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Gates: Microsoft's Upping Security R&D Budget

• By Scott Bekker
• January 28, 2004

More of Microsoft's $6.8 billion research budget will be directed toward making its software more secure and reliable, chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates said at a European technology conference.

"For Microsoft, security will continue to be our top R&D investment for years to come," the Reuters news service reported Bill Gates as telling industry experts at a Microsoft conference in Prague.

Gates apparently did not specify how much of the research budget would be funneled into security in 2004. Microsoft has said publicly in the past that it spent about $200 million on its Trustworthy Computing initiative for things like staff retraining and code reviews.

The comment comes after Gates, earlier in the week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, predicted that spam would be drastically reduced by 2006. "There are a lot of advanced breakthroughs in the area we call Trustworthy Computing. In the next 12 to 18 months we can expect (spam) not to be a major problem as today," Gates said.

Gates also said that only 20 percent of customers use up-to-date software, a figure he would like to see increased to 90 percent.