The road aheadBILL GATES
This is a difficult one. I don't really want to wade through a couple of hundred pages of a book on screen, yet the hypertext is useful. I suspect I would have preferred having a bundle of the conventional book for a straight read and the online version for reference. Whether you admire Mr Gates or hate him, though, it's always interesting to get a view on someone who has this much influence on our world. Overall - installation could be better, and I'd prefer to combine it with a real book, but an interesting insight into a key player's view of the future. Priced at £14.99 in the UK. Produced by Penguin books, web site: http://www.penguin.co.uk/ |
Bill Gates' book might not have the set the world on fire, but
it was a predictable best-seller, and this electronic version
seeks to take its paper cousin into a new dimension. Frankly,
given the subject, the CD-ROM could have been a little easier
to get going. It installs itself automatically under Windows 95
(or manually on 3.1), though there's no uninstaller, a shame given
it fiddles with files like SYSTEM.INI that human beings don't
want to know about. When I first ran it, I got an error message
saying there was a problem with a device driver - on a hunch I
reduced the number of colours to 256 and it ran fine. This simply
shouldn't happen. Once it was going, though, it was stylish and
nicely presented. There's a futures section with reasonably long
videos looking at the I.T. of the home, business and school in
ten years - this is very well done (though the tour of a computer
model of the Gates house was undertaken in such a reverential
tone that I was looking for the complimentary sick bag). There
are rather uninspiring interviews with the great man, and there's
the full text of his book with plenty of useful hypertext links.