PRIDE BEFORE THE FALL : The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era.

PRIDE BEFORE THE FALL : The Trials of Bill gates and the end of the Microsoft Era by John Heilemann Harper Collins, $25.00

ABOUT THE SAME TIME THAT I sat down to write this review, I got one of those forwarded jokes that account for most of the traffic on the Internet. This one was brilliant: "In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with Haiku poetry messages," Among the adaptations of this ancient Japanese poetic form, which seeks to convey powerful insights through extreme brevity, were: "Yesterday it work'd/Today it is not working/ Windows is like that," "Windows NT crash'd/I am the Blue Screen of Death. / No one hears your screams," and my favorite, "With searching comes loss/And the presence of absence:/ `My Novel' not found."

Exactly. Here we are, universally equipped with the technological miracle of the personal computer, and half of the time the damn things don't work. It's not that they can't work--I found that out when I switched to a Mac--it's just that Microsoft has gotten away with foisting a miserable operating system on most of the world, and it doesn't care. Therefore, like all other rational human beings, I greeted the humiliation of Bill Gates and his corporation in federal court with an instant and delicious thrill of schadenfreude.

Understanding exactly what Microsoft had done wrong, and why it deserved to be obliterated, took rather longer. In fact, I did not really get the point until I read Pride Before the Fall, a refreshingly succinct history of the Microsoft anti-trust trial and the events leading up to it. An adaptation of a long article for Wired magazine, the book explains the technology surrounding the case without being incomprehensible to cyber-illiterates like myself. This may be because author John Heilemann is a journalist who delved into the wired world, rather than the other way round. Thus he displays an easy fluency with the sometimes arcane subject matter without advertising the fact. As the book makes clear, the Microsoft trial was not simply a battle waged by Joel Klein of the Justice Department and the brilliant trial lawyer David Boies against a mighty corporation that ended in victory. In fact, even when presented with clear evidence of Microsoft's dirty work, and even while Netscape, a principal victim of the corporation's modus operandi "was reduced to rubble," the Justice Department dragged its feet. More deserving of heroic status is Gary Reback, a Netscape lawyer prone to trenchant observations such as, "The only thing that J.D. Rockefeller did that Bill Gates hasn't done is use dynamite against his competitors," Government lawyers sniffed that this crusader "needs help," However, as Heilemann notes, "History might well have judged Reback a marginal figure, just another Gates-hating ranter, were it not for one inconvenient fact: Almost everything he claimed turned out to be true."

But none of the numerous good guys in this story can compete in sheer dramatic reach and force with the villains. Take Steve Ballmer, the redoubtable Number Two at Microsoft. Heilemann describes an interview with Ballmer in which he asks whether Microsoft had signed a contract with Sun Microsystems in bad faith. "Ballmer's face was beet-red now, and he was screaming so loudly that, had there been any window shades, they would have been rattling. Up on his feet, leaning across the table so that his face was no more than six inches from mine, pounding his meaty fists on the tabletop so hard that my tape recorder leapt and skittered, he roared, `Nobody was ever one teeny tiny bit confused that we and Sun had this wonderful dovetailing of strategic interests! Those sub-50-IQ people who work at Sun who believe that are either uninformed, crazy, or sleeping!' "I took this as a Yes," concludes Heilemann.

Then there is Bill Gates. All the world knows that the government's single most potent weapon in the anti-trust trial was Gates' monomaniacal display of arrogance in his videotaped deposition, played to devastating effect by Boies. But Heilemann gives us further insight into this truly weird character, revealing how the man who boasted in 1993 that he had "as much power as the president," was five years later bursting into tears at a Microsoft board meeting, wailing that "The whole thing is crashing down on me; it's all crashing in."

Call me old-fashioned, but it's really nice to learn that the richest man in the world can be that hysterically miserable, and it's also very scary to think that someone with that much power cancer, lose it. Hardly less terrifying is the telling description of Gates' workforce, young people, mostly male, who as a matter of recruitment policy had little or no experience of life outside Microsoft. Inmates of the outwardly benign environment at company HQ in Redmond, Washington, where everyone walked around in casual clothes, were imbued with a supremely aggressive culture--"the frat house," as Heilemann notes, "from another planet," So insulated were they that they genuinely could not understand why So many people hated and feared the company they worshiped.

This story would have had a happy ending if it had concluded when Microsoft lost in court. But, in the most chilling section of the book, Heilemann describes the terror that overcame Gates' enemies in Silicon Valley once they were asked to come out in the open and offer suggestions as to suitable punishment. They knew that the monster was still alive and dangerous. Eric Schmidt, for example, the CEO of Novell, would talk privately to the government about what should be done, but, as Heilemann notes in a truly sinister aside, "experience had taught him that whenever he invoked Microsoft's name in the press, one of Novell's products would soon stop working smoothly with Windows"

That the Clinton administration did pursue Microsoft with such vigor is, in retrospect, a miracle. We can expect no such miracles from W.'s team, and Gates may well win on appeal. But at least the bully took a beating. Enjoy that part of the story.

ANDREW COCKBURN is the author; most recently, of OUT OF THE ASHES: THE RESURRECTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN.