Dotty Bill Of Fare

Indian politicians love American Bills. Remember the mad scramble honourable MPs made earlier this year to shake hands with US President Bill Clinton, after he addressed the joint session of Parliament? Last week, during Microsoft chief Bill Gates’ whistle-stop tour of Delhi, there was almost an encore. Chief ministers of 10 Indian states rescheduled all appointments to show their best face to arguably the second most powerful man in the world. Indeed, information technology minister Pramod Mahajan flew back from the US for a 30-minute meeting with Gates (the meeting finally stretched to 56 minutes).

His visit to India was just for 24 hours but Gates packed more than enough into that time before he jetted off to Sydney to watch the Olympics. His appointment diary read something like this: meeting with Indian ceos at Microsoft India’s 10th anniversary bash; meeting with Azim Premji and ceos of Indianoil and tcs, with Mahajan, with Chandrababu Naidu and S.M. Krishna, signing of a strategic alliance agreement with Infosys, lunch meeting with chief ministers of Indian states, launch of Microsoft’s new initiative .Net and msn’s India-specific portal; press conference on .Net, Microsoft review meeting, round table with Indian ceos and presentation on new Microsoft strategies including .Net. In between, he also visited a polio hospital, administered the polio vaccine to some children and announced three grants totaling $35 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for immunisation programmes and rural computer education.

But the main aim of the visit was the announcement of Microsoft’s new Internet initiative, .Net, which, says Gates, will transform the way one looks at and interacts with the web. .Net plans to make the Net far easier to handle. For this, Microsoft is trying to shift the Net’s basic programming language from Hyper Text Markup Language (html) to Extensible Markup Language (xml) which offers greater flexibility. Gates feels the Net remains basically a "read-only" service and so, very limited. Says he: "Today websites are isolated islands and cannot communicate or interact with each other. They cannot analyse or manipulate numbers or information. This is what .Net seeks to change." But a full realisation of his .Net dream will take at least five years, he feels.

At the same time, devices to access the Net also need to be made more flexible, Microsoft feels. With .Net becoming a reality, the PC will also give way to newer, smaller, user-friendly devices to run the Net on an always on, anywhere-everywhere module. Says Gates: "We can make the PC dramatically easy to use. We’re building an interface where one can use speech and handwriting along with the keyboard and mouse." He also said the .Net dream did not just embrace the PC but all software-driven devices like the mobile phone, pdas, Palm computers and others so that data can be accessed on any or all these. What .Net hopes to be is a universal platform of convergence technology, like Microsoft’s ms-dos and Windows are the platforms for the PC. But this time around, Gates knows he can’t do it alone; Microsoft will work with over 100 firms worldwide to develop .Net to its full potential.

As for India, Gates made three big announcements - an investment of $50 million over three years in the Hyderabad software development centre; a strategic alliance with Infosys for developing and marketing solutions for using the .Net platform; and the launch of the India-specific portal www.msn.co.in. He also announced the setting up of a . Net lab in Bangalore.

Gates, whose card carries his new title of chief software architect after he made Steve Ballmer ceo last year, also said Microsoft would soon launch India-specific software: "We are here for a long-term continued commitment and will introduce Indian language-enabled products. The next release of Windows 2000 will have a lot of Indian language interfaces."

But for Gates, the most interesting meeting in India was undoubtedly the one with the CMs. They were all there - Naidu and Krishna, along with the CMs of Gujarat, MP, Rajasthan, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra and UP. And they competed for Gates’ attention and through him, Microsoft investment. If Gates were to meet their demands, there’d be more Microsoft software centres in India than, say, fast food joints.

What’s clear, though, is that Gates and Microsoft are serious about India. If his initial investments and personal involvement with the Indian IT industry is any sign, India will see many more of such visits. Gates perhaps sums it up best: "India is not the cheapest place in the world to do business. It is just the kind of software skills that it offers. This place has the momentum."