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I was prepared to hate Gary Rivlin's The Plot to Get Bill Gates (Random House, 1999; ISBN 0-8129-3006-1). The title just sounded to me like cheap sensationalism. A book editor tells me that the recent tech-industry books about Gates and Ellison and AOL aren't selling all that well; maybe someone thought that this one would do better if spiced up with a conspiracy-theory title.
When I got into the book I found some decent writing and analysis on Microsoft and its competitors. Rivlin's a good writer. But I don't know that I'd say, based on this book, that he's a good author or a good reporter, because I found the book to lack cohesion and originality. Even the conspiracy-theory premise doesn't tie all the chapters into one story. And Rivlin seems to rely far too much on other books. Having read a lot of his sources, I kept encountering stories I'd read before. And although I don't know that this is a bad thing, the book really doesn't justify its sensationalistic title. By the end of the book, you really don't come away with a sense of a conspiracy against Bill Gates so much as a sense that a lot of people really don't like Bill Gates or Microsoft. Which you probably went into the book with.
Rivlin actually undermines one of the conspiracy theories I've heard, pointing out that, far from buying Senator Orrin Hatch's (R-Utah) opposition to Microsoft with contributions, Utah-based WordPerfect and Novell were heavy contributors to the Democratic party. When I finished the book, it struck me that Rivlin might have been better able to defend the notion of a real plot against Gates if he had focused on just one of Microsoft's competitors.
As Rivlin documents, there is deep hatred of Microsoft and of Bill Gates in the halls of IBM. It's hard to picture IBM making product-line decisions motivated by hatred of Bill Gates -- harder than picturing Oracle twitching to the whims of Larry Ellison. Still -- the IBM that is today embracing every non-Microsoft technology that comes along is not the same IBM that smugly expected to take over the PC industry in 1981. Ellison and McNealy were founders of that industry, sort of. Anyway, they are of the generation of risk-it-all entrepreneurs who rode the revolution from hobbydom to Wall Street. It's not surprising to see them and their companies acting as though this were still a game of marbles between them and a few other boys. Sure they're out to get Gates. But it's open warfare, not some conspiracy that needs to be unmasked. But IBM -- there's the real story, I think. A book on how IBM is making decisions these days, and the extent to which its corporate strategies are based on a hatred of Microsoft -- that's a book I'd read.
-- Michael Swaine