Rohm, Wendy Goldman. The Microsoft File: The Secret Case Against Bill Gates.
New York: Random House (Times Business), 1998. 313 pages.
After a decade as a journalist specializing in high-tech, Wendy Goldman
Rohm found at least one Deep Throat with some access to internal Microsoft
e-mail. This book is the result. While not exactly a smoking gun (whenever
Microsoft trains its firepower on a competitor, they're as likely to brag
about it as to disguise it with PR), it provides an inside view of the
historical situation as the antitrust trial begins. Several topics are
covered in detail: how Microsoft pressured Europe's largest PC manufacturer
to discard DR-DOS; the struggle of various innovators, such as WordPerfect,
Lotus, Borland, and Novell, to survive Microsoft's leveraging of Windows
into "office suite" applications; Microsoft's clear preference for stealing
ideas and buying products rather than innovating them; the history of the
antitrust case since it started at the FTC seven years earlier; and Bill
Gates himself, whose predatory personality dominates the Microsoft campus.
The only criticism of this book might be that Rohm is a closet
novelist. Sometimes her prose is unnecessarily poetic, while at other
times the snippets of reconstructed dialog detract from the book's
credibility, and fail to add the personal dimension that was presumably
intended. Nevertheless, Rohm gets an "A" on her homework for this story,
and she turned it in at a crucial moment in high-tech political history.
ISBN 0-8129-2716-8
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