Gates open to Vietnam's IT potential
As Vietnam's Communist party apparatchiks met this weekend under portraits of Marx and Lenin for the opaque process of selecting the country's new rulers, Bill Gates, the world's richest man, landed in Hanoi for a one-day visit and was received as a conquering hero. Mr Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft, a first-time visitor to Vietnam and the epitome of capitalist success, was given a red carpet welcome at the dilapidated Hanoi University of Technology, where he was mobbed by thousands of cheering students, many clutching Vietnamese-language versions of his books. In a speech and subsequent question session, Mr Gates won repeated applause as he spoke of the potential for young Vietnamese to work in software outsourcing, call centres, back office processing and other niches of the global information economy.
