83 Reasons Why Bill Gates's Reign Is Over

		PLUS
		The Rise and Rise of the Redmond Empire
		Why Bill Gates Quit His Job

Perform a supreme act of imagination: Envision a world in which Microsoft doesn't dictate your personal computer reality. Too much for you? Stay with us - we're about to give you 83 reasons why Redmond is not invincible.

Microsoft seems like a fact of life. We know how the company took over the desktop. But how did it get to be standard equipment in our consciousness? Omnipresence helps. Windows and Office are everywhere. Then there's history: To paraphrase a Confederate general, the company may not have been firstest to the software battle, but it came with the mostest, and it humiliated a huge, established power, IBM, in the process. And, to keep the list brief, there's return: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is, unless you're talking about Microsoft stock; a $1,000 investment in Bill Gates and company on the day they went public, March 13, 1986, had grown to $258,000 by this fall.

But here's news: Microsoft is just a company, not a force of nature. It's not the biggest company in the world, nor the richest, nor even the biggest seller of packaged software (that's IBM). We reel at the mere thought, but Microsoft can be dislodged from its place at the center of the software universe. How?

Look at Microsoft today. It's beset by distributed-computing technology like Sun Microsystems' Java and Jini. It's threatened by the Internet, which is beyond domination by a single technology or set of tools. On dozens of fronts ranging from bandwidth to set-top boxes to handheld devices to embedded systems, innovation is accelerating. No company can be boss of all the new stuff.

Yes, Gates is writing about The Era Ahead and talking about a new miniature computer and data storehouses and hooking MS Office users on an online software upgrade habit. Like any good horse player, the company is spreading its investment bets across the board: WebTV, cable TV, freemail, streaming media, and portal services, among many, many others. The company is trying to extend its dominance into server software with Windows NT and to become the brains of the handheld universe with Windows CE. As for individual competitors, there's not a true dragon slayer in the crowd. Linux, a challenger in the server market, is still a geek's toy that no one in Redmond will really take seriously until they see developers lining up to write mass-market apps. Java and Jini are still mostly a dream (but one with enough substance that, a Sun lawsuit alleges, Microsoft has tried to take control of the language by promulgating a variant version).

So why worry if you're Microsoft?

Well, it's a baggage problem, and the Redmond Twenty-Seven Thousand are carrying a real load. For instance: the history of shipping buggy software and of taking their own sweet time to get things right; the habit of adopting hardball as modus operandi for all seasons and of assuming that they represent a superior kind of being; a forecast slowdown in the sky-high earnings that built the company's $14 billion bank account; and, worst, the use of its PC desktop dominance as a works-every-time door opener to supremacy in new sectors.

For Microsoft, this dependence on dominance is a self-set trap. It has led the company to play rough not only with competitors, but with partners, too. It has given government antitrust prosecutors religion and emboldened legislators to consider whether the company's monopoly power has gone too far. It has given Sun, IBM, Apple, Novell, Oracle, and Netscape - as well as a new generation of competition - the resolve to continue to resist the corporate steamroller. Where do you want to go today? Microsoft asks. Some of the toughest voices in the high tech world answer, "To war."

(1) Funky Karma.
Ill will could be Microsoft's most widely distributed product. The company's strong-arm approach to business has provoked prosecutors, competitors, and would-be allies. The result? At October's Agenda Conference, for example, a non-wild-eyed audience of tech execs listened to federal trustbuster Joel Klein speak, then were polled on the question, "Do you believe antitrust regulation is necessary in the computer industry?" Eighty percent answered yes.

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