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With his philanthrophic activities restricted to day one of his four-day trip to India (he donated $100mn for an aids-awareness programme ye...

With his philanthrophic activities restricted to day one of his four-day trip to India (he donated $100mn for an aids-awareness programme yesterday), the world’s greatest businessman, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, today announced a $400mn investment commitment and returned to what he does best— promoting Microsoft and its products.

So, as part of his presentation, Gates picked up a tablet PC, ‘to be launched in India next month’, to show the audience just how versatile the PC was becoming (thanks to Microsoft software, naturally)—‘okay, just twist the screen this way, flip it over, and it’s like a pad … if you have a stylus, you can take notes at a meeting’, Gates demonstrated.

A video demonstration in the background showed just how (again, thanks to development work Microsoft is engaged in) your cellphone could be used to video-record meetings and send the recordings to people across the world … And when someone in the audience asked him what looked awfully like a planted question—‘how do you managed to keep so energetic?’—Gates used the opportunity to reel off the number of other software applications Microsoft was engaged in developing, and said he was ‘having fun’ doing this! He did add, though, a bit bashfully, that he was quite young as well.

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And since no promo is really complete without a few digs at your rivals, Gates made good use of the 17-minute Q&A session his minders allowed him. Why is Microsoft hiring lesser locals (in India) as compared to firms like Intel and Oracle asked someone—WHO?, joked Gates, before launching into an explanation as to why this was not true. Isn’t Linux emerging as a big threat to Windows, asked someone else—not to Windows, but you’re right, ‘within the Unix-pie, there is a shift from Sun to Linux because the price-performance is much better’, Gates deadpanned while taking a determined swipe at Sun Microsystems.

Among the more exciting investment commitments made by Gates today was a $20 million fund for Project Shiksha—a program to impart computer literacy to 80,000 school teachers who will, eventually, impart this to 3.5 million students. As part of this effort, Microsoft will set up 10 state-of-the-art Microsoft IT academies and also collaborate with 2000 partner-driven school labs. The number of developers in the India Development Centre is to be trebled, to touch 500 in another three years—the center has so far filed for 12 patents already and four more will be filed within the year.

Microsoft will also invest in local partners to develop more .Net solutions. Microsoft XP and Office will be launched in Hindi within the year, and XP support will be extended to Bengali and Malayalam as well.

Earlier, at a meeting with Communications Minister Pramod Mahajan, Gates also agreed to provide an assistance of $1 million for the Media Lab Asia project by government of India. Gates, scheduled to have spent 30 minutes with Mahajan, ended up spending close to 70 minutes. And sources say the investment for Media Lab Asia was not on the cards, but was an offer made by Gates thanks to Mahajan’s charms.