Over the course of two decades Microsoft, a computer software corporation founded in 1975, has become synonymous in the minds of many with the computer age and its high-speed advances in technology and communication. Often called the General Motors of the computer industry, the mystique of Microsoft in the public imagination has many sources, not the least of which is that favorite American myth of unlimited opportunity: the rags to riches story. From its beginnings in the minds of two computer-obsessed students to its status in the 1990s as a 14 billion-dollar-a-year industry giant on a sprawling campus in a Seattle suburb, Microsoft seems to fulfill that archetypal American promise.

This is perhaps most appropriately reflected in a satirical computer game called "Microshaft's Winblows '98," where players compete to rise from Penniless Nerd to Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy. The nerd in question is William Henry Gates, III, usually referred...