James Wallace's 1997 sequel to Hard Drive, published by Wiley, picks up the story of Bill Gates and Microsoft after the IBM deal and follows it through the internet turn, the browser war with Netscape, and the antitrust scrutiny that was about to become United States v. Microsoft. Wallace, an investigative journalist, wrote both books without Gates's cooperation. The book stops in 1996, just before the Justice Department filed its antitrust complaint — a moment when Microsoft was at maximum market confidence and maximum legal vulnerability.
The Gates shelf note says Overdrive covers 'the internet turn, the Netscape fight, and the antitrust scrutiny that was about to become a lawsuit' and calls it 'a useful snapshot of Microsoft at maximum confidence.' Founders covered it on episode #174.
For a founder, the book is a time-capsule of a company that had won everything and then found that winning brought a regulator it could not outrun. The browser war is the operational core: Microsoft recognised late that the web was a threat to its Windows monopoly, then turned the entire company toward it in under a year — the 1995 Internet Tidal Wave memo, the bundling of Internet Explorer, the free distribution, the deals with ISPs. The behaviour that the antitrust case called 'predatory' was the same behaviour that had made Microsoft unbeatable in every previous market. Overdrive captures the period before the bill came due, when the strategy still looked like genius. For founders near the top of a winner-take-all market, the uncomfortable mirror is that you may not see the regulatory trap until the case is filed.