Description: After nearly a decade covering the converging information industries for The New Yorker, Ken Auletta found himself presented with the most important antitrust trial in modern history, a trial that will put its defining stamp on the digital age, pitting the richest company and man on earth against a fascinating government legal team egged on by Microsoft's many enemies. But Auletta did not merely chronicle the compelling courtroom drama as Bill Gates and his all-star legal team went down in humiliating defeat, done in partly by their own hubris. This book contains stunning revelations about what happened in court, including the rage Gates could not contain when he confronted his most powerful foe: the government. Beyond the trial, this is the story of an up -- for-grabs global information economy, of a climate of historically unparalleled frenzy and hype, in which the driving fear -- that on the road ahead, you're either there first or you're carrion for the birds -- has infected everyone. Auletta uses the trial as a narrative clothesline, hanging on it the stories of Microsoft's rivals -- Steve Case and AOL, Nobuyuki Idei and Sony, Rob Glaser and RealNetworks, Lewis Gerstner and IBM, Scott McNeally and Sun Microsystems -- all of whom maneuver to supplant Bill Gates. The fierce courtroom confrontation becomes a prism for viewing the bitter war for the future that is raging between the most successful companies on earth. World War 3.0 defines and explains the Internet age and where it is taking us, even as it chronicles the age's greatest trial.

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