Product Reviews

Four years ago Bill Gates brought us The Road Ahead, with very little serious attention paid to the Internet. Rather than risk being made to look foolish again, Gates has opted in Business @ the Speed of Thought to rehash old ideologies, few of which are attributable directly to himself.

Supposedly a guide to business in the e-commerce age, and co-authored by Microsoft executive Collins Hemmingway, the cynic in me can't help but think that this book is a blatant marketing exercise. An underlying theme stresses the importance of building digital infrastructures using standards - that is, standards that embrace the Microsoft product family. This vision of the future not surprisingly depends on essentials like a Microsoft OS and Office 2000, which has led unkindly

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to some folk referring to the book as Microsoft Kampf.

Subtitled 'Using A Digital Nervous System', and aimed squarely at readers at corporate-director level, it comprises a 12-step programme to exploit the e-business opportunities of the next millennium. This digital playing-field concept is nothing new, and I have to say that others have presented it better - not least Patricia Seybold in her book Customers.Com. In fact, the Gates 12-step plan reads more like a correspondence course primer than a serious business bible. 'Use technology to create virtual teams' and 'Use technology to deliver new kinds of customer service' being prime examples.

So there we have it: it's duller than dishwater with little or no inspirational insight for anyone who has been awake during the latter half of this decade.

The most interesting chapters are the ones that are missing. Chapters dealing with how a large company doing business with a digital nervous system deals with anti-trust lawsuits for example, or the business threats from rivals like Sun, AOL/Netscape and Linux.

The companion Web site (www.speed-of-thought.com) is an equally poor advertisement for a philosophy that argues that to survive you need to be that one step ahead, while claiming to be best viewed using IE 4, rather than the current version of Microsoft's own browser.