Titan:
The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.

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Release date: May 1998
Price: $30
ISBN: 0679438084
Category: Profiles

In the terrific new book Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr., author Ron Chernow describes the 1860s Pennsylvania oil region as follows: "Rockefeller beheld the satanic new world bequeathed by the oil boom, an idyllic valley blackened with derricks and tanks, engine houses and ramshackle huts, thickly crowded together in a crazy-quilt pattern." Fast-forward 130 years, and that titan could be Bill Gates peering out over Silicon Valley. And the parallels don't end there. As I read Titan, I was struck by the similarity not only of the social environments that spawned these two giants, but also of the way in which Rockefeller and Gates responded to their opportunities.

"For Rockefeller, success in the oil business required a bullish, nearly glandular faith in its future," writes Chernow, who won a National Book Award for his earlier The House of Morgan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990). So it is for Gates, too. Both men recognized early the potential of their new technologies--oil and PCs. They also shared the notion that the path to success would be through rapid commodification: to drive down prices, drive up consumption and drive out competition.

Equally important, each of the two men had the will to create and dominate his industry--by any means necessary. For Rockefeller, that meant turning an anarchic industry into an ordered one. The same holds true for Gates. In the beginning, the PC industry was chaotic. Software developers were unable to thrive because they had no single platform to write for and thus were not assured of a mass market. For better or worse, Gates did what had to be done: He created a standard PC platform the industry could build on--one that he, of course, controlled.

Not surprisingly, the means by which Rockefeller and Gates consolidated power often stretched the limits of legality, and both became targets of government lawsuits. However, both men again had it easy: Rockefeller because there was no antitrust law to speak of at the time, and Gates because traditional antitrust law was slow to respond to the changing environment of the information age.

Nor do the similarities end there. Rockefeller once struck a deal promising some large Northeastern railroad companies all of Standard Oil's shipments in return for rebates not only on those shipments, but also on the oil shipped on those same railroads by other refiners. Sound familiar? Microsoft Corp. adopted a similar policy when it began requiring PC companies to pay for a copy of its operating system on each PC they shipped--regardless of the OS the machine actually used--if they wanted the best price on Windows.

Of course, there are also contrasts between the two industry titans. Consider Rockefeller's relationship with the press and public: A series of muckraking articles exposed the way Rockefeller's monopoly allowed him to raise prices on domestic oil to compensate for pricing battles abroad. And his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was implicated in the 1914 Ludlow, Colo., massacre, in which two women and 11 children were killed in a miners' camp strike against a Rockefeller-controlled company.

Gates and Microsoft, by contrast, are still reasonably well-liked by the general public. PC consumers will remain happy as long as they get more for less. And the debate about whether Microsoft should be able to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows strikes many as absurd. Today the entrepreneur is regarded as hero, not robber baron. And far from shooting his employees, Gates has made thousands of them millionaires.

The most important difference between the two, however, lies in the commodities under their control: Oil was and is a finite physical commodity; bits, on the other hand, are unlimited and virtual, making Microsoft's opportunities for expansion vast. And unlike Rockefeller, much of Gates' legacy is yet to be written.

Titan is a long, dense book, but Chernow is such a good writer and Rockefeller such an important subject that I recommend taking the time to plow through it. You'll come away with not only a better understanding of one of the giants of the industrial age, but also of the lessons his story holds for the information age. There is, after all, more to history than the 30 years since the microprocessor was invented.

Reviewed by Eric Nee

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