Each chapter of the book concludes with a list of supposedly practical "business lessons", but these are remarkably vague, even platitudinous. He writes: "If we go out of business, it won't be because we're not focused on the Internet. It'll be because we're too focused on the Internet."Focus is obviously the key to Bill's success. Bill threw money, time and energy into capturing the Internet, just as he had into dominating the market for PC operating systems.

Netscape, its rival and market leader in Internet browser software, found its position under sustained assault from what turned out to be (according to the Justice Department case against Microsoft) profoundly anti-competitive strategies. It was, he says, "the biggest unplanned event we ever had to respond to". Bill obviously does not like unplanned, but he gives credit to Microsoft employees who spotted the importance of the Internet and shifted it from the company's fifth or sixth to its top priority.As we know from the anti-trust case under way against Microsoft in the US, the response, when it came, was aggressive. He was cataclysmically wrong.Bill Gates recounts here the story about how Microsoft was left behind by the rapid growth of the Internet. Talk of PCs, upstart challengers to the kind of small mainframe computers DEC produced, was banned.

Ken Olsen, once head of Digital Equipment Corporation, famously pronounced in the late 1970s that nobody would want a computer in their home. he cites approvingly the book by Andy Grove, head of computer chip-maker Intel: Only the Paranoid Survive.Perhaps it should not be surprising that, in such a fast-moving industry as computing, the industry leader should be looking over his shoulder all the time. He has a whole chapter about the importance of getting bad news quickly He fears the worst all the time. He has been dressed up in an expensive suit and tie for the cover photograph, and his thoughts have been clothed in grown-up language, but it is clear that here is somebody most at home in front of his computer screen when he is not watching science fiction on TV, spooning ice cream from the tub.The other thing that is obvious about Bill is that he worries. What does he have that we do not, apart from bucketloads of money? As the occasional aside reveals, Bill is still a teenage nerd at heart. We don't care what Bill thinks about how to create a paperless office - one of his top priorities, to judge from the prominence he gives it here - so much as what the richest self-made man in the world is like. To be fair, it is hard to think of many books by top businessmen that offer a rattling good read.