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Financially, the company couldn't be more secure. Microsoft's revenues for 1994 were nearly $5 billion, more than all its competitors' in the PC-software business combined. Its market value tops $40 billion, more than that of companies 10 times its size. It employs 16,400 people-one-third of them women-in 49 countries. Thousands of current and former Microsoft employees have become millionaires, at least on paper, and three are billionaires.
Gates has amassed a net worth of more than $10 billion, making him either the richest or the second richest man in America, depending on the closing price of his 141 million shares. He was married last year on the Hawaiian island of Lanai; the wedding was attended by publisher Katharine Graham and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett. He is building a $40 million-plus home on suburban Seattle's Lake Washington, with video "walls" to display an ever changing collection of electronic art, a trampoline room with a 25-ft. vaulted ceiling where he can burn off steam, a 20-car underground garage and a trout stream. The Road Ahead, a book on which Gates is collaborating with Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft group V.P., and journalist Peter Rinearson (publication date: Oct. 16), received a $2.5 million advance from Penguin, a record for a book by a few computer geeks.
None of which gives anyone at the Microsoft "campus" in Redmond, Washington, an excuse to relax. One of the most remarkable traits of Microsoft's corporate personality -- inherited directly from its restless chairman -- is its inability to sit still. What other companies see as wind at their back, Microsoft sees as turbulence from competitors catching up. "A revenue-generating franchise is the most fragile thing in the world," says Myhrvold, who, like Gates, is something of a professional worrier. "No matter how good your product, you are only 18 months away from failure."
A touch of paranoia is not a bad thing to bring to the computer-software business, where shifting alliances, rapid technological changes and intricate co-dependencies make plotting long-term strategies hazardous. For example, Software Arts, which invented the electronic spreadsheet, lost its market to Lotus because it failed to anticipate the impact of the IBM PC. Lotus, in turn, failed to recognize the importance of Windows and the Mac, and was overtaken by Microsoft.
Nobody navigates this chaos more deftly than Gates, who not only understands the technology (he wrote the company's first product, Microsoft Basic) but also meets regularly with the ceos of all the major hardware and software firms. This enables him to spot trends and anticipate developments as clearly as anyone in the industry. It is as if he were playing three-dimensional tic-tac-toe in a world where everyone else is playing in 2-D.
"You get Bill Gates in a room with his peers, and he will know more than anybody else in the room," says J. Paul Grayson, chairman of Micrografx, who has worked with Microsoft's chairman for more than a decade. This gives the company a big edge, says Myhrvold, who likes to talk about riding the "wave" of technology. "If you want to surf it, you put someone on the board who knows how to surf," he says. "Most companies have to put people on the beach shouting 'Go left!' and 'Go right!' Next thing you know, the company is underwater."