Bill Gates Promotes Electronic Cash as a Development Tool
In the mid-1990s, Bill Gates speculated that banks could one day be made obsolete by the Internet. That didn't exactly endear the Microsoft Corp. co-founder to his numerous customers in the banking industry. As they began to understand the web's boundary-breaking implications, many bankers came to view Microsoft as an all-powerful gatekeeper that could control access to important new technologies and perhaps pose a direct competitive threat.As BusinessWeek said back in January:
Sensitive to allegations of monopolistic behavior-- not only from bankers-- Gates embarked on a diplomatic offensive, making himself available to the trade press and speaking at industry conferences. Whether because of Gate's effectiveness in presenting Microsoft as a partner whose interests aligned with those of a healthy and presumably technology-savvy financial services sector or just a wider awareness that the high-tech revolution and its challenges were bigger than any one company, bankers toned down the rhetoric and turned their attention to developing their first generation of Internet-based services.
In retrospect, those tensions turned out to be instructive, a foreshadowing of Microsoft's less imperious future and a proverbial wake-up call for the banks.
Today, as co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the software billionaire is still in the business of stirring things up, promoting favored causes like education and disease eradication in the developing world. One of those causes is electronic cash --or, more precisely, in the words of Gates Foundation grant recipient the Better Than Cash Alliance, "accelerating the shift from cash to electronic payments."...MORE
Bill Gates Hates Cash. Here's Why
