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Admittedly, the make-do interviewees often have more direct knowledge about the topic at hand than Gates himself. But who's kidding whom? The media game is to bag the big lion. My purpose -- even as I was granted access to top-tier people at Microsoft, names such as Nathan Myhrvold -- became divining those issues I would touch upon in the book I was writing ("The Plot to Get Bill Gates") that no one on this earth could possibly answer but Lord Gates himself.

Let me confess up front that I personally didn't place much stock in an interview with Gates. There was a time when a writer in conversation with Gates had a shot at discovering a revealing fact about the man (like the time he practically confessed, during an interview with Playboy, to dropping acid), but that was an earlier version of Gates that had long ago been upgraded. Every word uttered by the current version, Gates 3.1, has been carefully scripted. Still, I wanted the interview. There was a question of fairness and also a matter of credibility. You write a book with Bill Gates' name in the title and the first thing some people are going to ask you is whether you interviewed the man himself. So I made up my mind to embrace the task with all the overbearing Microsoft-like aggressiveness I could muster.

My nemesis proved to be Pam Edstrom, who has been spearheading Microsoft's PR efforts since 1982. Our first talk, in January 1998, proved typical of the dozen-plus conversations we'd have over the next 12 months -- a gossipy marathon, intimate and revealing, in turns friendly and combative. Edstrom exhibited a light-hearted sarcasm as she shared blow-by-blow accounts of the missteps of Microsoft foes who had allowed themselves to be distracted by a personal animosity for Gates, but her sunny good cheer turned to an instinctive defensiveness when detecting even a whiff of a criticism of her boss -- or an imposition on his time.

"Bill?" she snorted when I asked about a sit-down with Gates. "You and everyone else." She listed the media outlets requesting time with Gates that she had recently turned down (including CNN, Business Week, Newsweek, the Washington Post), and then told me a story about a man she described as a "well-known editor at a prominent business magazine."

Like Indiana Jones bushwhacking his way into the inner temple, this editor-writer had prevailed in his quest for time with Gates but then supposedly made so many mistakes in the resulting article that Gates felt compelled to pick up the phone to complain. "For this guy it was this great badge of honor," Edstrom hissed. "Bill had yelled at him because he had been so stupid, but he's bragging about it to everyone like, 'I took on Bill Gates and survived, I must be quite a man.' I had to call him up and ask him to shut up." I can't say precisely why Edstrom shared that story with me only an hour into our first conversation. Was it to scare me? To shame me? To solidify the relationship with a bit of insider gossip? Or simply to get me feeling sympathy for Gates, whom everyone seemed to want to bend, shape or mutilate into his or her image?

Next page | When called the Great Satan, Gates gets miffed