Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace

click here for more details, find new or used items	James Wallace New from £2.66 Used from £0.01 Pages: 307 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0471180416 Pub: John Wiley & Sons Pub date: 1997-05-02 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 136586

Reader Reviews:

Excellent Update on HardDrive (0/0 people found this helpful)

This book filled the gap that was left after HardDrive left off. but of course, i would want an update to this book already, its been out just over a year, and its almost outdated. Just to show you how fast Microsoft moves

A horrible follow-up to Hard Drive (2/3 people found this helpful)

I'm actually quite surprised at all the decent reviews of this book...I had to double-check that I had the right page on Amazon's site. Overdrive is an extremely poor quality follow-up to the excellent Hard Drive and has little to its merit. It is a disjointed, unfocused, biased, poorly written, and outright painful read. I agree with the comment that Jim Erickson's contribution must have been substantial; the evidence is overwhelming. I have read almost every book on Gates and Microsoft I could get my hands on, and this one qualifies without a shadow of doubt as the worst. Buyers of this book will walk away with some dollars less in their pocket and very little else...in fact, it's only been a couple of weeks since I read it and I already can't remember anything of substance whatsoever. Save your money for the original Hard Drive...a far superior work and still relevant.

Fascinating subject and a titanic struggle (0/0 people found this helpful)

A fascinating subject, one really gets the feeling this is the cutting edge of technology, of enormous significance for the future. A titanic struggle in the field of "high bandwidth intellect". The anecdotes are at times fascinating,at times drawn out.Some excess detail is given at times,but overall a great read. My wife says "Why can't you make money like that?"

Difficult Read (1/1 people found this helpful)

This isn't a patch on Hard Drive. Whereas Hard Drive was one of the best reads I've had, Overdrive is neither objective or intesting.

It seems apparent that Hard Drive benefited substantially from having Jim Erickson as one of the authors.
Overdrive is written by James Wallace alone. And it shows. His biased negative opinion of Microsoft shows through.

Wallace is also not a very good writer.
For example, when writing about the actions undertaken by the Justice Department to investigate Microsoft, Wallace documents boring details about which lawyers were involved, what their backgrounds were, etc., and he stretches this section out until it is completely out of place in this book.

This is a difficult read because of the bias and poor writing ability of Wallace.

See what happened to MS after 1993 (0/0 people found this helpful)

A lot of book exist about the story of Microsoft from its start to about 1993-1994. Until now there wasn't one detailing the events after that year.

Starting from the day of the Windows 95 world wide widespread (I just need 3 W words!) it take us on a tour about what happened in the last years, from the legal causes to the main change of road that has taken Microsoft to be a dominant player also in the Internetet market. The book has its major flaws in the fact that sometimes is not so deep and leaves a lot of things pending. Beside that it talks a lot about how a judge was about to change the ruling of the FTC based on author previous book. I don't live in America but I think that american judges could go deeper that a single book (it seems a sort of free promotion of its previuos book!). Also the parte about Gates marriage is a little to long, but it's fun.

Despite all this flaws the book has one HUGE merit: it's the only that exist now about the subject. I think it's worth reading, but maybe an update release in one year or so would be very appreciated by readers (maybe just one two chapter free of charge on the web would be nice).

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