• Collective Medical Technologies Receives e-business Award
• Students Learn from the Pros
• Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson Says Technology Changes Lives
• Email Etiquette: How to Use it More Effectively
• The World is Flat

• Register for the FREE newsletter
• Submit ideas for future articles
• Become a partner with the eBusiness Center

• Newsletter Archives

• Contact the editor of the eBusiness Center Newsletter:

Rachel Finley
574 TNRB
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-3598
prspecialist@byu.edu

Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson Says Technology Changes Lives

Kevin Johnson, a top Microsoft executive, spoke about how technology can bring changes to people’s lives, on his 10 March visit to Brigham Young University. Johnson was the keynote speaker for the eLeaven track of the 2006 Economic Self-Reliance Conference, sponsored by the Center for Economic Self-Reliance and the Kevin and Debra Rollins Center for eBusiness at the Marriott School of Management.

Johnson says it is important to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential and achieve it. More than 50 percent of Microsoft’s growth in the last few years has come from emerging markets in Asia and South America.

“These emerging markets want technology to help educate their children,” Johnson says. “There are masses of people in the bottom of the pyramid struggling to survive.”

He suggests that computing in emerging markets goes the opposite way as it does America, creating a need not only for a different set of products, but a different business model as well. This model tailors to, as well as localizes products for consumers who will be first-time buyers with different needs and expectations.

“If you have a computer at your house your children will stay at home and won’t have to go to the café,” comments a mother from Thailand featured in Johnson’s video presentation. “Otherwise my children would have to do homework outside the house.”

Johnson says community development will come from reaching out. Some of their concerns are economic prosperity, education, health, security, and digital inclusion. He said this makes it possible to develop a technology economy roadmap that will work for their specific needs.