Pride Before the Fall

"John Heilemann's Pride Before the Fall uncovers the secret history of the antitrust trial that shook an economy: United States v. Microsoft. Drawing on years of reporting - including extensive interviews with Gates and other top Microsoft executives, Justice Department trustbuster Joel Klein, superlitigator David Boies, Intel chief Andy Grove, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, and scores of lesser-known but pivotal players - Heilemann lays bare the chaotic confluence of forces that shattered Microsoft's aura of invincibility and the climate of fear that held an industry in thrall.". "Based on an acclaimed Wired magazine cover story, Pride Before the Fall is packed with rich personalities, dramatic scenes, and explosive revelations. It tells the stories of the largely unknown men and women who turned their opposition to Gates's company into a crusade, laboring for years to persuade the government to indict Microsoft for its monopolistic practices. Pride Before the Fall explains in compelling detail how the high-tech kingpins whose businesses Gates had tried to destroy or strong-arm (Netscape, Apple, Sun, and even Intel) worked in secret to help the Justice Department bring down Microsoft. It explores the lasting damage the trial has inflicted on the first great empire of the Information Age. And Heilemann offers a vivid and sometimes shocking portrait of Gates himself - describing a man who in 1993 told his friends, "I have as much power as the president," only to be thrown into rage and depression a few years later, when he discovered just how wrong he'd been."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.