Volume 43, Number 3 · February 15, 1996
Caught in the Web
By James Fallows
OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates, with Nathan Myhrvold, by Peter Rinearson
Viking, 286 plus a CD-ROM pp., $29.95
Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Harper Collins, 371 pp., $21.00
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway
by Clifford Stoll
Doubleday, 247 pp., $29.95
The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity
by Thomas K. Landauer
MIT Press/A Bradford Book, 425 pp., $27.50
I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier
by Fred Moody
Viking, 311 pp., $23.95
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure Story
by Jerry Kaplan
Houghton Mifflin, 320 pp., $22.95
Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People
by Michael A. Cusumano, by Richard W. Selby
Free Press, 512 pp., $30.00
Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway
by Daniel Burstein, by David Kline
Dutton, 466 pp., $24.95
Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry—and Made Himself the Richest Man in America
by Stephen Manes, by Paul Andrews
Touchstone, 560 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The most effective aspect of Bill Gates's new book is its cover. A wonderful photograph, taken by Annie Leibovitz, shows a friendly-looking and casually dressed Gates standing on an isolated highway somewhere in the West. With his crew-neck sweater and penny loafers, with his warm expression and relaxed pose, Gates looks like the brainy young nephew in whom a family reposes its future hopes. Behind him, toward a horizon of pastel blues and pinks, the highway stretches straight, promising much. The image recalls other American fantasies of the next frontier and the open road. The message is, of course, that the competent, unthreatening Gates will guide us toward the information frontier.
Review, 5893 words
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