"The week typically starts with Gates, 49, taking a helicopter or seaplane to the two-story clapboard cottage on a quiet waterfront. It's a tidy, relatively modest place with a small bedroom for Gates. During the week he bars all outside visitors -- including family and Microsoft staff -- except for a caretaker who slips him two simple meals a day.
He starts the morning in bed poring through papers mostly by Microsoft engineers, executives and product managers and scribbling notes on the covers. Skipping breakfast, he pads upstairs in his stocking feet to read more papers. Noon and dinnertime bring him back downstairs to read papers over meals at the kitchen table, where he has a view of the Olympic Mountains.
Facing the windows with a water view stands a desk with two Dell personal-computer monitors. To the side is a bookshelf lined with literary classics. A portrait of Victor Hugo hangs nearby. A bathroom and a small refrigerator, stocked with Diet Orange Crush and Diet Coke, have been added to the office in recent years, Gates said, so he can maximize his reading time by not having to go downstairs. Papers in orange covers litter the floor, their pages stamped "Microsoft Confidential."
On this particular day, Gates settled behind the PC monitors, which displayed a database of nearly 300 papers for this week. Among the topics: the growth of Internet video, hard-drive capacity and the diminishing advances in microprocessor "clock speed," historically the driver of PC-market growth. Other paper topics included trends in digital photography, computing trends in 2005 and ways for software to better handle languages like Vietnamese."
(Via Indystar)
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