Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller)

John Gruber wrote an interesting article back in 2004 on his Daring Fireball Web site about what he sees as a persistent and erroneous myth, namely that if Apple had only been willing to license its OS to PC makers, it could have become the industry-dominating giant that Microsoft eventually became—“an industry colossus sitting atop a Scrooge-McDuck-style mountain of gold.” He believes that this is unlikely for a number of reasons, but he also offers, as a theory about why Microsoft became so gigantically successful while Apple struggled through much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, that it came down to pragmatism vs. idealism. Microsoft, after convincing IBM to license MS-DOS, was able to build on that success with early versions of Windows (which, importantly, still ran DOS software and would still run on the same kinds of PCs that DOS did), and then able to build off of Windows with Microsoft Office. Microsoft wanted to dominate the PC software market, and particularly the OS market, so compatibility was key.

Apple, in contrast, had developed the hugely successful Apple II . . . and promptly abandoned it in favor of the Mac, which had nothing to do with the Apple II. The Mac was revolutionary—but anyone who wanted one also had to buy all new hardware and all new software, a not-insignificant obstacle. Rather than making the sound business decision of building off the Apple II, they wanted to make something insanely great.

To hear Jennifer Edstrom (daughter of former Microsoft PR rep Pam Edstrom) and Marlin Eller (a lead developer at Microsoft for over ten years) tell it in Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside, however, Microsoft practically stumbled into its monopoly on accident—almost in spite of its business strategies rather than because of them. Far from the clear-headed prescience often assigned to Gates, which would have him cackling as he talked IBM into handing over control of its OS and then relentlessly pushing forward with the ubiquitous Windows, Edstrom and Eller describe Windows as something of an ugly stepchild at Microsoft, a project seen as little more than a temporary stopgap product while they worked with IBM on a graphical OS/2, one that was almost wholly abandoned at least once, and one that Gates himself only saw as important after it was well on its way to monopoly status.

Although Microsoft might not have had deliberately and strategically built off of DOS the way Gruber implies, he and Edstrom and Eller certainly agree on one thing—by the time Windows rolled around, Microsoft was pragmatic to the core. Rarely do you hear anyone in the book talk about making a great product, something cool that people would like, or even something that they themselves would like, much less anything truly innovative. Everything they did was instead motivated by a competitor: in describing Microsoft’s floundering attempts to build sophisticated software to automate people’s homes—lights, music, heating, air conditioning, everything—Edstrom and Eller write, “No other major companies were working on it, and that was exactly the problem. Microsoft does best when it has a successful competitor it can copy and then crush.” Gates’s constant refrain throughout the original development of Windows was “Make it more like the Mac!”* And after devoting a lot of time and effort, during a brief craze for handwriting recognition technology instigated primarily by a company called GO, to developing an OS called Pen Windows, when Eller’s manager points out that it hasn’t really sold well and seems like a disaster, Eller tells him,

“Greg, look. This wasn’t a thing about making money. This was all about ‘Block that kick.’ We were on the special team. We were preventing GO from running away with the market. That was our job. . . . We weren’t trying to sell software, we were trying to prevent other people from selling software.

“From my view, Pen Windows was a winner. We shut down GO. They spent $75 million pumping up this market, we spent four million shooting them down. They’re toast. That company is dead. They won’t sell their shit anymore. We did our job.”

Barbarians is, unfortunately, plagued by strange decisions in the writing. They make occasional stabs at a misguided breeziness, referring to Microsoft as “the Soft,” and to Gates as “Field Marshal Gates” and (once, weirdly) “Supreme Techlord William Gates.” More significantly, although Eller is a coauthor, he is also described in the third person: Marlin Eller did this, Marlin Eller said that. They mention this in the introduction, and explain that the book had evolved beyond an autobiography when they wanted to include more varied material, but it still gives the book an oddly disingenuous feel—particularly since it seems that Eller’s colleagues and managers, and Gates himself, are always missing the big picture, pushing forward with unrealistic goals, and wrongheadedly refusing to listen to Eller’s invariably sensible ideas:

Myhrvold was just throwing out some random and utterly convoluted way of doing the same thing Eller was already going after on a much more direct path.

. . .

Plenty of developers resented Myhrvold. They were the ones who actually wrote the code and knew the nitty-gritty. . . . Myhrvold argued that you could design a new graphics architecture in only two weeks. People like Eller, who had personally spent three years developing graphics for Windows, knew better.

. . .

A long silence hung suspended between the two. Eller knew Gates had heard him. But Gates gazed off in the distance, seemingly oblivious to the Willits canoe, to the black and white stills of early Seattle settlers—and to Eller’s point.

“Uh huh,” Gates muttered.

In a first-person autobiography, it would be understood that the author is just presenting his own view of things. Here, though, the third-person narrative gives it the weight of journalistic objectivity, a weight it doesn’t always bear well. Still, Barbarians is a quick, interesting read on how one of the most dominant companies of the last quarter-century arrived in that position—full of fits and starts, fights, and accidents, and driven as much by internal politics and competitiveness as anything else.

__________
* A refrain he seems to have been keeping up during the development Windows Vista, as David Pogue points out in this tongue-in-cheek video for the New York Times Web site.

Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Kevin Kelly)

Somewhere inside the middling 521-page Out of Control is a really, really great 350-page book trying to get out. Which is unfortunate, because Kelly—at the time the executive editor of Wired, and currently billed as its “chief maverick”—tackles a lot of very interesting subjects, and clearly has an affinity for them as well as the natural curiosity that makes for great science and technology writing. But mostly reading this book just made me really wish someone like Oliver Sacks or Malcolm Gladwell had written it instead—or that, at the very least, he could have had much better editing than he did.

The book focuses on complex, distributed, adaptable systems such as biological organisms and superorganisms, computer networks, and swarms of various types, which takes Kelly across such diverse subjects as the Biosphere 2 project and other “closed systems,” artificial evolution, industrial ecology, military simulations, robotics and artificial intelligence (and the nature of human intelligence itself), and predicting the future—all very compelling stuff. The problem was that I found that I was having to enjoy the information in spite of Kelly’s writing, rather than because of it (or, better, without having to notice it at all). I’ll often flag things when I read, and one way to tell how much I’m liking a book is to compare the ratio of things I’m flagging as “Wow!” to those I’m flagging as “This seems awfully silly.” And although there were a lot of things I liked about Out of Control, I also found myself flagging an awful lot of things for silliness. He often seemed to spend four or five pages making a point he could have said in one or two, and was prone to wild, pseudo-profound generalizations like the following:

• “While every human is born pretty much the same, every death is different. If a coroner’s cause-of-death certificates were exact, each one would be unique.” (This is barely more true of death than of birth—if a doctor’s birth report were exact, each one would be unique too, and by the same token, plenty of people have died very similar deaths.)
• “Snake is linear, but when it feeds back into itself it becomes the archetype of nonlinear being. In the classical Jungian framework, the tail-biting Uroborus is the symbolic depiction of the self. The completeness of the circle is the self-containment of self, a containment that is at the same time made of one thing and made of competing parts. The flush toilet, then, as the plainest manifestation of a feedback loop, is a mythical beast—the beast of self.” (The abstract academic language is bad enough, and the flush toilet simply can’t support this level of grandiosity. I had to stop and search for signs that he was trying to be funny, and found none.)
• “Stripped of all secondary motives, all addictions are one: to make a world of our own.” (This is the kind of thing that sounds good until you try to figure out what it means—how, exactly, are alcoholics or heroin addicts trying to make a world of their own? I have no idea. I thought they were trying to satisfy a chemical dependency.)
• “So few long-term predictions prove correct that statistically they are all wrong. Yet, by the same statistical measure, so many short term [sic] predictions are right, that all short-term predictions are right.” (What he’s trying to say is that people in the prediction business know that they cannot rely on long-term predictions, because so few of them are right—which is a far cry from saying that in fact they are all wrong. Applying the word “statistically” doesn’t change “few are right” to “none are right.” If anything, it makes the statement even less true.)

He also expends a lot of words on dubious imaginative journeys through history (the invention of “autonomous control” in ninth-century China) and more esoteric terrain (searching Borges’s Infinite Library for a copy of his own as-yet-unfinished Out of Control), and on hopelessly clunky constructions like “This hardware quarantine has been a prime factor in the nonhappening of this future” and odd similes like “The CPU, no larger than a soggy cornflake. . . . ”

Which isn’t to say that it’s a terrible book—in fact, the reason I found the writing and editing (or lack thereof) so frustrating was that the material itself was so fascinating, and I wanted to like it. He’s at his best when discussing cutting-edge technology and possible futures—computer simulations, robotics, artificial life—and although he loses his way a bit when he involves himself in philosophy and more general science, he does always takes them on with an obvious and genuine enthusiasm.

But still, on finishing it, I was mostly relieved that I could finally get back to Dance Dance Dance.