RE: BillG at Davos on Influencing Professors

Mark Kuharich (mkuharich@BESTNET.com)
Mon, 8 Feb 1999 10:17:28 -0800


Buying your friends. "If you're a professor and you mention Microsoft
programming tools in a scholarly presentation - in fact, even if you just
use the tools -- Microsoft will send you a check for $200

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Mark Kuharich

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-----Original Message-----
From: Rohit Khare [mailto:rohit@uci.edu]

After wading through an hour of video from WEF99 in Davos, there was one
unscripted tidbit from Bill Gates: he's really keen on "making sure we're
serving those professors".

Sessions: http://live99.weforum.org/live.asp
In particular, cue exactly 1 hour into:
http://play.rbn.com/?novell/novell/demand/nov990201a-32.rm

Then, just before question, Chad asked Bill how he recruits. The session
goes something like:

C: Do you have any unique methods or recruiting?
BillG: Well a huge percentage of our new hiring is people right out of
university - -so having personal relationships with the key professors in
the leading schools and making sure we're serving those professors, tracking
attitudes towards our company -- particularly when there's a dip, when we're
not getting as many people out of that institution - we want to know what
are we doing wrong there, what do we have to beef up? So it's going to the
strong universities, that's been a huge benefit for us, and that works
internationally.

[So, I wonder what the bribery budget is like this year... I know some
Caltech people made off well with Adam :-)]

[one presume's he's referring to NT educational licenses]