Hard Drive -- Book Review

Hard Drive:  Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

By James Wallace and Jim Erickson

HarperCollins:  New York.    1992

Bill Gates is an interesting person.  Not necessarily a likeable person.  Many people dislike him strongly.  But there are many fascinating nooks and crannies in his personality.  His drive, his intensity, his intelligence, and his leadership must command respect, if not admiration.  This book covers his early years and his rise to the top of the computer industry.  He was still not married when the book ended.  It gives a pretty good picture of his early development as a computer geek.  What it doesn’t give is an intimate portrait of Bill Gates.  It doesn’t examine his family relationships, his parents, siblings, childhood experiences in any great depth.  His name is William Gates III, which indicates a strong family tradition of pride and high expectations.   He has a close relationship with his mother and his family has been very supportive of him throughout his life, but beyond that there is not much detail offered.  He has an older sister who is barely mentioned in this book.  There is a lot of personal information about him in the book, however.  I wouldn’t say that the book is sanitized, but it steers clear of his intimate family life – which I would like to see more of in order to understand his emotional temperament and the ferocious, all consuming, implacable drive to succeed and prove himself the best at all costs.  The temper tantrums, viciousness, and duplicity testify to the intensity of those needs.  There is a high degree of anxiety underlying all of this, but its origin remains murky. 

Mathematics, and especially computers, is about power, control, and domination.  In a computer nothing is chance – unless you program it that way.  Computers, through software, yield absolute control and predictability.  It is not an accident that this would be the driving passion in Bill Gates’ life.  One of Gates most derisive assessments of a person is to call someone “random.” Gates doesn’t like unpredictability or anything that cannot be controlled.  That might help to explain his fondness for speeding in his cars (sometimes as high as 150 mph).   There is a very strong need to prove he is in control, first and foremost of himself, and this is affirmed through testing his mastery of external challenges.  

The book tends to stick to the facts and is spare on interpretation.  That is probably a good thing.  However, sometimes I wish there was more psychological depth.  His fondness for gambling, speeding, and workaholism all reflect deep personal need to push himself to the limits – but why?  There seems to be an underlying sense of worthlessness or futility which he is forever trying to counteract with ever greater achievements and the defeat of his rivals, who threaten to expose that vulnerable sense of failure or unlovability.  There was a remark from one woman whom he dated that he had felt very lonely as a child and was also lonely as an adult.  She said he hides his hurt and disappointment when key employees leave Microsoft.  I suspect there is a lot of hurt and disappointment in his personal relationships that one rarely sees.  The workaholism covers it. 

There were two incidents of personal disappointment reported in the book that I felt were particularly unfortunate.  One was a long time friend who was not part of the computer world was supposed to meet him and go to a movie – after Gates had become a prominent figure in the computer world.  The friend arrived significantly late.  Gates did not say anything, but after that the relationship withered.  This friend did not respect his time and his importance.  On another striking occasion he went out with a few low level Lotus employees and spent a long night for over four hours in a hotel bar just chatting candidly and informally about himself and some business matters.  The next day the three employees met and decided to write up a memo recalling as much as they could of what Gates had said.  One of the three dissented and would not participate, but the memo was written and sent to some top level Lotus executives, one of whom was a Gates enemy.  From there it was sent to one of Gates enemies at IBM and finally a garbled version was published in Infoworld, a computer industry magazine, causing a furor.  I felt it was a very unfortunate betrayal that a moment of relaxed informality and personal engagement would be opportunistically turned against him.  It made me wonder how he values human relations and his basic outlook toward them being in his position?   Girlfriends did not have high priority in his life during his early years as some found out. 

The book is a well balanced presentation.  It is sympathetic and at the same time unsparing.  It is weighted toward his business ventures, but then, that’s how his life is.  Life equals work and work equals life.  This is the fundamental equation in Bill Gates’ life, and anyone who works at Microsoft is expected to adopt it as well.  The authors give rather thorough overviews of Microsoft’s relationships with IBM, Lotus, and Apple, among many others in the computer industry.  His success cannot be attributed to luck.  Bill Gates would have been successful no matter what direction he had taken.  Where luck entered the picture is in being in the right place at the right time when the world was on the cusp of the computer revolution.  That revolution would have occurred without Bill Gates.  If Bill Gates had come along two years later, he probably would not have become the world’s richest man – although he certainly would have done very well.  But his unique personality and abilities in the right nurturing environment at the right moment in history is what made this story and reshaped the modern world.  This book is an excellent introduction to the inside story of this world transformation.  It will be fascinating to anyone who lived through the computer revolution and watched these developments unfold.