Bill Gates Finds a Seattle in India

Date: Friday, November 15, 2002 2:55 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Bangalore and Seattle are getting more alike all the time, and that's just
how Bill Gates likes it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/international/asia/14INDI.html?ex=1038027600&en=e81531d5a32c5303&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
November 14, 2002
Bill Gates Finds a Seattle in India
By AMY WALDMAN

BANGALORE, India, Nov. 13 — Old if they were over 30, the elite of India's
high-tech revolution sat today in a food court at Infosys Technologies Ltd.,
Domino's pizzas stacked in the background, awaiting their guru. The air was
heavy with expectation, which, when the man himself appeared, turned into a
standing ovation.

Bill Gates was in the house.

Microsoft's chairman and, more importantly for this crowd, its chief
software architect, was making his first visit to India's technology
capital, where his example has long provided inspiration, and his company
has been a key customer, supplier, and partner.

"It was long overdue," said N. R. Narayana Murthy, the chairman and chief
mentor of Infosys Technologies, India's pioneering software development
company, who had lobbied Mr. Gates to come to Bangalore.

Young software developers, most of them only a few years older than Mr.
Gates was when he dropped out of Harvard University to found his company,
vied for the chance to see him. At Infosys, where only 1,000 of 5,000
developers were allowed to attend his talk, the rest watched it via Webcast.

For Mr. Gates, it was a window into an India not much different from
Seattle. In the last 10 years, Bangalore has become a hub of an enormous
software services industry. It has also become an island of sorts within
India, with thousands of young people frequenting its bars and restaurants,
occupying its new apartments, and navigating its scooter-clogged traffic
when they are not staring into computer screens on software campuses.

Accompanied by Mr. Murthy, Mr. Gates toured the 52-acre Infosys campus —
billed as the world's second-largest software campus after Microsoft — with
its mini-golf course and swimming pool, its lake and light-filled
architecture.

While Mr. Gates has long had relationships with Mr. Murthy and executives at
Wipro Ltd., the other top software company he visited today, this was a
chance for the generation of Indians who have vaulted into a new India to
lay eyes on the man who, from thousands of miles away, did much to shape it.

Both campuses are full of 20-somethings like Nalini Kumari Boini, 22, the
daughter of a housewife and a government employee. She is fresh out of
college and deep into programming for .Net, Microsoft's Web services
strategy. Mr. Gates has contended that .Net will transform computing in the
next decade by letting businesses tie various Web-based services together
through a common structure that will operate regardless of differences in
operating systems or software programs.

"He's built Microsoft, he's launching so many technologies which will impact
society, some of these technologies are going to change the world," she
said.

Mr. Gates seemed as interested in the quality of the young peoples' lives as
in the architecture of their software. He asked Mr. Murthy about how
employees got to the campus (by bus and by car, with more cars all the
time), where they lived and where they ate.

Usually one of the cafeterias, for about 40 cents a meal, he was told.

"Subsidized?" he asked.

No, no subsidies.

"Oh really?" a surprised Mr. Gates said, quickly calculating that employees
could eat for about a dollar a day.

He then drove the short distance to the 30-acre campus of Wipro, another
Microsoft partner and client. As many as 2,000 employees were arrayed in an
immaculate outdoor amphitheater.

Among them was Srinivasan Iyer, 23, a software developer who described his
family as "middle class — not one dollar more, not one dollar less." With a
monthly take-home pay of almost $3,000, he is well on his way to surpassing
that status.

He had benefited from an education at one of India's top engineering
colleges, and counted himself lucky to have a job at Wipro. But he also said
it was not about luck: Wipro was a meritocracy in its purest form, he said
proudly.

In the distance, three new towers were under construction, to grow Wipro's
campus in Electronics City — the industrial park it inhabits, along with
Infosys and about 100 other companies — to accommodate 15,000 people.

Among the tasks the company will undertake for Microsoft, said Vivek Paul,
Wipro's chief executive for technologies, is performing basic business
functions, essentially back office work, one of the fastest-growing
industries in India.

Mr. Gates, meanwhile, also continued Microsoft's campaign to interest
government agencies in India in digitizing their functions, like putting
their records on computers. He signed a memorandum of understanding with the
chief minister of the state of Karnataka, S.M. Krishna, that said that all
government services for Bangalore residents would be done using Microsoft
products.

Mr. Paul said he welcomed Mr. Gates' investments in trying to close India's
digital divide. But he confessed to a twinge of sorts at the welcome Mr.
Gates had received. Indians, he said, too often looked for a "messiah" to
cure the country's ills. Mr. Murthy, a serious fan of Mr. Gates, agreed,
saying India had answered to outside masters for so long that it had lost
its commitment to problem-solving on its own.

But the high-tech world of Bangalore both men inhabit is a place where
problem-solving is an art. Mr. Gates said today: "In India there is very
interesting energy around taking technology and making it relevant to all
citizens, much more than I've seen anywhere else in the world."

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