Microsoft is committed to being a responsible industry partner, working with businesses, communities, and governments to help advance social and economic well-being and to enable people around the world to realize their full potential. Over the past three decades, we have expanded our business from the United States into more than 90 other countries, and we now employ nearly 60,000 people globally. While Microsoft, by many measures, could be considered the world's most successful software company, it is also a local company and a neighbor in every country and community where Microsoft employees live, work, and do business.

As a successful global corporation, we have a responsibility to use our resources and influence to make a positive impact on the world and its people. At Microsoft, our passion to do well is matched by our desire to do good. We believe the best way to achieve those parallel goals is to align our business and global citizenship strategies. To achieve that goal, we consulted with our employees, and with people in government and industry from many parts of the world, because we wanted to create a citizenship framework that would both reflect and enhance the other aspects of our business.

Executive Welcome

In 2005, we're celebrating Microsoft's 30th anniversary. Over the past three decades, our software products have enabled hundreds of millions of people to fulfill their personal and professional goals. We're proud of everything we have accomplished, but we haven't done it alone. From the beginning, we have built our business through partnerships with approximately 650,000 companies, and we're expanding our global citizenship efforts through the same kind of proactive collaboration with other industry leaders, governments, community-based organizations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

None of our achievements would be possible without the extraordinary efforts of our employees. Not only do they work hard every day to make Microsoft a successful business, but they also contribute their time, expertise, and personal resources to many of our citizenship efforts.

In the course of our work, we meet often with government, NGO, and community leaders worldwide, and during our discussions one theme always emerges: their passion and drive to create opportunities for their citizens, for local businesses and industries, and for the communities they serve. At Microsoft, we share this passion for creating opportunities, and it is our mission to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.

That's why we have made a commitment to provide technology access and skills training to a quarter billion people by 2010—people previously underserved by technology. It's why we collaborate with law enforcement agencies and officials worldwide to help keep children safe online, and why we work hard to make our software more secure from viruses, worms, and other malicious attacks. And it's why we have created a culture of accountability at Microsoft to help ensure that all of our business relationships and transactions exemplify the respect and integrity we have built into our core values.

But no matter how far-reaching our overall goals may be, they always come down to empowering one person at a time. Whether we're working with community-based organizations and NGOs in China to increase employment opportunities for unskilled migrant workers, partnering with law enforcement officials in Canada to develop a customized system that helps police fight computer-facilitated crimes against children, collaborating in Latin America with the Organization of American States and its affiliate the Trust for the Americas to help people with disabilities gain the skills they need to start their own businesses and find employment, or working with leading companies and community organizations in Europe on a grants program to help small and medium-sized enterprises improve productivity through technology, our commitment is the same: to make it possible for people to use technology to improve their lives.

We are working every day to ensure Microsoft's continuing evolution as a global corporate citizen and to create new opportunities for people everywhere.

Sincerely,