Here Come Geeks, Lawyers and Money

Computerworld - Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, by John Heilemann, (HarperCollins, 243 pages, $25). Heilemann, a former staff writer at The New Yorker and The Economist who was also a special correspondent for Wired magazine, offers an eye-opening, if slightly biased, account of the events leading up to last year's court-ordered breakup of Microsoft Corp., which the firm is appealing before a federal appeals court.
Pride Before the Fall is an easy and breezy read with many riveting passages.
Heilemann's story begins in 1995, when Microsoft's enemies in Silicon Valley began lobbying to bring the antitrust hammer down on the firm.
The book looks into the personalities on both sides of the case, from Joel Klein, the Justice Department antitrust division chief, who reluctantly took on Microsoft, to Gates, who is portrayed both as a defiant corporate giant and as a beleaguered executive who wept before his board of directors as pressure from the landmark lawsuit increased.
Heilemann had the greatest access among Microsoft's enemies, but, to his credit, did legwork on the firm's campus to gauge the mood inside the company and to interview Gates on two occasions. He also shines a light on the zeal among Silicon Valley adversaries to prosecute Microsoft and on the reticence of some of its key players to testify for the government out of fear that doing so would be bad for their businesses.
But the bottom line of the book is that the antitrust case has cut the software giant and its seemingly invincible chairman and founder, the world's richest man, down to size.
- Rick Saia


Eyeball Wars, by David Meerman Scott (Fiction, Freshspot Publishing, 351 pages, $24). Every generation has its overexposed social phenomena and bad fiction glorifying it. The Great Depression and World War II generations had their stoic heroes; the Vietnam era had its tortured- but-sensitive warriors and sensitive-but-tough protesters. The '80s had greed. But good fiction about those eras mostly skewered their icons.
So far, the e-commerce revolution is no different. Those with the best opinions about the e-commerce revolution tell the worst stories about it.
The latest in the exploitative, wanna-be-an-Internet-billionaire collection of millennial fiction stars Richard Williams, a disinherited heir to an international newspaper empire who is forced by vile circumstance to struggle (with just a few million in funding from Dad), to build a borderline e-commerce site into an initial public offering monstrous enough to make him a billionaire and unseat his old man.
Williams,