Fade in on sign: "Password Required." Pan up to an old, spooky castle overlooking Lake Washington. Dissolve to GATES as an old man, holding a hard drive.

GATES: Xcopy.

BOSS: That doesn’t really tell us much about him. I’ve got it! What about his last words? When it came time for Charles Foster Gates to die, he said only one word: Xcopy. What does that mean? Has anyone ever heard of it? Find out. Interview everyone whoever worked for him, whoever loved him…

BOSS: …whoever hated his guts.

THOMPSON: Oh…

Dissolve to a large, luxurious office. THOMPSON is interviewing an old man, BALMER.

BALMER: Who’s a busy man? Me? I’m chairman of the board. I only work a 23-hour day.

What was Mr. Gates like? There was that time one of our marketing people was supposed to write a press release about bugs in WordPerfect, but couldn’t find any. Mr. Gates just smiled. "You provide the prose poems. I’ll provide the bugs."

Then there was that meeting with me and his old friend, Mr. Jedediah Allen. Mr. Gates had just moved his bed into his office over his assistant’s objections.

"But Mr. Gates," the assistant said, "this is a software company. We’re practically closed two hours a day."

"The programming goes on for 24 hours a day," thundered Mr. Gates.

He was talking about a new program he wanted to make called "Windows." We felt that no one would buy it, that it wouldn’t be big enough. He just laughed. "If the ads are big enough, it makes the software big enough." He pointed to his computer. "I’ve got to make Microsoft Windows as important to PCs as the juice in that power supply." Just after he said that, the power supply died.

I’ll never forget the rollout when we introduced Windows. It was in a big theatre with dry ice effects and everything. And way up in the flies above the stage stood two stagehands, one of them holding his nose.

After he went broke, Mr. Gates sold everything to IBM. His original mentor there, Mr. Thatcher, never approved of him. "You know, Charles, you never made a single purchase. You always used money to…"

But Mr. Gates interrupted him. "…to acquire power."

ALLEN: Say, you don’t have a modem on you, do you? I’ve got this young doctor who thinks he’s going to keep me off-line.

I remember the big moment. When Charlie confronted that judge, "Boss" Jim W. Jackson. The judge had figured out the whole scam, how Charlie was wiping out other companies by forcing everyone to use his products. Jackson had given him an ultimatum: Either get out of the software business, or every newspaper in the world would report that Charlie had been caught in a love nest with Apple, and that Charlie had insisted on being on top.

Charlie was angry, as angry as I’d ever seen him. "You can’t tell me the users of world will abandon me after I invented computers, the Internet, paperback novels! I’ve given them great software! Great, enormous, ponderous software filled with bugs like they’ve never seen before!"

As Jackson walked out the door, Charlie screamed after him. "Don’t worry about me, Jackson. Don’t worry about me. I’m Charles Foster Gates! Do you hear me? Charles Foster Gates!"

Charlie and I had our big falling out not long afterwards. I tried to explain to him that his actions wouldn’t go over with the public. "People will think…"

"…what I tell them to think."

That got me mad. "You talk about the ‘people’ as if you owned them. But one of these days you’re going to discover that they expect software that’s bug-free. Then what will you do? Sail away to a desert island somewhere and network all of the monkeys?"

I never saw him again.

RAYMOND: Xcopy? I’ll tell you about Xcopy. How much is it worth to you?

THOMPSON: Nothing.

RAYMOND: Then I’ll tell you this story instead.

It was just after he had sold everything to IBM. He was at his computer, boiling with rage. Suddenly he got up and started smashing everything. Turning over bookshelves, throwing vases, smashing chairs. Everything.

But he stopped just before he attacked the computer. He looked at the keyboard for a moment, then muttered one word. "Xcopy."

THOMPSON: Why do you think he flew into that rage?

RAYMOND: Nothing unusual. It’s a common reaction to most people using Windows.

WOMAN REPORTER: You know, if you had found Xcopy, it would have explained everything.

THOMPSON: I doubt it. I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. Except, perhaps, megalomania.

© Copyright 1999 by Lincoln Spector

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