Creating Opportunities
A new global study finds that 14 million jobs depend on Microsoft’s ecosystem.
Here’s some good news: 2007 is shaping up as the fifth consecutive year of extraordinarily strong growth in the global economy. According to the International Monetary Fund, the world has not seen such rapid, sustained economic expansion since the early 1970s.
What’s producing this vigor, which is creating opportunities and reducing joblessness around the world? One of the key factors helping sustain economic activity and stimulate social progress is information technology.
The impressive economic impact of IT in 82 countries was recently quantified in an independent, Microsoft-sponsored study by global IT research provider IDC. The firm found that IT is a leading driver of job creation and growth in the tax base worldwide.
Spending on IT will be about US$1.24 trillion this year and is expected to grow at almost twice the rate of global GDP through 2011. Today, more than one million IT companies—selling hardware, software and services—employ around 14 million people. Another 21 million IT workers are employed in other industries. Over the next four years, such jobs are expected to increase at three times the rate of growth in the overall global workforce. In the United States alone, 1.5 million new IT-related jobs are expected.
Software has an especially important impact because its sales have a big multiplier effect, helping stimulate demand for new hardware and IT services. As a result, while software accounts for 21 percent of all IT spending, IDC’s report indicates that software is responsible for half of all IT employment.
What’s more, spending and jobs are growing even faster in software than in IT overall. In the United States, software employment is expected to continue growing at a solid pace of 5 percent a year through 2011. Globally, fully one-third of the 82 countries studied should see their software employment increase by 10 percent a year or more.
For Microsoft, what’s especially heartening is to see the enormous economic impact of our ecosystem—at least 500,000 companies, by IDC’s estimate, that offer products or services involving our software. Not counting Microsoft itself, the ecosystem employs 14 million IT workers and will generate $420 billion in revenues around the world this year. That’s about $7.79 for every dollar Microsoft will make. In the United States next year, the Microsoft ecosystem should generate close to $100 billion in investments in local economies.
IDC concludes, “The economic benefits quantified in this study help countries grow, create new jobs, improve the quality of their labor force, and support the formation of new companies.”
That is good news, indeed. And we’re extremely proud to be a part of it.
