"One of the first nonfiction works to tackle technology's biggest topic with a sense of humor...Rivlin is a good reporter with a talent for highlighting the hypocrisy and personal feelings of just about every major industry figure."

-Jonathan Littman, Upside magazine

"Bill-watchers will adore this book. All the dish about your personality makeovers, your eating habits and resultant weight gain, your extravagances and your penny-pinching, your teary-eyed reactions when the Department of Justice started poking you with sticks--that Bill, is the stuff that beach reading is made of."

-Angela Gunn, Seattle Weekly

"The Plot to Get Bill Gates combines impressive reporting, original analysis and a keen eye for telling details that illuminate a larger story of mass obsession. This is Melville updated for our times, with a Politically Incorrect twist of humor."

– Randall Stross, author of The Microsoft Way

This book began with a facetious line, delivered after a friend asked me how I'd sum up what was going on in Silicon Valley. It was spring 1997, and at that point I was spending all of my time writing about the Valley, for San Francisco magazine and as a contributing writer for Upside. Ironically, though the eyes of the nation were on Silicon Valley, in the Valley all eyes seemed diverted northward toward Redmond; Bill Gates's name was on everyone's lips. "It's all just a plot to get Bill Gates," I said to my friend. "A plot by everyone to prove themselves bigger, better, and smarter than this dislikable, slop-shouldered tyrant from Redmond."

At that point I had been a journalist for more than 15 years. As a staff writer for an alternative weekly, I had covered Chicago's City Hall (resulting in the book, Fire on the Prairie) through most of the 1980s. and I had spent several years as a street reporter on the youth violence beat (resulting in the book Drive-By). But by 1994, when I completed Drive-By, I was ready for a change. And just a short drive from my home was this stretch of land that, with the sudden surge of widespread interest in the Internet, was ground zero.

In the mid '70s, I had spent a great deal of time in my high school's computer room attempting to master BASIC. I had started college as an engineering major—until abandoning the hard sciences because of a new-found interest in politics and writing. But now journalism and my long dormant technical bent have merged. I dove whole hog into high tech, bringing with me an ingrained distrust for hype, a died-in-the-wool dislike of hypocrisy, and a strong love of narrative (i.e., tell it like a story). I cranked out articles for a variety of publications while simultaneously searching out the story line that would serve as the backbone for a book bringing readers into this era-defining business battle.

I see myself first and foremost as a storyteller. And so my aim with this book is to present an entertaining and compelling tale that helps the general interest reader and industry veteran alike gain insights into the nature of competition in computerdom and the larger-than-life personalities who rule this world. In a nutshell, The Plot to Get Bill Gates is a story of obsession: obsession with money, obsession with the Big Strike, but mainly obsession with Bill Gates, the world's richest man and therefore the object of envy, attention, and resentment the world over. To my mind it's a tale of obsession worthy of Melville, where a long line of Captains of Industries have taken turns playing the role of Captain Ahab, ostentatious in their hate for Gates—the Great White Whale. The more he is attacked, the angrier and meaner (and larger!) this whale grows. I hope you enjoy.

"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!