Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...access to all the key players in the story. His interviews with Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the federal district court judge who heard the case, yield a motherlode of provocative, if sometimes injudicious, reflections. Recalling, for example, a photo he came across of Gates from the early days of Microsoft, Jackson told Auletta that what he saw was "a smart-mouthed young kid" who "need[ed] a little discipline...
World War 3.0 also provides fresh insights into the failed effort to reach a settlement before Judge Jackson ruled. Justice and Microsoft were moving toward compromise. But, Auletta reports, the state attorneys general--who had to sign off on the deal--took a harder line than Justice on what the remedy should be, causing the mediator, Judge Richard Posner, to throw up his hands. The book's main flaw is one of pacing: there's too much detail on the trial and too little on Judge Jackson's order to divide up Microsoft...
...World War 3.0 is the diligent analysis of the case, John Heilemann's Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era (HarperCollins; 246 pages; $25) is the dramatically arced screenplay. Heilemann's book, which started life as an article in Wired, is a fast-paced account full of big-screen moments. The most impressive: his contention that the richest man in the world exclaimed at a Microsoft board meeting last year that "the whole thing is crashing in on me" and started...
Heilemann also pounded his share of pavement. The payoff is a compelling account of what he calls the "secret history" of the trial, including the clandestine maneuvering of Sun Microsystems, Netscape and other Microsoft enemies, to persuade the Justice Department to bring a lawsuit it didn't want to pursue. In the end, Heilemann draws on the Bible--as his title suggests--rather than Jesuitism to reach much the same conclusion as Auletta's: Gates' arrogance led him to run Microsoft, and the trial, like an "aspiring...
...Internet--one of the highest per-capita ratios of Web access in the world. In fact, South Korea is one of the most wired--and wireless--places on the planet. So faddish are all things cyber that hip young Korean men have adopted the scruffy, geeky dress of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates...