This is a very important document. M
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Love Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 2:22 AM To: Ip-health; a2k Subject: [A2k] Microsoft, Gates Foundation Timeline http://www.keionline.org/microsoft-timeline Microsoft, Gates Foundation Timeline November 29, 2010 Introduction This timeline contains a number of selected data points concerning Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). The motivations for this timeline, which features entries for both Microsoft and the BMGF, are several. Both Microsoft and BMGF are important and extremely powerful in their core areas of operation. According to some estimates, Microsoft has a greater than 90 percent global market share for the operating system used in personal computers. Despite the modest needs of most users, and the availability of several plausible alternatives, Microsoft continues to enjoy a global market share of 80 to 90 percent for applications such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Microsoft is also an important provider of a variety of other products, including software for databases and web hosting services. In the areas where Microsoft enjoys monopoly power, the margins are high and the profits are large. This has not only made Microsoft's largest shareholders extremely wealthy, it has provided enormous resources to lobby governments and influence institutions and the public. While no longer as intimidating a presence in the technology world as it was in 1997, in part due to the moderating influence of antitrust laws, Microsoft has enormous power, and it uses that power to shape policies in the public and private sector in ways that few are aware, including not only government policies on intellectual property, procurement, innovation, the regulation of telecommunications and competition, but also topics such as climate change and public health. In many of these areas, Microsoft promotes policies that harm consumers and block innovation, such as Microsoft's well documented attacks on open software standards. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has enormous assets and is growing in size, in part due to a generous 2006 pledge stock from Warren Buffett, the investor. In 2009, the BMGF reported more than $3 billion in grants, and $409 million in operating expenses, mostly directed at projects to improve the lives of poor persons living in developing countries. In the area of public health, there is no donor as influential as the Gates Foundation except the U.S. government. Globally, everyone who seeks a career in public health must anticipate the importance of developing a good relationship with the Gates Foundation, or at least a low profile. The Gates Foundation is doing much good, and Bill Gates is admirably showing leadership in encouraging others to do what he has chosen to do -- give away most of his wealth. And while few would say his philanthropy is too much of a good thing, there are clearly significant consequences and indeed also risks in such an enormous concentration of power. The fairly rapid demise of public sector policy-making in key areas of public health, and the reliance upon the Gates family and its staff, creates an impoverished debate over public health priorities, and leads to unchallenged policy changes in others. One area that is quite important concerns the debate over intellectual property rights, and the testing of new models to de-link R&D incentives from product monopolies. While Gates made his money from a software monopoly, he also insists that strong legal product monopolies are the best instrument to fuel innovation for new medical technologies, including drugs, vaccines, diagnostics and medical devices. Despite massive empirical evidence of the failures of the current systems of financing medical innovation, many public health officials correctly anticipate their careers will be harmed if they openly embrace needed reforms. The centralization of decision-making in the area of R&D for neglected diseases is thought by many to lead to "group think" and other bureaucratic flaws that undermine innovation -- an issue that may seem more relevant once one considers the paucity of successful new products (outside of its two areas of monopoly power) that Microsoft has launched in the past twenty years and the durable hostility of Microsoft to open collaborative models of innovation, including those that involve open licensing of intellectual property rights. There are also concerns about the lack of transparency, stakeholder voices and accountability for a system of public health that in some areas has become effectively privatized by one entity. Finally, it is regrettable that the Gates Foundation is a staunch opponent of discussions at the World Health Organization of a possible treaty on medical R&D --- an initiative that would create new global norms for sustainable funding of priority medical R&D, promote access to knowledge, and bring needed transparency and new ethical standards to medical research and development system. The following timeline combines entries involving selected events and actors for these two different, but related entities -- Microsoft and the BMGF. Timeline [snip] The timeline is at the link below: http://www.keionline.org/microsoft-timeline -- James Love, Director, Knowledge Ecology International http://www.keionline.org | http://www.twitter.com/jamie_love Wk: +1.202.332.2670 | US Mobile +1.202.361.3040 | Geneva Mobile +41.76.413.6584 _______________________________________________ A2k mailing list [email protected] http://lists.keionline.org/mailman/listinfo/a2k_lists.keionline.org _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
