Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Mayor Bernard Delanoe click in Paris
January 30, 2008
Soon-to-retire Microsoft chair Bill Gates met with Paris Mayor Bernard Delanoe on Wednesday to discuss a sweeping new partnership based on Microsoft technology.
Security was tight as Delanoe and Gates, thought to be the world’s richest man, met in Paris, France to discuss innovative ways technology could be brought to bear on Paris’ social challenges including unemployment, education and business development.
Features of the deal include training and Microsoft network support for 120 unemployed IT workers in Paris, two years of training and support for 40 French start-up companies, and even a brand new digital sports center in the Porte de Montreuil area of Paris, due to open in 2009. The center will host traditional physical sports but also video games, with specific video tournaments being planned for the new space. Microsoft will provide X-Box consoles and other multimedia equipment.
The Mayor of Paris said that Gates was a man he admired for his advancement of knowledge, business innovation and values around the world. Socialist and Green leaders sniffed, only partly in jest, that this deal was simply one more step in the Microsoft founder’s quest for world domination. There were also some criticisms that Paris mayor Delanoe made such an important deal with Microsoft’s leader only 40 days before the end of his term. Delanoe retorted that he would be Mayor “right up until the end.”
Gates himself is something of a lame duck. He plans to stay on with Microsoft only a few more months before retiring from business to devote himself 100% to the philanthropic work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates called himself “proud and happy” to have signed the agreement with Delanoe, which he said was not exclusive. Gates said his company would provide Paris with Microsoft software, but other software could also be used in the planned projects. The two men called the deal a both public and private partnership where each partner would keep its independence. A spokesman of Paris’ city hall asserted that “7 000 of the 20 000 data-processing stations used by the services of the City use free software as well as that of Microsoft.”
The private sector in Paris has its Microsoft fans as well. Thomas Sernal, one of the founders of Baracoda, a start-up company in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, applauded the deal, having already been a beneficiary. His company developed a program allowing users to listen to radio using Microsoft Vista software. Thanks to Baracoda’s partnership with Microsoft, the software has been downloaded 325,000 times in only one year.
Bertrand Delanoe has invited the founder of Microsoft to the next congress of the CGLU, a union of some 200 mayors in France, of which Delanoe is chairman. There he hopes to seal other philanthropic partnerships with the Microsoft chairman. Delanoe coyly hinted that the Paris-brokered deal on Wednesday was only the beginning, saying that he had the feeling that he and Gates were not through finding new ways to work together.
The Paris visit on Monday was only the latest stop on Bill Gates’ European tour. Two days earlier, in Athens, Greece, that country signed an agreement with Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company to establish IT development centers in an effort to boost the Greece’s competitiveness. The agreement, signed by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Greece’s finance minister calls for the creation of centers to provide IT and business development skills.
And Gates gave a glimpse of his future as a philanthropist in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland the week before calling for a new kind of creative capitalism from businesses to help improve the lives of the world’s poorest people without sacrificing their own business needs.
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