History will record Gates as a visionary. Gates was a bits and bytes man, a productized thinker whose zealous focus on code combined with his belief in empowering people through PCs based on commodity components gave us things like a good productivity suite and low-cost database at a time when the competition either sucked or was too expensive for the ordinary consumer user or business. He saw the potential for the PC when computing dinosaurs like DEC and IBM were out of step or thought software too small to care about.

Gates ended as a man fitting his ideas to the realities of the business he’d created - a $50bn business. This you expect from a businessman. Unlike Berners-Lee, Gosling, or Bray who also changed our world with their ideas, Gates' vision became one of preserving and extending the one company and the one technology stack that he made and that defined him: Microsoft and Windows. ®