How The Web Was Won: How Bill Gates and His Internet Idealists Transformed the Software Empire

Taking the reader into the mind of Microsoft, Andrews reveals how the company struggled first to comprehend and then capitalize on the Net. How twenty-two-year-old Internet hound J. Allard was shocked to learn that nobody at Microsoft seemed to know anything about networking computers when he arrived in late 1991. How Steve Ballmer, Gates’s Harvard buddy and second in command at Microsoft, lit the internet fuse with a head-scratching e-mail in December 1993. How Gates’s technical assistant Steven Sinotsky discovered in early 1994 that Cornell University, his alma mater, was more “wired” than the world’s most successful software company. And how by mid-1995, awash in the rising tide of Netscape, America Online, Java, and the Web, Bill Gates assigned the internet the highest level of importance, launching an effort that, in a matter of months, would provoke the justice Department, competitors, and industry analysts to warn that Microsoft could someday rule the internet. PAUL ANDREWS (author)