A "digital nervous system," according to Gates, can motivate and empower managers, increase manufacturing efficiency, hone sales-force performance, enhance strategic planning, speed the flow of information and boost the bottom line. A "Web lifestyle" and "Web workstyle" will allow managers, employees and customers to conduct ever more of their professional and private business across the Net, profoundly transforming the home and the workplace. "Going digital," Gates writes, "will put you on the leading edge of a shock wave of change that will shatter the old way of doing business."

If you plow through "Business @ the Speed of Thought" you will quickly realize three things: Nearly everything Gates writes is obvious. Nearly everything Gates writes is right. Yet somehow he has missed the real story.

He's right that digital technology allows companies to react faster. He's right that e-mail allows important news to bypass hierarchical bottlenecks and get to the people who need to know it. He's right that abandoning paper and "going digital" can not only cut costs but create new business opportunities.

To such revelations, at this point in history, one can only respond: duh!

But your eyes may glaze over as Gates delivers example after example of mega-corporations like McDonald's, Nabisco, Boeing and Coca-Cola achieving digital nirvana. And as the book progresses, a subtle blurring of a key distinction takes place: Going digital is gradually equated with replacing all your old systems with Windows-based PCs. A handy appendix at the book's end provides a technical roadmap; all that's missing is a 1-800 telephone sales line for Windows 2000.

"Business @ the Speed of Thought" is packed with examples of how Microsoft has, in industry parlance, "eaten its own dog food" -- used its own technology to build the kind of "digital nervous system" Gates preaches about, routing critical information to the people who can act upon it. Gates himself says he has "a natural instinct for hunting down grim news ... An essential quality of a good manager is a determination to deal with any kind of bad news head on, to seek it out rather than deny it."

OK, Bill, here's the bad news: A lot of people who agree with you about the promise of digital technology are deeply unhappy with the particular incarnation of it that you peddle. And the Internet makes it possible for them to do something about it.

Gates-trackers will recall that the Microsoft founder's previous book, "The Road Ahead," offered a vision of the digital future that essentially dismissed the Internet as a mere stop along the way to the "information highway" that would change our lives: "CD-ROMs are one clear precursor to the highway," Gates wrote. "The Internet's World Wide Web is another." Today, CD-ROMs offer a good way to distribute software but are in no danger of transforming the world; the "information highway" is a phrase even Al Gore can't utter with a straight face; and it's the Internet's uniquely open standards that have become the foundation for an unprecedented boom in online media, communications and commerce.

"The Road Ahead" appeared in December 1995, just as Gates was unveiling Microsoft's master plan to "embrace and extend" the Internet. Yet the book's first edition, with its clunky accompanying CD-ROM, mentioned the Web a mere seven times in nearly 300 pages. Though later editions tried to correct this gaffe, "The Road Ahead" remains a landmark of bad techno-punditry -- and a time-capsule illustration of just how easily captains of industry can miss a tidal wave that's about to engulf them.

Gates and Microsoft have, of course, so far managed to ride the Net's wave to further success. And "Business @ the Speed of Thought" makes clear that Gates has totally got the Net religion: "If we go out of business," he writes, "It won't be because we're not focused on the Internet. It'll be because we're too focused on the Internet."

But the Internet that Gates depicts is barely recognizable as the Net on which more and more of us work and play. For better and worse, today's Internet is a vast, teeming commons on which buggy technological innovations, experimental business plans, fringe political movements and evanescent pop-culture trends are all emerging, converging and mutating. The Net has become such a crucible for human energy because its technical standards remain wide open -- it's the proverbial "level playing field." Gates does wield considerable influence, largely because he sits upon an enormous mountain of cash that enables Microsoft to acquire promising small companies whenever it chooses. But he does not call the shots.

This must be galling to him.