November 13, 2002 | 1323 IST
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Money > Business Headlines > Report November 13, 2002 | 1323 IST |
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Gates urges IT, education, telecom funds
BS Corporate Bureau in New Delhi Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation said on Tuesday that India should continue to make investments in the area of areas of education, communication infrastructure and technology. However, unlike the other global corporate heads, Gates seems comfortable with the strides India has made in the area of communication infrastructure. "Communication infrastructure is not an area that would hold back India from growth. I was worried about it once," he said. Lack of advancements in the telecom infrastructure in India has been the top of the list of complains for most of the global technology companies. According to Gates, Indian IT industry has greatly benefited from this advancement in the global infotech sector. "The increased investment in the global infotech industry has led to the growth of a services industry in the country. This has resulted in about half a million high paying jobs in India," said Gates while attending a press conference on the second day of his India visit. Pointing that the global economic slowdown would not have a major impact on the Indian infotech sector, he said, "The advances in the global technology industry would generate more and more high paying jobs in India. India will benefit in this way," he pointed out. Gates said he expected a new technological rebound from the current two-year slowdown aided by faster and cheaper telecoms, microchips and computer storage. "The next decade will be a very exciting one. That is something that you might not be hearing from a lot of people connected with the IT industry," he said. "They simply see the spending over the next year or two in markets like the United States and Europe," Gates said. "During the Internet excitement people overestimated what could happen in the short run, now they are really underestimating." Elaborating on his vision about the future of computing, Gates who is on a four day trip to India said that the new age computers will be easy to use, easy to service and provide tremendous improvement in productivity. "Pocket sized and smaller sized computers are being developed to put the user at the centre. The aim is to reduce operating cost and complexity," Gates said adding that he would call the current decade a "digital decade". He predicted that computing devices and technologies are undergoing a rapid change and the future would see emergence of devices which are easy to use and are with less complexity. Analysing the growth of the infotech sector in the last ten years Gates said, "In 1990 there were only 10 million PCs shipped, which has gone up to 600 million in the end of the decade powered by various Windows applications and growth of Internet." On asked about the threat that Linux software would pose to Microsoft, he said, "Linux is a competitor, but not a threat. We have seen a shift from Unix to Linux, but not from Windows to Linux." Gates said Linux was only a platform and needed network software and various kinds of support to make it cheap for the end customer. "You are talking about a dozen additional things," he said. Powered by ALSO READ:
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