PRIDE BEFORE THE FALL : The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era.

• Author: Cockburn, Andrew
• Position: Review

PRIDE BEFORE THE FALL : The Trials of Bill gates and the end of the Microsoft Era by John Heilemann Harper Collins, $25.00

ABOUT THE SAME TIME THAT I sat down to write this review, I got one of those forwarded jokes that account for most of the traffic on the Internet. This one was brilliant: "In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with Haiku poetry messages," Among the adaptations of this ancient Japanese poetic form, which seeks to convey powerful insights through extreme brevity, were: "Yesterday it work'd/Today it is not working/ Windows is like that," "Windows NT crash'd/I am the Blue Screen of Death. / No one hears your screams," and my favorite, "With searching comes loss/And the presence of absence:/ `My Novel' not found."

Exactly. Here we are, universally equipped with the technological miracle of the personal computer, and half of the time the damn things don't work. It's not that they can't work--I found that out when I switched to a Mac--it's just that Microsoft has gotten away with foisting a miserable operating system on most of the world, and it doesn't care. Therefore, like all other rational human beings, I greeted the humiliation of Bill Gates and his corporation in federal court with an instant and delicious thrill of schadenfreude.

Understanding exactly what Microsoft had done wrong, and why it deserved to be obliterated, took rather longer. In fact, I did not really get the point until I read Pride Before the Fall, a refreshingly succinct history of the Microsoft anti-trust trial and the events leading up to it. An adaptation of a long article for Wired magazine, the book explains the technology surrounding the case without being incomprehensible to cyber-illiterates like myself. This may be because author John Heilemann is a journalist who delved into the wired world, rather than the other way round. Thus he displays an easy fluency with the sometimes arcane subject matter without advertising the fact. As the book makes clear, the Microsoft trial was not simply a battle waged by Joel Klein of the Justice Department and the brilliant trial lawyer David Boies against a mighty corporation that ended in victory. In fact, even when presented with clear evidence of Microsoft's dirty work, and even while Netscape, a principal victim of the corporation's modus operandi "was reduced to rubble," the Justice Department dragged its feet. More deserving of heroic status is Gary Reback, a...