Bill Gates (Allen Lane)
There are few people in the world of technology with more interesting stories to tell than Bill Gates. The entrepreneur and co-founder of Microsoft has seen computers morph from hulking machines that fill entire rooms – and cost thousands of dollars a day to use – to tiny, handheld devices that can be picked up for comparative pennies. He has seen, and changed his mind on the importance of, the rise of the internet and artificial intelligence, with his personal volte-faces shaping industry adoption. That’s before you get to his work leading Microsoft – now the world’s second-highest valued company at $3 trillion.
Which is why his autobiography, Source Code: My beginnings – which covers his early years in Seattle, Washington, up to the point he starts Microsoft with Paul Allen – has been so hotly anticipated. Getting into the head of someone with such a standing as Gates could produce insights into so-called tech bros more widely, and therefore the influence they have on our society.
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We get plenty of self-reflection from Gates, who has always seemed somewhat more earnest, though no less sharp-elbowed, than the generation of tech entrepreneurs who followed him, which includes Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. We understand more about his mercurial mind and the drive that led him to make Microsoft and usher in modern computing – and how that one-track focus stems from harnessing a bloodymindedness that infuriated teachers and rubbed his family up the wrong way.
We also understand a little more about why Microsoft is more boring (comparatively) than its peers, by being given a peek into Gates’s psyche. Early vignettes highlight how caution was impressed on him, when, for instance, Gates loses badly at cards to his hustler-like grandmother, Gami, before finally besting her – only to then overstate his expertise and come a cropper at college poker games.
And we get some disarming honesty from the multi-billionaire. He recognises that as the privately educated and already rich son of a well-respected lawyer father and highly connected community-organiser mother, he had privileges that helped him on his way.
The book is eminently readable. It is deeply researched and richly told, thanks to strong family archives that have kept drunken letters to friends and loving missives from parents and grandparents. Gates’s prose is well-constructed, too, even if the narrative can be repetitious (there are only so many times we can learn that as a teenager he snuck into school or university computer labs at night, watching the hours fly by in a frenzy as he coded his latest harebrained, would-be commercial project).
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But the story comes to an end just as it gets really interesting. This is understandable – Gates is clear that this is the first of a trilogy – but it does leave the reader frustrated that as soon as Microsoft is set up and on the cusp of defining home computing, the book wraps up abruptly with a sidebar about a melancholy family trip to Hood Canal in Washington state. The idea seems to be to finish on a particular moment to set up the sequel, but in the end all it does is underwhelm and feel tacked on to what had been, until then, a deeply methodical walk through Gates’s life.
If you are planning to read all three books to learn more about the origin story of the Microsoft billionaire, then by all means pick up Source Code. But if you just want to learn about how we got to the stage where almost every person on the planet has a phone in their pocket and a laptop on their desk, I would skip this one and wait for the sequels, where there will be fewer scenes from prep school and more from Microsoft itself.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
