A good article on IT myth in India

Wanted: Out of the box thinking

Ask any well-informed person on the street about her impressions of the software industry and chances are she would tell you that we are a world leader in software services; the industry is doing extremely well; and if all our other industries performed as well, we would be one of the most developed countries by now. Face in the Mirror The Indian software industry is one of those feel-good stories that make most Indian hearts swell with pride. It is a story that has been told umpteen times. In 2002-03 the size of the Indian software and services industry totalled $12.4 billion, with exports accounting for $9.6 billion and the domestic sector $2.8 billion. The corresponding figure for 2003-04 was $15.9 billion, with exports amounting to $12.5 billion and domestic sales $3.4 billion. In 2004-05, the figures are estimated to climb to an industry size of $20.5 billion, with exports of $16.3 billionand domestic sales of $4.2 billion. Three Indian companies—TCS, Infosys and Wipro—have already crossed the billion dollar revenue mark, and several others like Satyam and HCL are waiting in the wings. They are also huge in terms of headcount: TCS (37000 approx), Wipro (37000 approx) and Infosys (37000 approx), and each day you hear not only of them but even smaller companies hiring by the thousands. But as someone once commented "Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." So consider these statistics too. The revenue of Microsoft was $32 billion in 2003, and $36.8 billion in 2004. So that makes the entire Indian software and services industry less than half the size of just one global giant. Currently India's share of the world's software and services market is only 3.5%. We do not have any consumer or desktop software to our name. Big Question In a country so short of global success stories, whatever has been achieved by the software industry is remarkable. But the reality is that we haven't done anything earth-shattering. Let me explain. Save for IBM, there are not many well-known software companies from the pre-1950s still around; EDS was founded in 1962, but most of the marquee names in the global software industry came up in the 70s and early 80s: SAP in 1972, Microsoft in 1975, Oracle in 1977, and both Sun and Adobe in 1982. The Indian poster boys too came up in the same period. TCS was founded in 1968, Patni in 1978, Wipro IT in 1981 and Infosys in 1982. Today SAP, Oracle and Sun are all over $ 10 billion companies while TCS, Wipro Technologies and Infosys are $1 billion companies. Why such asymmetrical growth? After all, most of these Indian companies make their money from selling to the world, and therefore are in an equally good position to compete with their global corporate peers dollar-for-dollar. My hypothesis is that we as a nation are immensely adverse to risk-taking, and prefer the easy way out wherever possible. And this holds true as much for the average individual as for the big software companies. Why take risks, why innovate when there is so much easy (risk-free) money to be made?Just think: How many Indian parents would gladly accept their child not choosing a mainstream career like medicine, engineering or chartered accountancy, in favour of, say, sports or music? Even among the mainstream careers, how many engineers would say that they prefer the dust and grease of a shop-floor or construction site to the air-conditioned ambience of an office job? All through the 1970s and 80s, Indian software companies made their money by body-shopping. Their value proposition was simple: wage arbitration. If your American programmers charge $X to do a piece of work, our programmers can do the same at the same location for one-fourth or even less. With the coming of the internet and better network connectivity, the logical progression from onsite body-shopping was offshoring. If our programmers can do the same piece of work at your American location for one-fourth the price of your American programmers, let us do the same from India and we can lower costs to one-tenth. This continues to be the reigning mantra of the BPO industry. As long as a couple of variables are in place—our people have a certain basic level of knowledge, we have mastered certain processes for smooth delivery, and our wage levels are lower—this value proposition will work. Our software giants will go from the billion dollar mark to two billion to five billion to even 50 billion. And we will continue to uncork the bubbly. But the lingering doubt is: can we do better?Good, But Not Good Enough I would argue that Indian software industry is more a story of the lack of imagination, myopic vision, missed opportunities and plain lethargy. Why is it that none of the big Indian companies have been able to come up with a database product? In 1970 an IBM researcher Dr EF Codd published the paper titled A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Based on this article, Larry Ellison and his associates founded a database product company that later took the name Oracle. Note that Oracle and Patni are near contemporaries. In the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, released a new operating system called Linux. It was a little rough-edged in the sense that it did not come with the installation wizards of commercial OS like Windows, but then it was free for anyone to download and do whatever he or she liked. Several companies like Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera, etc. did precisely that: they downloaded the software, added some tools so that non-techie people can install it easily on computers, wrote out help guides, and marketed it to the world. These days one regularly reads stories of how Linux is gaining ground and is poised to become a significant player in OS segment in the future. Why did none of our big guys think it worthwhile to create our own 'flavour' of Linux? Take another example—this time not of corporations but individuals—that demonstrates that we Indians have a serious lack of pluck. There is on the web a site called Source Forge that hosts open-source software projects. Software engineers can ut up ideas, invite people with specific skill-sets to join them, and start the software development work. Why do software programmers undertake such work? For most people it is out of a spirit of altruism, but there is an equal driving force in the challenge of creating something that can match the work of a commercial enterprise. It's like: if Microsoft can do it, so can I. There are about one lakh projects hosted on Source Forge and more than a million programmers work on them but there's very little participation by Indian programmers. Many years ago the founder of Apple Computers, Steve Jobs, while luring Pepsi veteran John Sculley famously asked: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" The Indian software industry needs to ask the same question: do we want to keep making money, or do we want to change the world?

byProdyut Bora

The author is CEO,Brahmaputra Infotech

Message from Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Computer)

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much