War belongs to the province of business competition, which is also the conflict of human interests. --Karl Von Clausewitz
On a cloudy morning last December, as the white light of winter picked its way across the face of Mount Rainier, William H. Gates III, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., rolled out of bed after a brief night's sleep. There was no time for breakfast. He showered, pulled on his customary slacks, open-necked shirt and sweater, and climbed into his Lexus for the 20-minute drive from his suburban Bellevue, Washington, home to the Seattle convention center.
Gates had been at the center late into the previous evening--an eight-cheeseburger night, he calculates--preparing what he suspected would be the most significant Microsoft announcement in a decade. For two years the rapidly expanding global computer matrix called the Internet had nagged at Gates like a low-level headache. Even as his company shipped Windows 95 last fall--an 11-million-line program that solidified Microsoft's PC hegemony--Gates worried about what lay ahead. Microsoft had long dominated the world of personal computing by providing the software that controlled the way users interacted with their machines--a program called an operating system. Microsoft's operating systems, first DOS in 1980 and then Windows 10 years later, had given the company intimidating control over PC software. And lush profits, enough to vault Gates to the top of the list of the richest Americans.
But the Internet could undo all that. Gates had been warning his top lieutenants that the Net could change everything about the way people used computers, perhaps even the fact that they needed an $89 copy of Windows to make their machines work. But he hadn't quite figured out Microsoft's proper place in the new terrain, and the company's thus far tentative market initiatives reflected that indecision.
This morning he planned to bring the uncertainty to an end. Microsoft would reorient every effort, every project and product to the new reality of the Internet. He was about to send a company with $6 billion in sales and 19,641 workers--all $70 billion worth--hurtling in that direction. In the future, as in the past, nothing was going to stand in Bill Gates' way.
Nine hundred miles down the Pacific coastline, in Mountain View, California, James Barksdale, president and CEO of Netscape, was bracing for another day of standing in Bill Gates' way. Barksdale slipped into a suit, grabbed a quick breakfast and pointed his Mercedes toward Netscape's Mountain View headquarters.
With $81 million in sales and 600 employees, Netscape had enjoyed a comfortable dominance of the infant Internet world. Its killer app was a program that made navigating the Net as simple as pointing at what you wanted to see and clicking on it. Browsers brought order to the chaos of the World Wide Web, a corner of the Net stuffed with text, sounds and pictures. Netscape's Navigator browser was the best on the market, and it had propelled the company through a wildly successful initial public offering in August. Some analysts were saying Netscape had an invincible lead in the browser business, even against Microsoft.