There is no question that inside the world of computers, Bill Gates has assumed dimensions that far exceed human scale. “It’s like walking the Vatican with the pope,” Brokaw said to a crew member after the Comdex jaunt. As the chairman, cofounder and CEO of Microsoft, the company that reaps almost half the revenue in PC software worldwide, Gates is indeed regarded as nearly divine-though some competitors view him as satanic. More recently he has become a figure of fascination to the public, as befits a former computer nerd who used digital machismo and hardball business skills to accumulate a net worth of nearly $15 billion, give or take. He is also revered as the person who understands computer technology best, at a time when just about everybody else is still trying to figure out how to get their CD-ROM to play. But to date he has been reluctant to play his powerful celebrity card. While his appearances have been increasingly splashy–the recent rollout of Windows 95 software saw him trading quips with Jay Leno and being picked up like a round ball by Shaquille O’Neal–they have always been strictly in the service of Microsoft business. Aspects of his private life have been closely held, as evidenced by his wedding last year at a privately owned Hawaiian island, where he took the precaution of renting every helicopter in the area to assure no tabloid flybys.
But now Bill Gates is trying something different. Later this month “The Road Ahead” hits the stands, a book that explains how the Information Highway–or whaddever you wanna call it–will change our lives. He believes beyond question that this digital infrastructure will be built, though it may take some time (20 years, perhaps) before the wish list of amazing transformations in his book is converted to everyday reality. Though Gates had the help of two collaborators–Microsoft’s vice president Nathan Myhrvold and writer Peter Rinearson–at a certain point, well past the book’s original publication date a year ago, the chairman himself took charge, concentrating on the text to make sure the book wound up “sounding like me.” In effect, he has adopted the role of a high-tech Disney, guiding us through the way we will live after this new revolution morphs us into wireheads.
To say he is bullish is an understatement. For those of us who suspect that this world presents exciting new opportunities, Gates tells us our hopes will be fulfilled and attempts to outline specifically how our chances for fortune will expand: by doing away with distribution middlemen, he explains, the Internet will allow for “friction-free capitalism” that enables even the most humble business to reach a worldwide audience. For those titillated at the prospect of wonderful new toys, he gives us a delicious run-down of various “information appliances” and their functions (imagine! running a version of “Gone With the Wind” with your face mouthing the words of Scarlett or Rhett). For people who dread the changes that will come from such a major shift, he assures us with Panglossian confidence that though “dislocations” will indeed occur (meaning: you’re fired), the net result of these disruptions will be a more empowered, better educated, wealthier populace. “It’s a great time to be alive,” he says.
Some may disagree, and that’s fine with Gates, who hopes the book will generate a useful discussion about how we negotiate the future’s uncharted shoals. And there’s plenty to talk about. In his predictions about the fate of privacy, for instance, Gates outlines the possibilities of video cameras mounted on every streetlight, or devices capable of capturing every conversation and transaction a human being will ever make, in what he calls “the documented life.” Though he professes neutrality on these issues, he does admit that the prospect is “chilling.”
And what of Microsoft’s role in all this? There is a theory afoot that the Internet revolution Bill Gates describes in “The Road Ahead” is the immovable object that will thwart his company’s heretofore perpetual ascendancy. Proponents of this view charge that Gates can thrive only when he controls the field of play, and that in the wide-open competition to commercialize the Internet, Microsoft not only holds no particular advantage but is hobbled by its unwieldy size and the degree of its involvement in the current desk-top-computer world. (Last Thursday those theories led a Goldman, Sachs analyst to downgrade his investment rating of Microsoft stock, which promptly dropped $4.125 per share.) Then there is the constant threat of a government antitrust action: Microsoft dodged a bullet in its first settlement with the Justice Department’s complaint about abuse in distributing the Windows operating system, but a later ruling thwarted its purchase of Intuit, the creator of Quicken, the country’s most popular personal-finance software. As a result, even as Microsoft becomes more powerful, it has become fashionable to predict its decline. What? Microsoft will sell only 20 million copies of Windows 95 this year, and not 30 million? Write them off! But Gates’s competitors will not be pleased at the climax of his book when he proclaims, seemingly between clenched teeth, “There has never been a leader from one [computer] era who was also a leader in the next . . . . But I want to defy historical tradition.” Immovable object, meet irresistible force.
How will Microsoft pull this off? The same way it has earned its dominance to date. The company throws waves of resources at a problem, draws on the talents of very smart people and leverages its current position in the marketplace to accelerate acceptance of its new products, be they operating systems, applications or actual content. Earlier this month, for example, Microsoft hired tiber political pundit Michael Kinsley to edit its upcoming electronic magazine. (“If you can’t ship more bits,” Gates ,writes in characteristic techspeak, “an alternative is to have a financial interest in the bits being shipped.”) In Gates’s keynote speech at Comdex, he outlined how within five years a new generation of his company’s applications software (like word processors and spreadsheets) will have built-in features that allow users to take complete advantage of the Information Highway simply by upgrading the current versions of Microsoft’s Office suite of tools that are already fixtures on so many of the world’s hard-disc drives.
Meanwhile, Microsoft will fight fiercely to whittle down the lead in the “browser” market assumed by Netscape Communications, which currently boasts a 70 percent share of the software used by the millions of World Wide Web cruisers. One small contribution will be the distribution of 800,000 copies of Microsoft’s own Web browser, by including it in the CD-ROM that comes with “The Road Ahead.” The disc also offers the reader a chance to reread the book on screen, accessing hypertext links to selected terms. For instance, dick on Melinda French, the name of Gates’s bride, and you see a picture of the happy couple and a list of her accomplishments as a Microsoft marketer.
Of course, there are plenty of potential readers less concerned with the niceties of broadband technology–discussed in a chapter that decodes the difference between ISDN, DSVD and ATM (don’t ask)–than with the gossipy truth of what Bill Gates is really like. There is no sloppy self-confession from Bill’s inner child here, but sprinkled throughout are a few anecdotes that shed some light on our era’s Horatio Alger. He tells of a self-imposed mission he began at the age of 8 to read the entire World Book Encyclopedia, A to Z (the marathon ended at the P’s, five years later). Then there is the odd practice of “virtual dating.” When conducting a (pre-Melinda, one assumes) long-distance romance, Gates and his lady friend would look for a movie playing in their respective cities at about the same time. Driving to the theater, they would talk to each other on their car cellular phones; on the way home, they would reestablish the connection and hash out the movie. The most personal section of the book comes in a tour of the $30 million house he is building for himself on the shore of Lake Washington, a short hop in the Porsche from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. The house’s use of new technology is important to Gates, particularly in the proliferation of display screens that will portray a continually changing set of artistic images, movies and patterns, customized to each resident or guest. Neo-Luddites will find it comforting, however, that the house’s most imposing feature is not technological, but natural: massive beams from 500-year-old Douglas fir trees, rescued from a recently demolished Weyerhaeuser lumber mill.
A more subtle revelation in the book is the degree to which Gates seems frustrated at the limitations of time itself. His main complaint about writing a book, in fact, is that it burned up so many days of work. An important goal of the software he is building for the future–complete with “intelligent assistants” to dispatch tasks for you and built-in conferencing equipment to spare you from business trips-is to provide more time for its users and himself. At one point he writes that he would change his negative attitude about casino gambling if it were possible to win not money, but extra hours.
Last Tuesday, for instance, you could sense his impatience as he endured a series of a half-dozen television interviews in a backstage dressing room at Las Vegas’s Aladdin Hotel after delivering his Comdex keynote speech. He reeled off sound bites in a makeshift studio with broiling klieg lights, each interviewer providing variations on the same interrogatories, including the query du jour: can Microsoft compete in the wide-open world of the Internet? (Answer: you bet.) Between interviews, he talked to colleagues or sat alone, intensely rocking back and forth in his chair. At one point there was trouble with the audio in the TV satellite connection, and Bill Gates had to keep talking until the sound kicked in. “I can hear you,” he said, looking into a bright light, to a stranger somewhere across the country. “Can you hear me? Am I speaking in your ear? Can you read my lips? You don’t hear me at all? Not even the vowels? He should hear me. I can hear me. Why don’t they send my audio the way they send my video?” Then he closed his eyes for a second and sighed very deeply.
Is this what Bill Gates really wants for himself?. The answer seems to be yes. He has never presented himself as anything other than a software entrepreneur, passionately devoted to maintaining his company’s continued leadership and profits. If submitting to interviews, or writing a book, will help matters, so be it. The road ahead is important to Gates, but what keeps him going is his drive to get there first.
