About Microsoft and Digital Policy
Innovation for the digital Economy has become Europe’s engine for growth and job creation across all sectors.
A clear example of this is the EU programme ‘Horizon 2020 running from 2014 to 2020 with an €80 billion budget for research and innovation to create growth and jobs in Europe. "Horizon 2020 aims to tackle societal challenges by helping to bridge the gap between research and the market by, for example, helping innovative enterprise to develop their technological breakthroughs into viable products with real commercial potential."
The ICT sector itself holds some of the most promising prospects for growth. By creating new ideas, new services and new technologies, Europe has the potential to create new businesses, new jobs and increase its competitiveness. In 2010, Microsoft invested 6.54 billion euros worldwide in R&D. Our R&D facilities in Europe employ 2700 researchers and engineers across 28 countries. Ultimately, our future success as company is based not only on our innovation but also on the many opportunities our products create for other to innovate.
As a platform company, Microsoft works with a diverse and mutually-beneficial partner network of 146 000 companies, ranging from multi-nationals to SMEs, to build an innovative and competitive digital market. Focusing on policies favoring Intellectual property protection, interoperability, child online safety, privacy and security, we wish to be part of the debate on the EU digital agenda to ensure that the EU’s regulatory and policy environment enable both consumers and partners to reap the maximum benefit from our innovations.
An IDC study released in 2009 projected that spending growth in the ICT sector would drive the creation of 16,000 new businesses, mainly SMEs, and generate more than € 264 billion in tax revenue annually”. Microsoft is working to expand the possibilities for computing every day - investing in new technologies and new business models that are transformative and are helping to solve important global challenges. We are working in partnership with EU stakeholder involved in achieving the Digital Agenda targets to ensure that new technologies and services evolve to meet the needs of Europe’s governments, economies and citizens.
www.microsoft.eu offers a space for debate around how best to advance the development of both technology and policy that will pave the road to a green, healthy, digitally-skilled, competitive & entrepreneurial Europe. To this end, Microsoft representatives, external experts and stakeholders blog and exchange views on all sorts of topics related to Innovation, Skills & Education, Entrepreneurship & SMEs and of course Digital Policy. We also publish video interviews, case studies as well as information about forthcoming events, and articles from our Futures Innovation magazine.
On this section, an extensive amount of content related to Europe’s digital framework on interoperability, security, privacy, online safety, telecom and cloud computing is available and we increasingly welcome guest bloggers to share their views on these key topics. All that said, we hope that the information provided will match your interests. We strongly encourage you to dive into our site and to let us know if you have any comments or suggestions. Learn more about our technology policy initiatives:
Interoperability
The ICT revolution continues to deliver new products and services to more -- and more diverse -- users, enabling greater productivity, access to information and entertainment. As new technologies and companies multiply, the links between old and new products from different companies become more complex. Today, the ability of different products developed by different vendors to work together is more important than ever.
Reflecting huge changes in our industry, we are transforming the way we work. Our user-friendly technologies bring people and businesses innumerable benefits across the world, but we also know that consumers should not have to be locked into or out of particular products – so we are working continually towards a model offering choice. No single vendor can address increasingly complex needs alone. That is why, even as we create software that can be used by people around the world, we also work to ensure more open and interoperable products. This includes partnering with competitors, working with open source communities, ensuring open connections to our high-volume products and sharing more information.
Click here for more information about Microsoft and Interoperability.
Child Online Safety
The internet offers Europe’s children tremendous educational and social benefits, but may also expose them to harm. We therefore help raising awareness of law enforcement and technology solutions that can help to reduce the risks faced by children online. We partner with NGOs such as Child Focus to bring child online safety education to schools through our employee volunteers programme, and raise awareness at events such as the European Safer Internet Day. We engage on many levels with industry, business, law enforcement and government to create an expanding ‘culture of online safety’.
Click here to learn more about Microsoft and Child Online Safety.
Privacy
Europeans are spending more of their lives online, with the web providing access to entertainment, banking and even healthcare. Yet the internet, to which we entrust so much, will fail to achieve its full potential if we lose faith in the privacy of the information we share. We are committed and active participants in high profile initiatives such as Data Protection Day, celebrated each year in January.
Click here for more information on Microsoft and Privacy.
Security
The internet can act as a platform for Europe’s innovation and imagination, but only if public confidence is maintained and cybercrime tackled effectively. We are helping to establish a trusted community across the internet, embracing people, data, software and hardware. Also, partnering with other leading technology companies, we have founded the ‘Trust in Digital Life’ partnership to define a vision for trustworthy ICT-related products, including devices, applications, services and infrastructures.
Technology is only part of the solution, with the consumer being at the heart of defense in depth. We work to ensure that security technologies are user friendly and work hand in hand with consumers, enabling productivity rather than impeding it.
Click here to get more information about Microsoft and Security.
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