Bill Gates visits India

Bill Gates, chairman and founder of Microsoft Corporation, the chief architect of software revolution, is in India from 6th to 9th December. He has come here with his wife Melinda and had numerous public engagements such as Confederation of Indian Industry-hosted CEOs' Forum and Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in New Delhi. Today there is a Developers' Forum in Bangalore.

As always, a visit from such a high profile personality raises lots of investment hopes and to be true Bill Gates has lived up to the expectations with his announcements. He said that the company will invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years to expand its operations. The amount will be deployed across select focus areas in line with Microsoft's strategic vision for India. He also announced that Microsoft will scale up its India operations by increasing the local headcount by 3,000 over three to four years, taking the total strength to 7,000. Gates was emphatically impressed with India's human resource saying, "India has a fantastic pool of software professionals. The world needs to benefit from this. I never thought with so little product companies software services sector will grow so strong as it has grown here."

Bill Gates also met political and industrial heavyweights. He met Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi. He had a meeting with Anil Ambani to discuss cooperation between the two companies on next-generation Internet Protocol (IP)-based television services in India.

This is a very high profile visit and has generated lot of hype. One view is that he came to India and has conquered the mindspace of everyone with his announcements, but techies like me think that he has come here just to buy some cheap labour in disguise of big announcements. Pretty wierd thought.. huh?!

Anyways hail Bill Gates, hail Microsoft because for last few days I have been using Linux extensively and have realized that nothing beats the simple and effective user interface of Windows. I simply love windows!!

For complete coverage of Bill Gates visit to India, click here.

Cheers!