NETWORLD!
VERSUS BILL GATES'
$2.5-MILLION ROAD AHEAD
NetWorld! Table of Contents | Sample NW!
Chapter | Shortcuts | Buying NW!
No-Frills Home Page | God and PGP | Gates & Slate vs.
Media Clutter 
TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home | E-mail
me at rothman@clark.net
Debate on Microsoft vs. Feds | Wicked RealAudio on NW!
and Road
NetWorld! vs. Bill
Gates' $2.5 Million Road Ahead
is
a Golden Oldie written in late '95. Some Microsoft folks are
actually keeping an open mind about the TeleRead idea discussed
below. Bravo! My real goal here, of course, besides having a
little fun, is to see TeleRead become a reality--as opposed to
"Death to Microsoft." So far Bill Gates has donated
just a speck of his $60-billion fortune to libraries despite all the
headlines hailing him as Carnegie II. But if that changes, I'll be the first to
give him credit, and meanwhile I do applaud his contributions in other areas
such as public health. - David H. Rothman, Feb. 23, 2002. Email:
dr@davidrothman.com.
Just why am I--the perp of a rival book on high tech--serving up yet more publicity for William H. Gates III? He's already to computerdom what O.J. is to Geraldo Rivera.
Let me quote an old adage, however. A reincarnated Buddha uttered it around the time Microsoft bought the Catholic Church and he was trying to reposition his faith for a niche market. "Better to ride Microsoft's back than try to dance under the elephant's feet." In fact, I'll even urge you to buy The Road Ahead.
You may, however, want to pick up a copy of NetWorld! at the same store. Why not a more Net-friendly view of what's going on? Road could use lots of context, and NetWorld! and this FAQ should help provide it.
Along the way I'll tell below how Bill Gates could be a true Andrew Carnegie if he put his mind to it. Schools and libraries need powerful friends and real money--not just much-ballyhooed grants that are minuscule in the grand scheme of things.
--David Rothman, dr@davidrothman.com
SHORTCUTS: How many writers does it take to do a book?... Gates' vision and small business people... Microsoft's
hardback ad... Huh? Only one or
two appearances of the word "Usenet" in the
pulped-wood book?... How I feel about Microsoft
in general... Is
Bill truly pro-education?...
Could he unwittingly worsen the savage inequalities of schools and libraries?... What Road
coauthor Nathan Myhrvold needs to tell Bill Clinton... Gates
and The Great Gatsby... If Bill Gates really wants to
be Andrew Carnegie... 
Reconciling TeleRead with Microsoft's duty to the stockholders... Gates the info-populist?... NetWorld!'s
title... William F. Buckley, Jr., and James
Fallows on NetWorld!...
Ordering
Information...
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of page or, if need be, top
of shortcuts
Update of May 7, 1997: The news since I created the page is both good and bad. The good news is that his Microsoft is more Net-hip--I'm in fact using FrontPage on this Web site (no charge for the free link, Bill). The bad news is that Microsoft is more Net-hip. Newspapers correctly fear that they'll suffer the fate of, say, Digital Research, as Microsoft goes more deeply into the content business. As for the digital library issue, Gates has continued to use library donations to polish his image, but they still are a long way from Andrew Carnegie's gifts--both in focus and in the percentage of the giver's wealth. Right now he is more of a marketer, interested in hooking libraries and schools on Microsoft products, than a Carnegie-level philanthropist. For the latest check out The Unofficial Bill Gates and, of course, The Secret Diary of Bill Gates, Age 41 1/4.- David H. Rothman, rothman@clark.net
Q. How do NetWorld! and Road differ?
A. If nothing else in the number of authors. Three people wrote Road--a committee, you might say, and the robotic prose shows it. If Road were a technical manual? Then I'd understand. But, hey, we're talking about Gates' personal vision.
By contrast my NetWorld! is an old-fashioned, one-writer job. And a lot more cost-effective, too. I did it for well under one-hundredth the advance given Gates. The "Winner Takes All" mindset is afflicting our publishing system and other industries such as motion pictures and music. If big conglomerates dominate too much of the infobahn, it'll only get worse. Last thing we need is to digitize the present.
Right now professional writers like me must fight for every column inch of publicity and hope that the stores don't hide their works on the lower shelves in the back. Meanwhile Bill's on the cover of Newsweek and has bagged a $2.5 million advance. And Microsoft, er, Viking Penguin, reportedly did a worldwide printing of 1.5 million copies. Clearly the $2.5 million was just the start of the investment. The more copies of Road in the stores, the less money and space for small fry--for writers of first novels, poetry, public affairs books, or, yes, Net books with a 'tude.
Should everyone get a Bill-size advance and be on the cover of Newsweek? Of course not. But it will help if electronic publishing makes the distribution system more fair and more efficient. Gates says he's for "Friction-Free Capitalism," and I think that the book industry would be a great place to start. Let's hope that the Microsoft Network and the other new distributors won't gouge writers and small publishers and favor the Leviathans.
Gates, of course, wouldn't mind being a publishing Leviathan himself--note his most recent acquisition, Michael Kingsley, ex-editor of the New Republic. Too, Gates has bought up the Bettman photo archives. If we must use the infobahn metaphor, you might say that Gates is outdoing even Henry Ford. It's as if Ford wanted to control not only the auto industry but also the steel mills, along with the roads for good measure. And this will help writers like me and make our culture more diverse?
John Dvorak of PC Magazine recently warned that a Gates company has "already purchased images from the following collections: the David Meunch collection, the Sakamoto Archive, the National Gallery of London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Richard Hamilton Smith, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, Roger Ressmeyer, and the Library of Congress. It's believed by industry insiders that by the year 2000, Bill Gates will own the rights to the majority of digital images and text in the world."
Far-fetched? I don't know. Still, if Microsoft has shown monopolistic practices in computer software, mightn't it do the same in other areas? Gates in most cases buys nonexclusive rights, but people will rely on him more and more for nonstop shopping--putting rival archives at a disadvantage, so that in the end he might as well own exclusives.
Needless to say, NetWorld's philosophy reflects who I am: a self-employed writer who doesn't want his research costs jacked up, or a Gatesian monopoly controlling most of the material used in his multimedia projects.
At $20 billion or so, Gates is worth three or four times the book royalties paid to all writers each year in the United States. We're talking banana republic here. I'm not calling for confiscation of his wealth--just an information system fairer to nonbillionaires, be they writers or schoolchildren.
Q. But Gates depicts himself as a sensitive champion of the little guy.
A. Let's see what happens. At least at the time I was researching my business chapter, MCI was planning to charge small merchants some $20,000 a year for a Web presence and related services. Bill Gates suggests that small merchants will be able to advertise very cheaply online even with video. And probably he'll be right someday. But he doesn't really offer enough specifics about people who are doing good things on the Net now without help from either Microsoft or MCI. If you rely too much on a Billcentric vision for the future, you're robbing yourself of more immediate possibilities.
The big money isn't there yet for 99 percent of Web merchants. But it would be helpful for people to know more about what's happening now and to pay less attention to the scenarios that corporate futurists are spinning. In fact, the giants themselves would be better off if they kept their minds open.
Q. Other differences between NetWorld and The Road Ahead?
A. The Road Ahead is a hardback ad and CD-ROM promo about Microsoft's role on the "information super highway." Bill Gates smiles and boasts a lot. In places this is capitalism's answer to Soviet films about happy workers and tractors. Me, I'm out to tell what's happening on the Internet right now before the big boys can elbow aside the small guys. In fact my subtitle is What People Are Really Doing on the Internet--and What It Means to You.
Bill Gates is busy coming up with some rather conventional scenarios and celebrating average Joes online such as Warren Buffett. Flip through the index of his pulped-wood book, and see how many nonVIPs you can spot. I myself, however, would rather write about Bob and JoAnn Lilienfeld and their ups and downs with White Rabbit Toys on the Net.
Readers can extrapolate a lot from the present. For one thing, it's clear that the talk of reaching 35 million people in one swoop--via the Net--is pure malarkey. It's a series of communities. That'll be true, I suspect, even when high-quality, two-way video, or even virtual reality, is the norm.
I just wish Gates had paid more attention to the human side of the Net and a lot less to technical explanations. Why do we get several pages of jargon on encryption but not one word on the Clinton Administration's Orwellian harassment of Phil Zimmermann, the creator of the Pretty Good Privacy program?
Q. What about your general attitude toward the Net vs. Gates'?
A. Road's pulped-wood index doesn't include the word "Usenet" (the text itself does sneak it in a time or two) and even the CD-ROM index lacks the phrase "mailing list." I want to know more about how Bill Gates uses the Internet and the services offered there. Either he isn't that much into Usenet and lists, or he's playing down those non-Microsoft approaches--I don't know which. Hey, Bill, where do you want to go today on Usenet? To rec.autos? To comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy? Or maybe to news.comp.os.os2.announce to check up on the gang at IBM?
Perhaps Gates feels nervous about with the Net's many-to-many model--obscure people talking to other obscure people, rather than passively consuming Hollywood dreck and getting billed by the minute.
Gates, in fact, is so Billcentric that he even downplays many of the existing mass media efforts on the Web. A wonderful free service called NewsLink has assembled links to 2,193 newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations, and other information sources on the Net. But touring the pulped wood book, you'd never get a feel for the full richness of the content already online. You don't hear of NewsHound--from the San Jose Mercury News--which fills your electronic mailbox with items of precise interest. Whenever a member of the giant Knight-Ridder chain prints an article containing such words as "Internet," I'll know about it. Cost is all of $5 a month right now for an unlimited number of articles emailed to me. Even at $10 a month--the possible cost in the future--News Hound is a marvel.
Oh, yes, such services will get easier to use, and we'll see all kinds of multimedia, and, sure, News Hound isn't as inclusive as more expensive services, and, of course, commercial Net content could be better. But the basics are here now. Gates either ignored them or overlooked them, perhaps because he wants to be Information Central.
In other ways, too, the CD-ROM version of his book slights the Net. Even more than I expected--yes, I know that Gates mustn't forget the people without modems--links go to information on the disk itself rather than to the Web. The first Net link I myself encountered took me, surprise, to http://www.microsoft.com.
So what about the Web area for The Road Ahead? As of November 26, 1995, it seemed to consist mostly of promo stuff for Road, Gates, Microsoft, and Viking Penguin. This material about the Bill book is on the Net but not of the Net, the way I've tried to make my own Web area, which includes a NetWorld! Tour. Hundreds of links go to topics discussed in NetWorld!. Readers can even click on some links and e-mail certain of the people in the book, ranging from North Carolina newspaper editors to an Anglican priest who accepts PGP-encrypted confessions. Yes, I asked all involved to complain to me if the e-mail would be a problem.
Reading my Web site or thousands of others, you can pick the size and style of the type if your browser is in the Netscape vein. You can do the same on the Gates book site. That's in the spirit of the Net. But the spirit of his CD-ROM is something else. You must put up with a corporately approved type style when you travel the Road electronically. I'd rather be able to use Netscape and make the "print" as big or small as I want. The designer of the CD-ROM deprived me of a choice.
Click here
to learn why SoftScore President Clay Ver Valen didn't let
readers of the CD-ROM vary the font size.
Q. You sound like a Microsoft-basher.
A. More like a skeptic, and a selective one. Hey, I'm writing this FAQ with the Win 95 version of Microsoft Word, which, of course, offers many customization capabilities.
Yes, I myself bemoan the bugs in Gates' products. When I use a certain DOS word-processor, I get the same blackout problems in Win 95 that I endured from time to time under 3.1. And speaking of glitches, Rich Graves, author of an FAQ on 95's Net-related bugs, notes that the CD-ROM for The Road Ahead won't even run under NT. However, I hear that fix is on the way. Besides, nasty surprises are an industry-wide phenomenon--not just a Microsoft program, er, problem. OS/2 is much more stable than Win 95 but can be Amityville to install. As for word-processsors, I wrote guides to WordStar and XyWrite before Microsoft was so big in applications--and if you'd switched the names of the product, the users of those programs could have been griping about Word.
What's more, I agree with James Gleick's rational observations in The New York Times Magazine: "The Department of Justice does not need to break Microsoft apart. It need only--a far-reaching step in itself--require Microsoft to make its operating system, and the web of standards surrounding it, truly and permanently open. Other companies should be allowed to clone it if they could; Microsoft should be restricted from taking internal advantage of new changes until they were published to the rest of the market."
Otherwise we'll see more trouble ahead for rivals such as Lotus--makers of word-processors and other "applications" programs. Their people don't enjoy the same head start that Microsoft does. Whenever possible Microsoft steers the public to its wares.
Gates is right in saying that it's hard to predict winners in the long run, but meanwhile he's doing all he can to rig the rules in his favor.
Still, my fears notwithstanding, I find plenty to like about Microsoft and, yes, Gates himself. If nothing else, I hate the neckties and pretense that characterize life in many other corporations the size of Microsoft. His company is much more of a meritocracy than most others. Too, the $90 I paid for my Word upgrade was worth it. Lucky us. May Microsoft rivals survive to help keep prices under control.
I do, of course, worry about the future. Will Microsoft abuse network technology and insist that ordinary buyers rent software such as Word?[1] Will people have to pay according to how much they used the programs? Will Microsoft penalize hard-working people in small business? Tax diligence? And how about education? Metered e-text could end up as a curiosity tax.
Q. But isn't Gates big on education and other good stuff?
A. I love some of the statements he makes in The Road Ahead, especially in Chapter Nine--titled "Education: The Best Investment." Gates is absolutely right to say we mustn't use computers to replace teachers; they can supply warmth and guidance that machines just can't replicate. He's right, also, to say children will learn best if they can enjoy a wide variety of content! That's exactly the thinking behind TeleRead, which would apply the same thinking to adults as well. Bravo, Bill!
On the other hand we need to remember that it's easy for Gates to give money away for schools. Yes, his advance of several million dollars will go to an educational foundation. But that's a speck of his net worth of $20 billion. And his various educational adventures can let him test-market his products. Besides, he introduces young consumers to them.
What's more--quite unwittingly!--Gates may actually hurt kids in the long run.
Q. How?
A. By worsening the savage inequalities of our schools and libraries. In Road he writes, "Library committees might use the budgets that today pay for buying books, albums, movies, and subscriptions to fund the royalties for using educational electronic materials." Good luck, Bill. This year Beverly Hills is devoting maybe $34 per capita to library materials. Shasta County, California, can come up with all of 25 cents per citizen for materials--well, 35 cents if you include private donations.
American public schools are spending an average of perhaps $125 per child per year on copyrighted works. Hardly enough for the so-called information highway. The more knowledge-dependent we become, the worse the inequalities will be if we don't change the present system. It isn't just the lack of willingness of many taxpayers to support local schools. Some local educational bureaucracies are so inept that they don't budget sufficiently for books, having other priorities such as maintenance or athletic facilities.
Whatever the reason, the effect is the same--children cheated of knowledge for the new era. Take Washington, D.C., which is to bad school administration what swamps are to malaria. "Three months into this school year," begins a story in the Washington Post of December 1, "hundreds of D.C. public school students still do not have books for some classes.
"Many students say they are failing classes because they can't take books home to study. Some copy notes from books shared with classmates. Others reply on photocopies or take notes from the blackboard.
"Sean Mathews, 14, a 10th-grader at Coolide Senior High School in Northwest Washington, has no textbooks in history, chemistry, Spanish or computer programming. To study at home, he calls a friend who has read a book and asks the friend to read paragraph after paragraph, while Sean takes notes."
Such outrages aren't the only argument for a well-stocked national digital library to help overcome inequalities. Specialized knowledge can be too expensive for small business people, including those whose new technologies could mean scads of new jobs someday. Imagine the new opportunities that a national library could bring to small businesses and their employees even in poorer areas. But the Clinton people are more oriented toward the needs of big conglomerates with a vested interest in the present information and copyright systems.
Simply put, in both patent and copyright law, Clinton people have protected big business at the expense of schools and small business. They appointed just one librarian and one educator to the 37-member National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. Among the favored was Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft vice president, who, along with Gates and a newspaper alum named Peter Rinearson, wrote Road. Gates and Myhrvold need to stop wimping out and tell Clinton that Microsoft people won't lend the company's name to any more advisory panels unless the White House gets serious about a well-stocked national digital library.
Of course is it just possible that Microsoft itself is one reason why Clinton isn't pushing for a true Carnegie-type library to go online for rich and poor alike? Maybe.
Gates' company even belongs to the Creative Incentive Coalition, which is trying hard to skew the copyright laws against the public. Persons affiliated with members of CIC and related interests made more than $700,000 in campaign donations just in the first half of 1995. Microsoft people apparently weren't among the big givers. But I don't see how a company can belong to the coalition and be fully pro-library in the copyright controversy.
While I applaud private efforts, we need much more--for example, a TeleRead-style national digital library of the kind about which I wrote in NetWorld! and in an information science collection from The MIT Press.
Given Bill Gates' eagerness to own the word "Windows," I doubt that he would go for a TeleRead-style approach to help narrow the equality gap. But I'll try to keep an open mind, just in case; Gates and Microsoft have surprised people before. Meanwhile, I will say I loved an observation he made about the integrity of content in a multimedia age.
Q. Which was?
A. On page 127: "No one suggests that every book or movie should allow the reader or viewer to influence its outcome. A good story that makes you just want to sit there for a few hours and enjoy it is wonderful entertainment. I don't want to choose an ending for The Great Gatsby or La Dolce Vita. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Federico Fellini have done that for me."[2] That sounds pretty basic, but it isn't. I fear that in the future some software magnates will fiddle with the contents of old novels to make them more salable, so that the originals won't be available many centuries from now. That's one argument for a well-integrated national digital library approach of the kind that NetWorld! advocates.
Yes, people could still manipulate material--a right I believe is desirable in this multimedia age. But it would be easy to track down the clearly identified originals with their integrity preserved. Such a scenario would be best for both the public and the creative community.
Q. Mightn't Gates argue that a Carnegie-style national digital library would threaten property rights and reduce creative incentive?
A. Actually a TeleRead kind of arrangement would protect property rights and writers' bank accounts by lessening the incentive for piracy. Investors could even bypass librarian by gambling money up front against future dial-ups. The more money they gambled--and they could add to the kitty at any time, with the costs going up as their revenue increased--the bigger would be their possible payoffs. In other words there are ways mathematically to replicate the risks and rewards that commercial publishers and writers face today.
I'd like publishers and writers to be the ones initiating projects--not librarians and bureaucrats putting out requests for proposals. I suspect most librarians would agree with me.
And while there is a place for some direct federal grants for writers and publishers, I'd hope the amount of money would remain low.
Otherwise we just may see the rise of state-approved literature in the Soviet vein.
We need to take other precautions, too. The librarians should be spread all over the country, not concentrated in D.C.--use network technology and instantly updatable databases in the acquisitions process. I'm progressive myself, but share the right-wing's fear of centralized authority.
Needless to say, too, participation in the library could be voluntary at the start. Writers and publishers would soon find the idea to be in their interest. They should think less of individual properties and more of the usability of, say, e-text as a whole. If the novel dies off, just how much will any kind of copyright protection be worth? TeleRead is a good alternative to no copyright at all, which is what things may come to if Washington's present rigidities remain.
If Gates somehow did endorse TeleRead, he'd have some company from the right. William F. Buckley, Jr., has written two favorable columns--one headlined, "The TeleRead in Your Future."
Q. Bill Gates would ask, "How would you pay for a TeleRead approach?"
A. Through a focused procurement program for schools and libraries that would popularize inexpensive computer optimized for reading, networking, and electronic forms. We're talking about a $7-trillion economy. Use the forms to reduce the amount of bureaucracy by just a little in the private and public sectors and you've more than cost-justified a national digital library. Such an endeavor could begin small in this frugal era and grow only with accompanying cost-justification.
Too, we could reduce expenses by having the library focus on the most vulnerable medium, electronic text, which also happens to be the one that most contributes to literacy. The collection would also include public domain multimedia--source material--as well as donations of all kinds from the private sector.
Here is a true chance for Bill Gates to be Andrew Carnegie.
Does this mean he should give away his entire fortune immediately or risk hellfire? No, that's not the idea here, just as it wasn't in Carnegie's case. Gates would wreak havoc on Microsoft, and other companies, too, if he just cashed in all his shares. But what he can do is commit publicly and legally to the orderly disposition of his wealth in the long run; such a promise could even include various scenario for Microsoft, allowing for success as well as failure in a world of fast-changing technologies.
Meanwhile, if he can afford a house costing tens of millions dollars, surely he could do better than the tiny percentage he has given of his $20 billion so far. I won't write off that possibility. Perhaps he would be more generous if he knew his charity were more focused. I'm trying to suggest a way here. He could use matching grants to help push Washington in the right direction, and along the way make it clear that he would be sending intellectual property in the direction of the library.
It isn't enough to wait for a philanthropic era of his life. Rather, if he is serious about giving most of his assets away, as he has said, he should plan ahead and establish priorities--the children need the books and educational software as soon as possible. He needs to sort out his values here. Right now Microsoft is going just by the standard, short-term visions. If his real goal is philanthropy, as he claims, then he needs to redirect his activities.
Q. But Microsoft is a public corporation. Doesn't Gates have a responsibility to assure maximum return to his stockholders? Milton Friedman said---
A. Certainly I designed TeleRead with the public in mind, not Bill Gates and Microsoft. At the same time, however, there are opportunities here for corporations of all sizes, such as in the truly massive sales of electronic forms and other software. Or in software for the national database. And what about opportunities in the content itself--for example, in electronic encyclopedias and educational software? The existing business system, in which software companies sell their wares on plastic disks in cardboard boxes, is on the way out anyway.
Here, then, is a chance for Microsoft and other companies to enjoy a new market. In The Road Ahead, Bill Gates writes, "My focus is to keep Microsoft in the forefront through constant renewal. It's a little scary that as computer technology has moved ahead there's never been a leader from one era who was also a leader in the next." Gates goes on to say he would like to break that pattern, and an openness to new business models would be a good start at realizing such a goal.
Too, remember that average consumers have only so much money to spend. They will always treat themselves to frills such as movies and video games; TeleRead would not take away from such revenue--it would simply add to the paltry amount now that is available for the intellectual property needs of schools and public libraries. Again keep in mind that the average school is spending only $125 per student per year on copyrighted works.
If nothing else, Gates' advocacy of a Carnegie-style digital library would win him much goodwill on the Internet, from which more and more of his customers will come. His rivals at Sun certainly pleased many Netfolks when they sponsored endeavors such as SunSites, which store free text, music, and images for all to access for free. TeleRead is a chance for Gates--or Sun, for that matter--to help out the Internet in a new way. It would enable commercial works such as e-books to be spread much more easily over the Net than is the case now.
Oh, and then there is the video factor.
Q. What's that?
A. Right now Washington has a rather video-centric view of the future; D.C. is expecting that American families will spend billions to switch over to digital TV technology. I believe, however, and presumably Gates feels the same, that computers offer much more potential than televison sets do for delivery of information and entertainment alike. Certainly computers are where Microsoft's main marketing strength is right now.
Meaning? Gates and others in the computer industry could use the literacy issue to argue for Washington to focus attention on text- and Web-friendly computers that children could curl up around--as opposed to big-screen, book-hostile televison sets.
While TeleReaders could start out with Web-level technology, they would inevitably acquire sophisticated video capabilities that exceeded those of high-definition television. Even then, however, the cause of literacy would still be served, because the machines from the start would be superb for reading and manipulating electronic text. Simply put, a TeleRead-style approach would offer new ammunition to Gates and other advocates of computer technology, as opposed to the TV variety. So, yes, the business reasons are there for updating the Carnegie tradition and using charity to help increase the amount of good e-text and educational software online.
But charity alone won't do. Even Gates' vast wealth has its limits. Significantly Carnegie himself helped public libraries get started but expected taxpayers to bear most of the ongoing costs. Exactly my vision! I even alluded to Carnegie when I wrote about TeleRead for Computerworld four years ago. Perhaps someday Gates will understand Carnegie's logic here. Carnegie realized that libraries provided the tools for democracy and for citizens to help themselves, as opposed to existing on government doles.
A. Any other possible overlaps with Gates' views?
I do think that he's on target when he talks of the need to make the Infobahn a mass phenomenon. He says, "The network will not attract enough great content to thrive if only the most affluent 10 per cent of society choose of avail themselves. There are fixed cost of authoring material; so to make them affordable, a large audience is required. Advertising revenue won't support the highway if a major of eligible people don't embrace it." Gates the info-populist? If he'd just go the next step and call for a focused procurement program for schools and libraries, he just might help commerce at the same time--given the potential of the same hardware to help popularize the Web and e-forms.
Both PB and AB (Pre-Bahn and After Bahn) there'll be room for everything--from a wild Usenet to a Time-moderated bulletin board or a professionally run national digital library. If Gates wants Microsoft to supply some of the software and information, that's fine with me. But no Windows-style monopolies online, please! And no insistence that everything be done The Microsoft Way, especially on the Net. Even popes should be able to appreciate the need for others' nirvanas.
GATES' E-MAIL ADDRESS: askbill@microsoft.com.
Please do not flame him. Such actions will merely serve as justification for anti-Net, pro-monopoly sentiments. Instead suggest calmnly that he plan to donate money and intellectual property toward a national digital library of the TeleRead variety.
NETWORLD!'S TITLE
Complete with the inimitable exclamation point, it comes from Prima Publishing. Yes, I told 'em about the NetWorld+Interops trade show. Blame me for the rest.
The book's ISBN is 0-7615-0013-8, the format is hardback, the standard domestic price is US$22.95, and you can buy NetWorld! from local bookstores or directly from Prima Publishing (distributed in the U.S. by Random House). The telephone number is 916-632-4400 or 1-800-632-8676, and the fax number is 916-632-4405; the e-mail address is steveb@primapub.com.
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR NETWORLD!
"A considerable achievement. You find yourself wanting to read NetWorld! even if you have no thought of baptism into the great new scene."--William F. Buckley, Jr.
"David H. Rothman has done the best job yet of illustrating exactly how and why the Internet will change the texture of daily life. Most discussion of the information age is full of airy generalization. NetWorld! is full of specific, amusing, often racy illustrations of how people around the world have already put the Net's possibilities to work. This is a very useful and entertaining book."--James Fallows, Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
NOTES
[1] Yes, copyright zealots would remind us that consumers typically don't buy software--they just buy a license for the right to use the "intellectual property." Still, as a practical matter, consumers don't incur any other expenses after they've paid Bill for his software--unless of course they want the upgrades (including bug fixes). [Return to text.]
[2] The Webbed hypertext links are not from Road. [Return to text.]