Bill Gates: Hero or fool?

A Wall Street Journal reporter says in a new book that even though Gates screwed up Microsoft's future he still might "shoot the moon."

By Andrew Leonard

Aug 30, 2001 | Microsoft executives have long argued that the attempt by the Department of Justice to discipline the company through an antitrust suit has been willfully foolish. Sluggish courts, they declaim at every opportunity, can't possibly keep up with the fast pace of technological innovation. By the time any final judgment can be made, the dynamics of the marketplace will ensure its irrelevance. So best not to even try: The only real solution is to let untrammeled competition decide winners and losers.

Never mind, for now, the niggling little fact that Microsoft's actions in previous years (for example, illegally abusing monopoly power to crush other companies) might have a rather significant impact on just how much competition will exist a few years later. There is still a basic truth buried in the somewhat disingenuous argument: High-tech markets change really fast, and court proceedings are a cumbersome way to deal with that problem.

As are books. David Bank, a Wall Street Journal reporter on the Microsoft beat since 1996, runs into the same problem as the DOJ in his otherwise excellent book "Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft." The vast majority of the book is devoted to the argument that Bill Gates, through a combination of bad technology decisions and poor management, led Microsoft astray. His decision to step down as CEO in 1998 is portrayed by Bank as a result of his errors. In particular, Gates' uncompromising legal strategy is depicted as a disaster, setting up Microsoft for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's devastating findings of fact and his order to break up the company.

But then, just as Bank must have been wrapping up his manuscript, came the two days of appellate court hearings early this year in which federal judges raked the Justice Department prosecutors over the coals. Suddenly it seemed to many observers that Microsoft might not be in such a bad position. And suddenly, Microsoft was making a big push for its .Net initiative, which made it seem as formidable as ever to both competitors and consumers.

And so we get to the last chapter of "Breaking Windows"-- a hastily written coda that undermines much of the argument set forth in the previous six chapters, and which ends with a breathtaking wet kiss for the very same Bill Gates whom Bank has gone to such great lengths to malign. Gates will "shoot the moon" writes Bank, rise to the new challenges and go out "a winner."

You have to wonder whether that chapter would have been written the same way had Bank waited to write it until after the actual appellate court decision, which found Microsoft to be guilty of abusing its monopoly power. You also have to wonder how much to trust the argument made earlier in the book, when the about-face at the end is so dramatic.

David Bank is an excellent reporter who was able to fruitfully combine his access to hundreds of thousands of internal Microsoft e-mails that became part of the public record with the extraordinary access to Microsoft executives that accrued from his position as a Journal beat reporter. He also makes a powerful argument that Microsoft's future lies in being more open and less proprietary. As such, his tale is clearly superior to the scads of terrible books that have been written by Microsoft's many critics, as well as some of the slightly better-written accounts authored by Microsoft sycophants. But his cop-out at the end cuts the legs out from under his own argument. It's a change of heart, midstream, and leaves the reader unsure and a bit unsteady.

Next Page: Bill Gates as doofus?

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