Bill Gates: Hero or fool?

Bill Gates has never been portrayed in as poor a light as in "Breaking Windows." To pick just a few phrases: "Gates was losing control of Microsoft ... Gates had lost the technical respect of many of Microsoft's key managers ... Gates was slowly being marginalized ... The conventional wisdom was that the more deeply Gates was involved the more likely a project was to fail." It's a courageous act by Bank -- as it becomes increasingly hard to imagine that he will be getting as many one-on-one interviews with Gates after the publication of his book as before.

Bank bolsters his arguments with quotes from thousands of e-mails and a detailed breakdown of an internal struggle at Microsoft that continued for years and sapped the vigor of the company. On one side, Brad Silverberg and the Internet visionaries argued for a future of interoperability and openness. On the other, under the lead of Jim Allchin, the Windows-first crowd looked for ways to keep doing business as usual, locking customers into proprietary software by leveraging every trick in the business.

Silverberg gets extraordinarily favorable treatment, but another dose of hindsight raises the question of whether his vision was actually appropriate for Microsoft. When Bank started writing his book, the Net was still in its ascendancy -- everywhere one looked, free services via the Net were flourishing. The free software model pioneered by GNU and Linux-based software was receiving favorable coverage, and the old proprietary dinosaurs like Microsoft seemed doomed.

That line of argument has fewer adherents today, when even such free software stalwarts as VA Linux have announced that they will be selling proprietary software. The Net's threat to established business models doesn't seem quite as potent as it did a few years ago, while Microsoft, despite a depressed stock price, continues to rake in billions of dollars of revenue the old-fashioned way.

Bank does make an interesting argument that, under Gates' leadership and with the encouragement of CFO Greg Maffei, much of Microsoft's financial prowess in recent years has come as a result of numbers games, but there's still no denying that the company sells a lot of software and will continue to do so in the future.

Microsoft isn't going away -- so the very subtitle of Bank's book, "How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft," seems a little misleading. He may have dropped the ball -- but a winning football team often recovers its own fumble and keeps on driving.

But then again, neither is the Net about to fade away, despite the passing of so many dot-coms and the financial disarray of so many tech companies. How Microsoft and the Net will come to coexist is still entirely uncertain -- as is the ultimate outcome of the antitrust suit, the success or lack thereof of .Net and Bill Gates' own legacy.

Right now, Microsoft appears more determined than ever to impose its own historically profitable vision on the Net. Such actions as excluding Java support from its operating system and new versions of its Web browser, and integrating media-playing technology and instant messaging into Windows XP are extremely familiar to longtime Microsoft watchers. So maybe when Gates stepped down and let Steve Ballmer take over the day-to-day reins of the company, he wasn't actually fumbling, he was setting the stage for even more success. And maybe the future isn't open, but closed: a choice between Microsoft or AOL Time Warner.

Indeed, given the problems facing so many Net companies, the real title of the book could have been "How the Net Fumbled Its Own Future, and Bill Gates and Microsoft Laughed All the Way to the Bank."

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