How the Web Was Won

Steve Lohr

...[O]n its own terms, How the Web Was Won is an exemplary tale of corporate resilience, filled with insider detail....Andrews, a columnist for The Seattle Times, is the co-author with Stephen Manes of Gates(1993), which is regarded as the definitive biography of the Microsoft chairman to date. For his current book, Andrews received Microsoft's cooperation from the top on down. And he delivers on his promise to tell ''Microsoft's Internet story through the eyes, ears and voices of the players themselves.''
— The New York Times Book Review \

Steven Levy

...Andrews is so tilted toward Microsoft's contention that it won the Web solely by fair play that the book has...value as an anthropological study....[A] well-researched account. —Newsweek

Publishers Weekly

That Microsoft was late getting onto the Web is a common piece of corporate lore. For Andrews, who for more than 10 years has covered Microsoft for the Seattle Times and is the coauthor of the balanced Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America, the nuts and bolts of how the company has rebounded to dominate the browser market is a milestone of corporate history. As such, he treats it lovingly, lingering over memos, basking in the company's high-stakes, big-money energy and spotlighting various corporate players as they maneuver the monolith into pole position. Andrews makes clear that Microsoft had been thinking at least peripherally about Web-like technology since 1990. Even before rival browser-purveyor Netscape went public in mid-1995 (creating a $3 billion company), the race had already started. The story is familiar: technologies crop up as challengers, only to fall or be absorbed. Internet Explorer becomes part of a desktop bundle. Antitrust suits are fended off. IE becomes something of a standard. Andrews's minute descriptions--though often slow moving--of the technology and of the problem-solving approaches of Microsoft and its rivals will fascinate tech-heads and intrigue the uninitiated. Yet, as Andrews notes, Microsoft's victory may not be permanent: the software giant is threatened by AOL's purchase of rival Netscape and its alliance with operating-system competitor Sun Microsystems, by the "open-source" movement that advocates giving users direct access to program code, and by the government's ongoing antitrust action. The notoriously volatile technology business may yet render at least the title of this book premature. Photos not seen by PW. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

From The Critics

Novel-length exposes of Microsoft and Bill Gates tend to fall into two camps: dry behind-the-scenes business studies and dirt-dishing tell-alls that focus on the eccentricities (or worse) of key executives. No different are the latest off the presses – Paul Andrews' How the Web Was Won and Gary Rivlin's The Plot to Get Bill Gates. Both longtime journalists, Andrews and Rivlin bring different perspectives and styles to the most overexposed subject of late '90s business media.

In detailing the fits and starts of Microsoft's march to dominate the Internet, veteran Seattle Times tech writer Andrews has the right idea. He profiles the handful of Microsofties who provided the inspiration for a complex tangle of initiatives. Problem is, the profiles aren't that interesting. Mostly we learn that folks like J. Allard, Steve Sinofsky and Brad Chase are smart, incredibly hardworking and maniacally dedicated to Microsoft. But Andrews' subjects feel interchangeable. They're all young, white, type-As who play practical jokes, fetishize retro gym shoes and eat lots of pizza. There's not much else to do when you work 90-hour weeks. Andrews also hurts his own cause by plowing stubbornly through technical details. Much of the first chapters trace the historical record of TCP/IP implementations and WinSock API development. Tech historians will love it, but general readers' eyes are likely to glaze over. Even the biographical details of the young, unheralded Softies – some of whom will become the next inner circle – read like the back of a geek bubble-gum card. Do we really need to know every version of DOS that Ben Slivka worked on?

In The Plot to Get Bill Gates, Rivlin takes an outside approach. This city-desk reporter strings together a rogue's gallery of Gates' foes: Suns Scott McNealy, former Borland leader Philippe Kahn, Oracle's Larry Ellison, antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, former Novell chief Ray Noorda and other usual suspects. Rivlin has a great sense of the hypocrisy and ego-tripping that pervades corporate boardrooms, and he spares neither Gates nor his rivals the rod. He may slap Microsoft for its unchecked greed and arrogance, but he just as eagerly shows its rivals – a modern-day "Captain Ahab's Club," as Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold impishly calls them – gnashing their teeth and foundering on the rocks of their own obsessions. Perhaps most brutal is his description of Ellison's Oracle as a testosterone-fouled sinkhole, a high-tech version of the company depicted in Glengarry Glen Ross.

While no one is safe from Rivlin's reproach, Andrews' tome is an elegy to the Microsoft Way. His laborious efforts to heap Gates with praise and defend him against criticism – such as the failure to grasp the importance of the Web in his "visionary" 1996 best-seller The Road Ahead – are embarrassing. Andrews describes Gates at a crucial 1994 offsite meeting in which Allard and others brought the Net's importance to Gates' attention: "Watching his lieges spar like a verbal version of Ali and Frazier did not faze Gates. He loved how passionate people got about Microsoft and its products. It was OK to disagree as long as no one got hurt and the results helped the company serve its customers." Gates couldn't have said it better.

Ultimately, both books rehash much of the daily news from the past five years. Rivlin's work collects in one place all the incidents, real or rumored, that are the very pith of Valley lore and ultimately concludes that there is no single plot to get Gates, just a greedy boys club playing one-upsmanship. Andrews' lens on his hometown company is as rosy as Rivlin's is gray. Neither author deserves 300 pages.

Katie Hafner

...[A] well-researched, highly readable account....For the most part, readers will find his profiles of Internet zealots both in and outside of Microsoft fascinating....While books like this often suffer from acronym and technical jargon overload, Mr. Andrews is admirably restrained on both counts.
— The New York Times

Steve Lohr

...[O]n its own terms, How the Web Was Won is an exemplary tale of corporate resilience, filled with insider detail....Andrews, a columnist for The Seattle Times, is the co-author with Stephen Manes of Gates(1993), which is regarded as the definitive biography of the Microsoft chairman to date. For his current book, Andrews received Microsoft's cooperation from the top on down. And he delivers on his promise to tell ''Microsoft's Internet story through the eyes, ears and voices of the players themselves.''
— The New York Times Book Review

Steven Levy

...Andrews is so tilted toward Microsoft's contention that it won the Web solely by fair play that the book has...value as an anthropological study....[A] well-researched account.
— Newsweek

Kirkus Reviews

The detailed story of how Microsoft created a substantive position for itself in the rapidly growing world of the Internet. Other books have already covered Microsoft's meteoric rise and massive presence in the computer software industry; Seattle Times technology columnist Andrews himself co-authored a business bio of the company's leader, Bill Gates (Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America, not reviewed). This time, he turns to Microsoft's decision to make itself a major player on the Internet, based on the company's belief that the World Wide Web would offer big opportunities for future profits. In a chatty and personal style, Andrews introduces the cast of characters assigned to this task, starting with those who had the initial realization that something big was brewing with this universal network. Bits and pieces of information are offered about how software is created, but Andrews's relentless main mission is to portray Microsoft's efforts to enter the Internet era as mortal combat with competitors rather than creative programming. Hyperbole often obscures the subject. We read that "the earth shook" at a Microsoft news conference, for instance, and that one of Microsoft's competitors is a "sworn archenemy." Still, software developers will feel kinship with the deadlines, crises, and interdepartmental fighting that accompany the story, and Microsoft aficionados may enjoy learning more about the workings of the company (including product and management failures) and about the expansive team of professionals who get as much credit and emphasis as the boss himself. Fan-club reading for Microsoft supporters. ($75,000ad/promo; author tour)