The flood of new millionaires created by Microsoft has slowed to a trickle. But even if the company never creates another software tycoon, it continues to have an outsized effect rivaling and in some ways surpassing that of Boeing, which shaped Seattle through most of the past century and has three times the number of employees. In jobs, in wealth creation, in real estate, in the spawning of scores of smaller businesses, the company that put Redmond on the map has spread its influence deep and wide in its quarter-century of existence.
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