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The authors of Barbarians Led by Bill Gates are billing their book as a techno-expose: "Microsoft from the Inside." But it's mostly a confused mishmosh of anecdotes and pseudo-history. Marlin Eller's name is familiar to those of us who wrote applications for Windows during the early years. He worked as a mid-level programmer on Windows' graphics engine (GDI.EXE) for most of the last decade, and also had some involvement with Microsoft networking, Pen Windows, and video compression projects. Jennifer Edstrom, as you might have guessed, is the daughter of Microsoft PR tycoon Pam Edstrom. Jennifer's contribution to the book is unclear, except perhaps to pass on juicy stories overheard at Mom's house and give Eller pointers about which names to drop to make the book more marketable.
Those who buy this book for "smoking gun" evidence about Microsoft's predatory strategies will not learn anything new. It's clear from his own words that Eller had little access to Microsoft executives at the level where real decisions are made. His encounters with Gates, Ballmer, Myhrvold, Silverberg, and other Microsoft movers and shakers were limited to parties, project launches, technical reviews, and postmortems. Many of the quotes in the book have been lifted from interviews that have appeared in trade journals and newspapers and Microsoft court documents. Consequently, Eller's tales of conversations and industry events outside his limited programming domain must be viewed as dubious and third-hand at best. Jennifer Edstrom's mother had much a tighter relationship with the Microsoft leadership cadre than Eller.
Those who might buy this book for some insight into the dynamics of the PC software marketplace will also be disappointed. At one point Eller asserts:
"At any given time, Microsoft has lagged behind in networking, desktop, applications, on-line services, Internet technologies, and Web browsers. And yet the landscape is littered with the bones of Microsoft's competitors: VisiCorp, Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, GO Corporation ... This corporate body count exists because Microsoft has always had one asset that no other company could touch -- Windows -- which Microsoft could leverage with unrivaled effectiveness." -- p. 207
This statement alone tells us that Eller has essentially no understanding at all of the history of Windows, even though he lived through it and was intimately involved with the product. If there's one asset that Microsoft had that no other company could touch -- and which made Windows' ultimate success possible in spite of its brain-damaged user interface, lousy performance, mountains of bugs, and Eller's own dismally-architected graphics engine -- it was Microsoft's cash cow MS-DOS. VisiCorp, for example, dropped off the radar screen years before anyone anywhere was convinced that Windows would ever be a viable platform for applications.
One characteristic Barbarians Led by Bill Gates does offer that is relatively unique is some of the most execrable writing and editing ever to be inflicted upon an unsuspecting public by an otherwise reputable mainstream book publisher. Portions of it were actually painful to read. For example, on page 109, we find the sentence:
"LAN Man is piss ant."
I have to admit that this sentence stumped me at first. I slogged my way through the rest of the book, but the meaning of these five words continued to nag at me, and eventually I puzzled out two possible interpretations. One is that the intended word is "pissant" (an obscure old slang word for an insignificant or contemptible person or thing), and that the manuscript went straight from the transcriptionists to the typographers without ever being touched by an editor. The other is that the intended word is "puissant" (mighty, strong, powerful), and that the Microsoft programmers being quoted are not only ignorant of the word's origins and spelling, but have inverted its meaning as well.
-- Ray Duncan (duncan@cerf.net)
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.