The breakthrough came in 1980 when IBM needed an operating system for its new personal computer. It has succeeded primarily through its ability to bring products to market and to outmanoeuvre competitors.Bill Gates started with a programme which linked together the devices on primitive computers and allowed the user to control them in a relatively easy way: a Disk Operating System. Tremulous and thin- voiced when he stood up to defend himself on Friday night he sounded less plutocrat than plebeian: more like a junior marketing executive caught out fiddling his expenses than John D Rockefeller.But don’t be fooled. The Economist has called Mr Gates a “paragon of industry” and a “ruthless predator”, and both are true: he has succeeded beyond all imagining in creating a behemoth of American industry, but, as the antitrust trial has made clear, it has not always been very pretty. Though he is worth pounds 75bn, owns Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Leicester and has a house worth more than pounds 31m, Bill Gates is not the man in the top hat and the frock coat, the classic capitalist. His credibility is on trial, as much as his company, as lawyers and consumers come to terms with how one man sought to use American capitalism, and to change it in the process.
He is, in many respects, an unlikely figure to follow in the footsteps of the pirate kings of American industry, the monopolists who sought to dominate the explosive growth of American heavy industry 100 years ago.

The company is the subject of a huge competition case, and if Friday’s statement from the court is to be believed, it is losing. Bill Gates himself lost $20bn, when the judgment affected Microsoft share prices. And when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson wrote his damning conclusions about Microsoft, calling it a monopolist and charging it with a massive abuse of its power in the market, he was not speaking just of a company or a hierarchy: he was damning Mr Gates. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of consumers and their expectations of business.”

The future of this man, his vision and the company which he has built from nothing to dominate totally the computer business is now in the balance. One person, more than anyone else, made this possible: William H Gates, the man who has defined the business of computing and the New Economy of the 1990s. “If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about re-engineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity,” he says in his new book, Business At The Speed of Thought “About how quickly business itself will be transacted.

Stock traders were selling the company’s shares from dealing floors, trading rooms and computers perched precariously on the dining-room table, and hundreds of thousands of copies of the document were being downloaded on to hard disks or printed out. No plane leaving any airport in the United States has ever been brought down by sabotage. Unless, of course, we one day learn that a crime, and not mechanical failure, was indeed the culprit in last Sunday’s disaster.. Also, modifications to reversers recommended after the Lauda crash were carried out by EgyptAir.Also waiting for answers is the city of New York. Seconds after the anti-trust judgment against Microsoft was released on Friday night, the news was powering through fibre-optic and copper cables around the world to electronic mail in-baskets and pagers. In just over three years, three jumbo jets from JFK airport, heading east at night over the Atlantic, have crashed, leaving no survivors.