>http://cnnfn.com/2000/04/07/companies/wires/microsoft_wg/

I haven't seen the add, but read the article in passing. I guess Gates knows what a friend of mine always says: "You cannot underestimate the american public too much".

A few friends with an _idea_. I'll buy that; ideas are the seed of progress.

But to boast about "enhancing people's lives", c'mon! That's Miss Universe material!

It is funny (well, that's not the word, but can't find a better one) how things turn out.

I don't think bill gates evern planned to become a monopoly. It just happened that way. It's no one's fault and at the same time it's everybody's because we, the public, made it possible with our buying decisions.

The funny part is that he brought the government's attention on his little operation mostly by trying to push a product (IE) that wasn't intended to make him any money. Perhaps on the long run he was indeed planning to sell IE, but due to the course of events that followed, he was forced to state that IE is an integral part of the OS and now he will NEVER be able to sell IE as a standalone product.

Not to sound too new age myself, but he started bringing bad karma upon himself from the very beginning when he screwed apple and then ibm with the OS/2 fiasco (but then I don't know what IBM's people were thinking when they delegated so much of their product development to a company that was openly working on a competing product). I guess we'll never know who went to bet with whom.

Alex