The Washington Post points out: "if you emptied the wallet and pocketbook of every person in the United States turned upside down the register in every store, smashed the piggy banks, looked under the mattresses and behind the couches, and plucked every dollar from every foreign black market, you would end up with $ 450.6 billion in loot. That still wouldn't be enough to buy Microsoft Corp," headed by Bill Gates. The US, it points out, did not hit a gross domesticproduct of $ 500 billion until 1960, when Gates was 5-years-old. The Gates saga is proof that in the past decade, the US technology industry has created wealth on a scale previously unimaginable.In India, Hindustan Lever tops the table of market capitalisation with a value of Rs 52,564 crore (as on July 16, 1999). Infosys Technologies, the software leader in India, has a market value of only Rs 16,369 crore and pales in comparison with Microsoft. In fact, the total market value of all listed shares on Indian stock exchanges also doesn't come even one-third of Microsoft's value. The total market value of all Indian companies (numbering around 6,500) works out to around Rs 6,50,000 crore.

Microsoft Corp shares had risen by nearly 4 per cent in early trade Friday after a published report that the software giant is close to creating a stock to track its Microsoft Network properties Internet unit. The shares were up $ 3.50 to $ 97.875 in early Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The Wall Street Journal reported that anannouncement on a tracking stock could come as early as next week when Microsoft hold its annual conference with analysts.

Microsoft is the biggest mover on the Nasdaq market. Microsoft's msn.com is one of the top sites on the Web, featuring the e-mail service Hotmail, the Expedia travel site and the CarPoint auto-buying service. It also includes dial-up internet access. The newspaper further said Microsoft has been considering a tracking stock for the properties for several months as a means to pay for internet-related acquisitions and to lure executives attracted to the high valuations of "dot-com" companies.

Bill Gates is also the world's richest person. According to Forbes magazine, Gates' net worth is around $ 90 billion. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft with Gates in the early `70s, is worth $ 30 billion .