At the seventh annual Microsoft CEO Summit today on the software company's campus here, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates told more than 100 top executives from worldwide Fortune 1000 companies that that the potential for innovation in the information technology (IT) industry can fuel substantial returns on IT investments.

Addressing recent questions over the role of IT in corporate competitiveness, Gates noted that "IT has been compared to the railroad, where now that the tracks have been laid, there is no advantage to be had from having better IT systems."

On the contrary, Gates said, "Our view is that IT long ago moved away from being simply about back-office activities."

IT, he said "has become the tool that determines whether your information workers can do their job effectively. Do they know what's going on with customer satisfaction? Are they engineering new models in a very effective way? Are they finding partners to work with in a strong fashion?"

Conceding that a few years ago technology suffered from too much hype, leading to speculation that overestimated the functionality of software, Gates said that "today, we are in some ways underhyped -- people are underestimating what can be done."