Pirates of Silicon Valley

Pirates, raiders, thieves, robber barons...with no honest bone in their body.

Yikes! Warning to all admirers of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - the 1999 movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, which freqently crops up in HBO, portrays these idols of millions of the Apple and Explorer generation in a totally unflattering light.

True, the movie depicts them both as driven, ambitious, eager to create their own new world - but that's just the problem that supposedly lies at the core of each man: everything else is secondary, and woe to everyone who gets in the way. Jobs' daughter is portrayed as a casualty (although the film acknowledges at the end that he eventually played loving father). Noah Wylie lets go of his aw-shucks charm to portray Jobs as a narcissistic genius who dismisses his men on a whim. Anthony Michael Hall's Bill Gates isn't an improvement, either - he's a whiny nerd who just wants to copy and "pirate" whatever it is that Jobs is doing.

So much for innovation. Granted that the movie can become a guilty pleasure of a tabloid TV movie that lets you in on the depraved weaknesses of today's gods...but still, there has to be more to these men. Wasn't there anything that the movie could have portrayed of the inner light in Bill Gates that decades later, would show him as an altruist donating his fortune to countless unfortunates? Or the strength of character that saw Jobs sustain - and triumph over - several bouts of cancer?

Nope, the definitive movie on these two tech giants still has to be made. I, for one, would like some meat on the plate in the new version, something that would show the heart, soul, and spirit that gave birth to the Internet era.

Gates and Jobs were probably the first software millionnaie entrepreneurs - they won't be the last. And if only for that, I'd really like to see an honest cinematic depiction of them (and not a homage, mind you).

This film just keeps knocking them down, and the tongue-in-cheek approach doesn't really help in getting the bile out of your mouth.

One supposedly revelatory scene SPOILER SPACE is that Jobs supposedly stole the concept of the mouse, one of the revolutionary tools introduced by Apple, from Xerox. Yup, it made me think...and wonder...and wonder a lot. But I'd also have to ask: how long can an empire last if its foundations and subsequent pillars were built on stolen loot? Not for long. It would have imploded as soon as it started. Last I heard, Gates was still giving away millions to charity as the #2 richest man in the world. And in one board meeting, Jobs announced that Apple had a SURPLUS of $40 billion just lying around.