Bill Gates believes Google's Project Loon isn't that helpful

Google had recently launched Project Loon, which aims towards bringing access to the Internet in the more underdeveloped parts of the world. If this seems charitable to you, Bill Gates would beg to differ. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Gates talked about how Google’s balloons won’t help solve problems. “When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you.”

“When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that,” he continued, “Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.”

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Gates doubts the usefulness of Google’s balloons

Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have their own well-known nonprofit organisation named the Bill & Mellinda Gates Foundation, which aims for ridding developing nations of diseases such as malaria and Polio. Gates has also expressed disappointment in Google’s other charitable ventures, which can be checked out on Google.org, a nonprofit arm of the search giant that attempts to develop “technologies to help address global challenges.”

“Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired [former Google.org leader] Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they’re just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor,” said Gates.