Last fall, the Department of Justice sued Microsoft for alleged violations of the antitrust consent decree signed in 1994. Microsoft responded combatively, and the press, rightly or wrongly, began to focus on how an arrogant Gates and his cohorts seemed to thumb their noses at the government. Applied Communications, a Silicon Valley PR firm, tracked the use of seven different adjectives describing Microsoft in 450 publications from February 1997 through mid-April 1998. As the Justice Department stepped up its investigation, use of the word "unfair" jumped more than sevenfold from July to October 1997, "anticompetitive" rose nearly tenfold by October, and "arrogant/arrogance" surged similarly by January.

Microsoft PR then shifted gears into a campaign to make Gates appear a more genial and accessible character to the general public. Its PR operation had long trained its efforts on first establishing that Gates was more powerful than his company's size suggested, then on cultivating and persuading a relatively small circle of influential journalists that Microsoft products were undisputed winners. The new PR direction was a tough transition to make, especially under such close scrutiny.