A Hero of Our Time Phenomenal riches always attract envy and adulation, and the Gates fortune is no exception.
There's nothing unusual about the level of hostility directed at Gates and Microsoft for what are perceived as their ruthlessness and monopolistic practices. Accurate or not, such charges are standard fare -- the wages of market success.
But the strange mixture of fan-level obsession, personal hatred and hero-worship that Gates often evokes, sometimes in the same person, is new to the computer industry -- a traditionally hardheaded, unemotional environment. People may have thought Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were cool, but they never became the totems that Gates has turned into.
I'd guess that's because Gates -- technically minded, still relatively young and rarely encumbered with tie -- is a figure so many people in the computer industry can identify with. He's neither a rebel nor an insider; as he portrays himself in "The Road Ahead," he's just a guy who "saw the potential" of microprocessors early and worked hard to make a lot of money from them.
All the 30- or 40-somethings laboring in the computer biz who spent their teens goofing around with Basic games, the way Gates describes his own school days, look at him and think, "That could have been me." The more unbalanced among them think, "That should have been me." There are doubtless some real crazies who think, "That is me."
Some of them are building some pretty creepy Web sites. I hope, for Gates' sake, that his new high-tech home runs -- alongside its fancy entertainment system -- an effective Mark David Chapman detector.
