Microsoft supporting French software venture

Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune : "Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, unveiled an agreement here on Monday intended to encourage software development in France.

Abbreviated to IDEES, the French word for ideas, the agreement involves 15 venture-capital partners, eight French start-up software companies and an initiative by Microsoft to offer privileged cooperation in a number of ways, including marketing, development and testing of new software.

The French government has been eager to promote the country's software industry. While recent buyouts of French companies by U.S.-based software developers have highlighted French technical abilities, marketing and scaling up have remained elusive. There are more than 3,000 software developers in France, but only 16 have been listed on the stock exchange and fewer than 50 have an annual turnover of more than 4 million, or $4.8 million, a year.

Speaking to a gathering of several hundred French software professionals, Gates emphasized that there was room for all sizes of players in the software market.

"We need in this industry small software companies with two or five people that are very, very specialized," Gates said. "We also need many giants."

Even as Gates focused on the idea that small software start-ups are important, he emphasized that there was also a major role for larger software companies in contributing to longer-term development issues. "In both Europe and in the U.S., the role of the start-up was overhyped," Gates said, highlighting the contribution that large companies bring to research. "When Microsoft was small, we benefited from the research others had done."

Protecting intellectual property is an important part of encouraging both research and small companies, Gates said, while adding that small software companies would do best to concentrate on those areas where they can be competitive.

Gates said word processing, a sector dominated by his company's Word program, is an example of an application that is best suited to a big software company with a global reach.

"Health care applications, on the other hand, are quite local," Gates said. "Most software is actually local and fairly specialized."

Asked to react to Gates's comments during a discussion session on the same stage, a French software developer, Jamel Labed, emphasized the difficulties that small software companies can face.

"It is not always easy to be a small developer," said Labed, co-founder of Staff&Line, a business software company. "Companies often have confidence in bigger companies."


Microsoft to extend Office

In a new bid for growth, Microsoft announced Monday that it would make an ambitious push into the $13 billion-a-year market for business intelligence software, The New York Times reported from New York.

The company is trying to lure new business by extending Office, its toolbox of desktop computing, beyond its familiar programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Business intelligence software is used to help workers quickly find and analyze information inside their corporations.

The company is positioning its new product, Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager, as an inexpensive, easy-to-use entrant for such uses."