Click here to read the review that ran in the July 19, 1999 New York Times, a piece of which is excerpted below:
"Mr. Rivlin has taken the not inconsiderable task of taking on an already overworked subject and saying something new not only about it but about what it reveals about the rest of us."
Richard Bernstein, The New York Times, July 19, 1999
1, Salon.com, by Janelle Brown
"Rivlin, executive editor of the East Bay Express, the Berkeley alternative weekly, is a marvelous writer who has a talent for colorful description of people and events."
2, Slashdot's Jon Katz gives the book seven of ten stars.
"Amid much Gatesian hype and hysteria, it's refreshing to encounter some history and facts and a linear account of Microsoft's intricate battles and strategies."
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
'The Plot to Get Bill Gates': Microsoft Capitalism as Mirror of America
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
It's safe to say that few among the public have ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee and that few newspapers and magazines have hailed him as a visionary. But Berners-Lee, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created the World Wide Web. He did it to enable himself and his friends to share their research, not to make money, and that is just the point of "The Plot to Get Bill Gates," a spirited new book by Gary Rivlin.
Rivlin has written an intimate history of the do-or-die competition that reigns in the lucrative, high-stakes world of computer technology...he also casts a light not just on Gates but on the world that loves him and hates him and that has made him a celebrity even as it has essentially ignored people like Berners-Lee....
But at the heart of this narrative is the dark side of fabulous success..... It is the fabulous envy that that success generates, the cult of hatred that Rivlin argues is behind the scheming and plotting to "get" Gates, scheming and plotting that, in Rivlin's description, have united Gates's main competitors with the United States and other governments in what has now become a well publicized antitrust case.
In other words, on the moral plain "The Plot to Get Bill Gates" is a complex tale, although it is handled surely by Rivlin, a reporter at Upside magazine and the author of two previous nonfiction books. If you want to dislike Gates, Rivlin gives you plenty of reasons to do so. But his ultimate point of view is that Gates has only been more conspicuously successful than almost all others in a cutthroat capitalist game that is as American as robber barons and price fixing. ….
His description of the hate-Gates industry and his intimate glimpses into the personalities and practices of Silicon Valley are bright and readable pieces of urban sociology. Rivlin, in other words, has performed the not inconsiderable task of taking on an already overworked subject and saying something new not only about it but about what it reveals about the rest of us.
"The Plot to Get Bill Gates is a must for anyone who loves a good old-fashioned high-tech food fight."
Money and success do strange things to people, especially when they're not their own. Perhaps no better example of this phenomenon is Silicon Valley's obsession with Microsoft and its leader, Bill Gates, an obsession that Gary Rivlin examines with great relish and in great detail in The Plot to Get Bill Gates. Rivlin discovers a "king-sized obsession among one-dimensional workaholics" that's known in the industry as "Bill Envy," a phenomenon that has destroyed companies, inspired dozens of jokes (e.g., "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None. Bill Gates will just redefine DarknessTM as the new industry standard"), and for some raises the possibility of a wider conspiracy that pits Microsoft against everyone else--Silicon Valley, the Justice Department, even Ralph Nader.
From Gates's awkward adolescence to his position as the world's richest man, Rivlin takes a deep look into his character and uses him as a means to reveal the character of those that oppose him, a drama that he likens to that in Moby-Dick. Unlike other books about Microsoft (The Microsoft Way, How the Web Was Won, Barbarians Led By Bill Gates), Rivlin's tries not to take sides. Nevertheless, the Captain Ahabs (Ray Noorda, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, among others) come off looking less flawed, but certainly not as smart or as calculating or as dangerous as the white whale (Gates). While most of this material will be familiar to anyone who follows Microsoft and its competitors, Rivlin manages to keep the pages turning with dozens of entertaining anecdotes and stories about Gates and his enemies. The Plot to Get Bill Gates is a must for anyone who loves a good old-fashioned high-tech food fight. --Harry C. Edwards
Barnes & Noble.Com
"a satisfying, rollicking read…"
-- Sarah Finnie Cabot, BarnesandNoble.Com
Gary Rivlin’s book THE PLOT TO GET BILL GATES is a satisfying, rollicking read for anyone who is one speck interested in the rise of the Internet.
And who among us isn’t? After all, we’re in the home stretch of the 20th century. The recent decades splay behind us, neatly defined, precise as an Excel spreadsheet: the ‘60s (revolution), the ‘70s (adjustment), the ‘80s (excess). It’s possible to think of a person or people who characterize each of these decades: the Beatles, the new executive woman, Ronald Reagan. The ‘90s have been all about technology and, most specifically, the Internet.
Going into the ‘90s, no one had a dot-com tacked on to their name. As we leave this decade, domain names are almost as common as middle names. There’s a sea change happening in the world. We sense we’re in the thick of technological innovations that are as consequential, as momentous, as the birth of fire or the automobile or the railroad. And if you had to pick one human being who personifies that transformation, Microsoft’s Bill Gates is an obvious choice.
The reader emerges from the book with a full view of Gates the man—albeit a smidgen biased by Rivlin’s unrelenting interest in Gates’s physical features, e.g., his hair ("dirty-blond and cowlicked," "bowl cut, his bangs looking as if he had taken a pair of scissors to them himself") and his voice ("a cross between Julia Child and Barney Fife").
More telling than the external details is Rivlin’s artful tracing of Gates’s childhood origins as a nerd in Seattle. His parents, well-meaning folks, just didn’t know what to do with him. The middle child in the family, he went to a private school while his siblings went to public school. Bill, not surprisingly, was always a little different.
Best of all is Rivlin’s ability to weave Gates’s biography into a chronological tapestry involving not only his colleagues and underlings but also his adversaries. The author paints a colorful portrait of the milieu, beginning in the late 1970s, when "the PC industry was still young, male, and awash in testosterone." Rivlin’s view is that there’s Microsoft, and then there’s the rest of the world—Novell, Oracle, Intel, Sun, and everyone else. Gates is at the center of this galaxy, "the Rorschach blot of the industry," as Esther Dyson dubbed him. "What people think of him tells you more about them than it does about him."
Rivlin is a thorough and entertaining reporter, and it’s fascinating to have a glimpse of what makes each of these high-tech titans tick: Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Sun’s Scott McNealy, Novell’s Ray Noorda, et al. But Gates is the standout. His ambition and focus beat all. And if Rivlin’s story of the riches man in the world doesn’t keep you riveted, skip ahead to the appendix: It’s a compendium of Bill Gates and Microsoft jokes. --Sarah Finnie Cabot
"Rivlin captures the fear and loathing of Gates with snappy prose, keen analysis...and laugh-out-loud funny profile of Silicon Valley's personalities and their world-class egos....The result is one of the best books on new technology so far."
-Jon Swartz, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Informative and entertaining....[a] highly convincing analysis."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"A fun read"
-Business 2.0
"Rivlin manages to keep the pages turning with dozens of entertaining anecdotes and stories about Gates and his enemies. The Plot to Get Bill Gates is a must for anyone who loves a good old-fashioned high-tech food fight."
-Harry C. Edwards, Amazon.com
"Rivlin’s investigation of Gates and the industry that is fixated on him grips the reader because of its precision, detail, and perspective."
-Loretta Kalb, www.bookworld.com
"The Plot to Get Bill Gates makes for a fun read that in a few places is downright laugh-out-loud funny. Rivlin is a good writer. His insights into the zeitgeist of high-tech business…cut to the quick."
-Business 2.0
"Rivlin has a great sense of the hypocrisy and ego-tripping that pervades corporate boardrooms, and he spares neither Gates nor his rivals the rod. He may slap Microsoft for its unchecked greed and arrogance, but just as eagerly shows its rivals…gnashing their teeth and foundering on the rocks of their own obsessions."
-Alex Lash, The Industry Standard, June 14, 1999
"Rivlin makes many intelligent, irreverent points that you would have thought somebody would have made long ago but didn’t, because high-tech has steamrolled the media. Rivlin has met the enemy and is still standing tall."
-Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary, author of Showstopper!
