Microsoft Rats Jumping Sinking Ship?
Sid Harth
Gates, Allen to sell Microsoft stock worth $109 m
WASHINGTON: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen plan to
sell a total of $109.3 million of stock in the company, the world's
largest provider of software, regulatory filings showed on Thursday.
Gates, chairman of the company, intends to sell 850,000 common shares
valued at $59 million, while Allen plans to sell 720,000 shares valued
at $50.3 million, according to their filings with the Securities and
Exchange Commission.
The filings do not indicate if the shares, which were part of founders'
stock they acquired in June 1981, have been sold. The stock may be sold
within 90 days of the filings, which Gates made on Sept. 8 and Allen
made on Sept. 7.
Company officials did not immediately return a telephone call seeking
comment.
In the past three months, Gates has sold 4.15 million shares valued at
about $291.2 million, while Allen has sold 16.26 million shares valued
at about $1.2 billion, according to the SEC documents.
Shares of the Redmond, Wash.-based company fell 2 7/16 to 65 13/16 on
Nasdaq trading. They have a 52-week high of 119 15/16 and a low of 60
3/8. (Reuters)
http://news.indiatimes.com/toit/15home3.htm
Bill opens gates of opportunity for India
Business Times Bureau
NEW DELHI: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates rejected suggestions on
Thursday that India was a back office for software companies around the
world and was a preferred destination because of cheap labour. He also
dismissed the suggestion that Microsoft was planning expansion in India
because of legal problems it was facing back home.
``None of our expansion has anything to do with any legal problems. At
Microsoft we wake up every day, thinking how to make better software.
That is purely an engineering decision,'' Gates said at a press
conference during his day-long visit to India.
His comments were backed by three major announcements Microsoft made
earlier in the day. The company has decided to invest $50 million in
its development centre at Hyderabad over three years, which Gates said
would do high-end projects for the global market.
Microsoft also entered into an alliance with Infosys, a leading
software company in India, to develop and market solutions based on
Microsoft's .Net (dotnet) enterprise platform.
Broadly, Microsoft's .Net strategy aims at making information easily
accessible to users, irrespective of the devices they use -- a PC,
handheld gadgets or even TV.
Gates also unveiled its MSN portal for India, to offer local content
developed by 30 partners organised in various categories, spread over
eight channels.
The Microsoft chairman said the new release of Windows 2000 will have a
lot of native languages to expand into newer markets.
He said it was a good experience for Microsoft to be working here.
Microsoft has been in India for 10 years and was among the first
companies to tap the skills of Indian software professionals.
Gates referred to India as an ``IT superpower'' and said that it was
because of the high quality of skills. ``The key is the quality of the
human talent here. When people do software projects in India they do so
because this is the place they can find people with latest skills. It
is not on the (cheap) price (of labour),'' he added.
Gates said that India was not the cheapest place to do business and
salaries here were going up because of increase in demand for IT skills
the world over. ``That's how it should be. The momentum is here. That
might have been true if you go back five or six years. It might have
started in early days when there was a low-price labour for some of
those things. Now, it is about world class skills. And that is going to
sustain growth,'' he added.
Gates appreciated growing awareness among the leaders of various state
to focus on use of IT in political governance and education. He,
however, refused to pick his favourite state saying that `friendly
competition' among the states (to better their IT infrastructure and
education) was a positive thing.
http://news.indiatimes.com/toit/15home4.htm
Cyberheaven as seen by Gates
Business Times Bureau
NEW DELHI: Almost magician-like, he conjures up the future. With slow
but steady strokes of the wand, he then proceeds to flesh it out. And
voila! You find yourself centrestage in that future. Along with
Microsoft, of course. After all, it has created and taken you up each
step to that future. And the chief software architect of Microsoft,
Bill Gates, continues to build on that magic.
As Vineet Jain, managing director, Bennett, Coleman & Co, who called
Gates a strategist, a visionary and an adventurer, put it : "The Gates
and Microsoft story is about reinventing the corporation to craft the
future." He was welcoming Gates at a technology summit co-hosted by
Microsoft and The Economic Times.
And what a future Gates is painting for us now! One in which tablet
PCs, screen phones, digital cameras, televisions, and similar other
devices, will talk to each other with ease. There will be no language
or device barriers. Voice, handwriting and data will be recognised
without snags. And your grandchildren will ask you: What's a CD?
You will store pictures, music and movies on any digital device and
corporations across the world will buy and sell directly, using
different languages, different servers and maybe even different
generation PCs. That is the future .Net promises to deliver.
Gates says 25 years ago he and a friend visualised a computer on every
desk. "With software giving shape to our creativity, we find that we
have made some amazing progress in these 25 years but not come even
half way in our vision." The journey onwards seems to promise as much
transformation for the world as the one undertaken has delivered till
now.
As he sees it: "We can assume wireless will bring change at work, home
and everywhere else. At a meeting like this three years from now, you
will carry tablet PCs and not need to take notes." It sure sounds good.
Some more of the vision and good news for knowledge workers in India.
Gates says the power of the Internet will ensure that incomes, driven
so far to a large extent by the country you stay in, will soon depend
on the amount of education and ability you have. Anyone, anywhere can
bid for and provide a service.
It was a theme that Vineet Jain alluded to as well: ``The Net is all
about connectivity, convenience and empowerment. That is where Gates
succeeds.''
Spelling out the digital business and digital lifestyle of tomorrow,
Gates says: "It is very easy to say the best is yet to come."
Considering the past record, it may not be words whispered in the wind.
As Mrs Indu Jain, chairman of Bennett, Coleman & Co, illustrating the
enormity of the impact Gates has made to business and life,
said: "While ancient seers of India discovered that there are three
kinds of spaces - the outer space, the inner space -- where thoughts
and emotions flow -- and the absolute space of consciousness where the
other two spaces exist - Bill Gates has contributed the fourth space.
Cyberspace."
http://news.indiatimes.com/toit/15edit4.htm
Deciphering DotNET
Microsoft @ the Speed of Light
By VIKAS SINGH
THE world's foremost geek is known to read passionately, on an eclectic
range of subjects. One is not sure if military history figures in his
list of preferred reading, but one story should certainly strike a
chord with Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates.
The story of the general who, confronted with a routed left flank and a
collapsing right one, went right ahead and launched a furious charge
with his vanguard.
That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Mr Gates and Microsoft are now
doing with the ambitious initiative titled Microsoft.NET (DotNET), even
though the situation may not be quite that desperate. Judge Thomas
Penfield Jackson may have passed a historic ruling ordering Microsoft
be broken into two, but the company is acting as if the anti-trust
trial never took place. What about Linux, the greatest threat to
Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system in recent times? It may
as well not exist, given the attention Microsoft is paying to it.
Indeed, nothing symbolises Microsoft's present priorities more than the
fact that its founder and greatest spokesperson is in India,
evangelising about .NET at a time when Microsoft has just launched the
latest Windows version in the US. Windows Millennium, or Windows Me,
made a low-key debut on Thursday in the US with demonstrations in
shopping malls.
But in all the talk of 25 years of Microsoft and 10 years of Microsoft
in India, not once do you hear even a mention of Windows Me. Compare
that to the hype and hoopla that accompanied the global launches of
Windows 95, 95 and 2000 and it becomes obvious that Microsoft has now
set its sights firmly on much bigger game.
And what exactly is it that Microsoft wants to do? Nothing much. It
just wants to change the way the Internet works. It plans to do so by
offering many layers of software that it hopes will end up in billions
of servers, PCs, cellphones, handheld computers, TV set-top boxes, and
lots of other devices not even invented today. The purpose: to enable
information drawn from unrelated sites anywhere to be spontaneously
synthesised into interactive pages tailor-made for any individual,
accessible from any device.
Here's the way Bill Gates put it himself, in a recent speech: "The era
of the Internet as a browsing environment is coming to a close now.
That's not to say that browsing won't still exist but this era's been
characterised by all of the input coming off the keyboard, primarily
being driven by PC screens only. The user has no control...if you want
to see what information is out there, you've got to go to many
different websites. If you go to them manually, you scribble that
information down on a piece of paper and then go to your productivity
applications and type that information in. If it changes you go back
manually to the websites...The Web today is about presenting to the
user...This next generation is about changing the richness of the
devices, about putting you back in control..."
In other words, .NET is squarely about the consumer. If knowledge is
power, then .NET seeks to empower consumers beyond anything ever
imagined till today. It marks a paradigm shift, from the painfully slow
process of manually extracting relevant information from the vast reams
of data available on the Web to simply sitting back and letting the
software do it all for you.
Naturally, this kind of vision is based on many assumptions. Microsoft
is depending on hardware manufacturers to keep coming up with
breakthroughs, on broadband spreading rapidly to consumers on a
worldwide basis, and on wireless technology to keep up the Big Bang
pace of evolution. Most of all, though, it is betting on XML as the key
standard for the next-generation Internet.
Short for Extensible Markup Language, XML is a standardised way of
storing raw data that allows every number or passage of text to carry a
little extra information. This makes the data readily identifiable by
just about any machine. The data can then be imported and instantly
manipulated by software programmes and devices anywhere in the world.
How does that help you? Well, for one thing, you could assemble all the
data you need, spread across a vast array of websites, into one table
that would make sense regardless of the device you're using -- all in a
matter of seconds. And let's not forget the implications for business,
specially e-commerce. By making key data of transaction participants
easily comprehensible to others, XML could kick-start B2B e-commerce.
But to make this audacious gamble work, Microsoft will have to re-
invent itself and the way it does business. For one thing, it will have
to evolve a consensus across the entire infotech industry to make XML
the basis for storing and moving data on the Web. Already, Microsoft
has decided not to create a proprietary XML version. Instead, it is
working closely with IBM and a body called the World Wide Web
Consortium, which is backed by known Microsoft-baiters like Sun and
Oracle, apart from more than 400 other companies, to work out a
universally acceptable version of XML. The days when Microsoft could
bully everyone else into toeing its line are decisively over.
In some ways, though, the whole .NET play actually marks a return to
Microsoft's roots. For one thing, it means that programming and
creating killer apps will once again take centrestage. Mr Gates'
decision to hand over the role of chief executive officer to long-time
confidant Steve Ballmer and himself become the chief software architect
clearly indicates a hankering to revive the missionary spirit that
drove the company when it was set up. Also, in the same way that
Windows provided computer users one consistent platform across millions
of devices, .NET -- if it works -- will end much of the confusion still
prevailing on the Web.
Twenty-five years after famously dropping out of Harvard to set up
Microsoft, Mr Gates is again refocusing the company on doing what it
does best: building ubiquitous software programmes. Only this time
around, he's playing for unimaginably high stakes. Apart from
programming, Mr Gates also has a passion for poker. As he makes his
biggest wager, he's going to need all his renowned courage -- and a
whole lot of luck.
--
http://www.indiacybercart.com/
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