AmCham hosted an iftar on October 19 with guest speakers Tarek Kamel, minister of communications and information technology, and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp., who spoke about the role of IT in Egypt’s future development. Both were optimistic about the country’s prospects of leveraging the benefits of technology for job creation and productivity growth in both the public and private sectors.

AmCham Egypt’s executive vice president, Gamal Moharam, opened the event by congratulating Karim Ramadan, general manager of Microsoft Egypt, on being nominated for the US State Department’s Award for Corporate Excellence – the award given annually to American firms operating abroad that demonstrate good corporate governance while assisting foreign countries with development. Microsoft Egypt was nominated by the US ambassador to Egypt for its highly successful Internet learning centers.

Kamel, speaking on behalf of Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, explained that his government’s goal was to outline a “strategic vision for the social [and] economic reform of Egypt.” One key aspect of this is the government’s partnership with Microsoft to develop e-government services. “Our e-government partnership with Microsoft is really becoming a model that is being implemented in many neighboring countries,” he noted. Kamel also praised other aspects of the partnership such as the PC For Every Home initiative, which, he says, has resulted in “a clear reduction in software piracy while availing PCs to the different layers of society at very affordable cost.”

Kamel praised Microsoft’s Egyptian initiatives, noting that the company selected Egypt to establish its first Innovation Center, the second outside the US, as part of its IT education initiative here. He went on to say that the cooperation with Microsoft is a prime model of the public-private partnerships (PPPs) that the Nazif government is encouraging. The floor was then turned over to Microsoft’s CEO.

From the moment he took the stage, Ballmer, who took over from Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft this year, left no doubt he had the energy to run the world’s biggest IT company. Animated, upbeat and with the occasional humorous quip, Ballmer explained what he envisions as the role of IT in human development over the coming decade and how Microsoft expects to lead the way in fulfilling it. “Ten years from now literally all forms of human knowledge and communication will be available to you instantly... on your computer, all digital,” he predicted.

Ballmer praised the Egyptian government’s development goals as they bring the world closer to this ideal. “There is a lot of technology talent here and I’ll say certainly there is no government I’ve ever met, anywhere in the world, where there is more focus on technology both as a driver of economic growth and an important supporter in improvement in government and social operations,” he said.

He then explained why, profits aside, this is a worthwhile goal. “The real value of a PC on every desk and in every home and the real value of information technology, is what it does to enable people to do things they never dreamed were possible.” He pointed out that Microsoft itself has changed its mission since its founding in the early 1980s to reflect this value. “Our first mission statement was to put a computer on every desk and in every home,” he said. “[Today,] our mission as a company is to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”

“When we’re sitting together here at the AmCham meeting in the year 2016... we’ll look back and we’ll say that this decade, the decade between 2006 and 2016, was perhaps the most exciting in the history of information technology,” Ballmer proclaimed. He asked the audience to consider how much can change in a decade. “Ten years ago most people didn’t have PCs, 10 years ago most people didn’t have mobile phones; perhaps even more shocking, 10 years ago most people didn’t know what the Internet even was, let alone used it.” He then described his vision for the coming decade.

The key change, he says, will be in integrating disparate technologies to facilitate communication, entertainment and data manipulation. One example he gave was the illogical divide between mobile phones and PCs that has developed because of different hardware technologies and infrastructures. “Is it PC versus mobile phone?” he asked. “I don’t think so... it’s a PC and mobile phone.”

Ballmer went on to comment on the Egyptian market specifically. “If you think about technology talent per GDP dollar, I think Egypt would be an upper echelon country,” he said, explaining that this makes it a good country in which to invest. “What I see us doing here is making a real investment in Egypt in a set of companies that essentially build applications and repeatable services and then having a chance for those companies to repeat that on an outsourced type basis throughout this hemisphere.”

Ballmer concluded by saying that “when you take that incredible base of talent, not only serving the Egyptian market, but I think increasingly being a source of export elsewhere... in the world, I think there’s a very bright and exciting future for the Egyptian technology industry, and for the Egyptian society.”

A question and answer session followed the presentations, at the end of which AmCham Egypt presented Ballmer with an honorary membership.