Inside UP : Access

Meanwhile, Back in the US, We Are Elevating America!

jamesu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:21:35 GMT

China isn’t the only country during these troubled times that is looking for creative solutions for how to prepare its workforce for modern, technology-enabled jobs. At the US National Governor’s Association meeting this past Sunday in Washington DC, my colleague Pamela Passman (above) announced a new skills training program called Elevate America. You can find a transcript of Pamela’s remarks here along with the press release and a short video of Pamela announcing the program here.

Among other things, the new program provides one million free training vouchers for Americans to learn new technology skills. It is a big deal and will be coordinated in partnership with state governments, and so far the states of Washington, New York, and Florida have signed up to participate.

Key components of the program include:

Expanded access to basic technology literacy and skills training
Basic-level information technology training resources through Microsoft Unlimited Potential and Digital Literacy curricula
Intermediate technology skills training courses, online and instructor-led, plus selected certification exams
Vouchers for eLearning course collections offered by Microsoft
Vouchers for certification exams leading to Microsoft business certification
Grants of cash and software to community partners to build in-classroom training capacity
Discounted membership rates for institutions participating in the Microsoft IT Academy program
Access to a new Web portal that will help guide individuals to training and resources that position them for success in the economy today, and tomorrow

So much of our energy with Unlimited Potential is focused on people in emerging markets that it is easy to overlook the fact that there are people in developed market countries who are underserved by technology as well. Our themes of transforming education, local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity are as relevant in the US and Europe as they are in the rest of the world.

iCafés in China

jamesu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:01:08 GMT

I spent the last week in China learning more about Internet Cafés (or iCafés) , which are becoming a key area of focus for the Unlimited Potential Group. This is part of our “shared access”strategy, where we are developing solutions for computers that are shared by a large number of people throughout the course of a day.

In emerging market countries, iCafés are a big deal. According to a recent report published by Euromonitor, 300 million people in emerging markets will be regularly using iCafés by 2010. That’s 5% of the world’s total population. In India and China, iCafés account for up to 40% of all Internet traffic.

And compared to the rest of the world, iCafés in China are huge, averaging over 100 PCs per facility. Some iCafés in Beijing can have as many as 350 PCs and are tricked out with fancy leather chairs and cordoned off “VIP zones” with large monitors and extra network bandwidth.

So I was pretty excited when I wandered into my first Chinese Internet café last Tuesday, located on the first floor of an office building right next to an electronics mall. It was a dark, low-ceilinged room with row after row of young men hunched over in front of flat panel monitors.

And what were they all doing there?

Playing World of Warcraft. Shooting at things. Winning at Mahjong. Some were watching movies. A few were surfing the web. But most were playing games. With great intensity. Many of the gamers were there with groups of friends and were playing together.

There is an interesting ecosystem that has built up over the last few years to support them. iCafé PCs in China have sophisticated game launcher software with up to 500 titles and are supported by a web service infrastructure that includes a Windows Update-like service to ensure that the games have the latest patches and bug fixes. Usage is closely monitored by the government, and your ID card is recorded before you can begin an iCafé session.

100 million people in China use iCafés on a regular basis. So this raises an interesting question for us: why on earth is the Unlimited Potential Group interested in this space, and how could any of our work here help us advance in our mission for enabling social and economic opportunity for people underserved by technology? Do we create a better gaming experience for the kids who hang out in Internet cafes? Build some better World of Warcraft add-on module tracking software?

In other words, by focusing on iCafés, are we really being true to our mission?

At first glance, the answer is obviously no. We are not going into the social and economic opportunity gaming business. But PCs are amazing tools that can be used for a lot more than just watching movies or gunning down imaginary dragons. They can be used for things like skills training and education. And that is where our strategy becomes interesting.

The government in China is really worried about unemployment right now. As my Microsoft colleague in China Nigel Burton likes to point out, the largest migration in the history of the world has occurred in China over the last 20 years, where 400 million people have moved from the countryside into cities (mostly in the eastern part of the country) to work primarily in manufacturing and construction. And as the global recession continues to prolong, more and more Chinese workers in manufacturing are losing their jobs.

So the government in China sees iCafés as a potential asset to help assist in the retraining of their workforce and are turning to companies like Microsoft for software and training programs to help with this effort. We have an iCafé eLearning pilot underway in one province in China right now, and are looking at ways to expand it to support more people.

But there are challenges we face in helping turn iCafés into a productive tool for society. Culturally, they are not viewed as friendly places where, for example, parents would want their daughters to go to learn how to use spreadsheets or other business software. We also need to create incentives for iCafé owners to support this training scenario. But our early experience from the pilot in China and from pilots in other parts of the world indicates that this idea of using iCafés as a workforce development tool has merit, and we are looking forward seeing how we can expand this idea more broadly.

“Phone First” in Boston

jamesu — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:41:58 GMT

Last month I had the opportunity to attend NextLab 2008: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users. It was a one-day conference at the MIT Media Lab involving projects from an interdisciplinary class there focused on how to apply cell phone technology to help create social and economic opportunity for poor people throughout the world. In UPG, we call these “phone first” applications, and it is an area of keen interest to us. I was invited by Sandy Pentland, one of the faculty advisors of this class; he also works with the Next Billion Network at MIT.

There were seven projects showcased at the conference, ranging from supply chain distribution to healthcare to the seemingly-ubiquitous “use a phone to help a farmer get crop prices” scenario. All of these projects featured a combination of the creativity and energy of students paired with the real-world requirements of an NGO. The projects were conceived and designed in the fall and are going into pilot in the spring. You can learn more about the class here.

My favorite project is the “Boston Baby Blog”, an application where health care workers use an SMS based notification network to share baby care information with low income families who don’t necessarily surf websites on PCs but who definitely use text messaging. It’s the sort of application we talk about deploying in places like Africa, except it is being deployed right here in the US! Rashni Melgiri, a second year student at Sloan, explains the project:

Another project called MoCa involves the use of cell phones as a diagnostic tool to extend the reach of doctors and nurses well beyond a single medical clinic. Here is Clark Freifeld explaining how it works:

As part of the class, each team of students had to create a video explaining their project. I’ve embedded a link to each project along with a brief description of each as well. Most of these are just now entering field trials, and it is too early to determine the long term impact they will have. But if you are interested in ICT4D, and in particular the use of cells phones in this field, then you will be hard pressed to find a better collection of scenarios that demonstrate the promise that phone-based applications can have as a tool for advancing social and economic opportunity.

M-Commerce
This project involves an application that enables a small store or reseller in a village in India to use a cell-phone to reorder commonly stocked goods from a wholesaler or distributor. It consists of a little database on the phone and an SMS fulfillment system.

Final Video from Kady Buchanan on Vimeo.

MoCA
”Mobile Care” is an application that enables field medical workers to record symptoms on a phone using forms, voice annotation, and photos, and then submit them to a health clinic for a nurse or physician to review. It is similar to a project UPG piloted with midwives in Uganda.

Final Video from Elliot Higger on Vimeo.

Fighting Farmers
This is an agricultural extension application being tested in Zacatecas, Mexico. It enables farmers to upload crop pricing data in order to access a database of historical and local pricing information and trends.

Final Video from Paul Moore on Vimeo.

NextMap
This is an application that lets people use an SMS message to report a locally occurring incident, and the report is then uploaded to a server where it mapped. Key scenarios for this include disaster response (e.g., “the people upriver are reporting flooding!”) or the tracking of environmental incidents. This project is similar to Project Butterfly from the students in Indonesia who won the Image Cup UP award last summer. And parts of NextMap run on Windows Mobile!

Disaster Management and Innovgreen Overview from Disaster Management on Vimeo.

Fellows Forum
This is a web and SMS-based social network for college students who have received grants from the Telmex foundation. Almost all of these students are poor and from developing countries, and the application gives them a way to connect with each other.

Final Video from Julianne Palazzo on Vimeo.

Multi-Level Marketing
This is a microfinance application in Ecuador that uses SMS as a networking and customer acquisition tool in a loan application process.

Get New Money Demo Video from Josh Kirchmer on Vimeo.

The Boston Baby Blog
My favorite application at the show involved a solution targeting a problem right here in Boston Mass. The Boston Baby blog is an SMS texting service that enables the city to communicate information around important parenting and healthcare milestones to low income parents of newborn children. They observed that many low income parents in Boston didn’t have computers or visit websites, but they all seemed to have cell phones and use text messaging. It’s a great example of a phone first scenario right here in our country.

Baby Blog Final from Javier Smith on Vimeo.

Paul Polak and the Art of Listening

jamesu — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:56:52 GMT

Paul Polak is a hero of mine.

He created a nonprofit organization called International Development Enterprises (IDE) and spent 25 years there developing creative ways to make poor people in Asia and Africa less poor. His specialty is developing sustainable tools that rural farmers earning $2/day actually buy in order to increase the amount of cash they generate; his approach is to spend an intensive amount of time in the field listening to these types of farmers in order to truly understand what they need; and his results have been amazing. His organization developed and marketed something called a treadle pump, a low cost human-powered $25 pump that made it easier for subsistence farmers to grow lucrative off-season vegetables by simply tapping into the water table that lay 15 feet beneath their feet. IDE has sold over 2 million of these pumps to some of the poorest people in the world, and almost all of them achieved a payback on their investment in a matter months, lifting their families from $2/day to $5/day in the process. What’s cool about Paul’s approach is that he didn’t just invent a pump, he created a complete ecosystem of local manufacturers, distributers, and marketers that figured out everything they needed to do in order to connect with local people and sell a product on local terms that could transform the lives of poor people. IDE is now a 500 person organization chugging along on its mission of helping the rural poor.

Paul’s Book, Out of Poverty, is required reading for anyone working in the International Development or ICT4D spaces because it lays out a fact-based model for managing projects that achieve their desired impact. Heck, it should be required reading for anyone in business because, well, it lays out a fact-based model for managing projects that achieve their desired impact.

Paul visited the Microsoft campus on Monday and gave a talk about his work. So what does a 75 year-old ex-psychologist, businessman, NGO-founder, and author do as a next step in his life? Why, start two new companies, of course! One of them is the design firm D-Rev that helps multinationals in designing products for poor people. The other is a firm that is developing its own products to take to market. The photo above shows Paul describing the concept behind one of his new company’s products in the speech he gave on Monday.

During his talk, he described his “Don’t Bother Trilogy” of rules that you absolutely need to do in creating a business case for a product targeting people living at the bottom of the pyramid. He calls them this particular name because if you don’t do them, then don’t bother proposing the project to him.

Go out and talk to at least 25 poor people in your target market, and spend at least four hours with each of them in order to truly understand what they need
Create a pricing and costing model where the poor people buying your product can achieve a positive return on their investment within three months of purchase
Select an idea with an addressable market of at least one million units

Clearly, the most important tool in his toolbox, the one he places the most value in, is the art of listening. Paul estimates that during his time at IDE he conducted 3,000 of these 4 hour interviews with farmers and their families in their homes and in their fields throughout the world. He actually videotaped most of these interviews and still has the tapes if any aspiring documentary film makers out there are looking for a new and interesting project.

After his speech on Monday, I had the chance to sit down with Paul and among other things discuss with him the art of listening within the context of developing new products. Here is a quick video where he describes how he went into the hills of Vietnam looking to sell drip irrigation systems but wound up getting into the pig business.

From his perspective, it comes down to making a human connection in a fact-based conversation that focuses on the outcomes that matter. For $2/day consumers, that outcome is increasing income.

So what does all of this have to do with Microsoft? Well here in the Unlimited Potential Group, we are trying to build technology products that target the specific needs of consumers in emerging market countries. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we are trying to reach, and I have to tell you it is a really hard thing to do, especially from Redmond. Sure we have local employees and local partners who help us understand emerging market requirements, our research and user experience teams do various types of behavioral and ethnographic studies, and our product managers spend a lot of time on the road interviewing people and evaluating our various technology incubation trials (while taking lots of pictures and videos in the process.) Shown here is my colleague Alberto Martinez, who was with me in India 10 days ago when we were doing some consumer research there.

But it’s hard enough to get customer requirements right for products being launched in the US; getting them right from the US for products designed for customers in India and China adds a degree a difficulty that reminds me of the line from Ginger Rogers, where she said she had to do the same dancing Fred Astaire did, except she had to do it backwards while wearing high heels.

So it can be done, and Paul is helping us, oftentimes in ways that we didn’t initially expect. No, he is not teaching us how to dance backwards, but last summer he was a judge in the Imagine Cup Rural Innovation Awards and participated on the panel that gave the first prize to the kids from Indonesia and their Project Butterfly submission. After the contest, he gave us feedback that he didn’t see enough evidence of students actually listening to their target customers in the process of designing their submissions, so for this year’s UP award at Imagine Cup we are making a formal requirement that the submissions adopt Guidelines for User Centric Design and document the number and types of conversations they’ve had with their target customers.

(By the way, the entire 2009 Imagine Cup is organized around the UN Millennium Development Goals, which means 200,000+ college students around the world will be applying their energy and creativity in a competition addressing the world’s most important social and economic problems! It is an amazing idea and will occupy a big chunk of my 2009.)

Anyway, for marketers and product developers, doing a good job at the art of listening can make the difference between writing an interesting trip report and delivering a product that achieves real impact with measurable outcomes in a completely different part of the world. And this week many of us here at Microsoft had the chance to meet face-to-face with someone who demonstrates on a consistent basis that it can be done. So it was a really good week.

And Paul, I listened. :-)

ICT4D Explained

jamesu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:38:36 GMT

ICT4D, or "Information and Communication Technologies for Development" is the name for the multidisciplinary academic approach involving the application of high tech to address international development problems. Kentaro Toyama - who leads Microsoft Research's Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group in India - just forwarded around some pointers to a series of papers that appeared in IEEE's Computer June 2008 edition. These articles combine to serve as a great primer on the subject.

You can read an overview paper on ICT4D that Kentaro co-authored here, along with instructions on how to access the rest of the papers here. We are going to try to get permissions to host the papers on the UP website, so stay tuned.

Included in the papers is one the TEM team wrote with Rajesh Veeraraghavan from Berkeley. It provides an overview of some of the projects the lab is doing, including Digital Green (which it describes as "Farmer Idol"), and presents a model for the 5 stages of design that ICT4D projects seem to experience:

Wonder: Recognition of the size or severity of a particular
challenge in development and wonder that
the problem persists.
Exuberance: Excitement at devising an initial technical
solution.
Realization: Discovery of ground realities when the
initial solution doesn’t quite work and realization
that the real problem is elsewhere.
Adaptation: Creation of a new solution that solves
the real problem.
Identification: An identification with the user that
often explains the gap between exuberance and realization.

Kentaro always hammers us back in Redmond on the need to get out into the communities where these projects are being deployed in order to truly understand how the solution is (or is not) being used. Oftentimes what you think you are working on isn't the real problem that needs to be solved. The paper describes how the team evolved this model from experience in projects involving "textless" UI, micro enterprises, microfinance, social enterprises, and agriculture extension.

Another paper from Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester describes "ICT4D 2.0", a concept that reflects the importance of sustainability and relevance in getting these projects to succeed. These are lessons learned from over a decade's experience with these types of projects. In Heeks' view, ICT4D 1.0 involves primarily PC and landline- based solutions (usually rural telecenters) that encounter environmental issues (rodents gnaw cables, dust clogs machines) or relevance issues (if I live in a remote village, exactly who am I sending an email to?) He thinks a more accessible platform for these types of projects are low cost cell phones using SMS and messaging, community radio, and even community participatory video (like what is used in Project Green.)

Within the UP Group, we are strong believers in the importance of simple cell phones as a platform for these types of scenarios and have multiple projects underway in this space.

In other papers, Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town discusses pragmatic design approaches for these low cost, "Phone First" applications that involve the creative application of Bluetooth, SMS, and phone UI. A team from the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group at UC Berkeley describes the sustainability issues they encountered in designing and deploying a series of remote eye care clinics in India.

If you want to learn more about ICT4D, these Computer papers are a great starting point.

Western China Project

jamesu — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:47:16 GMT

A group of people from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential team are heading out to Western China next week to raise awareness on a firsthand basis around issues involving the digital divide for rural communities in emerging market countries. You can learn more about the project on the UP home page. The team will be evangelizing existing UP programs targeting rural access like Telecenters and Infowagons. They will even be participating in a "Gobi March" endurance race across the desert.

From my perspective this is an interesting project because it involves direct interaction between people from Microsoft's corporate headquarters with people living in the types of rural villages that our programs and technology efforts are trying to serve. One of the goals of this blog and the UP web site is to "Tell the Story" around what Microsoft and other groups are doing in this space. Too often we wind up writing about announcements Microsoft execs (myself included) make at various conferences around the world. Now don't get me wrong, these conferences are important because they are often used by government and NGO leaders to exchange ideas around best practices and new programs they can use.

But there is something refreshing about actually "getting out there" and reporting on the kind of impact we can make. The UP team plans to do a lot more of this web based reporting over the next year. So I wish the team well and can't wait to see how this project turns out.

Look! Windows on the OLPC XO!

jamesu — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:00:03 GMT

Today Microsoft and the OLPC are announcing support for Windows on the OLPC XO computer. The two organizations will work together on several pilot programs in emerging market countries starting next month, and the offering will RTM in August or September. Initially it will only be available in emerging market countries where governments or NGOs are subsidizing the purchase of a large number of PCs for students, but there is the possibility of making this available for other customers through a broader set of channels at a later point in time.

From our perspective, Windows on the XO is a nice addition to the portfolio of products and services Microsoft has created to help transform education, one of the key themes of Unlimited Potential. It builds on the work we have been doing with partners like Intel and with programs like Partners in Learning, which has now reached over 100 million students worldwide.

And as you can see from this video featuring UPG's own Bohdan Raciborski, the Windows port to the XO is a snappy release that doesn't cut features or functionality in order to work in the constrained memory and storage environment of the XO.

It is the same basic Windows XP implementation that runs on the Intel Class Mate, ASUS eeePC, and other products in this emerging class of ultra low cost laptop PCs. As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast." Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.

So you may ask, why is Microsoft doing this?

The answer is simple: people are asking for it, it transforms education and it leads to the creation of jobs and opportunity.

You can classify demand for Windows on the XO into three groups. The first group consists of people who have fallen in love with that cute little green laptop with its excellent industrial design but are committed to Windows. I wrote last fall about the guys from the Romanian Ministry of Education who like Windows (their teams regularly place in the Imagine Cup) and thought it would be cool to evaluate Windows on the XO. Another example is the NGO Save the Children, who are interested in sponsoring projects with the XO but as an IT organization have a ~~Windows-only~~ Windows-standard policy. Any extra money they spend in IT supporting multiple operating systems or technology camps is money diverted from their core mission around service, which for them is not a good thing.

The second group involves governments who are considering deployment of the XO en masse but also want the low deployment risk and broad support that the Windows ecosystem can provide them. Let's face it, there are hundreds of millions of Windows machines out there in the world today, which means there are thousands and thousands of people who know how to deploy, support, fix, and upgrade them. Despite the "let the kids fix their own computers" mindset that exists in some parts of the open source community, what we call at Microsoft the "IT Pro" is exactly the type of person that is needed for these large scale education deployments. As we all know, computers break, and asking children and teachers to fix them is not always the best solution. When I presented Unlimited Potential in Guatemala to a gathering of Ministry of Education types from across the region, the slide that generated the most interest was the one that described Microsoft's IT infrastructure optimization framework for large scale education deployments. Based on that customer feedback, we've decided to invest even more into a formalized national PC deployment methodology that we are starting to roll out right now. And believe it or not, it's easier to find Windows system administrators in places like India and Africa than it is to find Linux system administrators, and the Windows IT Pros cost less. We'll be releasing a study on this next month, so stay tuned.

The third group involves people -- usually policy makers -- in governments who see a direct link between technology investments in education and the need to expand the skills capacity of their workforce on a national scale. In other words, they want to implement policies that can positively impact education and set the stage for better employment opportunities for their citizens. They see Windows as a key ingredient for making this happen because it is the software environment used by so many businesses around the world.

Microsoft has created the Unlimited Potential initiative around the themes of transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity. Today's announcement gives us the opportunity to reinforce how these three themes can support each other given the right scenario and the right set of tools. If we can provide children with a great learning experience, and do so in a manner that involves a massive scale with the right level of (local) support, it has the potential for being transformational across multiple fronts. It's pretty exciting.

We Have a Name: "Creative Capitalism"

jamesu — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:21:51 GMT

Bill Gates gave a great speech at Davos this week around the concept of Creative Capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and non-profits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities. It is an important and exciting way to think about the creative application of business models to help the world's poor. In addition to Bill's speech, there is also a good Wall Street Journal article and interview on the topic that appeared this week.

This is the concept that drove me to switch jobs within Microsoft last summer and join The Unlimited Potential Group, which is, of course, our company's main vehicle for Creative Capitalism. It is the concept behind the work Intel is doing with its World Ahead program. It is the concept behind the work the OLPC is doing with their XO computer. It is the concept behind the work of dozens of other companies around the world who are taking the philanthropic motivations of their Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) departments and integrating them with the creativity of their new product development departments in order to create a new, new thing: a systematic approach to applying the strengths of a company to serve the needs of poor people by essentially treating them as a new class of customers who previously happened to fall outside of the traditional market focus of a company. It involves a new approach to product design, research, distribution, partnership, and profit models -- all done in the name of helping a class of people that businesses have traditionally ignored.

A cool thing that Bill did with his speech is that he has given the concept a name. I really like "Creative Capitalism" as a description for the work we are doing.

From my perspective, there are multiple approaches companies can take to get on the Creative Capitalism bandwagon.

Differential Pricing - This is when a company creates versions of its existing products at a price point that poor people in emerging markets can afford. In Bill's speech, he talked about several examples of drug companies doing this with vaccines. CK Prahalad documents how Lever Brothers and others have successfully done this with consumer goods for the poorest of the poor in India. Microsoft's best example of this is the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite (MSIS), a $3 package of software sold through government programs where the government subsidizes the purchase of laptops for students.
New Types of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) - This is when governments and businesses transition from a classic buyer-seller relationship in order to partner in creating programs targeting specific social and economic outcomes. These PPPs usually work best in areas where government resources and expertise are achieving limited results. My favorite example of this at Microsoft is Partners in Learning -- a Microsoft program that we just renewed for another 5 years with a $235 million commitment -- that among other things has trained 4 million teachers on how to use technology in the classroom in a manner that emphasizes local collaboration and local impact. Also, Microsoft's Partnerships for Technology Access (PTA) program has worked with governments around the world to create dozens of these PPPs.
Affinity Campaigns - This is a branding campaign where a company publicly allocates a portion of its profits from a particular product to a development cause. These campaigns allow consumers in a small way to align their purchase choices with their desire to affect social outcomes. The best example of this, of course, is (RED) the branding campaign created by the singer Bono to help raise money for AIDS vaccines in Africa. Microsoft and Dell announced support for (RED) this week.
New Products - This is when a company designs new products from the ground up to meet the specific needs of people trapped in the bottom of the social and economic pyramid. This is the most exciting long term aspect of Creative Capitalism and is the main focus of the Unlimited Potential Group. We have software developers working in solution areas like education, low cost computing, and shared access computing. As part of this work, for example, some people on my team are conducting product design focus groups over the next month in Ghana, Morocco, and Peru. I've worked on a lot of products in my 13 year career here at Microsoft, and I can assure you that as a company we never used to do focus groups in places like Ghana. But it is the only way we can do what we do best -- which is develop new types of technology solutions -- in a manner that has the greatest impact on the needs of people that technology companies have previously ignored.

So why are we doing all of this?

From a long-term, pure numbers perspective this approach makes sense for us as a company. There are 6 billion people in the world today, and Microsoft's products are used by about a billion of them. As a company we can grow in the future by either selling more software + services to our existing billion customers, or we can grow by selling software + services to the other 5 billion. If we do the latter, than we have to do so on their terms, not ours. And the fact that our team is now doing focus groups in Ghana is interesting because it turns out that Microsoft sells more in Africa today than it does in either India or China. Most people in our company don't realize this. There is a real business opportunity here, but as I've mentioned before there is an emerging view that this opportunity requires new partnership and distribution models and even new types of products from us in order to sell into these markets in a relevant and sustainable way.

But there is a social aspect to this approach that goes beyond business, and this is an important theme in Bill's speech. People by their very nature like to help other people -- and believe it or not this sentiment is even shared by a lot of people like me who work at a company like Microsoft. There is a place for this personal need to help other people in business, and we can do this in a manner that goes beyond traditional corporate charity or philanthropy. In other words, it is OK to align business interests (the need to grow our company) with social interests (the desire to help people who need help) if it is done in a creative way that achieves measurable outcomes on both fronts, and those measurable outcomes for the company don't always have to be measured by profit numbers on this quarter's income statement. Microsoft has always focused on long-term markets, and why can't we continue to do this in a manner that helps poor people at the same time? Hence "Creative Capitalism."

Of course there are critics of all of these different types of approaches, and their general argument is that it is impossible for companies to serve their own economic interests and the social good at the same time. There is also a more specific criticism focused directly at Microsoft, that this is all simply an effort to circumvent the appeal of free or pirated software so we can gain access to markets in emerging countries. One group this week even likened Microsoft's approach to education as being the equivalent of a tobacco company handing out free cigarettes to children. These critics are missing the point, because this is not about Microsoft or about software licensing models or even about technology. It's about the recognition that people who are in the middle and bottom of the social and economic pyramid are, well, people who might actually have the opportunity to advance in their lives if there are greater choices for products and services that are relevant, accessible, and affordable to them. This realization can create opportunity for companies, but more importantly it can achieve a social good because the creative energies of businesses are now focused on the needs of people who were previously ignored. When software engineers in Redmond and India are focused on meeting the needs of farmers in Ghana, then the world becomes a better place.

And that is the beauty behind the idea of Creative Capitalism.

OLPC in the News (Part 2)

jamesu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:17:17 GMT

Well, I will be flying out to Cambridge next week for my first meeting with some of the people at the OLPC, and I have to say I am looking forward to it. Some of my UPG co-workers from Microsoft have been meeting with the OLPC team for about a year now, but since I am a relative newcomer to our group, this will be my first trip.

One of the things we will be discussing is the status of our port of Windows XP to the OLPC XO computer. There have been suggestions in the press by Nicholas Negroponte and others that “Windows already runs on the XO.” That’s not really the case yet, and with the attention the OLPC’s “Give One Get One” campaign is getting, along with the strong level of interest we are receiving from some Ministries of Education and NGOs in buying a version of Windows for the XO, we thought it would be useful to provide some clarity on the topic.

For starters, we are hard at work on the project here, and we are using an approach that is a little unusual for Microsoft in that we are managing the entire process of adapting and testing an existing version of Windows for a new PC. Usually the hardware vendor does this. And the Windows port to the XO is by no means done. Between Microsoft employees and third party contractors that we have brought into the effort, we have over 40 engineers working full-time on the port. We started the project around the beginning of the year and think it will be mid-2008 at the earliest before we could have a production-quality release.

Because of this, we have not announced formal plans to support the XO yet, and we will not do so until after we start getting feedback from our first limited field trials starting in January before we make the final call. We do not want to set expectations we subsequently cannot meet, especially when it comes to supporting the children’s machine. For governments in emerging markets evaluating purchases of Windows for the XO, this means that so far we are not announcing an availability date, pricing, or support policies. In fact, you should not yet assume that Windows on the XO is a done deal. We are hopeful that we will have a different story for you within six months.

It also means that if you are in the US and Canada and are participating in the “Give One Get One” program, you need to understand that Microsoft is not currently planning to support a retail consumer release of Windows XP on your XO computer.

Why is this work taking so long?

Flash
First, the XO computer uses flash memory instead of a hard disk drive for storage. This is one of the reasons OLPC can get the production cost of the computer down to $188. This is a relatively new class of machine, and we have to do design work to get Windows and Office to work reliably and with good performance using only 2 GB of storage. The XO actually only comes with 1GB of flash, and we asked the OLPC to add a slot for an internal SD card that will provide the 2 GB of extra memory needed to run our software. (By comparison, an entry level $499 Dell laptop comes with 60 GB of hard disk storage.) The potential payoff for students and schools from this work, of course, is that the tens of thousands of existing educational applications written for Windows can potentially run on the XO. As part of this engineering effort, we have to design a new BIOS – the layer of software that runs between the hardware and an operating system -- to have Windows boot and run off the SD card. For us this is new work and requires a design and processes for supporting the XO’s custom SD interface and for the installation of Windows on the SD card, both at the Quanta factory that manufactures the XO hardware and also in the field.

For much of this XO flash design, we are able to leverage the work we did to get Windows to support the Intel Classmate PC, another computer that uses flash memory for storage. However, the Intel computer comes with 2GB of flash storage, so we did not have to use the SD card approach we are designing for the XO. The Classmate port took us about 9 months, but we started that effort a year and a half ago. A third example of these low cost “Flash PCs” on the market is the ASUS Eee PC, and surprisingly enough getting Windows running on this computer required a significantly shorter amount of time because ASUS used a more standardized approach to its hardware design compared to the XO. In technical terms, ASUS put the flash drive behind the IDE disk controller, making the flash storage "look like" a hard disk drive to Windows.

Microsoft plans to publish some formal design guidelines early next year that will help Flash PC manufacturers benefit from our early work so they can design machines that enable a great Windows experience at as low a cost as possible, and with a minimum of custom design work necessary to get Windows to run on their machines, such as we have encountered with the XO.

Cool New Features
Secondly, as we all know there are many innovative features in the XO computer that set it apart from other designs, and we are working with partners to write the driver software so that Windows can support all of them. This includes drivers for the XO’s wireless networking, camera, graphics processor, audio system, and the various user input devices (game pad, writing pad, touch pad, directional pad, and mouse pad.) There are ten custom drivers in all that we are writing. We also hope to support the XO’s mesh network design, its power-saving “e-book” mode, and its capability for excellent screen visibility in full daylight.

And we have a different support model than OLPC is envisioning: we are not expecting K-6 school children to access the source code and do their own programming in the event they have to fix a problem in the computer. Certainly, we think there is a role for students in the support of school computers -- in fact, as part of our Partners in Learning program we have trained over a million kids in a student helpdesk program (like in this case study from Brazil) -- but we also think that local entrepreneurs and businesses need to play an important role here when you are talking about deployments involving tens of thousands of computers.

We want to support these new XO features without sacrificing compatibility with existing Windows applications, and we want to deliver an out-of-the-box user experience similar to the quality people expect from Windows running on more expensive classes of machines. All of this takes a lot of work.

Fast Moving Partner
Finally, we are doing this engineering work for a moving target. It is literally like designing parts of a car – well, actually a school bus -- while it is running down the highway at a high speed. I am not meaning this as a knock on the OLPC organization, because they are a small group of people doing an amazing amount of innovative design work in a short period of time. But we have only received a handful of machines for most of the last year, and the XO team was doing some hardware design changes as recently as this past August. This affects our schedule.

Much of the technology in the XO is developed using open source technology licenses that make it difficult for engineers employed by commercial software companies like Microsoft to work directly on the project. For this reason, we also had to follow a complicated process to figure out interfaces for many of the XO’s hardware components and to deal with some of the hardware bugs they were reporting in their design process in order to make progress on our port. All of this slows us down, but that’s OK given our overall shared mission here.

We appreciate the support we are getting from the OLPC team, and we know the focus their engineers need to get the XO out the door and into the hands of students. Now that they are finally shipping, our ability to support the XO with a quality release of Windows is accelerating. I also have to say that if our team continues down the path they are on and the system performs as we hope, then that cute little machine with the Wi-Fi ears will run Windows!

What Does This Mean for Users?
The Unlimited Potential Group at Microsoft is developing technology to enable social and economic opportunity for “the next five billion," and one of our key focus areas for doing so is through the transformation of education. As part of this, we are investing in programs and partners around the world to foster innovative schools, innovative teachers, and innovative students. We have a lot going on here, and there is clearly a role for low cost hardware as part of this vision. In fact, there is a good alignment between what OLPC is trying to do and what we are trying to do. And frankly, nothing would please us more than seeing hundreds of thousands of these XO computers that are now starting to be deployed all running Windows given the very high interest that has been expressed in the market for it. We are committed to developing a quality port of Windows XP for the OLPC XO computer, but we still have a lot of work to do to complete the effort.

OLPC in the News ...

jamesu — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:09:22 GMT

Well, it seems like the OLPC organization is in the news a lot lately, even more so than usual. Stories that caught my eye over the last week included a CNN report, a BBC story from Monday, and of course the Wall Street Journal page A1 story that came out this last Saturday.

Microsoft's approach to the OLPC continues to be that we will work with them to see if we can get Windows to run on the XO machine -- there is still a lot of technical work to do, despite what you might hear in the press -- but otherwise we need to remain focused on our Unlimited Potential mission for enabling social and economic opportunity for the next five billion through transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity. We are applying a great deal of energy across these three areas in pilot projects around the world, and we don't really want to get distracted by the public rhetoric taking place around the OLPC and their XO machine. We are working with partners on a broad spectrum of solutions for education in emerging markets -- and low cost computing is just one of them -- but we also have pilot projects in other areas ranging from rural kiosks to new approaches for subscription computing, new applications for cell phones, new models for Internet cafes/community centers, and new approaches for mobile and remote access to the Internet. We have a lot going on and really need to focus first and foremost on the needs of the communities we are serving. Our mantra in all of this is "Relevance, Access, and Affordability."

The WSJ article was kind of cool in the sense that I was interviewed and referenced in the story, even though I didn't land a direct quote. I've been at Microsoft since 1995, and this was the first time I have appeared on the front page of the Journal. (By the way, my sister Lisa -- who also works here -- was featured in a page one WSJ story last year, for those of you who are keeping tabs on the Utzschneiders.)

Anyway, I've thought a lot about this whole OLPC phenomenon, and the best way for me to summarize my thoughts on the topic is to refer you to two quotes, both from bosses I've had at Microsoft.

The first is from David Vaskevitch, one of Microsoft's CTOs. He was an early mentor of my career here, and at one point I ran a technology incubation team working for him. David always liked to remind me that "the technology industry consistently overestimates what it can accomplish in 2 years, and consistently underestimates what it can accomplish in 10". This is coming from a guy who chose to center his 1996 Professional Developers Conference keynote around the emerging importance of digital photography -- we all thought at the time that he was nuts -- but look at what happened 10 years later. It's now one of the most widely used scenarios on the PC today (and among other things, a staple ingredient for how I create this blog.) And for what it's worth, I used this quote in my interview with the WSJ to summarize our view of what Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC are doing.

The second quote comes from Doug Burgum, the man who spent 25 years building the Great Plains/MBS business into what ultimately became a billion dollar division for Microsoft before he retired this past summer. Doug had an amazing capacity to inspire a community of channel partners into creating an ecosystem around a shared vision and more importantly a shared set of values. His quote -- it actually originated from Margaret Mead, but Doug liked to use it a lot -- was to "Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." One of the powerful ideas behind the OLPC is their approach for harnessing the power and excitement of a community to accomplish a shared (and in this case, noble) mission. We know at Microsoft what this can feel like; sometimes people forget that my company has a lot of experience with building communities organically. There's nothing like the feeling you get when you start a parade!

So my view on the OLPC is that Nicholas, Walter, Mary Lou-- all people I've never met but whom I admire at a distance -- are a group of dangerous dreamers (another Dougism) who are out to change the world and could have a huge impact on education over the course of the next ten years, but not so much in the next two. I love the boldness of their vision, their focus on serving the needs of poor children, and their desire to do great things.

But I also know the reality of the physics of the IT industry and the difficulty in trying to go from zero to millions of deployed, functioning, supported machines in a matter of months. About the nature of how this industry works, where one group may come up with an idea and then other organizations or individuals build on the idea and come in from seemingly nowhere (hello ASUS!) with a different type of solution to fill a vacuum created by the original vision. (Ask me how I felt after I read the first public draft of the Enterprise Java Beans spec, a document that was "inspired" by work we were doing on COM and MTS in the mid-90's.) And how the implementation of IT visions ultimately comes down to customer choice, because people -- even people who work in government Ministries of Education -- are rational actors who select things that are in their best interest and take into account price, roadmap, TCO, pedagogies, politics, local infrastructure, support, bake-off results, the need for measurable outcomes, you name it ... the whole variety of factors that go into a complex government purchase process.

It takes a village to buy a computer, and it's always harder than you think it will be.

But that's all OK, because the OLPC vision isn't going to go away. There will be a permanent role for low cost, flash-based PCs in national education and technology policies. The XO will survive and evolve, and I bet every laptop vendor on the planet including Dell and HP will have a competing machine within 24 months. A new ecosystem of collaborative, social network-inspired and Internet-enabled education software will emerge. Cell phones will play a bigger role in this space than even Nicholas is publicly acknowledging. And kids and teachers will author a lot of the content.

Dangerous dreamers who assume they will change the world in two years but actually do so in ten, in a manner they never initially anticipated. That's my personal view of what the people at OLPC are trying to do. I love the industrial design, I love the screen, and I love the rabbit ears. I wish the team well. But there are other dangerous dreamers out there, and ultimately it will be the magic of software delivered in a sustainable manner that will be the key to transforming education.

But now I need to go back to work.

Beyond Travel

jamesu — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:22:50 GMT

It has been over a week since I returned from my trip to Helsinki, which makes it three out of the last five weeks that I have been on the road outside of the US. While I was in Finland, some of my colleagues in the Unlimited Potential Group were scattered to other parts of the globe. Orlando Ayala and Debby Fry Wilson were in China where they met with partners, helped open a community technology center, and even adopted a panda (as part of a environmental sponsorship program). Michael Rawding --who runs our Partners, Products, and Solutions team -- was in Rwanda, Kenya, and Nigeria. He spoke at the Connect Africa Summit in Kigali and then met with local leaders in the other two countries. National Public Radio in the US ran a piece on the conference. Craig Bruya, who recently joined the UPG team to run strategy for us, was in South Africa meeting with a partner. Will Poole was actually at home last week but leaves Seattle today for a flight to Macau.

So the casual reader of this blog might reach the conclusion that all that these Microsoft people do is jet around the world, attend conferences, and cut ribbons at opening ceremonies for community computing centers. At times I must confess that I feel like a highly paid travel writer.

But there is a method to our madness.

As I mentioned in my opening post, Unlimited Potential is actually a product group that is incubating new technologies targeting the needs of people in the middle and bottom of the economic pyramid. We have sales and technical people in the field who work directly with our partners (including governments and NGOs, by the way) on technology trials and incubations, and we have R&D people in Redmond, India, and China who develop the new technologies and solutions that go into the pilot programs in the field. These two groups work under a single management team to streamline the feedback and decision-making process.

Our goal is straightforward -- developing technology for the next 5 billion people -- and we are guided by a core set of requirements that have emerged for the middle and bottom of the pyramid (which we call MOP and BOP, by the way): Relevant (the technology needs to be useful to people within the context of their daily life); Accessible (it needs to be delivered to where they live); and Affordable (they -- or someone -- can pay for it.)

It is important to understand that our field trials are testing business models as much as they are testing new products and solutions. In almost every case, these new business models involve working with local partners and entrepreneurs. Traditional software industry licensing models -- and pricing levels, for that matter -- may not work in many of these segments. There is an assumption in some circles that the only alternative to this is a "free" open source model, but open source has its own issues in terms of helping bootstrap local technology economies, which we believe is a requirement for success in this mission. And one of the things we are hearing, especially from our experiences in Africa, is that a straight, aid-based model may not be the best way for countries to improve their economies at a national level. Sustained development requires the creation of local businesses, and helping create opportunity for local businesses is something Microsoft likes to do.

When you hear people talk about "new models where business meets philanthropy", this is what they are talking about.

The actual technologies and solutions we are developing cross a broad spectrum, ranging from policy-level programs like the work we are doing with Telecentre.org to hardcore engineering device-specific software development, including the porting of Windows and Office to the emerging class of low cost flash-memory based PCs that are proving to be popular in education scenarios. And we have developed an internal planning tool we call the "Innovation Lifecycle" that we use to gauge the progress of these business model/new technology pairings as they advance through their incubation trials. Many of these projects will never reach broad scale deployment and adoption, and we are consciously trying to avoid the type of hype cycle that characterizes the way the technology industry (including Microsoft!) typically markets products.

So the point of this post is to let you know that there is a lot more going on in UPG beyond travel. We learn so much when we are on the road, the stories almost seem to write themselves. And these solutions we are developing will not be built in a vacuum, we need to work with partners. But for every exec we have out on the road, we have about 40 people back at home doing (real) work. And that is the only way we are going to achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve, by trying to strike the right balance between listening and working.

Will the Digital Divide Widen Before it Narrows?

jamesu — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 09:18:24 GMT

October 19, 2007

I had a scary thought in Budapest today. What if the digital divide widens before it narrows?

The thought occurred to me on Day 2 of our launch event here. I was attending a meeting of an informal group working on a program called "EUGA", or "EU Grants Advisor." This is an ad hoc consortia of government agencies and tech companies in Hungary coming together to share ideas on how to improve digital literacy in the workforce, in this case through a program to make it easier for SMBs to apply for technical training grants from the EU. Some of the companies present included Microsoft, Intel, HP, Cisco, Nuance, and XAPT (the Microsoft partner who worked on WizzAir, one of my favorite case studies from the Dynamics business).

I was stunned to learn from the companies at the meeting that there was a skills shortage in Hungary, and that they all had job openings they couldn't fill with local talent. This was in a country who's economy is going through a rough patch but in general has a highly literate population.

During the meeting we were going around the table discussing ideas on what to do about some of these issues. At a national level in Hungary, there is a need for new programs to train citizens on basic "digital literacy" concepts like how to use a keyboard and how to navigate with a mouse. The government is considering some aggressive moves like a new initiative to buy 100k laptops for all the teachers in the country; another idea is to fund the deployment of a computer into at least half of the country's classrooms within the next two years.

But then the scary thought dawned on me. In "Top of the Pyramid" communities -- and I do mean communities, because there are rich people in Romania and poor people in Ohio -- we are beginning to graduate the first generation of students who have spent their entire life using the Internet. For these kids, it is not as much about computer skills as is about a mentality of living in a networked world where everything is connected, tagged, and discoverable. Articles are beginning to appear that describe how this generation doesn't even use email anymore, yet here I am in a conference room discussing ideas on how to train people to type with more than one finger.

So, is there a "technical skills" generation (where people learn how to use a computer) followed by an "Internet mentality" generation (where people grow up with a new mind-set - that everything is connected and tagged - that shapes how they communicate and work?) And does the wide-scale introduction of "Internet-mentality" students into the workforce widen the gap between developed countries and countries struggling with convincing their government on the need to fund programs to train their population on how to use a mouse.

One of the government officials from Hungary definitely picked up on this idea, expressing concern that his country may have an entire generation of citizens left behind. Hungary definitely has its Facebook crowd, but apparently many of these kids are leaving the country because there clearly aren't enough of them to work at the local Cisco and Intel offices.

If so, what impact will this have on relative economic growth among countries and communities? I am not sure if anyone is formally studying the economic impact of relative or generational levels of computer literacy, but I couldn't help but feel I was in a meeting discussing steam engines at a time when others were booking their own jet travel online. The situation could be more urgent than people realize.

Snowing in Moscow

jamesu — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:40:43 GMT

A group of us are in Central and Eastern Europe this week, starting with two days in Moscow. It's snowing.

The highlight of our day yesterday was the official opening of an IDEA Center, a community-based computer center targeting unemployed, seniors, and people with disabilities. IDEA stands for "Information Dissemination and Equal Access" and is sponsored by Microsoft and Project Harmony, an NGO based in the US. There are over 50 of these centers across Russia, and the new Moscow center is essentially the showcase facility where they set curricula and manage the program. It is housed in a pedagogical library that was a mansion before the Russian Revolution.

Kati Fedotova, the director of the project, described how the IDEA Centers focus on digital literacy and community access. Each center offers on a monthly basis 24 hours of basic computer skills classes along with an additional 10 hours of training on career and capacity skills. All of these centers are located in libraries, giving new purpose to old buildings. The Moscow Center has 30 computer stations across 2 training labs and a walk-in room. Overall the centers have formally trained 17,000 people since last year.

The opening ceremony was apparently a big deal. Over 30 journalists attended, and two news stories ran on local television stations last night. We started with a meeting on a third floor computer lab where we met with the folks from IDEA along with Ann Martin, the executive director of the NGO. We were joined by leaders of the Russian teaching institute who manage the library and host the program. There is a very good partnership here. Will Poole then did some TV interviews and then there was an official ribbon cutting ceremony with Will, Ann and the leader of the teachers institute. Everyone then went downstairs to a converted ballroom where we held a panel discussion and a press conference. The whole event went about two hours, which included the time required for the translators we used for the Q&A

The ballroom had these cool Soviet-era fluorescent light chandeliers. I had never seen anything like them before.

We have one more meeting with an NGO this morning, and then it's off to Bucharest. And in case you noticed, I bought a camera.