"This is the decade when IT will change the productivity of the economy," said Bill Gates in London last week, when he met chancellor Gordon Brown and addressed software developers. Between trying to hold the line on Microsoft pricing to the public sector and promoting Longhorn, Gates took on the sceptics who have been claiming that IT investment makes no difference to business success. From breakthroughs in speed and memory capacity in the 1980s to the decade of the internet in the 1990s, Gates said, "The missing link has been software." He added that there is no software more significant than XML.
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