Book Reviews (II)
Paramendra Bhagat
September 18, 2002

• Bank, David. Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled The Future Of Microsoft. The Free Press. New York: 2001. This book is supposed to convince you Bill Gates messed up, that he had the opportunity to move on to an Internet Platform in the late 1990s and leave Windows behind, but I emerged admiring Gates even more. (Caution, the final few pages end on a good note for the Big B though.) My instincts should have lead me otherwise. I spent my final three years at college trying to convince people to work to launch a company whose only product was to be a website. But then we are not in the broadband era yet and freeware resulted in a massive dot com meltdown. The book also whetted my personal appetite for XML and Java, something I hope to delve into teaching myself in bits and parts online. My favorite paragraph-segment in the book is on pages 223-24: ".....Among the .Net "building blocks" Gates identified were Identity and Personalization, all the services of authentication, billing, personal information, and legal accountability; Notification and Messaging, the fabric for knitting digital devices into a real-time communication network that would ultimately subsume the telephone; Storage and Delivery, the distribution and retrieval of all kinds of digital goods, from music to photos to software itself; Directory and Search, the core navigational tools for finding networked resources and information; and Calendar and Collaboration, the central repository for coordinating meetings and schedules." Microsoft is not exactly a start-up, but it has not yet become an IBM. And I was particularly touched to read about Bill Gates' summer 2000 reading vacation in Australia when he took a trunk load of books on health issues in the poor countries. The guy has poured billions into the effort. He can't be all that evil if his heart is in all those right places. The writer covers Microsoft for The Wall Street Journal. "The Internet is indeed a subversive force. From the time it attained critical mass, the Internet has been a great civic resource and a rolling business disaster, sucking the profit margins out of retailing, then music, and then software itself."