Microcosm
Business writing bores me.
It tends to be drier, less passionate, and less accurate than other forms of
journalism. Business writers are generally outsiders looking in: They lack the
access granted to political, sports, or even entertainment reporters, since few
companies seek the kind of publicity the press wants to bestow upon them.
Sometimes, practitioners of the genre can rise above its limitations; but you
can count on two fingers the number of books that have migrated from the
business-aisle ghetto to the mainstream: Barbarians at the Gate and
Den of Thieves . Barbarians succeeded because its writers, Bryan
Burrough and John Helyar, weren't seduced by the power of its subjects. They
knew that the RJR Nabisco-leveraged buyout represented the nadir of that era's
financial engineering. They called a moron a moron, and damned the whole lot of
them. Den of Thieves required even more intelligence work, as well as
author James B. Stewart's master touch at cutting through the
multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign--still ongoing--that tried to
make Michael Milken look like Albert Schweitzer pursued recklessly by
jackbooted government thugs.
Unfortunately, Randall E. Stross' The Microsoft Way ,
an inside look at the software giant that publishes this magazine, will not
match the gold standard set by Barbarians and Thieves . The book
succumbs to all the usual pitfalls of business writing. It shouldn't have.
Stross had unparalleled access to Microsoft executives, including the right to
stroll through the campus without an apparatchik at his side. And the tale of
Microsoft is certainly worth telling, if only because we can all learn from the
successes of one of the world's greatest companies.
To his
credit, Stross does grasp what's right at Microsoft: the hard-boiled
meritocracy that makes rich those who contribute to it; Bill Gates' prediction
that consumers, not just large businesses, would jump at the chance to own
computers; and his--and his company's--driving desire to outsmart and outfox
the competition. But Stross fails to see the larger context for Microsoft's
dominance, and we know that from the get-go, when he begins his book with a
pretentious foreword that postulates the similarities between Henry Ford and
Bill Gates, a comparison to which he alludes repeatedly over the next 239
pages.
In fact, the flawed Ford-Gates analogy is a
perfect metaphor for what's wrong with Stross' book. Ford's genius lay in mass
production, and in bringing down the cost of the product so that the consumer
could afford to purchase a one-time luxury item. In the province of computing,
that feat was accomplished not by Gates--who has never fought to reduce the
price of computing power, lest his margins suffer unnecessarily--but by the
boys at Intel, led by Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, and the late Robert Noyce--who,
years before his death, joked with IBM execs that computers in the future would
not only be more powerful than IBM mainframes, but would be smaller, and much,
much cheaper.
A better
comparison for Gates would have been John D. Rockefeller, who sought to
monopolize the fuel that went into automobiles. Like MS-DOS or Windows 95,
gasoline engines serve as the operating system of cars, and to be the dominant
provider of the fuel for that operating system seems a lot more Gates-like.
This hits on the larger flaw of Stross' analysis. Had the
writer drawn the obvious parallels, he would have run the risk of endorsing the
Justice Department's case against the monopolist Microsoft, a case Stross
spends almost the entire book debunking. Microsoft in The
Microsoft
Way is a benign, friendly company that succeeded in spite of itself. It
dominated the software industry because its rivals were such lightweights and
buffoons, and because it hired the smartest and brightest software writers.
When it came up against serious competition, in the form of Intuit, it was just
another bumbling competitor, hardly worth the Antitrust Division's time. (To
recap: The Justice Department vetoed Microsoft's 1994 attempt to purchase
Intuit, maker of the personal-finance program Quicken, on the grounds that it
was anti-competitive--a bid to corner the personal-finance-software market.)
Microsoft's aborted purchase of Intuit, says Stross, shows not only that the
company does not dominate, it can't even shoot straight.
Stross
could have written a fabulous book about how Microsoft's meritocracy produced a
perfect monopoly, out of sheer grit and the love bestowed upon its team of
managers by America's mutual funds (their fondness for Microsoft stock yielded
a price that allowed the company, with its handsome stock-option compensation
program, to hold on to its best, most talented players). He could have written
about how severely that monopoly was soon to be tested by the Internet, and by
its proselytizer, Netscape's Marc Andreessen. Instead, Stross spends most of
his time talking about Microsoft's attempts to produce consumer-software CDs,
which is only anecdotally interesting. (Intriguing, though, to learn that
Microsoft only approached Funk & Wagnalls to collaborate on an encyclopedia
CD-ROM after being turned down by a haughty Encyclopedia
Britannica . Microsoft and Funk & Wagnalls' Encarta is now the
leading encyclopedia in the multimedia market, whereas Britannica is up
for sale.) And Stross skips almost entirely over Microsoft's chief strength,
the operating systems of both personal computers (first MS-DOS and then Windows
95) and big corporate machines (Windows NT). Rather than find out how Microsoft
produced Encarta , I would really like to know how Microsoft got every PC
company to load its computers with Microsoft software and not that of other--at
times, superior--operating systems (the conventional wisdom that Gates handed
his systems' standards out to everyone while his competitors kept their
standards proprietary doesn't begin to account for the enormity of Microsoft's
success).
Don't get me wrong. I didn't agree with the
Justice Department's suit for one minute. I don't want a company to be punished
simply because it dominates. Were it not for the monopolistic traits of both
Intel and Microsoft, I believe that the Japanese would have had a choke hold on
this industry and destroyed the comeback that America has enjoyed in the last
10 years. But if you come at the industry with the perspective of a Microsoft
defense lawyer, as Stross does, you won't ever learn--let alone be able to
explain--why Microsoft succeeds the way it does.
Had Stross written his book
next year, he would have had a whole new story line: how Microsoft was or was
not able to translate its dominance in personal computers to the Internet. This
phenomenon happened so quickly, like much in the computer industry, that Stross
couldn't incorporate it cogently. Somehow I got the feeling, when reading
The Microsoft Way , that I was reading about the greatness of the French
army and its Maginot line in 1939. Bill Gates may not be waking up in the
middle of the night worried about whether Netscape has stormed the Ardennes on
the way to Sedan, but I'm sure somebody at Microsoft is worried (probably Steve
Ballmer, a college buddy of mine who would wake up in the middle of the night
if he bothered to sleep), and is working on a devastating counterattack this
very moment. Microsoft doesn't seem like the kind of place that would fight new
wars with old-war strategies, but it is insightful to see just how little of
the Microsoft that Stross saw was focused on the Net, and how much was focused
on old-fashioned software-delivery systems.
Maybe we'll never know what
really goes on inside Microsoft. The people I've worked with there, including
my editors at Slate, certainly don't seem to know. Whether that's by design or
disinformation on the part of their nonjournalist Microsoft bosses, I can't
tell. My conclusion after reading The Microsoft Way : Stross has plenty
of company when it comes to those who are clueless about this huge capitalist
success story.
