Gates: Microsoft to spend $40b in R&D over six years
crn.com | at | by Mike
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told more than 100 CEOs that Web services--and Microsoft's software in particular--are quietly driving a "rewiring of the economy" in the post-dot-com era.
Gates said the pending beta of the next version of Visual Studio--together with Web service standards and new speech, collaboration and wireless applications--will simplify business-process re-engineering and boost information worker productivity.
"This statement is like deja vu. People said that in the late '90s and didn't most of them go out of business? Yes. But the difficult work to make this happen has only been taking place now," Gates told CEOs gathered at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters for its eighth annual CEO Summit.