the canary in the coal mine The truth is: nobody knows. And, because most often they do not know that they do not know, no one will ever tell you that truth. Some people don't know because they are too hopeful and sometimes because they are very greedy. Some are profoundly stupid or are a little too smart. But in the spanking new world of the Internet, nobody knows because everyone and everything has just been born. Which is why Steve Case found himself on May 8, 1997 cruising on the calm waters of Lake Washington in Seattle on a boat carrying him and more than 100 other chief executives toward the 20,000-square-foot, $40 million home of Bill Gates. Case was definitely not supposed to be there--if you had paid heed over the years to a variety of learned Wall Street pundits, savvy journalists, pontificating technology consultants, and waspish naysayers in Silicon Valley. And the computer online service, America Online Inc.

, which he had built into the world's largest, was just one tiny step away from falling right over the precipice. The dirge had been endless: AOL was nothing. AOL was history. AOL was dead. Yet there Case stood--perhaps the liveliest corporate corpse one might ever meet--chatting with American Airlines head Robert Crandall, kibitzing with a cadre of Microsoft's top executives, and joking with Vice President Al Gore. In the near distance, in Bellevue, Case could just make out the outlines of Gates's glass-and-wood palace, still being built on the lakeshore, where an elaborate dinner awaited them. Getting to see the famed technological Xanadu that Gates was constructing for himself was the highlight of a flashy, two-day CEO "technology summit" Microsoft had organized. There had been speeches all day.

Now a dinner of spring salmon, fiddlehead fern bisque, and tortes with Rainier huckleberries awaited them. As the boat wended its way from its launching point on Lake Union, surrounded by a flotilla of security boats to protect this small ship carrying very powerful people, to the place Case jokingly was calling "Bill's San Simeon" (after William Randolph Hearst's egotistical monument to himself), the man from AOL thought it was all just a little too bizarre. He was happy to have been invited, of course, but felt decidedly out of place. He had quipped to Microsoft finance chief Greg Maffei and other executives from the company that he felt like a spy deep in enemy territory. He ribbed them, asking playfully if he should be taking notes on any stray Microsoft secrets he could glean, and sending them off in a bottle over the side of the ship. But inside his head, he wondered seriously: Should he even be here at all, still standing? Had it only been four years ago that Case had been told by Gates that it was probably the end for AOL? Gates--whose leadership of Microsoft and ensuing vast wealth had made him into an American business icon on the level of John D. Rockefeller--had been spectacularly wrong.