Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era

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HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2001 - Business & Economics - 240 pages
"Special feature! This e-book edition contains the full texts of the landmark legal documents that emerged from U.S. v. Microsoft. The humbling of Bill Gates and Microsoft is the last great business story of the 20th Century and the first great riddle of the 21st. How did it happen? How did the richest man in the world, the most powerful icon of the New Economy, wind up being pursued and attacked by his own government? And how did a company that had utterly dominated the technology landscape find itself weakened, vulnerable, and under the threat of a court-ordered breakup? 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, in-depth interviews with Gates and other top Microsoft executives, Justice Department trustbuster Joel Klein, superlitigator David Boies, Intel chief Andy Grove, 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 detail, 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 Microsystems, and even Intel) worked insecret to help the Justice Department bring down Microsoft. It explores the lasting damage that the trial has inflicted on the first great empire of the Information Age.

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About the author (2001)

John Heilemann is the national political correspondent and columnist for New York magazine. He is a former staff writer for the New Yorker, the Economist, and Wired. He is the author of Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime and Double Down: Game Change 2012.

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