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A lot has already been written about Wendy Goldman Rohm's The Microsoft File. It's been reviewed in newspapers across the country, and in The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Upside, and The Red Herring, among other publications. That may make The Microsoft File sound like a business book, and so it is, but because it's about Microsoft its audience is much broader than the average business book. It has probably caught your eye, and perhaps has caught a piece of your disposable income. ("I've got plenty of disposable income," he said; "It's just all predisposed.")
So why am I writing about it?
Well, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of wanting to recommend a bad book. That in itself required an explanation, and that explanation, as I wrote it, took the shape of a review of the book I disliked and wanted to recommend. To be exact, it took this shape:
Wendy Goldman Rohm's The Microsoft File asks good questions: "Is Microsoft's rise as the world's most powerful and successful company in the computer and information industries a classic example of the free market at work?
"Is Microsoft's success and the failure of other companies the result of the creative destruction that makes capitalism so strong and unique?"Or was there another force at work?"
We all think we know the answer to those questions, right? But anyone who really answers them, documenting that "other force" in detail, will have a powerful book, and possibly a case for the Justice Department, in his or her hands.
Rohm promises to document that "other force":
"This book will show that Microsoft, under the leadership of its founding genius, Bill Gates, has engaged in a pattern of predatory business practices over the past decade that have all but killed the market in operating systems and applications software, and now likewise threaten to stifle free competition in the Internet and electronic commerce arenas."
And again:
"The Microsoft File will show, from inside offices around the world, Gates' campaign to stymie free competition."
That's a book I want to read.
I wanted to read the book that readers were talking about when they called The Microsoft File shocking, eye-opening, and powerful, and said that it made them mad. Readers are seldom wrong--at least in describing their reactions. There was something in The Microsoft File that evoked these reactions in readers. I wanted to know what it was.
It sure wasn't Wendy Rohm's writing.
Well, the editors at Random House share the blame. They should have caught the obvious errors in grammar, diction, logic, and usage. "Chomping" for "champing," "threshing" for "thrashing," "no black and white areas" for "no grey areas," "New versions... was released" for "new versions... were released."
A good editor could have told Rohm, too, that the story of Microsoft's business practices was exciting enough without introducing details of the sex lives of Bill Gates and Microsoft legal honcho Bill Neukom. Publishers may believe that you can't have too much talk about sex, but Congress has tested the limits this year, and may just have found the point of surfeit. Speaking of which, the bit about the cigar on page 72 read like something from the Starr report. Ultimately, Bill Gates' social life comes across as more pitiful than scandalous. Not as pitiful as Ray Noorda's poetry, which the Random House editors couldn't prevent Rohm from quoting at length more than once, but still pitiful. Other matters not central to the book's theme take over the book for whole chapters at a time, with no explanation offered for why we have, for example, left the subject of Microsoft's legal problems to delve into merger talks between Novell and WordPerfect.
There are crippling problems of pacing, organization, emphasis, and stylistic consistency. Rohm has an annoying, formulaic way (apparently borrowed from a bad novelist) of introducing a character, and she uses it every few pages. The style swoops from novelistic painting of scenes to dense, opaque prose without pausing for breath.
This is the book Microsoft doesn't want you to read, the book's presskit says. Rohm and her editors seem not to want you to read it, either.
One big reason for reading books these days is because other people are reading them. You don't want to appear not to be up on the latest thing, you want to be able to hold your own in the IRL chatrooms of daily life, you want to score acceptably in the ongoing game of Trivial Pursuit that is casual conversation.
And so, though it pains me to say it, one reason to read this book is that it will be much read. And, unlike the latest Diana bestseller about which you can be honorably ignorant, you won't gain any points in most social settings by being ignorant of the subject matter of The Microsoft File.
A better reason to read it is that there is good information in it. Rohm has packed the book with details that you won't find elsewhere about Microsoft's practices, the charges and allegations against the company, and how the Justice Department case played out.
Yes, it's old news even as I write this and older news as you read. But in fact a lot of what is in the book never was news, in the sense that it wasn't widely publicized, particularly the government's handling of the case. And since the mindset behind Microsoft's practices has probably not changed, it's good to review this history.
"Salacious, unbelievable, and dated," the Business Week reviewer called The Microsoft File. I'll give him one for three. It's only dated if you think of it as news; the concept doesn't apply to history. And unbelievable to the Business Week reviewer perhaps, but apparently not to most readers, nor to anyone who has negotiated with Microsoft. I have been very hard on the writing in The Microsoft File, but I must concede that there are stretches where it flows smoothly. Rohm has used a novelistic, fly-on-the-wall style that relies on multiple unattributed sources and her own imagination, which leads to gripping prose during the periods when she manages to hold it together. And the imagination is just to make the conversations read naturally. The significant facts of the story seem to be well researched.
And it's not as though poor writing is rare in business books. If you pass up The Microsoft File in favor of Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller's Barbarians Led by Bill Gates (Henry Holt, 1998), you'll find that it's no better.
So read The Microsoft File, but don't buy it. Borrow a copy. That shouldn't be hard. The book's not a keeper.
-- Michael Swaine (mswaine@swaine.com)