Steve Ballmer: Microsoft To Invest About $300 Million to Russia

Today Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has visited Moscow and made some interesting announcements here. The most important of all the things he has said (at least for the Russian market) is that Microsoft is going to invest as much as $300 million to the Russian market within the next 3 years.

The goal for the money to be invested in Russia by the Redmond giant is to both launch some short-term antirecession actions and to expand the long-term projects that Microsoft already has here.

The interesting part is that some of the projects here will be implemented jointly with the Russian government - for example, as soon as this year Microsoft will launch a program to teach people basic computer skills. There will also be dedicated IT programs for students and college graduates. Up to 300 thousand people will be able to study in 100 Microsoft training centers (currently there are 60 such centers throughout the country so the number will be increased to accommodate all the people who want to learn how to use a Windows computer).

Of course it is quite understandable that Microsoft pursues very simple goals by establishing all these training centers as the more people use Microsoft products as their default productivity applications, the higher sales of Microsoft products will be in Russia.

In addition to that, Microsoft has plans to support Russian startups by offering them Microsoft software products for free: as many as 1,000 Russian companies will receive both server applications and productivity applications for up to 10 computers in each company. The only problem that I see here is that after working in quite a number of software companies and startups here I know for sure that you will hardly find any software or web developer in this country who will agree to use Microsoft products - even if they are offered for free.

There will also be other fields where Microsoft will apply the money to strengthen the ties with Russia - in science and in secondary and higher education. Of course it is totally obvious that Microsoft is only looking for new ways to increase its revenue off the Russian corporate and consumer markets so there’s nothing that I’d really want to thank Microsoft for even though I appreciate their willingness to invest in my country.

At the same time it is interesting if this decision and pretty large-scale investments have anything to do with the recent decision of the Russian authorities to include Microsoft into the list of monopolies. If Microsoft is officially considered to be a monopoly in Russia, the operations of the company in the country will be watched more closely to make sure it does not prevent its competitors from doing their businesses here as well. Unfortunately I don’t think any large-scale investment could persuade anyone that Microsoft was not actually a monopoly so this is probably inevitable for the company but having good relations with the authorities will probably help avoid more serious actions against the corporation at least.

Via (in Russian)