With the very occasional dip, the graph of Microsoft Corporation's share price has been upward-sloping ever since the company's inception. It's been a must-have in US equity portfolios over the last few years and its Chairman & CEO, Bill Gates, is admired, feared and loathed almost in equal measure. When Bill speaks, people listen. And when he writes books, people buy them. His first, The Road Ahead, sold two and a half million copies worldwide and his publishers are hopeful that his latest, Business @ the Speed of Thought, will do equally well.
It's subtitled Using a Digital Nervous System which, according to Bill, was a phrase he coined so that people would have to ask what it meant. Bill is good on making people ask what on earth do they mean by things - look at any error message on your PC! Actually, a digital nervous system is just a computer network with e-mail and Internet access. This book is really all about why your company should have a computer network and what benefits you will gain from it. Because the industry in which I work has always used technology, I found quite a lot of what Bill had to say somewhat self-evident, although perhaps less computer-orientated firms would feel differently. Basically, we are told that "business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50" and that the 2000s will be "all about velocity". The book doesn't move at the kind of pace technology does, though, because by page 98 he's still telling us how important the Internet is and how things are going to be in the future. He lists out a variety of ways that technology will make our lives easier - you can see them already in any sci-fi movie, so telling me I'll have an intelligent fridge one day is yesterday's news.
Bill wants us all to adopt the "Web Lifestyle": which is gradually happening anyway, it just takes longer than people in the computer industry would like. In a lot of ways this book is a big advertisement for PCs and, while Bill is careful to list other applications developers, it's also a big advertisement for Microsoft. Hardly surprising, since the book is co-written by Collins Hemingway, who's director of executive communications at Microsoft.
The examples of how new software can help companies are informative - he describes the systems which Merrill Lynch, Marriott International, GE, Coca-Cola and Dell, among others, have used or developed. Basically, though, according to Bill, there is no part of business that can't be solved by using a PC. And preferably one with Windows. (Which is most of them.)
The book is divided into sections on Information, Commerce, Knowledge, Insight, Special Enterprises and the Unexpected. Each chapter has summary bullet points at the end under the headings Business Lessons and Diagnosing your Digital Nervous System. Again, a lot of it seems self-evident to me - but the bullet points focus your attention.
Some bullet points are good; "customer service will become the primary value-added function in every business". Some are hoary; "to win big you sometimes have to take big risks".
Interesting parts of the book focus on the assessment of how much a company should be spending on IT as an information tool rather than on IT support, how to decide what you need to find out, and how to implement your system. But the most interesting section is where he talks about Microsoft itself and how they've reacted to the market. In many ways the book came to life for me in Chapter 11 where he discusses Microsoft's failures. Not that I wanted to gloat, but I was getting tired of being lectured and at least it was possible to identify with this; no matter how much information you have, and how strategic your planning, people can still mess up.
I found the book too long and too repetitive - in some ways a little like Microsoft applications - lots of gizmos, but you only use about a fifth of them! I didn't really learn any more about Bill Gates, which I would have liked, and I didn't feel that he said anything new about technological advances either. I got more out of the chapter summaries than the main bulk of it, where at times it reads simply like a list of companies all of whom saw the light when they invested in IT. I can see a lot of people buying it but probably not finishing it. Still, at £18.99 sterling a copy, I don't suppose he'll mind if you skip a few chapters. Being a Bill Gates book, you can also access information on the Web at www.speed-of-thought.com.
Sheila O'Flanagan works in the fixed income division of NCB Stockbrokers. Her latest bestselling novel, Isobel's Wedding, is published by Poolbeg at £6.99.