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Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (Paperback)
by James Wallace, Jim Erickson
| Category:
Corporate history, Biography, Business, Technology |
| Market price: ¥ 208.00
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¥ 158.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Even though this book is a little outdated, it's still a great read with compelling insight into Gates's young and adult life and his building of the Microsoft Empire. |
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Author: James Wallace, Jim Erickson
Publisher: Collins; Reprint edition
Pub. in: May, 1993
ISBN: 0887306292
Pages: 448
Measurements: 8 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00005
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller (in North America) |
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- MSL Picks -
In early days when Microsoft was located in Albuquerque, after long, nighttime programming sessions, Gates would relax by speeding through the foothills in his Porsche 911. On a few late nights Gates and a friend would go to a road construction site and, after learning by trial and error to operate the complex machinery, drive them around. One night they held a bulldozer race (although neither could claim to be the winner) and another time Gates nearly backed over his Porsche.
Under intense pressure by Gates to ship the long overdue Windows software, employee dedication quickly turned to fanaticism. One of the Windows testers showed up at the office with a sleeping bag. For a month he camped in his office working around the clock and sleeping only when he couldn't stay awake. The microkids found diversion by building bombs, setting off rockets, and holding full-volume jam sessions which brought the police. One ex-Microsoft employee said, "you felt you were at the center of the universe. That was the motivation, that and just trying to get clean code out there. It was an invigorating feeling to be working for Microsoft. And all this pounding by Steve Ballmer, and yanking by Bill, was the price you paid to be there."
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is the first biography of the controversial Microsoft chairman. Despite Gate's attempt to discourage people from talking, authors James Wallace and Jim Erickson, reporters for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have interviewed his closest friends, associates, and former employees, as well as many of his business rivals, to provide a comprehensive portrait of this complex computer wunderkind, the company he made, and the industry he continues to shape.
This is the first "big" biography of Gates and is written by local reporters with a feel for Seattle and the indigenous industry which has been guaranteed a place in world history all because Bill Gates decided to jump in his Porsche one day and get out of Albuquerque as fast as he could drive. Home to the ancestral Seattle, with Mom-very-rich-family and dad respected-lawyer with connections all over the place: None of which would have been worth anything unless Bill was obsessed with software, starting with Lunar Lander, traffic light control programs, and then of course the big IBM success.
The intensity of Gates comes out clearly here. Wearing the smae shirt forever, paying some lady to do his laundry and pay his bills, ripping the radio out of his car so he can think more intently, sleeping under the desk. And lots of foul language. This strain of the book does not come out as clearly in later books, now that Gates is married, a major philanthropist, and under the gun of all of the politically connected Utah software Republicans he defeated in the business wars. The book has a funny scene where Gates refers to the 70 year old head of Novell as "Grandfather from Hell."
When Judge Stanley Sporkin read this book over a weekend (hoping to develop more obsessive behavior like his anti-hero Bill?), it caused him to try to quash the DOJ consent decree negotiated with Microsoft in the first antitrust case. Sporkin saw something evil in Microsoft and Gates as a result of reading this book. Microsoft got Sporkin's judicial spike of the consent decree reversed by another court, and got Sporkin dumped from the case (I seem to recall).
The childhood portions of the book are revealing. There are the usual recitations of how smart Bill was as a kid, but also a hint that he had to change schools because of adjustment problems prior to junior high.
The early years in N. M. are recounted with a sense of drama, and in that sense, reading this book prepares you to understand more completely the details in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (e.g., the scene in the diner where Bill successfully argues Paul Allen into a larger equity chunk for Bill, less for Paul).
Bill going "legal" early to protect the I.P. rights to Microsoft's software is also key to his later empire, and the authors cover it early, along with the court battles with the MIPS guy over rights to Bill and Paul's work.
My reaction to reading this right after it came out was to buy stock in MSFT, which Judge Sporkin may have also done, I guess. I must have skipped over the rabid anti-Microsoft stage of my development… Bill owns it and stole it from Patterson? So what, he bought it.
Gates seems to have the qualities of an inventor, a construction foreman, and a broker. This puts him in Henry Ford's league, and he seems to be a lot smarter, as well. Go Microsoft.
This book is one of the best references to understand Bill Gates, the computing industry and how Microsoft has transformed the way how we work and live. (From quoting Publisher and an American reader)
Target readers:
Business and technology executives, managers, entrepreneurs, and MBAs.
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James Wallace is a senior reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and recipient of the 1990 National Headliner Award for Public Service. He is the author of Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, also published by Wiley.
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From the Publisher:
From Brainchild to Billionaire
Born outside Seattle to socially prominent parents, Gates was a gifted child with a photographic memory. He first encountered computers as a seventh-grader at the prestigious Lakeside private school, and quickly outstripped his instructors in expertise.
As a Harvard student in 1973, he spent most of his time playing with computers - and winning at high-stakes poker - but he never graduated. Instead, education took a back seat to ambition. In 1974, Gates and his friend Paul Allen developed a BASIC language for the Altair 8080, the world's first personal computer. Surviving on catnaps and working on a Harvard computer rigged to mimic the Altair - a machine they had never seen - their program ran successfully the first time it was tried."It was the coolest program I ever wrote," Gates said, and it set the industry standard.
In 1975, with a vision of a computer in every home and the conviction that the fledgling computer industry was about to soar, the two formed Microsoft. Ironically, it was in collaboration with IBM - a company that dwarfed them in size, represented an entirely different corporate culture, and would later become a bitter rival - that Microsoft hit upon its greatest success to date. When IBM needed an operating system for its new PC, Big Blue turned to Microsoft. Gates turned to Seattle Computer products, a small, local computer company and, in what was one of a long series of brilliant business deals, purchased the rights to DOS for $50,000. Now labeled MS-DOS, it too became the industry standard and generates more than $200 million a year, helping to make Microsoft the most successful start-up company in the history of American business and enabling Gates to proceed with such projects as Word, Multiplan, OS/2 and Windows. When Microsoft went public in 1986, its shares were traded with a frenzy virtually unprecedented on Wall Street, and many of its employees became paper millionaires.
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| View all 10 comments |
J. Robinson, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
Should I Buy This Book?
The story is starting to get a bit dated but the book still has 95% of the Gates story warts and all. He is one of the most compelling and admired and maybe feared business leaders today.
Unlike Jack Welch, another great leader and manager, he started from zero or near zero in a new field and (largely) owned the company. I remember seeing the personal computers for sale in the 70's - just pre Microsoft - that did not come with anything other than a very rudimentary software. He was one of the first people to recognize the dollar value of the software and to charge for its use in the hobby market. Since then he has dominated the market. Now there is a computer in virtually every office and home using his (expensive high margin) software. Now he has the resources to buy anything he wants, or to support any charity or university, or buy a sizeable portion of the stock in almost any company that he wishes. And of course he has no debt. He used no risky leverage or tricks. He took the software and generated billions of dollars in cash and securities on hand. It is quite the story.
This is a relatively short book and an easy read. Frankly it is a must read for anyone running their own business and or in the Tech field. Gates is the statistical anomaly who sits at the very pinnacle. He is perched even above Warren Buffet the financial guru who is at least 20 years older than Gates. But Gates was astute enough to buy DOS for $50,000. and then had the business smarts and drive to market and sell the product. He was a hands on manager working long hours and a technical leader. He was (is) as smart or smarter than anyone else in the field. He did not invent any major new invention but he had the practical ability to take the product to market and make it work, make it better, and build a winning business. He hired great people and built a team that literally crushed the opposition including IBM and all foreign competitors in that area. It is only now two decades later that people are (seriously) starting to consider alternatives such as Linux, and these still have a lot of catch up to do.
Still a great book and a great yarn. A must buy 5 stars. |
Kirkus Reviews, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
Two Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters take on - and fumble - the fascinating tale of how an archetypal nerd built a multibillion-dollar enterprise that sets the standards for PC/work- station software. In Accidental Empires (1991), Robert X. Cringely tells more in brief about William Henry Gates III (cofounder of Microsoft) and his game plan than the authors manage to do in an entire book. Wallace and Erickson do make a competent job of chronicling the dramatic rise of a quirky Harvard dropout whose technical/commercial genius coexists uneasily with an impatient, demanding, and ultracompetitive personality. They follow Gates from privileged youth at a Seattle prep school through his creation (at 19) with Paul Allen of the first computer language for PCs and beyond, to the establishment of Microsoft, which eventually made them billionaires. Along the way, the single-minded Gates, now 36, helped develop the computer operating system DOS, forged a since - ruptured alliance with IBM, and evidently became willing to do whatever it takes to keep Microsoft atop the programming heap. Among other consequences of his intimidating management style are lost friendships - and a potentially ruinous lawsuit, in which Apple seeks billions in damages for copyright infringement. But by focusing on Gates's less admirable idiosyncrasies and on anecdotal trivia, the authors miss much of the point of his empire-building ends and means. Nor, absent wider-angle perspectives on the fragmented software industry, do they convey with any real impact how Gates intends to parlay essentially mediocre technology into a perdurably dominant market position. While the authors supply many of the pieces missing from the public record, they don't quite have the whole story. A full account of Gates and his empire probably awaits someone like Cringely, with a firmer grasp on where PCs are taking the Global Village. |
An American reader, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
This book portrays an intensely driven person. He was born with talent and wealth, yet he did not rely on either of these to just get by. He pushed his talents to their limits. While still in grade school, he would pull all nighters programming. The picture of him sleeping on a table in the schools computer lab reminds me of Edison sleeping on the bench top in his lab. We have all benefited from the increase in productivity that computers have brought to many types of work, and credit is due to Bill Gates and others like him that worked very hard to improve the quality of computing. This book reveals the intensity with which he works, and made me feel happy about his success. |
An American Reader, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
A history of how the PC software industry grew up, this book was read while a team of software marketing executives were driving to Comdex. It was so good we traded off until it was done - and then we worried about our recent contract with Microsoft! Hard Drive is a history of how the PC software industry grew up. It uses a dynamic no-holds bar style. If there is a lesson about alliances to be learned, it's in here. It rates #3 on the "Chanimal" top ten list. |
View all 10 comments |
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