Mr. Softy

IT TOOK place only a few hundred miles from Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, but the introduction of the Xbox 360 games console in the Mojave desert this week was light years away from the company's usual product launches. The festivities began on Sunday evening in a remote aircraft hangar, bathed in white and green light, at an event attended by thousands of gamers who had won tickets online. Fans posed for pictures and asked for autographs from Microsoft executives, who were treated like rock stars, before rushing into the hangar to play on hundreds of consoles connected to high-definition...

The software giant usually demolishes any opponent that dares to step in its path. But it can't beat streaming-media king RealNetworks. If Microsoft had its way, which it usually does, it would be dominating the streaming-audio and streaming-video software market with typical ruthless efficiency. Over the past decade, Microsoft has littered its path to world domination with the corpses of countless competitors;

n May 1998 the U.S. Department of Justice ("DOJ") accused Microsoft of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by vigorously competing against Netscape's Navigator software with Microsoft's rival browser, Internet Explorer. The substance of the allegation revolves around defensive actions taken by Microsoft to protect the dominant position enjoyed by Microsoft's Windows operating system. The DOJ's theory is that, were it not for Microsoft's overly aggressive reaction to Netscape, Navigator software would have been more broadly distributed, thus enabling competition to Windows.

Microsoft has articulated a vision of software engineering in which all the pieces are tightly integrated and reusable, a vision that closely matches the ideal development process desired by developers. The plan calls for tools that support the entire process, beginning with a modeling tool capable of using stored components to produce machine-independent code. The code would be distributable, and middleware and messaging system would allow users to partition the application as needed. Changes to an applications would be performed through the modeling tool or object-oriented tools. The result...

Who is the most powerful person in the computer industry? Arguably it is the frail, bespectacled, boyish figure shown below, the essential computer nerd, William Gates, 35. His Microsoft Corp., which he co-founded two years after dropping out of Harvard, is to computer software what IBM is to hardware -- and now the two companies, formerly partners, are contenders in one of the industry's most important battles.

He looks like an undernourished grad student as he waits for a plane at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. His gray sweater has patches on the elbows; his shoes are scuffed; his ginger hair flops over a pair of steel-framed glasses. He fidgets with a thick pile of papers that contain preliminary sketches for a new portable computer and technical details for silicon chips that will be used in machines of the late 1980s. The tag on his battered black suitcase reads "William H. Gates, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, Microsoft." Gates, 28, has helped catapult Microsoft...

Two software leaders give video screens a new look Like women's fashions, computer buzz words change with the season and tend to hide more than they reveal. Last year's programs were all "user friendly," although many proved painfully difficult to master. This year, software is "integrated," which means that information from one program can sometimes be merged with data from another. Industry watchers are now getting a preview of the pet phrase for 1984. Two leading computer software companies, Microsoft and VisiCorp, are offering products with "windows," a system that lets users run several...