Bill Gates (11 page)

One of Microsoft’s chief allies in this fight, the computer manufacturer Compaq, gave up on the fusion idea in the summer of 1997. At almost the same time, the press began to take notice of a new book by Dr. Michael L. Dertouzos, who has headed the computer laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the past twenty years. The book, called
What Will Be
, laments the complexity of PCs in bold terms. “You want to use them as boat anchors,” Dertouzos told the
New York Times
. “People really should revolt.” Since many of the most important players in the computer business are former students of Dr. Dertouzos, this pronouncement was not to be taken lightly. In the same article, friend and colleague Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed a direct finger at Bill Gates, saying, “Anything Microsoft does makes it worse.” But other computer scientists say that the complexity prob
lem can only get worse because both computers and software become outdated before anything gets fixed or simplified.

Bill Gates and other Microsoft executives insist they are working to simplify computer software, but many observers are dubious. In any case, Bill Gates is not about to give up on the idea of merging the personal computer and the television set. In April, Microsoft acquired Web TV Networks Inc., a company specializing in Internet-via-TV services based on set-top boxes, and followed that up in June with a $1 billion investment in the Comcast Corporation, the fourth-ranked television cable company. Such acquisitions and investments put Microsoft in an even stronger position to influence the shape of the emerging information highway. With $9 billion in cash reserves, Microsoft can afford to spend a great deal of money to see to it that Bill Gates’s vision of the future comes true.