Barbarians Led by Bill Gates Microsoft From the Inside: How The World's Richest Corporation Wields Its Power By Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller Henry Holt. 256 pp. $23 Cyber Rights Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age By Mike Godwin Times Books. 333 pp. $27.50 Reviewed by By Rob Pegoraro, editor of The Post's Fast Forward Section. Sunday, July 19, 1998; Page X11

The two authors' thin volume argues that Microsoft isn't the omnipotent, omnivorous capitalist force it appears to be; rather, it more often succeeds by accident as it lurches drunkenly from strategy to strategy, depending on the mood of the Committee of the Month. In other words, it is – are you sitting down? – a normal company. Barbarians is blessed with ridiculously good timing, having arrived just as the Justice Department sued Microsoft for allegedly violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, but cursed with a clumsy structure and spotty writing.

Edstrom, a journalist, is the daughter of longtime Microsoft uber-flack Pamela Edstrom; Eller worked at Microsoft for 13 years (he helped craft Windows' clunky graphics infrastructure, which may not be quite the thing to brag about on one's resume). The two of them haven't produced any big insights here, but they do deliver some highly entertaining anecdotes about Microsoft's messy process of advance, retreat, reorganize, debug, then advance in a different direction. One development head calls another's group "chimps," while Bill Gates curses out his minions: "Why am I paying you people salaries?" The writing crackles with cutting, cunning descriptions: A meeting between competing user-interface development teams is "like a multiethnic family reunion in Sarajevo."

But any intramural conflicts are overridden by Microsoft's corporate survival instinct: "Kill anyone trying to take that [Windows] revenue away." A revelatory chapter describes how Microsoft succeeded in crushing a foundling competitor in the "pen computing" market, in which electronic pens and tablets were to replace keyboards (but still haven't done so).

The last third of the book aims to prove that Microsoft's weaving of its Internet Explorer browser software into Windows was basically a matter of expediency and dumb luck. But these chapters, with their duller, largely quote-driven style, might as well have been stapled on. Eller had left the company before most of these events took place, apparently leaving Edstrom to do most of the work here. Although convincing, this stuff is not much better than reading back copies of trade publications like InfoWorld or PC Week.

In the end, Barbarians, like many products from a certain software firm in Redmond, Wash., comes off as a rushed, version 1.0 release, with the typos and minor technical inaccuracies to prove it. Unfortunately, unlike software, books rarely come with bug-fix version 1.1 releases.

By contrast, Godwin – staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading online civil-liberties lobby – has delivered a much more substantive work in Cyber Rights. (The title, by the way, is a bit of a misnomer; most online activists just want the same rights they enjoy offline.) From defending the Internet's good name on talk shows to writing legal opinions against various Internet-censorship proposals, Godwin has basically done it all. Either as cause or effect, he is a True Believer in the idea that "the world of the networks is a true democracy: your influence is measured not by wealth or position, but by how well you write and reason."

With this, he argues, comes the potential for new, more democratic communities to arise online. But he has few real-world examples of this happening, besides the discussion forums on the WELL, the small, San Francisco-based online service of which he is a member. This idealistic segment also suffers from the occasional outbreak of unexplained computerspeak, a jarring touch given the book's orientation towards Net novices.

But after this shaky start, Godwin moves on to the territory he knows best: the various attempts to regulate online discourse. The book's heart is its extended recounting of two related episodes: the trumped-up study of cyberporn that Time magazine turned into a lurid cover story in 1995, and the fight to undo the Communications Decency Act over the next two years

After Time's Internet-pornography story broke, Godwin and a small squad of academics and journalists, linked mostly by e-mail (and FedEx), scrambled to document the crippling flaws in the study – and to persuade the media to report them instead of uncritically quoting the study. This man-versus-magazine story is fascinating reading; Godwin's account of his experience on a "Nightline" episode reads like an outtake from the movie "Broadcast News." His and others' debunking effort sounds like trying to steer a supertanker with a sailboat – but it worked. Time ran a retraction of its story weeks later.

Congress, however, was less dissuaded – despite a flurry of online protests, something that Godwin mostly skips over – and passed the Communications Decency Act, banning "indecent" speech online. The EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union and several other parties promptly sued to block its implementation. Godwin ably outlines such relevant issues as the different legal meanings of "indecent" and "obscene" and the principles behind government regulation of such media as radio and TV, then goes on to explain the important parts of the various judicial opinions that killed the act.

But what's really memorable about these closing chapters is Godwin's own reaction, after weeks of anxious waiting, upon hearing the Supreme Court's ruling that struck down the CDA: He breaks down crying as he writes a speech. The legal principles he discusses in this book might seem like abstract stuff, but, as he shows, they're plugged in to some deep parts of people's lives.