*Have you ever wondered why Gates sits alone as the World’s Richest Man, and not Gates and Allen given the two founded the company together?

*Imagine how different things would be had James Gosling, the Sun engineer who created Java, taken the job he applied for at Microsoft two years BEFORE Java was released.

*Have you ever heard of Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft’s designated Java hit man?

THE 60-40 SPLIT

Bill Gates would be accused of predatory pricing and a partnering style that one competitor described as a "preying mantis business model": First Microsoft had sex with you, then it ate you. His rapaciousness would raise questions about fair play in the computer industry—but to me Bill Gates’s single most shameless act occurred while he was still at Harvard, and involved his longtime friend and partner, Paul Allen.

Allen is third on the Fortune 400 list behind only Gates and Warren Buffett. He bought most of an island on Lake Washington to build an estate that includes a fully-equipped health club, a regulation-size indoor basketball court, authentic Roman statues, and paintings by master French impressionists. This rock and roll fanatic didn’t just dream of a museum honoring Seattle native Jimi Hendrix, he built one. He owns the Seattle Seahawks football team and the Portland Trailblazers basketball team, and also his own Boeing 757. But it’s like the ridiculously inflated salaries Allen must pay the young stars of his basketball team: All sense of proportion and reality go out the window. Sure, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for a man worth as many billions as Allen. But the question remains, Why would Gates end up owning nearly twice as many Microsoft shares as Allen?

Allen was always the more personable one. He was a nerd, naturally; as a high schooler he carried a briefcase to and from his classes. But he was always down to earth and better liked than Gates. His parents were both librarians and he lacked Gates’s arrogance. It was Allen who had the moxie (and also the facial hair) to gain entry to the computer center across from the U-W campus, and it was Allen who brought Gates along once he had scoped out the scene. A few years later, it was Allen who spotted the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics and it was Allen who, eight weeks later, demo’d BASIC in Albuquerque. Gates deserved more of the credit for the initial design of BASIC but Allen deserved more credit for the overall product. He added a host of new features to this skeletal product created in eight weeks, and patched most of the bugs

Yet Gates used those months Allen spent perfecting BASIC against his friend. Allen had gambled his future when he dropped out of Washington State[?] to move to the Boston area. But while he worked on BASIC he was earning a salary working for Ed Roberts. Gates, in contrast, had hedged his bets. He remained at Harvard for two more years. But he had also done some work on BASIC. Where was his compensation? Always playing the angles, even when dealing with a childhood friend, he demanded a sixty percent cut of the company, and the mild-mannered Allen obliged.

Consider two of the friends who co-founded Sun Microsystems. Sun was nothing without Andy Bechtolsheim, the Stanford Ph.D. student who had invented the SUN (Stanford University Network) workstation, so the goose who laid the golden eggs was in for the biggest cut. But the dilemma confronting Vinod Khosla, the Stanford MBA who had roped the highly-coveted Bechtolsheim, was the deal he’d propose to Scott McNealy, his friend from business school. Khosla had already co-founded a successful startup, and there was no question that he would be running Sun. He sought to sign up McNealy because McNealy had experience running an assembly-line plant. If looking to give McNealy an official title, you would call him Chief Operating Officer. The protocol would be to grant McNealy somewhere like a ten percent share, but McNealy was a friend, and he was part of the founding team. Khosla split his piece of the company 50-50 with McNealy.

Gates pushed for a second change in the partnership formula when he left Harvard. He proposed a 64-36 split because, after all, he was risking a great deal by leaving Harvard—Harvard, mind you, not Washington State. And again his mild-mannered friend demurred rather than fight. Allen made the key contact when Microsoft was desperate to find a workable operating system it could tailor to the IBM-PC. Until he got sick with Hodgkin’s Disease, he ran the software development side of the company while Gates flew around the country signing up partners. Yet by 1998, Allen’s months as vice president of software for Ed Roberts would end up costing him roughly $8 billion, and the fact that he had dropped out of Washington State, not Harvard, cost him another $3 billion.

JAVA’S DADDY ALMOST FLIES THE COOP

1993: Feeling what he described as "cynical, depressed, and very, very angry," Gosling wanted out. He phoned someone he knew at Microsoft. "I look at them as just a bunch of dumpster-divers," Gosling said. In other words, they were imitators who created by copying the work of others. "But Microsoft was also a company that had both the will and might to push products they believed in. The thought that went through my mind was, ‘Well, I might be working on inferior stuff, but at least it would see the light of day.’"

Microsoft offered Gosling a job, but moving to Redmond would have meant a taking a 30 percent pay cut and walking away from stock options potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Microsoft human resources office didn’t seem to care about his credentials or status as one of the Unix world’s more creative talents. "It’s common when recruiting a top person to offer a counter-balancing exchange on options," Gosling said, but the Microsoft’s human resources official told him the company’s policy was to value other company’s stock at zero. And he thought, what a perfect expression of the Microsoft master plan-to assume that value of the stock of every other high-tech company would eventually be worth nothing. "It was," Gosling said, "easily the most deeply offensive interview experience of my life."

BEHIND THE SCENES

Tod Nielsen is the friendly face of Microsoft. He’s intense, sure, but his job is to win programmers over through kindness. Charles Fitzgerald’s job, on the other hand, is to throw mud. If Microsoft’s assault on Java can be likened to a political campaign, Nielsen is the press secretary who smiles for the cameras while Fitzgerald is the shadowy behind-the-scenes figure feeding dirt to reporters and responsible for all those name-smearing negative commercials. Where even competitors describe Nielsen as the nicest guy you would ever want to meet, what they say about Fitzgerald is unprintable.

Java had just recently turned two when, in mid-1997, Fitzgerald visited the country’s most influential business publications to launch his Java offensive. "Set aside two hours," he would write in an e-mail in advance of his arrival. "This is going to take a while." He was a lean and terminally intense man, flitty and unable to sit still, armed with a slide show that cast every Java shortcoming and every McNealy promise so far unfulfilled in the worst possible light. Have you by chance read, he asked, the PC Magazine article showing that only 48 percent of the Java programs the magazine tested ran glitch-free? [10 out of 21] Or did you notice where analyst so and so, in an interview with Computer Reseller, backed away from his earlier endorsement of Java? He was sarcastic ("I’m convinced Sun’s marketers and its engineers have never met"), he was deceptive (like the performance figures he later admitted were "cooked"), he even expressed mock sympathy. "I was part of an equally ambitious project at Microsoft," he would say. "I know what it’s like to start on a project that turns out to be infinitely more difficult than you ever imagined." He even offered reporters lists of questions. He would ask them, "Which do you prefer, the ‘nice’ version or the ‘nasty’ one?"

Six out of ten adults in this country own no stocks nor any mutual funds.

Despite the drumbeat of rosy economic news, the U.S. has the highest percentage of its population living under the poverty line among the 17 largest industrialized nations in the world. Fact is, the real wages of the poorest 40 percent in this country have dropped in recent years, while the real wages of the richest 20 percent have soared.

So that people recognized how well-regarded Microsoft was within academic circles, the company initiated a "Faculty Speakers’ Program": the company would send $200 to any professor mentioning a Microsoft development tool during a conference presentation.

Though most people regard Bill Gates as a top technologist, he hasn’t done any computer programming since he worked on a Radio Shack portable dating back to the early 1980s—and even that wasn’t a particularly challenging piece of code.