redmond, Washington State. However, by the end of the two-year process they would wish that that first offer still stood.
It says much for the might of Microsoft that the Justice Department was seen as David to its Goliath. Its key people were company general counsel Bill Neukom, lead lawyer John Warden and, inevitably, Gates himself. On the other side were Klein, a man with a public service belief, who had the wit to entice David Boies (for a fraction of his normal fee) to lead his team. At the time, Boies was considered one of the smartest trial lawyers in the US. It was to be a fateful choice.
Equally important was the decision of the defendants not to call their leader to give evidence but rather to rely on a deposition. Unfortunately (for Microsoft) this was videotaped. It revealed a man clearly intent on evasion, who staggered through a hail of reasonable Boies queries.
For Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, it was the start of the slippery slope for Microsoft. A hard-talking Reagan conservative, Jackson grew to dislike the company and all it stood for and, after a trial of 78 court days during 1998 and 1999 and the submission of 13,466 pages of trial transcript plus final submissions by lawyers for both sides, he came down like a ton of bricks on Microsoft's defence.
Gates protested. The judge knew nothing of technology. The trial was a farce. But the more Microsoft hollered, the worse it got. By the time Jackson announced the penalty, he had decided that the only way to curb Microsoft's power was to break up the company that had been acclaimed as one of the pillars of the American economic boom. The company appealed and the Supreme Court finally gave it some time, if not succour, by returning the case to the Court of Appeal. However, such is the weight of the judgment against it that it is almost impossible to see Microsoft emerging unscathed. Even with Dubya in the White House rumoured to be sympathetic to Gates's predicament, for once the odds are stacked against the golden boy.
And even if by some miracle Microsoft escapes severe sanction, the world of technology is moving on. The case has served to remove the aura of invincibility that surrounded the company and soften the fear it once evoked. Others are beginning to challenge the Microsoft hegemony and the company, once so vociferous in response, now finds itself constrained by a government looking over its shoulder.
These two books offer different slants on the tale, but essentially come from the same pro-government perspective. John Heilemann, a writer for Wired magazine and clearly an authority on Silicon Valley, offers a racier and more condensed version, giving more space to people such as Netscape's Susan Creighton and Gary Reback, who helped push the Justice Department to take on the case. It is a zippy and gripping 242-page read and the author is not without sympathy for Bill Gates's position. But ultimately, as the title implies, it comes down hard on his creation and the way it operated.
On the other hand, Ken Auletta, a renowned journalist with New Yorker magazine and an authority on new media and business, was given remarkable access to the various players and their inner thoughts. He has repaid them handsomely with a compelling and finely detailed tale of corporate arrogance and public responsibility in the late 20th century. Perhaps for European readers he may be over-generous with the wealth of detail, and he is a mite unbalanced. For all he writes of the extraordinary generosity of Gates and his wife Melinda, and the valiant honesty of some of his executives, it is clear that Auletta has little time for the men from Redmond. Brash and arrogant, they stomped their way to zillions of dollars. At their head, whipping them along, was the man who believed himself the cleverest of all. And yet he was the one who refused to settle when all that was required was the removal of a piece of software. Why?
"Judge Jackson thinks he might know why," writes Auletta. "Looking back on the case and puffing on a pipe in his chambers in mid-July, 2000, Judge Jackson was only half-kidding when he said: `If I were able to propose a remedy of my own devising I'd require Mr Gates to write a book report."' He'd ask Gates to review a recent biography of Napoleon. Why? "Because I think he has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company. An arrogance which derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses." Bill Gates, he implied, was not an adult.
Joe Breen is an Irish Times journalist