BUSINESS THE BILL GATES WAY

The New Indian Express of 26th July 2009 has in the headline, the statement made by our Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Sigh, exhorting India Inc. to emulate Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft Corporation. He said that Bill Gates is a unique business leader and while others have shown how to create wealth from knowledge, very few had worked as hard as Bill Gates to share the wealth with marginalized people. Obviously Manmohan Sigh was referring to Bill Gate’s attempt to help eradicate the Polio and HIV from the face of earth through the funding that he had done of hundreds of millions of Dollars to appropriate agencies and the funding of those NGOs in educating children from socio economic backwardness, over the past years. Bill Gates was here in India to receive the Indira Gandhi Peace Award from the President of India.

I really do not know if I could agree with our beloved Prime Minister. I feel that Mr. Singh got so enamored by Bill Gate so as to speak out as above, without really knowing Gates & his company. Or he would have just said it ornamentally (as every Indian usually do, without meaning any of it) to please Bill Gates, the richest man and the strongest philanthropist of the world.

Knowing a little about Microsoft would help us understand this person. It was built up by Bill Gates and associates with lots of passion. For a small company that was originally engaged in making Basic and Cobol compliers for the micro computers, Bill Gates realized the chance of a lifetime when he heard of IBM’s search to locate the man who developed the operating system (OS) for Apple computers, to write a similar one for IBM Personal Computers, way back in the early eighties. Having failed to locate the person who was holidaying somewhere in the Caribbean, IBM just accepted the advances made by Gates & company to write an OS fro the IBM PCs. All of us know the impact made by IBM PCs and IBM compatible PCs and the dependence of the world on it now. There was no looking back for Microsoft and Bill Gates. It grew into unassuming proposition and started controlling the software and IT market not only with the OS, but also by adding the productivity tools, internet tools, compilers, RDBMS and now of course, the Enterprise solutions.

Lots of water had flown under the bridge by now. Microsoft became the world’s largest software company and Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. But if you look at the monopolistic practices employed by Microsoft and the huge pricing that it had marked on its software products, one would realize that he was fleecing the customers by pricing his products at very high rates, without ever bothering about the affordability of the same by users, particularly belonging to the poor third world countries. For example, today to buy a PC, one need to spend only INR 12,000/- whereas to have a Microsoft Vista operating system, it would cost a minimum of INR 7,000/- (that is more than half the cost of the physical computer). The office productivity tool MS Office would cost anywhere close to INR 15,000/- to a buyer and so are the costs of other software from Microsoft.

A third world country such as India cannot afford these costs. After spending INR 12K, a customer has to spend almost INR 20 K plus to make it run with OS and software utilities! One finds it very highly unreasonable because it is un-affordable to many Indians.

And you knew the profits that Microsoft made in the last two decades. It was obscene! There were instances of the company’s net profit amounting to more than fifty percent of the turnover of the company. Yearly profits used to be more than US $ 25 billion and there were instances of all of the profits of the company being given away by the company as dividends. Who benefits, Bill Gates Of course, for he is the largest share holder of the company. No wonder he has all the money in the world to dole out as charity!

And then there is this question, is it charity or guilt money? I believe it is the latter. As an entrepreneur, I am definitely not against making profits. It is the selfishness and GREED that the companies show in amassing profits that I am against. And Microsoft is never an exception. Companies like these have no social consciousness. What prevails is utter greed. They fleece consumers with monopolistic products. And they show very roguish behavior in business.

If one goes by our PM’s praise of Gates, one has to surmise that our PM is approving the strategies made by companies such as Microsoft on poor nations like India through its monopolistic pricing. I find the praise very difficult to come from a compassionate person like Manmohan Singh who always clamoured for inclusivity & social justice. Additionally, Microsoft had played all sorts of games from in and outside the book to arm-twist the governments, authorities, hardware vendors and other software developers to accept its policies and tread its chosen path. By doing so, today every computer user is building walls around him that can only help Microsoft to become its captive vendor. When will such games ever stop?

The practice adopted by Microsoft to annihilate the competition has always been very brutal. Investigating this, two years back, the European Union and slammed a huge fine of US $ 1500 million on it. But will it ever learn? The company continues with all of its competition killing strategies, even now!

Would it not make a difference to Indians if a Microsoft OS is available for INR Rs.500/- and MS Office software at Rs.1000/-. I think so. This would have made more legal users of Microsoft in India, not to speak of the Software Piracy in the country coming down drastically. And of course, many users could escape the legal harassment that the company is putting them under. Our PM could have made a request like this to Bill Gates yesterday.

So what do companies like Intel, Microsoft and Oracle etc do. They price their products at unreasonable levels and then arm-twist poor countries and its denizens to fall in line. A small percentage of the profits so made by the company are doled out to causes like HIV, Polio etc. If any one looks at the PR blitzkrieg that accompanies all these, he would be amply convinced that even these charities are small baits thrown to catch the larger fish. You would realize that his eyes are on the 300 million Indians with huge purchasing capabilities and the burgeoning Indian corporates. All said and done, Bill Gates is an American and Microsoft is an all American company. Selfishness forms the core of Americans, particularly the American business. History had so many examples to prove the point. Vietnam, Iraq, Haiti, Pakistan, Gulf war, Arm Sales, Nuclear deals etc points us to the intent of the nation and its business houses.

In 1999, I had read this book titled “Business the Bill Gates Way” written by Des Dearlove (Capstone Publishing, ISBN 81-7310-123-X) and I would conclude by citing some findings on that. It says the secrets of doing business the Bill Gates way are:

* Be in the right place at the right time
* Fall in love with technology
* Take no prisoners (kill them all)
* Hire smart people
* Learn to survive
* Do not expect any gratitude
* Cover all bases
* Have small sized effective team, &
* Never take your eyes off the ball

For companies like Microsoft and chieftains like Bill Gates, business is war out there. And they perform it by doing all the killings and use means that are considered very un-ethical. They justify the means by citing the end. And in the end, the poor and third world countries such as India get this guilt money that is doled out as charity, making our leaders to accept it and award them and praise them.

It is just like that.