Companies should not outsource their core business functions and staff, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates told a group of Japan"s top businessmen in a speech in Tokyo on Wednesday. Gates, who was speaking at the Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), Japan"s biggest and most influential business group, urged IT companies to beware of outsourcing too much to save costs and to keep their key engineering resources and IP (intellectual property) at home.
"If you rely too much on people in other companies and countries ... you are outsourcing your brains where you are making all the innovation," he said. The need to maintain a competitive edge by investing rather than cost cutting was a theme that Gates returned to several times in an address to a group of leading Japanese IT and consumer industrialists that included NEC Chairman Hajime Sasaki and Tadashi Okamura, chairman of Toshiba, both of whom had front-row seats.