Microsoft at middle age.

"Microsoft has become what it used to mock," says Gabe Newell, a developer on the first three versions of Windows. At late-night rounds of poker with "Bill and Steve" in the mid-1980s, he says, "We laughed at IBM. They had all this process for monitoring productivity, and yet we know they had spectacularly bad productivity. That's Microsoft now."

From the October 3, 2005 issue of Forbes magazine