Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...someone's garage trying to invent the next Mac. This is Microsoft's Red West campus, in the Olympian heights of Redmond, Wash. These sleep-deprived souls are software engineers--trained to write code, not dirty their hands with metalwork. Which explains why Angeloff has accidentally soldered the wrong pieces of circuitry together in one of the boxes. The engineers have been up so long on this frazzled assembly line because their boss--Bill Gates, a man whose tolerance for failure is minuscule--needs to demonstrate his company's tentative entry into the games-console market. "It's like...
...vision is almost lovely enough to obscure the enormous mountain Microsoft has to climb if it wants to plant its flag on the $7 billion games business. Sony stands astride this pile of cash like Gamezilla, with a 60% market share; 1 American household in 5 owns a PlayStation. The next-generation PlayStation 2 sold 980,000 units in Japan in record time; a rock-star-style arrival in the U.S. is scheduled for this fall. Sony's new machine also has the advantage of being backward-compatible, meaning you don't need to throw out all your old PlayStation...
...face of it, Microsoft ought to have a tremendous head start in this area. It owns three of the top 10 PC games, including the world's best seller, Age of Empires II. But the fact is, there's a world of difference between PC games and console games. Because the technologies are so far apart, you won't be able to play PC games on your X-box--even though it runs on something similar to Windows 2000. And as X-box manager J. Allard concedes, PC gamers and console gamers are quite different animals: "Microsoft gets...
Granted, hearing Gore and Bush talk about campaign finance is a bit like hearing Microsoft extol the virtues of antitrust law. Gore's campaign has been hounded by a Justice Department investigation for 1996 fundraising practices. Recently, Maria Hsia, a Democratic fund-raiser, was indicted for her role in the now-infamous Buddhist Temple incident. Meanwhile, Bush's campaign gained notoriety for the millions it raised from wealthy donors. Bush's recent campaign finance proposal would allow still candidates to fundraise from these very same donors, and Bush's large tax breaks for higher-income Americans would ensure that these...
...believe in technology. I believe in the Internet. It's insane not to have some of your money invested there. But no stock group is truly bulletproof. Since late '98, rising interest rates have toppled one after another--utilities, then banks, then industrials. Now some established tech leaders like Microsoft and Lucent are under pressure. Next and last on the ladder of interest-rate vulnerability are the new-economy darlings. Can they stand firm? Given the money flowing their way, maybe...