Innovating or Exploiting?

While cruising around on ted.com I came across what looked like it might be an interesting video by Hector Ruiz called "The power to connect the world". I thought this might fit quite well with my whole rant about getting everyone informed about what's going on beyond their own villages. I had no idea who Hector Ruiz is and so I read his bio while listening to him introduce himself. Based on his own introduction, mannerisms and dress I was rather surprised to find out that he's the CEO of AMD and his mission is to promote a commercial project that AMD has going to get 50% of the World's population on the Internet by 2015. His initial talk, whilst very dull, seemed as though it might be altruistic in nature. AMD is a pretty big company and I thought perhaps they were trying to do some good. Alas this is not the case. As Ruiz points out several times during his uninspiring speech, AMD wants (presumably) to sell semiconductors to the companies who make backbone routers, switches, power supplies and so on but with the side-effect of somehow connecting half of the planet. Of his 18 minutes, he spent at least half of it working up to saying why it might be a good idea if Africa had good Internet connectivity. By 12 minutes I gave up and stopped listening. This leads to a couple of questions. First is how a man with so little presence could have become the CEO of a large international company. I know nothing of his skills as a business man but his ability to pitch what should have been a very cool idea makes me wonder how he pitches a business plan to his board. The other question is: why does AMD think it can help get coverage if all it's going to do is come up with a project name (50x15) and not fund anything? Surely Mr. Ruiz does not think this is an original idea? Many people have proposed getting more people connected to help counter the effects of local propaganda and any educator on the planet could do a pitch for why the Internet might be useful in a general educational sense. All in all this was very disappointing and also rather boring. Such is the way of business at AMD I suppose.