Begun in 1979, COMDEX, the computer distributors exhibition, had become the scene, where industry go-getters had to be, and where opinion makers and trendsetters gathered in full force to see and be seen. By 1983, it was a huge phenomenon, and with all that ballyhoo, it was very difficult for any company, much less a small upstart like Microsoft, to be noticed at all.

Once Hanson knew that Microsoft would launch Windows at COMDEX, the entire communications department embarked on a mad frenzy. Gates had made it perfectly clear that the launch of Windows was the Super Bowl, and Gate didn't want to play… he wanted to win. Knowing that, Hanson's goal was two-fold: to make Windows a Phenomenon, and to create the buzz in the industry with Microsoft. Immediately, they faced huge obstacles.

For starters, all of Las Vegas was booked solid.

Hanson called Bob Lorsch, a marketing mastermind, with a Los Angeles-based sales promotion agency whom Hanson had used in crisis mode at Neutrogena.

Hanson said, " I need to own Las Vegas during this event. I don't care what the rules are. We need to rise above the clutter."

Then Hanson warned his team, "We're never going to get this done working through the normal channels. The normal channels are all taken. I mean this is an insane launch plan. I need to bring in somebody who can make the impossible happen. And you need to trust me. This guy is going to scare you because he is a little off the wall."

When people showed up in Las Vegas, they were awe struck. There wasn't a taxi on the Strip not promoting Windows. Stickers were all over the back seats of cabs; the drivers wore Windows buttons.

These same buttons were handed out at the booths of every hardware manufacturer that supported Windows. Each button had a number on it. If people could find someone else with a number that matched theirs, they could go to the Microsoft booth together and receive software, gifts and a bombast of Windows hype. In a Disnyesque mode, Lorsch also created wuppies-little fuzzy mice holding Windows flags-to promote Microsoft's new mouse.

Lorsch was a magician who believed anything was possible and simply wouldn't take no for an answer. He managed to get Windows 1.0 pillowcases placed in 20,000 Las Vegas hotel rooms. When half-asleep COMDEX attendees turned down their beds at night, they were astonished to find their pillows instructing them to stop by Microsoft's booth. Windows 1.0 marketing materials were subversively slipped under hotel doors. Every day, during the entire week of COMDEX, Microsoft had new and different promotional materials delivered to the hotel rooms.

Microsoft's competitors were crazed, but Gates and his marketing crew were ecstatic. People couldn't go to bed without Windows. Microsoft had a Windows sign right outside the front lobby of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Microsoft was dancing in the end zone.

As for Hanson himself, he was accustomed to trade shows in Las Vegas, but not to computer conventions. He was used to walking down the strip talking to beauty editors and fashion models from Vogue and Vanity Fair. Now he was staring at programmers with pocket protectors.

Microsoft's colossal party at Caesar's Palace-suits and ties were the order of the day-brought Hanson somewhat closer to his own element. Naturally, it was Hanson who had demanded that the Windows developers show up for the party looking like IBMers, or not showing up at all.

Only a handful of the Windows 1.0 developers toed the line. Most boycotted the party to protest the dress code-many didn't even own a suit. Still, it was a roaring success.

Microsoft arranged for country singer Glen Campbell to show up for the soiree and give a speech. Dressed in cowboy boots, the "Rhinestone Cowboy" stood incongruously next to the world's soon-to-be-most-famous computer geek.

"I just wanted to welcome y'all here for the Microsoft party," Campbell said in his Arkansas drawl. "And I just wanted to let you know this is my good buddy Bill gates."

The crowd laughed till it hurt.

But the buzz was no joke. Because of this Hanson-inspired blitz, Microsoft went from being a player to being the player. Nobody had ever owned COMDEX this way before, and no company ever would again. Microsoft had reinvented and redefined the idea of "promotion," with tens of thousands of dollars in tips for hotel bell clerks and housekeeping staffs alone. (All those pillowcases didn't come cheap.) Microsoft had greased the palms of certain shift managers; other times it was a worker with a little entrepreneurial chutzpah.

"You'd be amazed by the power held by doormen, head maids, housekeepers, and security guards." Hanson said. "As well as the leads limo drivers can give you."

In total, Microsoft would spend $450,000. After that, COMDEX put policies in place requiring that companies go through the proper channels if they wanted paraphernalia in hotel rooms.

From that point on, Gates did all of the announcements related to Windows, which seemed fitting, inasmuch as, by PR edict, he would personally get all the credit.

At Gates keynote speech, the lights dimmed, and a spotlight followed him to center stage in front of a standing-room-only audience. His fingerprint-smudged glasses reflected the light. Dandruff dusted his collar. He looked like central casting's idea of a technical genius, which was, of coarse, all part of the image being marketed.

So when Gates stood there and promised that Microsoft would ship Windows in the spring of 1984, people believed him. The company had just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch it, so of coarse it would ship.

However, the developers actually doing the work back in Bellevue knew the truth was something quite different. Eller, Wood, and Remala, especially, knew the product would never ship by April 1984, because of coarse, Windows was "vaporware." Gates's COMDEX demo was little more than a videotape that flashed graphics on the screen in different windows. It barely contained any code, and what little code it did contain was riddled with bugs, but it looked better that VisiOn's demo, and in this age of image, that's what counted.

In Microsoft's initial surveys of COMDEX attendees arriving at the Las Vegas airport, only 10 percent of those polled had even heard of Windows, and no one understood what it was or why it was important. When Hanson's team conducted their exit polls, public perception and awareness for Microsoft and Windows had grown to 90 percent-in one week.

The company received its first television coverage, and people held off on VisiOn, waiting instead for Windows 1.0-the safe, quality buy. Developers stared calling VisiCorp, "VisiCorpse."

Microsoft crushed VisiOn and built infallible momentum for Windows. The Soft would emerge as a completely different company, not based on its technical merit, but on its marketing prowess.

Gates would emerge a different person as well. He was on his way to pop-icon status. But a casualty of this change would be the attention he could pay to his technical people and to the actual development of Windows. Ironically, never had the programmer-CEO been less involved in his companies programming.

This lack of involvement would wreck havoc during the entire two-year period it would take to get Windows out the door.

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