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Bill Gates throws cold water on Google's dream of connecting the world |
August 08, 2013
What good is an Internet balloon if kids are dying underneath it? In a Bloomberg interview, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates implies that the world’s burning, and companies like Google—and Silicon Valley at large—are simply inventing better fiddles.
The interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, released Thursday, doesn’t just take the side that Silicon Valley isn’t just inventing anything useful, as some have said over the years. It takes aim at the idea that the technology industry is losing sight of the big problems that it should be solving.
Case in point: Google, which Gates uses as a scapegoat for tech woes in general. Google recently unveiled Project Loon, a series of wirelessly interconnnected balloons designed to float over third-world counties and provide Internet access to those below. The problem, according to Gates, is that challenges those poor countries face isn’t a lack of Internet access, but the basic issues of poverty, income, education, and health.
”When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you,” Gates said, according to the interview. “When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.”
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2046197/bill-gates-throws-cold-water-on-googles-dream-of-connecting-the-world.html#tk.rss_all
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