Cape Town and Seattle - Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, and the UN are forming a partnership to supply information technology (IT) and other support to small businesses in Africa.
Microsoft and the UN Industrial Development Organisation plan to set up technology centres in African communities, where entrepreneurs will be able to access business support services, information, training and computers.
Community centres
Continues Below↓The initiative "will make growing and starting a new business much easier", Cheick Diarra, the chairman of Microsoft's African unit, said yesterday at a conference in Cape Town. "We need to commit to the shared responsibility of growing the continent and its people."
Microsoft has helped set up about 1 000 community centres in Africa that provide computer training and other services to rural communities.
Those centres would be expanded to offer additional services to businesses, minimising the need to build new infrastructure, said Paul Hengeveld, Microsoft's UN account manager. He declined to reveal the project budget, saying it was difficult to quantify.
Deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said Africa had to spend more on technology if it wanted to speed up development and poverty alleviation, and urged computer companies to make it more readily accessible.
Ready to invest
Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete said Africa needed to reduce its dependence on satellite communication. "Our nations are ready to invest in subterranean and fibreoptic cables," Kikwete said.
Microsoft said it would change the way it charged small businesses for accounting and finance software, cutting prices by 10 percent for customers with 15 users or less.
Tami Reller, a Microsoft vice-president who leads marketing for small business applications, said companies would have to buy about 20 percent fewer user licences. Reller said previous licensing plans were too confusing for customers and the Microsoft partners who sold to them.
Microsoft is spending $10-billion (about R71-billion) to increase sales of accounting and customer management programs. The company has forecast growth of more than 10 percent for that unit in the fiscal year that just ended. That is double the rate of the previous year, an improvement for a unit that has had slower growth than Microsoft initially expected.
After several years of reorganisations to integrate acquired businesses, revenue from Microsoft's business solutions unit probably topped $900-million in the year to June, according to a Microsoft forecast in April. The company has backed away from a forecast for the unit to reach $10-billion in sales by 2010.
New licences
Microsoft is implementing the changes, called business ready licensing, beginning in August. Under the new plan, customers will only have to pay for the number of employees who use the software simultaneously. Previously they had to buy licences for anyone who wanted to use the program at any point.
Customers who want to upgrade to a pricier version of the accounting software will have the purchase price of their current program applied as credit to the new product.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said the company expected to meet a target of getting its next version of Windows software, known as Vista, on store shelves by January.
"The chance that we will hit January for Vista looks to be 80 percent at this point," Gates told Microsoft clients in Cape Town. "Even though the amount of investment we've put in over the various years is probably $8-billion or $9-billion", the release would be delayed if it was not functioning optimally, he said.
Tough projects
Microsoft would spend more than $7-billion this year on research and development (R&D), up from more than $6-billion last year.
This "makes us the biggest spender on R&D in the world. We are taking on very tough projects, like computer vision, computer speech recognition, better ink recognition. The latest version of Vista actually has very good speech recognition and speech synthesis," Gates added.
