As I fire up the laptop to write this review, a company called Microsoft — or Micro-Soft as it started — asks me for an authorisation code for access to the computer. It is a timely reminder of just how embedded into the minutiae of our everyday existence is the business started and run for decades by William Henry Gates III. It is up there with Ford, Boeing, Bell Telephone, and of course Apple, in the pantheon of US corporations that changed how billions of us live — forever.
