(FORTUNE Magazine) – Finding examples of Microsoft executives sounding warlike has to be one of the easiest tasks a government antitrust lawyer could hope for. Here's a choice specimen, uttered by Paul Maritz, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms and applications, before a gathering of industry executives: "We are going to cut off [Netscape Communications'] air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free."

That gem, along with other excerpts from truculent tirades--especially e-mails--made by Bill Gates and his executives, jumped right out of the dry legalese of the antitrust complaint the Department of Justice filed in May against Microsoft. The quotations, a vivid illustration of the "jihad" Gates and his minions launched against Netscape and its Net browser software, were held up as evidence that Microsoft's hypercompetitive corporate culture was running amok.

Now, no one disputes that Gates and Microsoft are as aggressive as they come in the world of business. How else could an upstart company have outmaneuvered big old IBM to establish the most lucrative and daunting monopoly the computer industry has ever seen? But couldn't Justice's e-evidence simply be the ironic result of the company's "eating its own dog food"--i.e., using its own technology as its preferred mode of communication? After all, e-mail is to Microsofties what the telephone, the golf course, and the water cooler are to more traditional business people. The company's e-mail archives--rather similar to Richard Nixon's tapes--hold an incredibly detailed record of how it does business. But if you probed the e-mail files of Netscape or Sun Microsystems, you'd probably find similar discoverable fingerprints of heavy-handed behavior, not to mention a lot of trash talk.

Every journalist who follows the company has a favorite "hard core" anecdote about Bill Gates. My first choice is the one about how he and his wife, Melinda, often compete to see who can be the first to assemble identical jigsaw puzzles. (Gee, I always thought jigsaw puzzles were something you collaborated on....) And there's no doubt Microsoft employees mimic Gates' Patton-esque approach to business, viewing just about every corner of the software marketplace as territory in need of conquering. But e-mail aside, Microsoft's culture, like Gates himself, is more complex than Justice's evidence indicates.

Yes, the company tends to believe that anything short of crushing a competitor is tantamount to losing. But one reason employees feel that way is that, over the years, they have turned out more than a few products that were real dogs (early versions of Windows, Microsoft Money, Bob, and the many cheesy and short-lived online offerings of the Microsoft Network, to name a few). Microsoft employees are driven as much by the fear of failure as by the urge to annihilate. (For more on Microsoft, see Fortune Investor.)

It might seem strange to think of Microsoft and its employees as feeling insecure, but no one knows better than they that in the high-tech world, the ground can shift quickly. There's no question Netscape's browser could have marginalized Microsoft's Windows operating system if software developers had decided to retarget program development to Internet-based applications rather than to Windows PCs. The need to keep developers in the Windows camp was precisely why Microsoft lashed back so strenuously. More recently, Microsoft has been struggling to set the software standards for the interactive, Net-savvy TV set-top box, a device likely to become the consumer computer "platform" of the future. Although Microsoft now has a handhold in this nascent technology, it is unlikely to gain the chokehold it has in the PC-software market.

Microsoft's corporate culture has other interesting nuances. It is without a doubt a personality cult, but one in which employees try to emulate Bill's most effective traits rather than simply worship or blindly follow him. Employees perpetually try to anticipate "what Bill would do," but they also say it's a badge of honor to have challenged him and won.

And, yes, Microsoft seems like a 25,000-member Mensa chapter, so intelligent and driven and condescending are its employees. But even so, you can tell the work force is mellowing as it ages, and as the distractions of wealth take their toll. "We are very fortunate that every employee of Microsoft is today ten years older than they were ten years ago," jokes Mike Murray, Microsoft's head of human resources. "Hopefully, this aging process will make us more empathetic to customers and suppliers, help us listen better. I think we'll learn these lessons either from the marketplace or from 'other forces,' nod, nod, wink, wink"--namely the Justice Department.

The bottom line is that, if anything, Microsoft is a little schizophrenic these days. For all the talk about how Microsoft "integrates" other software companies out of business by replicating their technology and building it into Windows or other products, the company itself has always been rather Balkanized and fraught with turf wars. In fact, insiders say that some of the most strident e-mails Justice found had as much to do with Microsoft executives attacking one another as with flattening Netscape. This buccaneering tradition is at odds with the company's new objective of making everything in its ever-growing product line work together.

For all its successes, Microsoft has a lot to learn about the responsibilities of leadership; about teamwork, compromise, and magnanimity; and about actually leaving some chips on the table for others to win. The company needs to get over seeing itself as a perpetual underdog.

What will remain an issue--at least until Microsoft's hyperaggressive behavior is toned down--is how the company crassly manipulates the marketplace through its contracts with computer makers and Internet service providers. As long as they play fair, however, Gates & Co. should be free to define the future of Windows. And that, after all, is the biggest issue for Gates. Already Microsoft seems to be softening a little: The company acquiesced when Gateway 2000 recently announced it would preload its PCs with a choice of browsers. The Justice Department action, whatever the outcome, just might jolt Microsoft out of its foot-stamping adolescence and into the ranks of the world's great companies. If so, even Gates may have to admit that the government's crusade wasn't such a bad thing.