Don't you think it is a bit ironic when a venture capitalist as Microsoft does not put its own money into these start-ups. I mean why should our governments support companies which strenghten the Microsoft sales platform or reduce their taxes? That doesn't make any sense.

Dear Jana thank you for your comment. You are right, Microsoft doesn't make direct investment in new business ideas because it's not a venture capitalist. However we do still invest substantially in European start-ups. We do this in several ways: we encourage students to innovate and reward the best, see DreamSpark [https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx] for more details. We deploy teams of experts in local markets to find innovative ICT start-ups and coach them through their first few years of business which really helps their chances of success. You can find out more about this program at BizSpark [http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/]. The BizSpark team also create networking opportunities for start-ups to meet venture capitalists and Microsoft offers free software to entrepreneurs to allow them to innovate without having to invest in the latest software. Finally we have a program called European Grants Advisor [www.microsoft.eu/euga], where we employ local experts to help entrepreneurs access their country's government funding which can be complicated and time consuming process to go through alone. Of course Microsoft is first and foremost a business but we cannot survive if the local market isn't thriving, so it's part of our business to help others grow. In fact we recently calculated that for every one euro Microsoft makes, our partners make 9 euros. By partners I am referring to start-ups, independent software sellers, developers etc.