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Microsoft Writing about Gates and Microsoft, generally uncritically, has become a minor industry in its own right and probably one of the more profitable ones. We'll be rounding up some of the major books in the near future. Business At Light Speed (New York, Viking 99), the latest communique to Planet Earth by Microsoft's CEO, confirms criticisms of his The Road Ahead (New York, Viking 95) that Mr Gates hadn't come to terms with the Web. We don't recommend either book for original insights or entertainment. Jonathan Gatlin's hagiographic Bill Gates: The Path To The Future (New York, Avon 99) is thin. Paul Andrews' How the Web was Won: Microsoft from Windows to the Web - The inside story of how Bill Gates and his band of Internet idealists transformed a Software Empire (New York, Broadway 99) is well-researched but distressingly reverent. Gates is not Mother Teresa, despite efforts to buff & polish his public persona through large-scale philanthropy - sometimes with strings attached - involving his wife and father. More sober reports are provided in Overdrive: Bill Gates & the Race to Control Cyberspace (New York, Wiley 98) by James Wallace - updating his Hard Drive: Bill Gates & the Making of the Microsoft Empire (New York, Harper 93) - and the portraits of Clark and Netscape identified above. The glossy Inside Out: Microsoft- In Our Own Words (New York, Warner 00) is the sort of production that gives propaganda a bad name; appropriately all Microsoft employees are reputed to have received a copy. Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (New York, Owl 99) by Jennifer Edstrom & Marlin Eller presents a devastating and ultimately convincing view from the inside (Edstrom, for example, is the daughter of Microsoft's chief spin doctor), in stark contrast to the picture of vision, harmony and exemplary ethics painted by Randall Stross in The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition (Reading,  Addison-Wesley 96). As John Heilemann notes in the excellent Pride Before The Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates & The End of the Microsoft Era (New York, Harper Collins 01), while the legal outcome of the case is likely to be indecisive, the litigation's exposed Microsoft's spin machine and demonstrated that at best Gates is economical with the truth. Wendy Rohm's The Microsoft File: The Secret Case Against Bill Gates (New York, Times 98) is a hard-hitting expose of corporate skullduggery and ineptitude, considered by some US analysts to have been a trigger for the antitrust action. A perspective is provided by Folded, Spindled & Mutilated: Economic Analysis & US versus IBM (New York, MIT Press 83) by Franklin Fisher, John McGovern & Joel Greenwood. The Plot to Get Bill Gates: An irreverent investigation of the World's Richest Man ... and the People Who Hate Him (Times, New York 1999) is a wacky ride at high speed past the egos and misdemeanors of poor Bill Gates and the likes of fellow billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle. Ken Auletta's 50 page profile in The New Gilded Age: Profiles from The New Yorker (New York, Random 00) is more insightful. It's a succinct, and overall more insightful version of the book-length treatment in his World War3.0: Microsoft & Its Enemies (New York, Random 00). Nathan Myrhvold, dinosaur buff and one-time Gates lieutenant, was perceptively profiled in Wired in 1996.  Paul Allen, Gates' partner and Star Trek buff, had been anatomised in issues 2.08 and 7.12. Fred Moody's I Sing The Body Electronic (New York, Viking 95) gives an entertaining and, alas, apparently accurate picture of life as a Microsoft net-slave. It's more perceptive than G Pascal Zachary's Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft (New York, Warner 96).  The essays in The Future of Software (Cambridge, MIT Press 95) edited by Derek Leebaert suggest that the 'road ahead' won't be owned by Microsoft.      next page  (other software: Oracle etc)