Rating: 
Summary: Great reading. I enjoyed all the practical experiences.
Review: I work in an institution with a 500+ PC intranet. Although it is available in Spanish I read the original English version. This book changed my view of the objectives that should be acomplished with PCs and networks. I am starting a review/revision of many of our work processes and integrating many of the practical knowledge of the book. This is why I give it five stars.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Book
Review: There is no initiative that lets you continue reading the book. I think of it as a poor descriptive book.
Rating:
Summary: so far so good
Review: Not quite finished but on chapter 6. I recommend this book for any IT/MIS type person. He gives good examples of thoughts to where information should be....at ones fingertips right after the thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Book seemed like it was patched together
Review: This reads like a committee book; Bill clearly wrote parts of it (reads like a long email) and probably several other people wrote the rest.Net-net: Bill's writtings are excellent. Unfortunately, it seems like he did not write a lot of the book.
Rating:
Summary: More Hype than Hope
Review: The book reveals little as far as technology. It's more like a new-age stream of consciousness than concrete ideas that will keep Microsoft on top. The real Bill Gates is better described in "The Plot to Get Bill Gates". This book shows little originality and seems to be the publishing equivalent of vaporware.
Rating:
Summary: Can the World's Foremost Copier Be a Visionary?
Review: Microsoft is renowned for watching trends, finding the best provider of new ideas and services, and buying/copying that innovation. You might call the company, the world's greatest fast follower. With the tremendous market power of its installed base of Windows, the company has moved profitably in a lot of new directions. IBM did the same before the Justice Department made the company allow anyone to use its operating sytem at modest cost. IBM also made lots of money. Was IBM a visionary company at the time? Absolutely not. Does Microsoft's success mean that it is a visionary company now? Probably not. For example, Gate's view of a paperless, electronic world proved to be a real problem during the company's recent antitrust trial with the U.S. government. Electronic records of aggressive behavior and intent kept showing up to contradict Gate's live testimony. Also remember that Gates thought the Internet was a nonstarter until quite recently, when it began its come-from-behind charge against Netscape. Specifically, the weakness of the vision is that it makes a company likely to be too internally focused. You can communicate so well with one another that you do not communicate so well with the customers and others who are important to you. I personally found the vision of Direct from Dell and Customer.com to be much more relevant. Read this book with caution, but do read it because we all need to know where Microsoft plans to take us. We'll have to go there anyway, to some extent.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for managers wanting to leverage pc technology.
Review: Bill Gates has written an informative, well described process for implementing technology (specifically PC technology) into any organization. He draws on Microsoft's experiences as well as several other succesful company profiles to illustrate problems and their PC based solutions. The overall premise is compelling, as every manager wants to improve his/her company's productivity. Bill Gates gives managers the tools to accomplish this.
Rating:
Summary: Only anecdotes and examples.
Review: The book seems to be more of a marketing tool to sell Microsft products rather than try and define a scope for future managers. I was highly disappointed. I think it is a poor book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Sleeper
Review: Compared to leading edge publications (University texts, IT Journals), Gates' view of the connected "nervous" system infrastructure is hardly visionary. Perhaps if he had published these thoughts a decade ago his material would be interesting. If you keep abreast with IT issues, you WILL find this book very slow and without revelations.
Rating:
Summary: B@ST is a great book. I see why BG is the worlds richest
Review: Although a little dry and too full of acronyms, I found this to be a very exciting book. Gates is truly a visionary man. I could not help thinking as I read this book, why doesn't the world already operate the MS (paperless) way. It's sad that one man is worth over a hundred billion dollars, but hey, this is still a free country with a capitolistic attitude prevailing. I wish I were more enterprising and open minded. This book was great.
| 
