BILL GATES: MINE, ALL MINE

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Gates claims not to understand such talk. Why, he asks in mock frustration, do people complain that he sells so much software? Is there something wrong with that? Should Microsoft just sit back and not make its products any better so that more people will buy from its competitors? Is that what it's all about?

Even some Microsofties-parodied as slavishly loyal worker bees in Douglas Coupland's new novel Microserfs (HarperCollins; $21)-think Gates goes too far. Privately, they regret that the company has sailed so close to the wind, especially when it might have won the race simply on the strength of its technology. "Sometimes I think it's unfortunate that we compete the way we do," says a Microsoft middle manager, in a rare expression of doubt.

In fact, Microsoft's business practices are not that far out of line with most of Silicon Valley's. "I don't think they have done things we wouldn't do ourselves, or that the people who have complained the most wouldn't do either," says Gordon Eubanks, chairman of the Symantec software company, based in Cupertino, California. Even companies that have submitted evidence against Microsoft are deeply ambivalent about inviting the Justice Department to police the industry.

"Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst," says Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and a longtime Gates watcher. According to G. Pascal Zachary, author of Showstopper! (Free Press; $22.95), a book about the making of Windows NT, the company is the model of a new, postmodern corporate culture, perfectly suited to survive in an era of rapid technological change. The Microsoft way, says Zachary, writing in Upside magazine, is neither purely individualistic (the American approach) nor consensus driven (the Japanese style) but a third way he calls "armed truce," in which employees are encouraged to challenge everybody, even the chairman. "Conflict is at the heart of every significant Microsoft decision," he writes. "This is a company constantly at war, not only with outsiders but also with itself."

Gates and Microsoft have demonstrated what the armed-truce approach can achieve. The company is a national treasure, the undisputed leader in a business now crucial to everybody's life. What Microsoft has yet to discover-and what the world is waiting to learn-is whether the qualities that brought about its triumphs will somehow make it falter.

--Reported by David S. Jackson/Redmond and Suneel Ratan/ Washington