Seeking Microsoft's next billion users

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got Microsoft its first billion customers. It's Will Poole's job to get the next billion.

Poole, who co-leads Microsoft's emerging-markets push, is chartered with enabling the company's goal of allowing one billion more people to access computing technology by 2015.

The company has a number of efforts underway in the area, from the Starter Editions of Windows XP and Vista, to shared computers for classrooms, to research into turning a mobile phone into a low-cost computer by connecting it with a large display. Poole said the last effort, which has garnered a fair bit of interest, is moving from the drawing board to reality.

"We've got it in development in China right now," he said during a recent meeting with reporters and editors from ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, CNET News.com. "We've got a manufacturing partner signed on with us and our group in Beijing is working quite hard on it. It'll be in trials I think within a year, and we'll see how people respond to it."

In the meeting, Poole talked about Microsoft's approach, as well as some of the challenges, which stretch well beyond the fact that many people can't afford the latest technology. Relevance and accessibility are bigger hurdles for the world's poor, Poole said.

Q: How can Microsoft reach people who historically have not been users of its technology?
A: Let me begin by clarifying the difference between emerging markets and emerging segments. An emerging market is what people typically think about — such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. The other includes very large developing economies.

Of course there are many people in those countries who do not have very good access to technology. At the same time, we look more broadly at a concept called emerging segments... people who do not have access to technology in whatever market they're in.

It turns out that affordability is actually the third on the list of issues. The first one turns out to be relevance

So what do you do to reach those people? There are obviously people who can't afford technology in the US, as well as in its neighbouring countries and in emerging markets.
There are three primary areas where we can help people realise social and economic opportunity through technology. Transforming education is the first one. The second one is looking at fostering local innovation, and the third one is enabling jobs and opportunities.

When I travel around the world I see the power of the PC to bring people new opportunities, either to have skills that they can apply to get better jobs to earn more money, or to take a disadvantaged person who simply could not get a job at all because of a handicap.

What are some of the technologies that you guys are working on that can really help beyond the economic issues that are in play?
You bring up a very good point. When I started looking at this about five years ago, I thought that affordability was the biggest challenge.

It turns out that affordability is actually the third on the list of issues. The first one turns out to be relevance.

That means bringing a product to market that really meets the needs of somebody in an emerging segment — be it in rural India or in urban China or down the street, here in San Francisco. Are we building a technology that is relevant to the specific needs and problems that they have?

The second thing is to look at whether the technology is accessible to them. Can they find a place to buy it? Can they get support? Can they get broadband connectivity to bring them into the world of the web? And then the third thing is affordability.

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So, for example, in Asia we focus a lot on education because that's a very high priority there. In Latin America, we focus a little bit more on the jobs and opportunities and helping people get better jobs through the use of software technology. So there's a variety of different technologies we'll bring to the market, depending on the specific needs of local people.

I've seen a lot of interesting demos from across the company of some different approaches. One of those is called MultiPoint, where it's basically an entire classroom using one computer. Can you talk a little about how that works?
MultiPoint came from Microsoft Research India. They had sent people out to see what kids were doing with PCs in schools.

What they found was that kids tended to be gathered around a PC and [watching] one person do their thing and then they took turns every five minutes or so. It was really not very engaging.

So they developed this technology called Microsoft MultiPoint, which enables an application to be built that lets multiple mice be used…