High St@kes, No Prisoners
A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars
Charles H. Ferguson

[Review by Zube (8/19/01), zube@stat.colostate.edu]

This book is very much the flip side of Jerry Kaplan's Startup.  Like Startup,
High St@kes, No Prisoners gives a detailed look at the whirlwind life of
a startup company through the eyes of one of the founders.  In this case,
however, the end result is success and fortune.  Ferguson started Vermeer 
Technologies (the company that developed FrontPage) and was bought by 
Microsoft.

With only a couple of exceptions, the first eight chapters of the book
are gripping and insightful.  Some of the most interesting lessons and 
tidbits are:

* If you deal with Venture Capitalists, never let your guard down.  VCs
are interested in exactly one thing: money.  They don't care about your
vision of the company or how hard you worked to get it to where it is.
If they could get some multiple of their investment while completely
killing the company, they would.

* Surround yourself with good people whom you trust.  You'll be surprised
how many people outside of this circle who are with the company are looking
out only for themselves.

* If Netscape hadn't been so arrogant and stupid in the running of its 
company, the computing landscape might be very different today.

* It is nearly impossible to compete with Microsoft directly in an area
that they wish to dominate because they have immense financial resources 
and because they use windows and office as large hammers.

Chapters 9-11, however, turn the narrative into an opinion page.  Ferguson
first does an autopsy on Netscape, then considers what should be done
about Microsoft and finally outlines the future.  Some of the opinions
I agree with, some I do not and some are sweeping, inaccurate 
generalizations like:

"I've mentioned several times Netscape's disdain for patents and other forms
of intellectual property.  Barksdale shared this view, one that apparently
he had absorbed from Andreessen and the other student UNIX hackers,
a community in which intellectual property is viewed as evil."

Of course.  How simple and how hypocritical.

Early in the book, when Vermeer is looking at only the long-term bottom
line, two of the goals for frontpage were:

[p. 104]  (2) to create "lock-in" to our product and architecture so
that neither users nor the industry could easily switch to a competitor

and 

[p. 104] (4) to make it difficult for anyone to clone us, which would
allow them to undercut our price and potentially wrest control of the
standard from us

But later, when he talks about Microsoft's control of windows and office,
one of his remedies is:

[p. 324] The first remedy would be the forced disclosure by Microsoft of
its major APIs, including the internal APIs of Office.

So, "lock-in" is only bad in the third-person, such as Microsoft's "lock-in"
but it's very good in the first-person, such as Our/Vermeer's "lock-in."

I also find it quite ironic that Vermeer was born out of the explosion 
of the Web.  This explosion occurred not only because of the cost and 
proprietary nature of the original on-line services (Compuserve, Prodigy, 
etc.), but also because of *open*, *non-proprietary*, standards 
such as TCP/IP.  Those standards were brought to you by the same "UNIX 
hackers" Ferguson holds in such low esteem.  And this is the key point.  
Most hackers care about the technical side of things: making things work
and then making things work better.  Vermeer, Microsoft and their ilk
claim to care about the users, but what they really are in business for
(no surprise) is money.  While I don't begrudge any company trying to make
money, it takes an amazing sort of hubris to berate the people who laid
the foundation for your success.

Finally, the title of the book (High St@kes, No Prisoners) is nothing short
of inane.  My guess would be that some dim bulb in the marketing department
had the final say as to the title.

In summary, I highly recommend the first eight chapters of the book.  The
other three are, at best, a mixed bag.