Pride Before the Fall

The humbling of Bill Gates and Microsoft is the last great business story of the 20th Century and the first great riddle of the 21st. How did it happen? How did the richest man in the world, the most powerful icon of the New Economy, wind up being pursued and attacked by his own government? And how did a company that had utterly dominated the technology landscape find itself weakened, vulnerable, and under the threat of a court-ordered breakup? John Heilemann's Pride Before the Fall uncovers the secret history of the antitrust trial that shook an economy: United States v. Microsoft. Drawing on years of reporting - including extensive, in-depth interviews with Gates and other top Microsoft executives, Justice Department trustbuster Joel Klein, superlitigator David Boies, Intel chief Andy Grove, and scores of lesser-known but pivotal players - Heilemann lays bare the chaotic confluence of forces that shattered Microsoft's aura of invincibility and the climate of fear that held an industry in thrall. Based on an acclaimed Wired magazine cover story, Pride Before the Fall is packed with rich detail, dramatic scenes, and explosive revelations. It tells the stories of the largely unknown men and women who turned their opposition to Gates's company into a crusade, laboring for years to persuade the government to indict Microsoft for its monopolistic practices. Pride Before the Fall explains in compelling detail how the high-tech kingpins whose businesses Gates had tried to destroy or strong-arm (Netscape, Apple, Sun Microsystems, and even Intel) worked in secret to help the Justice Department bring down Microsoft. It explores the lasting damage that the trial has inflicted on the first great empire of the Information Age. And Heilemann offers a vivid and sometimes shocking portrait of Gates himself - describing a man who in 1993 boasted to friends, "I have as much power as the President", only to be thrown into rage and depression a few years later, when he discovered just how wrong he'd been. Like a figure from classical Greek tragedy, Heilemann writes, Gates sowed the seeds of his own undoing. From lengthy visits to Redmond before, during, and after the trial, Heilemann paints a picture of a culture that can only be described as the Cult of Bill, a culture that had few limits when it came to eviscerating the competition, a culture that grew out of Gates's fiercely single-minded determination to keep Microsoft from meeting the fate of a company that he had studied, admired, rivaled, and then surpassed: IBM. But when that culture came under scrutiny on Capitol Hill, in the halls of the Justice Department, and in the courtroom of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, it provoked a verdict far harsher than anyone could have predicted - and guaranteed for Microsoft the very fate that Gates had struggled so desperately to avoid. With Pride Before the Fall, Heilemann confirms his reputation as one of Silicon Valley's most talented and respected