Bill Gates' 12 Rules: Is There A Chapter Missing, Bill Gates?

Whether you're a fan of his work or consider him a little too gauche, you can't deny that Bill Gates likes to use broad brush strokes. Business @ the Speed of Thought is full of them: How he turned Microsoft around like a supertanker on a dime and pointed it toward the Internet in late 1995. How a plague of paper records at his Redmond, Wash., headquarters was all but eradicated under his guidance. And so on. But the boldest, broadest stroke of all is this: at a time when the Justice Department appears likely to pop the software Goliath one on the chin, Gates studiously manages to keep mum on the ongoing antitrust trial. Not one peep of anger, frustration or resignation is allowed to pass his literary lips.

Doubtless this is simply practical professionalism from the world's richest executive, a man with an almost Clinton-like ability to compartmentalize. Still, it leaves us in a quandary. When we last saw Bill Gates, as a fuzzy image on a videotaped deposition, he appeared surly and arrogant. He followed each question with a lengthy silence, denied knowledge of e-mails he had written and professed not to understand words like "market share," "concerned" or "ask." He was, in other words, one of the most potent weapons in the government's armory.

Now Bill the tousle-haired billionaire is back, bursting with business advice and all the exuberance of a boy genius. Sun, Apple, IBM and Intel are merely examples of companies that use digital nervous systems. You'd never guess they also play a major part in the feds' case. "Trial" to this Gates means nothing more than putting a new software product through its paces.

What is the world to think of this Jekyll-and-Hyde performance? Take, for example, the sage advice from Gates the author, who exhorts us to appreciate less-than-salutary tidings. "I have a natural instinct for hunting down grim news," he writes. "If it's out there, I want to know about it. The people who work for me have figured this out."

Such diktats, however, do not seem to apply to the DOJ suit, potentially the grimmest piece of news Microsoft has received in its 24-year existence. "This antitrust thing will blow over," a lackadaisical Gates told Intel executives back in 1995. When the government's complaint finally hit his desk in 1998, according to his own testimony, the software titan refused to read a word of it. Given the chance to reassess his videotaped Q. and A. in the light of its disastrous courtroom debut, CEO Gates conceded only that he should have "smiled a bit." As Gates the author would have told him: "A CEO avoiding bad news is the beginning of the end."