In a move which is good for business both coming and going, Microsoft has indicated that it intends to commit an additional $20 million dollars to its Project Shiksha in India, which trains school teachers on the use of technology in education.

With the additional funding, the company plans to expand the program to directly address schools and students, providing them in some cases with the necessary hardware running the necessary software: Windows.

This of course is a boon to both the company's business directly by providing a whole generation of potential new customers, but also indirectly by providing a ready-made pool of talent to support additional off-shoring of the company's operations in the coming years. As a bonus, it dovetails nicely with the Gates Foundation's mission to support global learning.

I don't mean to cast any aspersions on the company's motivations, incidentally; I have nothing but the highest praise for what Bill has chosen to do with his fortune, and for the culture of giving that he and Paul Allen imparted to Microsoft almost from the beginning... while their business dealings have often been hard-nosed and even shady, there is nothing underhanded in the company's largely unheralded track record of donating money, time, and software to worthy causes around the globe. And lest any of the current management assume that providing students with Microsoft products in their impressionable formative years is a sure-fire technique for winning future customers, they have no further to look than Apple, which adopted a similar strategy back when they were still larger than the company from Redmond, to little avail.

Still, there is nothing wrong with doing well while doing right, and I'd rather see Microsoft milllions invested in this sort of endeavor (I suppose you can argue about the nationalistic aspects of off-shoring in terms of right and wrong, but I don't happen to agree with that perspective) than in funding litigation against open-source projects which serve the same purpose.