Bill Gates rocks developer community

Announces 'Code 4 Bill' talent hunt; selected best to work with his core development team

Bill Gates on Friday walked onto a set best suited for a rock star, to a thunderous applause to address what he termed the best developer crowd he will ever face. He should know, as a good number of his employees are Indians and India houses a key development centre of Microsoft.

Looking a bit drawn after a punishing schedule, clad in a black suit and an offwhite shirt with a maroon-striped tie, chairman and chief architect William H Gates addressed a packed house of 5,000 developers at India's Mecca of software development and put forward his views on pushing ahead the digital revolution.

"A breakthrough is needed in the digital world. What we are witnessing is just the start. The processing power of the computer will relentlessly move forward. Moore's Law has been the lever and complex scientific tasks can now be performed in desktop clusters instead of a supercomputer," he said.

Interspersing his 40 minute talk extensively to elaborate on the features of the enterprise software platforms Microsoft recently upgraded, he said, "Businesses today rely on information technology to make them more competitive. Our goal is to empower our customers with products that help connect people to processes and information on a trusted platform, faster than ever before."

SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 are the latest versions of Microsoft's database software and development tool. BizTalk Server 2006 is the product for building business process integration solutions. "The advancements in these products build on the foundation put in place over the last several years with significant investments in Windows Server 2003 and .NET, providing developers a dependable application platform with underlying support for Web services and service orientation capabilities," Gates explained.

On what one might get to see in the future, he said: "Corporations will be efficient, connected and will see much more deployment of software which will be the glue for the convergence. We are investing $6 billion into our R&D efforts to deliver the vision. The mobile phone of the future will deliver rich solutions such as speech recognition, navigate the way for you and translate the local language when one is travelling. These and much more will completely change how we work and live."

He added that the internet has evolved with increased adoption of broadband which will see the difference between office and home blurring.

"Adoption of broadband in India is low, but is growing faster. At present, 30 million people are using the Internet and one million using broadband. With the availability increasing, prices will fall," he said.

Showering praises on the independent Indian software vendor community and latent talent here, Gates said talent is what powers the success of the global IT economy today.

"Indian students are setting high standards in the industry. It is important for India to maintain the edge, and continue to nurture and develop its students so that they can drive India as an IT leader," he noted.

Not just content with showering praises, Gates also announced 'Code 4 Bill', a nationwide talent hunt to identify India's best student technologists.

"This will recognise India's leadership in nurturing world class technical talent and is aimed at pre-final and final year students pursuing various technical streams across India." The contest will provide students with an opportunity to showcase their talent and work directly with leading technologists.

"The best participants will get an opportunity to intern directly with my 'technical assistants team'," he said, which was received with a thunderous applause.

No celeb, no crowd

It would have been a dampener if you had waited to hear Bill Gates at the Digital Lifestyle event organised by MAIT. Moving into this event, after delivering a 40-minute lecture on the future of the digital revolution to the developer community, Gates spoke for some three minutes and departed.

It was left to his Asia-Pacific manager to talk about the IPTV offerings from Microsoft. But no sooner had Gates left, the crowd dissolved.