3 Chapter One 1 998 Bill Gates and Microsoft Late in 1998 the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta visited Bill Gates, then chief executive of Microsoft, at his offices in Redmond, Washington. It was, as you'd expect of a chief executive, a corner office, with trees on one side and buildings on another. Unassuming brown office chairs sat around polished pine furniture; Gates's desk emerged from the tree-side wall, looking more like a breakfast bar than the symbol of a powerful