overview four ages history bodies scientists digerati prophets IBM 5 Sisters Apple Microsoft other software dot com heroes

other software This page highlights writing about the software developers, commercial or otherwise.       Oracle Oracle's Larry Ellison was portrayed by Mike Wilson in The Difference between God & Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation (New York, Morrow 97).       take the money and run Fans of dot com journalism may enjoy the entertainment, sans economy, of the entertainment economy, in Robert Young's boy's-own-tale of commercializing Linux - Under the Radar: How Red Hat changed the software business and beat Microsoft (New York, Coriolis 99). Karen Southwick & Eric Schmidt's breathless collaboration resulted in the somewhat hagiographic High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy & the Rise of Sun Microsystems (New York, Wiley 99).  For those looking for more bite, Charles Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars (New York, Times 99) tells how the developer of web-authoring software FrontPage made $100 million from Bill Gates.      Netscape Clark's memoir Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Startup that took on Microsoft (New York, St Martins 99) is an interesting picture but suffers from having Clark on both ends of the camera lense.   Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape & How It Challenged Microsoft (Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press 98) by Joshua Quittner & Michelle Slatulla has more balance. We recommend Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape & Its Battle with Microsoft (New York, Free Press 98) a solid study by business analysts Michael Cusmano & David Yoffie and Cusmano's Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets & Manages People (New York, Free Press 95).  There's a more in-depth study of Microsoft elsewhere this briefing. A profile of AOL Time Warner, the conglomerate that gobbled up Netscape, appears in our media profile. The much-hyped The New New Thing by Michael Lewis (London, Hodder & Stoughton 99) is a portrait of zany Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape and Healtheon founder) and his very big computer-controlled boat, rather than a map of Silicon Valley and the Internet Economy. Judging by the biographies on this page Clark is no more disfunctional than many of the silicon mafia; Lewis appears to have built the book around him because Clark wasn't filtered by media minders. Regrettably New New is less perceptive than Lewis' famed Liars Poker (London, Hodder & Stoughton 89), The Money Culture (London, Hodder & Stoughton 91) and Pacific Rift (London, Hodder & Stoughton 92). The very rich dude with the very big boat featured in perceptive profiles in Wired 2.01 and 2.10 among others.      Linux and the Free Software movement For a personal perspective on the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) turn to Mike Godwin's memoir Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (New York, Times 98). The Foundation was captured at its height and nadir in Wired. Linus Torvalds, aka the Big Penguin and inspirer of Linux, was profiled in a 1998 Wired and features in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (Sebastopol, O'Reilly & Associates 99) edited by Chris Dibona & Mark Stone.  Mavericks Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman are also given voice in that book, although you might want to turn to the latter's The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Sebastopol, O'Reilly 99). Ted Nelson, hypermedia guru and proponent of global digital library Xanadu was memorably profiled in Wired and in Matt Kazmierski's more academic The World Wide Web: The Beginning & Now site. Open Source advocates Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond have characteristically quirky homepages mixing libertarianism, guns and code.   Peter Wayner's Free For All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans (New York, Harper 00) is a rose-tinted account of the free software push.  Glyn Moody's Rebel Code: Linux & the Open Source Revolution (Cambridge, Perseus 00) is drier and perhaps more perceptive, although understating the extent to which all 'revolutions' are capture by the dreaded 'establishment'. Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line (New York, Avon 99) is concise and thoughtful. Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic & the Spirit of the Information Age (New York, Random House 01) is another exercise in sniffing the digital zeitgeist.    next page  (dot com heroes: merchants, financiers etc)