Many of the critics accused the company of bowing to pressure from a prominent evangelical church in Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft is based.

The bill, or similar versions of it, had been voted down in Washington over three decades; it failed by one vote Thursday in the state Senate. Gay rights advocates denounced Microsoft, which supported the bill in previous years, for abandoning their cause. Web logs and chat rooms Thursday were buzzing with accusations that the company had caved to the Christian right and that it had betrayed its many gay employees.

"Apparently Microsoft's new motto is, 'It's your potential, our passion - - as long as you're not gay or lesbian,' '' said Dan Kully, a board member of Equal Rights Washington, a gay rights group that lobbied on behalf of the failed bill, referring to Microsoft's latest advertising slogan.

Microsoft officials denied any connection between their decision not to endorse the bill, which was supported by many other high-tech companies and multinational corporations, and the church's opposition, although they acknowledged meeting twice with the church minister, Ken Hutcherson.

Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church, who has organized several rallies against gay marriage in Washington state and Washington, D.C., said he had threatened in those meetings to organize a national boycott of Microsoft products. A state legislator, Rep. Ed Murray, a gay Democrat and the main sponsor of the bill, said that late last month he had had conversations with high-level Microsoft employees who mentioned the boycott threat and said they could not back the bill this year.

After Hutcherson said he would organize the boycott, "they backed off," Hutcherson said in a telephone interview Thursday. "I told them I was going to give them something to be afraid of Christians about."

The bill would have extended protections against discrimination in employment, housing and other fields to gay men and lesbians.

Microsoft officials said that the meetings with the minister had not persuaded them to back away from supporting the bill and that they had already decided to take a neutral position on it.

They simply examined their legislative priorities and decided that because they already offer extensive benefits to gay employees and that King County, where Microsoft is located, already prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, with a law as stringent as what the state bill proposed, they were focusing on other legislative matters.

"Our government affairs team made a decision before this legislative session that we would focus our energy on a limited number of issues that are directly related to our business," said Mark Murray, a company spokesman. "That decision was not influenced by external factors. It was driven by our desire to focus on a smaller number of issues in this short legislative session.''

He added that company officials had met twice with Hutcherson but that it was "long after our decision to focus on a tighter legislative agenda."

"We're disappointed that people are misinterpreting those meetings," he said.

But Ed Murray, the state representative, said that in a conversation last month with Bradford Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel, Smith had made it clear to him that the company was under pressure from the church and the pastor and that he was also concerned about the reaction to company support of the bill among its Christian employees, the lawmaker said.

Smith would not comment for this article.

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