WHAT DO I THINK OF BILL GATES' The Road Ahead (Viking, 1995)? A crushing disappointment. Bill, you're pure Tabasco when it comes to establishing and maintaining an intergalactically influential megacorporation, but the intricacies of the celebrity tell-all book are way beyond even your abilities.
Bill, I applaud your desire to make another quick million -- even better, a quick million for charity -- by churning out one of these spicy deals, but you should have understood that the best-selling nonfiction blockbusters follow one of two Surefire Paths. Option #1 is to spill your guts, detailing every embarrassing interlude in life for which you can't actually be prosecuted, as in Barry "Greg" Williams and Chris "Moke" Kreski's excellent Growing Up Brady (HarperPerennial, 1992). Surefire Option #2 is to tap-dance around the sordid details and rely on the obvious multitude of pathetic omissions and excuses to compensate for the lack of juicy dirt.
The first major section of Greg's book has the Bunch getting bombed en route to taping a Sally Jessy Raphael Show appearance. You, Bill, spend your first major section talking about the history of the Industry. Nevertheless, I'll give you credit for at least trying to embrace Surefire Option #2. I, for one, enjoyed the bit where you single out the Mac as an example of the mistake of proprietary hardware (page 54), contradict yourself on page 60, and then go so far as to disingenuously identify the problems that Wintel's nonproprietary farrago of hardware creates ("Microsoft has been able to provide compatibility because hardware manufacturers have agreed not to allow modifications to our software that introduce incompatibility," page 61). Alas, after this breathtakingly peppy sequence, you start talking about asynchronous communications again.
On to the middle third. Don't get me wrong, Bill; all your conjecturing about how developments in broad-bandwidth communications will impact our daily lives is certainly welcome. Here in Boston, AT&T has pulled those nifty commercials with Tom Selleck and I've missed being reminded that pretty soon I'll be able to pull out a tablet computer right there on the airplane to pick up a video message from my sweetheart announcing that she's leaving me, along with an alert from my home-security software informing me that my stereo and all my records are gone. But how can this compete with Greg's story of getting to third base with Marcia? It's like Barry Williams understands and is saying, "Thank you for making it past the halfway point of my book. I will now tell about how I had to film the Sailboat Episode right after smoking my first joint ever."
By the time we reach the end of the book, Greg has had to resort to documenting his recent career, in which the phrases "dinner theater" and "made-for-TV movie" figure prominently. Bill, you counter by telling us about the house you're building on the sunny shores of Lake Washington. Welp, OK, Bill, you and The House win this round.
The House of Bill
Folks, Bill's new house is big. How big? He's just closed escrow on British Columbia, and once its statehood is pushed through Congress (projected for Q1FY97), he'll finally have "one kick-ass sundeck" (page 262) (oh, I'm just fibbing). It is a Push-Button Home of the Future, every bit as marvelous as the one Daffy Duck tried to sell Elmer Fudd, and if you drop in on Bill and Melinda with a bundt cake, I strongly suggest that you don't push the red button.
So you can see how I'm a bit exasperated. I've already blown about 30 bucks on Bill's book, and if I'm going to deduct the expense on my '95 1040, I'm going to have to critique The Road Ahead as if it were some sort of individual collection of thoughts on the present and future of technology and technology-related businesses. By that narrow definition, it's actually a good read. It's engaging, surprisingly candid considering its author, and provides a nice foundation upon which the technophobic can build. On the minus side, as a man savvy enough to know how to spell ISDN, I found parts of it reminiscent of a 1962 edition of Popular Science, in which we're all supposed to be tooling around in personal suborbital nuclear-powered helicopters by now. It's also terribly optimistic, glossing over some Stonehenge-like pitfalls of the Internet Age. After reading The Road Ahead, I was prompted to reread Cliff Stoll's wonderfully cynical Silicon Snake Oil (Doubleday, 1995). Together, the two books are like Paul McCartney singing, "It's getting better," and John Lennon replying, "It can't get much worse" (q.v. Sgt. Pepper). Published in one volume, these books could make a definitive treatise on what the future has in store for The Huddled Masses Yearning to Log On.
Finally, Bill, kudos for the free companion CD-ROM. It features the text of the book (with embedded links to related Web sites), lots of video demonstrations of future technologies, software, and an audio interview with (who else?) you. It's not Mac-compatible, so I can't comment on its content, but I took it to my local used-CD shop and swapped it for a Spike Jones record. Someday, all books will offer this exciting feature.
