Focusing on a Losing Battle

He also said, "This is the first time I've made a film and I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes."

But his tyro's modesty cloaks a healthy ego and keen intellect. Ferguson is smart enough to know what he doesn't know. Then he surrounds himself with people who have the skills to help him succeed. He did this in the case of filmmaking -- recruiting Oscar-nominated documentarian Alex Gibney as executive producer and "the eminence looking over my shoulder," as Ferguson puts it -- and he did it when he launched his software company.

"He is absolutely the smartest person I've ever known," says Randy Forgaard, the co-founder, with Ferguson, of Vermeer Technologies Inc., which created the Web tool known as FrontPage. "He sees no limits at all, he just jumps into what he jumps into."

Ferguson says he grew up poor as an only child in San Francisco: "There was zero money in the family." His alcoholic father died when he was 19 and his mother held administrative jobs. Medical bills always chewed into the household income -- as a boy he suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis and he could not walk for several years, he says. (Now he's an avid jogger.)

Ferguson won scholarships to Berkeley, where he earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1978. He then spent more than a decade doing graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a detour into Silicon Valley.

He wrote his 1989 dissertation under the tutelage of Carl Kaysen, a former national security adviser in the Kennedy administration. The topic was the globalization of information technology, and Ferguson became a sought-after expert on trade policy during the Reagan and first Bush administrations. He also advised such firms as Apple and Intel. In 1993, he co-wrote the book "Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology."

In April 1994, when Ferguson started Vermeer (named after the painter), the Internet was an academic backwater. Only 10,000 Web sites existed, recalls Forgaard, a fellow MIT alum whom Ferguson recruited to be chief technology officer. "In the beginning, Charles was the idea person, and I was the one charged with filling out the details," Forgaard later wrote in a history published by Microsoft.

The Vermeer team worked frantically for 20 months to roll out FrontPage, which Microsoft snapped up soon after its release. Forgaard was able to retire and pursue a career as a magician. (Now 48, he applies his tech savvy to creating illusions for Halloween haunted houses.)

Ferguson says his adventures in Silicon Valley left him utterly burned out. "It took me seven or eight years to fully recover," he says with no hint of hyperbole. "Starting the company was the most exhausting thing I'd ever done. Two weeks in Iraq was easy by comparison."

He published a stinging, score-settling 1999 book called "High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars," in which he recounted the start-up period and unloaded his rancor on some big players and the culture of Silicon Valley.

Did we mention that the book described Oracle founder Larry Ellison as "severely warped," and called Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei "oblivious to everything and everyone except himself"?

"I regret the tone I took in nailing some of the people that I nailed," Ferguson says today. "I was angry when I wrote it. . . . Some people played pretty rough."