Next Bill Gates could be an Indian: Microsoft CEO

Will the next Bill Gates come out of India? The question could not have been put to a more apt person, as it was on Wednesday evening in New Delhi’s Teen Murti Bhawan. Steve Ballmer has been a friend of Gates from his Harvard days before the latter dropped out and he himself left his studies at the Stanford Business School to become Microsoft’s first managerial employee.

Today, Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft, and he said it may not be professionally prudent to say so, but yes, India could well produce the next Gates. However, he reckoned such an individual may still choose to take his big idea to the US and base his company there, for “proximity to affluent companies to get his company off the ground”. This is why it is so important, he said while delivering the Madhav Rao Scindia Memorial lecture, that India keep growing at 8-10 per cent, to spread the circle of affluence in the country and become a magnet for innovative ideas.

Ballmer said his job at Microsoft — which incidentally has made him the 24th richest person in the world according to Forbes magazine — is to pick the right kind of people to make innovation possible. And in India, he said there needs to be a particular kind of innovation that makes computing devices affordable to a larger part of Indian society. Microsoft will harness all its values and principles so that 400-500 million Indians get access to computers.

He said India is the leader in IT industry: 30 per cent of all computer science graduates in the world passing out of Indian universities. “That puts a special responsibility on this country. The world is counting on the talent of this country to lead the next wave of innovation. We want access to the incredible talent graduating from universities here.”

Harnessing that talent, requires companies to work with a “big bold goal”. He recalled how in his early days at Microsoft in the 1970s, he had a case of nerves and wondered whether he had done right to quit business school and join this new company. Gates took him to dinner with his father and spoke of his ‘big bold goal’, to put a computer on every desk in every home. Perhaps that was the first time Gates thought up the goal, but it worked, and today Microsoft has grown from a mere 30 employees to 73,000 in the 26 years since Steve joined (18 per cent of its Seattle-based engineers are Indian.)

Moore’s Law — that is, computing power and affordability will increase by a factor of two every 18 months — will operate over the next decade, Ballmer reckoned. “The innovation over the next 10 years will be even more exciting,” he said. Take this obsolete piece of technology he said, waving a piece of paper. The computer industry will produce devices over the next decade which are as thin as paper, yet will deliver all the tasks expected from them. Digitisation will move apace, enabling the user’s productivity and creativity by reading voice and intent.

Yet, he said, two key fields are yet to harness the real potential of digitisation: healthcare and education. This requires innovation to meet very Indian requirements and for businesses to be more socially conscious.