The American computer company Microsoft recently announced plans to pump between $150m and $160m into the Egyptian market over the next four years. Khalid Abdel Qader, Executive President of Microsoft Egypt, stated that the move came as part of the company's new plan to provide support to small and mid-sized projects operating within Egypt, in an attempt to open up and penetrate new markets and decrease spending. He added that the company seeks to establish a cloud computing centre to service users located in the Middle East, and is studying the potential creation of the headquarters for such a centre in Jordan, Qatar or Egypt. He went on to say that discussions had been held with Egypt's communications minister regarding the issue, adding that the company sought to test the service with governments and companies working in Africa. Abdel Qader went on to say that Egyptian market demand for the Windows 8 operating system has increased compared to previous versions of Windows. He added that the local launch of the company's new operating system came at the same time as that of its international release. He went on to say that the best way to combat the sale of pirated and knockoff versions of Microsoft products was to first encourage innovation, saying that research and development in Egypt was particularly lacking in this field. He stated that knockoff versions of Microsoft products currently made up 60% of Egypt's local computer market, a number which has increased 4% since the 25 January Revolution. He further stated that Microsoft has taken a series of strategic decisions regarding Egypt's local market, making significant increases in investment in the human resources sector, saying that the number of Egyptians employed by Microsoft has gone up since the revolution.
