Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

I think this is a must-read book for any technology entrepreneur -- and all senior technology executives. Covering Bill Gate's childhood and the first 17+ years of Microsoft, you read in gory detail about just how complicated and chaotic that time was, and you marvel at Bill's and Microsoft's ability to surf through and dominate.I joined Microsoft in 6/1985 and departed in 8/1999. It grew from 800 people and $120M revenue to >30K people and >$19B revenue during those 14 years.Manes and Andrews have done a very thorough job capturing the feeling of the 8 years (1985-1993) where I overlapped with their chronology, when I worked on what became OS/2 for my first 5.5 years, then did early work on "Win32 for DOS", and co-led software engineering for MS-DOS 6.0 and 6.2 (both shipped in 1993).As they describe, the focus of the company was on OS/2 and IBM up until the "divorce" toward the end of 1990. The OS/2 group was much larger than the Windows group and it was staffed with most of the more experienced software engineers. Similarly, the Apps teams working on Word and Excel for OS/2 were larger and had more senior folks.By 1987 I was leading engineering teams, and like all engineering leaders I spent a lot of time on recruiting. Our focus was on the top talent graduating with BS (and BA) degrees, and our summer internship program was a key tool to both get real work done and attract the best software folks. Up until the web started heating up in 1996, Microsoft was able to hire the absolute best undergrads (a role Facebook and Google have today).I was too busy working to read the print release back in 1993, but I just finished this 20th anniversary April 2013 Kindle re-release. Andrews and Manes did an exhaustive amount of research, and it shows in the level of detail they provide in the early years of Gates and to a lesser extent the other very early Microsoft employees.Readers who were not around the PC industry in the 1980s and 1990s might be overwhelmed/bored with all the details of companies, products, dates, product unit sales figures, etc. But it was a walk down memory lane for me: GEM, DesqVIEW, Taligent, Kaleida, PS/2, PS/1, SAA, Cairo, NEC 9800, Atari, all those long-gone PC vendors, strategic alliances, and could-have-beens.What is very clear from this book?1) Bill Gates is very smart, very hard-working, very technical, very aggressive, and has boundless energy. He placed many bets, traveled and met with friends and foes relentlessly, and was forever paranoid about how Microsoft could be tripped up.2) The current dominance of Windows and Office was never a foregone conclusion. There were many competitors -- bigger and smaller -- pursuing various strategies and technologies in the 1980s and early 1990s, all attempting to gain dominant market share in PCs, operating systems, and applications. Big companies like IBM, HP, AT&T, and small companies like Novell, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, WordPerfect, Borland, Software Publishing.3) Apple had its wins and (mostly) losses in the "PC Wars"...who would have predicted that Jobs would come back and resurrect the company with iPod, iPhone, and iPad?4) When the books closes off its narrative in 1993, it is far from obvious that Windows is going to dominate the "PC Wars". There are still plenty of competitors.5) Hardware prices were SO HIGH back then. A megabyte of RAM cost ~$350 in 1988-1989. Today you can buy an 8Gb RAM DIMM for $70. Even ignoring inflation, that is 8,192 times as much RAM for 1/5th the cost.There is a brief 1994 "Envoi: A Computer in Every Wallet?" (I assume from a paper pack release) and then a 2013 "Afterword: Windows Update" that very briefly catches up to the present.The 1993 book mentioned Bill's 1990 "Information at Your Fingertips", and the 1994 chapter hints at the coming "national data highway", but the rise of the Internet changed the world for Microsoft in ways that no competitor had been able to.My thanks to Steve and Paul for their hard work in bringing this story together and sharing it with us.

I like this book about Bill Gates because I am his secret admirer. His early practice and knowledge in computer programming are the elements which have compelled me to pursue this field of software technique. Additionally, I personally feel that I use this book mainly for understand his background and also to learn the materials which are useful for future use of my Scalecessor, the name which I have founded many years ago in the computer based on my final year project report.

I admit I dropped the book at 2/3.While it's an amazingly details-rich insight into early-Microsoft years (the book's been originally published in 1993, when Gates was 38 - with just a short foreword written in 2012 called "Windows Update"), Gates personality, strategy and anecdotes emerge but are soon drowned, in my opinion, in too many financial records and small details to make it an enjoyable read.Could be a good plot for a movie (visual action would possibly make it "lighter") but page after page about royalties for this or that product update, precise accounts of yearly incomes, etc - you might start loosing interest for the big plot, i.e. how Gates has become an amazingly powerful protagonist in computing business.Worth reading anyway, if you remember Lotus 1-2-3 and the like, lots of anecdotes from those years and the amazing way the young Gates has made himself.

Mark F. LaMoure, Boise, IDPowerful! You will enjoy reading "Gates." The book explains what it took Bill Gates to build Microsoft and grow the computer revolution. Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft Corporation and greatly empowererd the world's computer industry with his effective and precious software. His book gives you great insight and deep vision on the challenges Bill faced. The book is much more than fascinating. The two authors, Manes and Andrews, wrote an in-depth book on brilliant Bill Gates. It is entrancing, because the book chronicles the difficult trials Bill overcame for success at Microsoft. I rate the book 5 Gold Stars.The book is written from a captivating standpoint. Reading it gives you deep insight on Bill's personality, life and background. It is a first class story of an outstanding man everyone in America should be proud of.An ivy league college dropout, Bill Gates was a smart, pre-law major at Harvard University. In 1978 just after dropping out of Harvard, Bill cofounded Microsoft Corporation with Paul Allen. Paul was his smart boyhood friend, since Bill's early teens. The two friends proved to be a dynamic duo of sparkling genius.After going into the software business, Gates demonstrated his brilliant brain power. He has been constantly ranked with the world's wealthiest and most intelligent men for more than 30 years. At Microsoft, Bill's accomplishments have been stunning, as well as gigantic. His software has helped the world tremendously.Bill Gates became the guiding compass behind Microsoft. By a huge distance, Microsoft rapidly became the world's most enormous computer software company. Over the long-term, Microsoft has cumulatively earned literally hundreds of billions of dollars, selling software for computers over three decades worldwide. That's big-league, collossal achievement, in helping billions of people internationally.An exceptional book, GATES will blow your mind. With 560 pages and 31 chapters, the book not only explains the awesome history of Bill Gates, but also the major players and events in the intriguing computer industry. An excellent book, its full of marvelous ideas and stories on Microsoft's development.Buy the book. I rate the book AT LEAST 5 Gold Stars. It is for people who are fascinated by Bill Gates and the unbelievable miracles it took to build Microsoft. The book delivers a precious payload of golden history to help you understand what goes on in the American computer industry. Enjoy!

I recently read Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography [Kindle Edition] and, having done so, checked for an appropriate book about Bill Gates.This book seemed to be the obvious one to choose.Having worked with computers since before both Gates or Jobs, albeit rather less successfully, I was interested to see how my remembrance of the development of personal computers - generic small 'p' and small 'c' - mapped to the books' content.Having both books on the Kindle, it was an easy matter to identify common points in each book, and compare how they were spun. I think 'spun' is the right word because each book tends to discount the subject of the other book as being of any real importance. The authors of this book went rather overboard to discount the part that Jobs played and in doing so, lost a little credibility, for me.Having read both, I found the facts in each to be pretty much spot on and I was surprised to find I liked the Bill Gates as portrayed more than I did Steve Jobs.All in all, I found this book an engrossing read. It was flawed only in its premature end in 1993, with only some short additions to cover the next 20 years. While I appreciate that a full update would have been a huge undertaking, a lot has happened in that 20 years. As the update at the back of the book asks: "so how did Jobs manage it?".For me, the two stories become reality in what I now see before me. From 1983 to 2010 I used DOS and all versions of Windows, learning to kludge things throughout that time as a natural need to make the systems work effectively. Eventually, the fact that my PCs were always heavily slowed down by the need for copious anti-virus software topped me into switching to Apple. Productivity wise, there's no competition. The only problem moving to an iMac was learning to unlearn all the kludges as the Apple system simply worked, and the need for antivirus software disappeared. So, quality won the day for me.Summation: the Gates book is well recommended, but take a look at the Gates one as well, to get a view of the other side of the story. Then make up your own mind. The process will be very illuminating.

This book is the perfect counter to issacsons bio of Steve Jobs, giving a different perspective of the birth of modern computing. Also a very in depth account of the earlier life of Bill Gates and the formation of Microsoft. Having lived through this era it also set right some of the miss-reported facts from the time. A must read for any one interested in modern day computing.

An old book, but a great companion to 'Jobs'.

This should be read in conjunction with Hard Drive; it is a good book and explores Bill Gates from another angle.

Only slight criticism that it jumped back and forth by years and I sometimes I found it a bit difficult to follow chronologicallyWould recommend but just to remind anybody interested that this book is pretty much pre Windows 95 apart from the short update at the end.