You don't get to be the largest software company in the world by leaving things to chance. Microsoft was preaching the gospel to IT professionals in Barcelona this week, but last week the venue was Brussels and the audience was MEPs, European policy makers and academics.
To say Microsoft has had differences of opinion with the EU would be something of an understatement. The US company has been hit with a total of €777.5 million in fines for what European regulators saw as anti-competitive behaviour.
For its part, Microsoft suggested that the EU was stifling competition and didn't understand properly the way the technology industry worked.
Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates visited Brussels to speak about "innovation in Europe". The assembled journalists may have been hoping that the world's richest man was going to deliver a few home truths in the home of the European parliament, but they were to be disappointed.
Gates's speech focused on the economic importance of innovation and the roles that the technology industry, the EU and academia have to play in fostering it in Europe. He underlined Microsoft's commitment to research and development (R&D) and the links it has with universities both in the US and Europe.
In fact Gates was full of praise for the European approach, saying Microsoft was "very excited" by the seventh EU Framework Programme for Research which will channel €50 billion into R&D, and acknowledged that the Lisbon Agenda target of each member state spending 3 per cent of GDP on research was "very ambitious".
The only time Gates flirted with controversy was when he touched on the issue of software patents. Whereas the US allows new ideas in software to be patented, the EU doesn't. Opinion in Europe is split over the issue, with open source advocates in particular condemning the idea as one that will stifle innovation and favour big business.
"The incentive systems around copyright and patents is, along with the universities, the thing that has allowed the US to really be very strong," said Gates. "If you invent a new approach in software, you should have a patent right in that."
Gates suggested a harmonised system was required rather than the current "cumbersome" one which he said could be improved.
It was left to the man that Gates shared the stage with, Matti Vanhanen, the Finnish prime minister and current president of the EU council, to question Europe's record on innovation.
The former journalist is well qualified to comment on the issue - he heads up his country's Information Society Programme and says that innovation has been top of his agenda during Finland's EU presidency.
Vanhanen said he was proud that Finland was one of the top 10 global nations in terms of the proportion of its investment in R&D, but he said this was less to do with Finnish excellence than an underinvestment by other countries.
Vanhanen lamented the fact that, of the 500 companies worldwide which spend the most on R&D, only 70 are from the EU.
"I strongly believe that Europe needs an innovation policy that is more company driven and we in government should focus on removing barriers to innovation," said Vanhanen.
He said Europe needs to take innovation policy seriously if it is to prosper in the face of competition from the US and Asia.
At both events in Europe, Microsoft played the economic card with the EU and said it is committed to investing $500 million (€390 million) annually in R&D in Europe by next year.
It also pointed to a recent study of 28 European countries by analysts IDC which suggested that Windows Vista will support more than one million IT jobs.
