The growth of China's software industry will stun the world, as
the country pays more and more attention to innovation and produces
hundreds of thousands of computer majors a year, said Bill Gates in
Beijing on Friday.
"China is a market (for the software industry), but also a
contributor to this market," said Microsoft's founder and
chairman.
Zhang Yaqin, vice-president of the software giant in charge of
its development activities in China, said a trend that is taking
place is a shift from "made-in-China" to "innovated-in-China", as
the country builds up its innovation efforts.
China has set a goal to become an innovation-driven country by
2020.
"Innovation here is really at a rapid pace," said the founder of
the most successful software firm in the world. "We want to do our
part to help its innovation speed up."
Microsoft has established 20 innovation centers in cooperation
with local universities and companies, and this year, it will add
two more such centers.
On Thursday, Gates announced at a forum that Microsoft aimed to
increase the number of innovation centers in the world from 110 to
200 by 2009.
In China, Microsoft has the most comprehensive research and
development system outside its headquarters in Seattle, with 1,200
engineers.
On Friday, Gates also handed out awards to the regional winners
of its Imagine Cup in China.
The contest is the world's largest computer science event among
high school and university students with 100,000 participants,
7,000 in China. The Chinese team won the most medals in the global
contest in 2005.
Nigel Burton, a Microsoft executive in charge of the event in
China, said: "It is not important how many awards Chinese
programmers get, but to show to one million students that they can
be as good as people anywhere in the world."
When answering a question from a Chinese university student on
what he would do again if he was 20 years old, the age he started
Microsoft, Gates said his first choice would still be software as
there were "way more opportunities in the future than the
past".
He also accepted an offer to act as an honorary director on the
board of Peking University on Friday, after receiving an honorary
doctorate from Tsinghua University one day earlier.
Following Gates' speech at Peking University, a man jumped on
stage and waved a piece of paper, saying "Free software. Open
source."
Microsoft's software is mainly proprietary and is accused of
being a monopoly in many markets. There is a growing demand for
free software, like that of Linux.
(China Daily April 21, 2007)