BILL GATES' GIFT TO THE WEB

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Some people think of Bill Gates as a godless, misanthropic, penny-pinching monopolizer. But not me. And I'm not talking about that airplane he bought himself last week, either. You might be surprised to learn that the Bill Gates I know is bailing out the Web, and possibly enriching countless struggling electronic publishers.

My first exposure to Gates, the Net philanthropist, came a few weeks ago, when the techies at Pathfinder noticed that the computers that serve up the Web versions of TIME, FORTUNE, PEOPLE, MONEY, etc. were behaving, well, drunkenly (my word). The sites were running even slower than is normal on the World Wide Wait. Indeed, some users were complaining that it took longer to download a page of TIME Daily than it did to have a pair of pants dry-cleaned.

At first, we suspected hackers. But closer examination revealed an unlikely culprit: Microsoft's Internet Explorer. More precisely, the latest, just released 4.0 version of that fabled and controversial browser.

A browser, as anyone who's visited the Net knows, is the software you use to navigate the Web. You fire it up, click your mouse and "go" to a site. Simple. But the newest version of Microsoft's browser--the one that for other reasons got Gates in such hot water with Janet Reno--reverses the relationship: the Web comes to you. After you subscribe to various Web publications by clicking on a box in the new browser, a software robot employed by Microsoft scurries around gathering the latest version of those Web pages and then, periodically, "pushes" the information down the Net to your computer. The idea behind so-called push media is that you don't have to remember to go to, say, Slate every day; the new parts will be sent to your computer automatically. It's like having the newspaper delivered to your driveway, except you don't have to crawl under the car to find it.

Our site, like many of the other big ones out there, wasn't exactly prepared for the IE 4-spurred traffic boost. Those Microsoft robots were downloading so much stuff for so many users that our computers ended up working overtime. It was like one of those hamburger places on the interstate when a caravan of tour buses pulls up in the middle of the night. Luckily, in the digital age, we never run out of fries.

I checked with friends at HotWired, CNET, CNN Interactive and other Websites, and everyone was optimistic. ("Cha-ching!" was how a pal at HotWired put it.) The more traffic to your site, you see, the more you can charge advertisers, theoretically. That may sound venal, but it's been lean out here. A lot of Websites have died for lack of revenue. Thanks to IE 4, traffic is way up, in some cases more than 25%. Within two weeks, visits at TIME Daily doubled, to 500,000 page views a week. We still have to convince advertisers that people--and not just robots--are looking at their ads. But that will be easy. Right, Bill?

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