Microsoft's Mundie Talks Up Tech for Poor Nations
Mundie: Well, in a way I take a little bit of exception to his analogy. You know, I travel around the world. My wife and I went down to boat in India a few months ago. So we're on this boat run by a captain, a cook and a deckhand and they all three had cell phones and the whole time that we're cruising in the rural backwaters of India, these guys are basically calling and making arrangements about where to pick up the next guy and where we're going to dock and stuff on their cell phones. I think the stories are myriad now about fishermen that have cell phones whose fishing productivity is being improved by both getting reports on where the fish are... and where they get to know what the market price for the fish is and where the markets are. So I contend that even those fishermen, as small as their boats are, actually are benefiting from access to these technologies.
So all of that is consistent with what I'm trying to do, which is to find economical ways to provide Internet-based services and access to those services through a low-cost computing environment and with software that's appropriate to their needs.
I think that the last big part is you have to create what we call a software ecosystem in each of these geographies to build the applications people want. Microsoft is not going to write the global fisherman market pricing application. It's just not a thing that we would do. But, on the other hand, if we can give people the tools then in southern India, for example, some guy can write a fishing application and make it available. You know, we've done that historically on the PC and we are increasingly doing that on the smartphones and as the Internet-based services emerge, Microsoft is committed to providing a platform that provides a programming model for the application developer to build and deploy the Internet-based component of these future applications.



