The joker in Bill's pack

Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates is said to have been a voracious poker player in his student days, and it could be that his bluff is about to be called.

Stories about the various upgrades to NT being delivered late are legion, and though version 5 is supposed to ship towards the end of the year, it's probably worth placing a bet on whether Microsoft will deliver to schedule. For a long while, many people assumed that the NT initials stood for 'not there', and that it was the product for which the term vapourware was invented.

Gates has other things on his mind these days, not least an endless barrage of lawsuits and the challenge of the internet. His approach to the internet so far appears to have been that if he can control the Web's delivery systems, in the same way as he has managed to monopolise desktop operating software, then he can exact electronic tolls on the value of goods sold.

Hence Gates' enthusiasm for developing billboards and other content networks that can act as electronic malls under whose roof conventional goods can be sold and service providers can ply their wares. The problem is, like so many out-of-town shopping centres, Microsoft's sites are starting to resemble expensive white elephants and are visited only fleetingly by the Web community. It's here that content comes into its own - if only to provide a reason for people to visit the various Microsoft sites in the first place, in the same way that they might subscribe to a particular newspaper.

The trouble is, Gates' plans to buy into the content market are going far from smoothly. A recent rumour was that he was after Anglo-Dutch publishing giant Reed-Elsevier which, in the UK, own a large clutch of business titles, as well as the Lexis-Nexis database. True or not, it's a rumour that looks unlikely to be confirmed, if only because of Europe's tough competition laws.

Slate, Microsoft's literary e-zine, is far from breaking even, while another putative venture to acquire Dorling Kindersley, the illustrated books publisher, also appears to have fallen by the wayside.

Meanwhile, in the network operating system market, Novell's NetWare 5 is already shipping with a host of goodies that have been enthusiastically received by network managers: not just TCP/IP support, but its bundled NDS tool to manage software distribution, desktop configuration and remote-user issues. NT server can also be managed from within NDS.

NetWare's sales are still rising - albeit not as fast as NT's - and with some four million licences worldwide, Novell is still the largest server software supplier in the world. Most importantly, Novell probably has a six-month start on NT Server 5 and, at the very least, could thwart its blind acceptance.

For once, Gates, in focusing too much on the internet, may have overplayed his hand in the application server market - a market in which, as in poker, the winner usually takes all.