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Mar

31

Why don’t Indian CEOs blog?

Blogs, Editorials, Google, Microsoft, Novell, PR, Sun, Yahoo, india | 3 Comments

Just came across Basab Pradhan’s Blog via Sambhar Mafia. So he’s one of the rarer breed on the blogosphere today – the Indian CEO Blogger. Apart from Rajesh Jain, there are almost no Indian CEOs blogging. First, Basab’s got a few good articles straightaway – one that wonders why Navi Mumbai’s rise has to be the result of Mumbai’s meltdown, or an intersting one about why passengers hurry to disembark from a plane at Bangalore airport, but not at Delhi airpor t!

Back to the question I raised – why we don’t have Indian CEOs blogging – and don’t even get started on “American CEOs don’t blog either” – there’s nothing that says our CEOs ought not to blog if their American counterparts don’t. But why would Management blog? An CEO – that is, top management – blogging, can be a very effective form of market differentiation. Apart from conveying to everyone where the company’s headed and why, a CEO blogging gives the impression of a very open organization – and that can be a very powerful tactic. Indians perceive India Inc. with awe, but also with a certain degree of detachment, almost like a form of “us and them”. Who wouldn’t want to know the real Naresh Goyal, the real Sunil Mittal, what Nandan Nilekani’s thinking these days? Jerry Rao of mPhasis writes fairly regularly in the Indian Express – rarely about the IT industry, mainly on policy matters and reform. That, in my opinion, gives both Jerry and mPhasis a human face. If Jerry were to start blogging about matters in his industry as well, it would work tremendously in his, his company’s and his customers’ favour. Imagine Naresh Goyal writing about global aviation, business trends and his vision for India’s future, and Vijay Mallya on the Indian alcohol/airline market, Government policies, how the industry is subverting the Government’s ban on alcohol on TV via smart advertising, about serial entrepreneurship…

There’s a huge audience for these blogs, certainly. There are far more Indian bloggers than I ever could have imagined – the Indian blogosphere is a healthy and vibrant community. Most of them have good content too, so they’re definitely right-thinking, rational people. Besides, businesses of most companies today aren’t limited to India. If a company’s products and services have a global market, it follows that readership for Mr. CEO’s blog will be global too.

By the way, a few American tech company do have a blogging “face”. For instance, Microsoft has (like him or hate him) Robert Scoble, Yahoo has Jeremy Zawodny and Russell Beattie, IBM has Ed Brill for its Lotus product line, Novell has Nat Friedman , Miguel de Icaza, Sun has Jonathan Schwartz – that’s helped each of these organizations build up a community following. But here’s the opportunity for us to race ahead and build a vibrant online thought community with perspectives from our corporate leaders!




Mar

23

Speaking@PICT today.

IBM, Internet | 3 Comments

Today I’m speaking at the IBM-PICT Day at the PICT campus at 3:15PM. For those who’ve registered for Concepts 2006, be there. I’ll be talking about the ” Web2.0 Paradigm”, and how IBM’s leveraging these technologies, both for our customers and internally. I’ll make as much of the presentation available as I can later.




Mar

22

Opera Mini – as good as it gets!

Internet, Mobile, Opera, Trends | 2 Comments

What’s the best mobile browser out there? On my Nokia 6670, I’ve tried NetFront 3.2, Opera for mobile (the 15-day trial). Both of these run neck-to-neck in terms to overall experience. There are a few features NetFront has that Opera doesn’t, and vice versa. But I wasn’t happy with either of them – the speed, the rendering, the fonts (awful for both) – mobile browsing wasn’t quite there yet, I thought.

Enter Opera Mini. In a single stroke, Opera has managed to eliminate most, if not all, of the problems that plagued the other browser offerings out there. Opera Mini is a Java application, so advantage number one is that it’ll run on any phone that can run Java apps – so it doesn’t have to be a Nokia smartphone running Symbian Series60, or the high-end Sony Ericsson or Motorola ones. Repeat – it is not a native Symbian or Windows Mobile or Palm application; it’s a Java app.

There are two version of this phone – for low and high memory phones. So for those of you with, for instance, a Nokia 6610 (amazing phone, wish I owned one), you can try the low-memory version. The high-memory version will run on the Nokia 6600, 6630, 6670, 6680, 7710, nGage, and I guess the N-series. See the beauty? Even the Nokia 6610 can have a full-featured browser now! All you need is Java and a GPRS/3G connection.

That’s the Basic (MIDP 1)-type browser.


And that’s the Advanced (MIDP 2) browser.
The installation is dead-simple: it’s a direct download from www.opera.com/mini, no licence agreements, no filling out forms or anything. Click, download, install – right from your existing browser. Or of course, you could download it on your PC/laptop and copy it to your phone via Infrared/Bluetooth/plain old USB. At 100KB, it’s one of the smallest applications I’ve come across. And for a browser, that is stupendous.

And the browsing experience is something else! Opera Mini renders its own fonts, and it does a very good job of that. The default font is very very readable, and there’s also a small font option that packs much more onto one screen, while still keeping things very clear. The sheer quality of the fonts hits you. Those with small screens (low memory phones) will love the small font option. The home page has an address bar, a Google search box, a list of configurable bookmarks, and a short history. Cool!

Before I get any further, here’s a quickie on how Opera Mini works – your requests go via an Opera server, which does the page retrieval on your behalf, parses the page, makes it phone-friendly and passes it back to the phone, taking a huge rendering load off the tiny mobile browser. It also handles the available network bandwidth quite well ( Russell Beattie thinks that it does a very good job of overcoming “network latency”), so your GPRS connection does feel very fast and responsive.

Flip side/annoyances? Sure. Since it isn’t a native application, there’s a confirmation box that pops up on my Nokia phone, asking if I want to allow the application to connect to the Internet, every time I click on a link. I’m used to it now, but it’s annoying nevertheless. Then again, being a Java application means that if you leave it in memory for a couple of days, it’ll eat up almost all your phone RAM – so that means exiting and restarting the browser. Also, no downloads. Shocking, but true! You can’t use Opera Mini to download anything to your hard disk, so you’ll have to use NetFront for that.

I’ve become a huge fan! I use this browser on the train shuttling between Mumbai and Pune, on the bus to-and-fro work – I’ve even begun checking and replying to my email first thing in the morning, before I’ve even read the morning paper. Oh, and if my newspaper walla plays truant, I end up reading the paper on Opera Mini too! Go get it!

(Doesn’t it sound like one of those TeleBrand ads you see too often lately?!)




Mar

12

Go, Innovate!

Editorials, Social | 1 Comment

The motivation for this piece began when Bill Gates, on a visit to Israel, commented on the difference in the technology industries of India, on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Gates said,

“There will be competitors for Microsoft and for Israeli companies coming out of those countries (India and China) although today the success, particularly in India, has mostly been in the software services area, outsourcing work, doing call centers and things like that,”

This is not how we want to be viewed by the world. “Outsourcing and call centers” should not be the focus of our technology industry; we ought to be aiming far higher. We do not want our Telecom minister saying things like “BPOs are the nation’s pride”, (as he did a few weeks ago). Because in contrast to India’s tech industry, here’s how Gates sees the U.S. and Israel:

“In contrast, Israel, along with the United States, is focused on inventing new, patented products and software.”

That is where we ought to be – defining the industry, not servicing it.

The next giant leap for the technology industry in India is to create a Silicon Valley-like environment which produces great companies, people, and products. What made Silicon Valley the hotbed of technological revolutions? What made it build global giants? What made it throw up legends? If we understand the difference between Silicon Valley of the 70s and the Indian IT industry, we can usher in the technological revolution the IT industry has promised for so long, but failed to deliver.

Silicon Valley can be summed up in one word – Innovation.

That one characteristic defines the culture of Silicon Valley and persists to this day, making it the technology capital of the world. Services offer extremely low scope for innovation. And that is inherent to the business – a services firm is essentially doing something that it has been told to do by some other entity. This is in stark contrast to a product development company. Vivek Paul, former CEO of Wipro, in an interview to Knowledge@Wharton, said:

“Frankly, I feel that when people work in a service business like ours, it’s almost like we give them a lobotomy. I don’t think — and I hope I’m wrong — you will see a single successful product startup coming out of people who were working at Wipro or any other similar companies. You’ll find that innovation comes from people who worked for Intel India; they’ll go off and come up with a new chip. Or someone at Cisco India will come up with a new router.”

Let’s examine four points of difference between India’s IT industry and Silicon Valley, and we’ll see how innovation is at the core of each on of them. Each of these four points is inextricably linked to the others, and transforming today’s IT industry will mean tackling all four at once.

1.) Home-grown: Silicon Valley was constituted almost completely of home-grown startups which grew up to be the giants of today. Bangalore, in contrast, is home to the Indian development centers of those same companies. Therefore, the vision, strategy and tactics for the company are never going to be defined by an Indian board, and decisions are never going to be vetted by an Indian management. Even if the most high-end technical work is “moved” from the West to India, while the top management is non-Indian, the country can never define the direction of technology.

Vivek Paul, in the same interview, stressed the difference between going out and discovering something on your own, as opposed to implementing something that someone has told you to do. You may implement better than anyone else, but discovering something is a class apart. He was speaking for engineers; it’s the same for management.

The “Indian arm” of any Silicon Valley company will never be larger than the company itself. We can not create global giants out of subsidiaries. Sony would not have been Sony if it was the Japanese outsourcing center of Hewlett Packard.

2.) Entrepreneurship: The entrepreneurial spirit that swept the U.S. West Coast back then – when every Bill, Steve and Marc with half an idea set up a technology company – isn’t quite reflected here – yet. Entrepreneurship implies a certain amount of risk-taking, which seems to be a trait Indians as a society seem to lack. Gurcharan Das, in his seminal book “India Unbound” bemoans this too. He initially thought that it was simply a matter of Indians as individuals not taking risks, but over time has concluded that it might be a societal trait. In addition, the Government still makes it extremely difficult for an entrepreneur to set up a business quickly and easily. But great wealth can be only created when you own the company. You can only match world-class companies when you take them on in the marketplace, not be content doing some part of their work which they’d rather not do.

India’s flagship “old economy” companies – the Tata Group, the Birla conglomerate, Reliance, Bharat Forge – are all companies which have been founded by Indian entrepreneurs. These great institutions were also built in the age of excessive Government regulation, and before Globalization as we know it today. “New Economy” has been contrastingly risk-averse, creating services companies which work for larger Western companies. To actually create a new industry, define a new market, it needs entrepreneurs – people who bet on an idea, on a vision.

A culture of entrepreneurship necessarily implies a culture of innovation. Rajesh Jain, in his essay “India needs more entrepreneurs” outlines the three requisites for entrepreneurship: “People with Passion, Constructive Capital, and Big, Bold Ideas”. Personally, I have seen plenty of small-time innovation from bright young engineers around. Some have been process-oriented, some product-oriented, but no outrageous ideas to define new products and markets; nor with the vision to convert those ideas to products, products to businesses. Yahoo!, Intel, Lotus, Apple – all these companies dreamt big, and had the vision – and the guts – to realize those dreams.

3.) Universities: Silicon Valley firms were founded by graduate and post-graduate students from Universities in the area (think Google, Sun, and Yahoo). Surely it isn’t coincidence that Berkeley, USC, UCLA, Caltech and Stanford happen to be in California, and MIT and UMass Amherst happen to be in Massachusetts – the West and East Silicon Valleys? In contrast, there is no interaction between business and academia at all back home. And it’s a symptom that spans all industrial domains.

India tends to view its engineers as assets only once they graduate, unmindful of the fact that people are at their creative best when they are students. Faculty, senior technical staff and top management from the industry, and undergraduate/graduate students form a potent combination of ideas, application and capital. It is a model that Silicon Valley utilized to spectacular effect. It is only companies as large as IBM and GE that can afford to maintain their own Research departments. Other companies would do well to collaborate with Universities for their R&D needs, on a case-by-case basis, which could develop into more substantial relationships. The University gains handsomely in that it does research which is relevant to the industry, it gets better funding than it would if it relied solely on sources such as the Government. And of course, by performing research at that level, we can build world-class Graduate Schools like in the US. (The IITs, for instance, are only world-class Undergraduate schools).

The best business schools in the US also sprang up either as part of, or very close to, the best Universities. Think of Stanford Business School, Wharton (part of the University of Pennsylvania), and Harvard (adjacent to MIT). These schools provided the business know-how, support for budding entrepreneurs in the form of Venture Capital, legal skills, even Business Incubators, encouraging the best technical ideas to find the best business skills to form the best startups. In India, our premier business schools are often criticized for producing managers, not leaders, with too much emphasis on getting placed and too little on building businesses, teaching too much about management and too little business, too much theory and little application. And the practice of our technical institutions working along with our business schools is almost non-existent – other than students passing out of our technical institutions and entering our b-schools.

4.) Local Market: Most of those great companies started by concentrating on local markets, not those in Europe or South America or Asia. Why was that? It wasn’t that you were more likely to be successful if you went local, but because the opportunity was right at home, at the right time! As is the case in India – now! In the seventies, there were roughly 250-300 million Americans (probably smaller) – the initial market for Silicon Valley startups. Today’s Indian market is three times that size – and virtually untapped. The obsession with creating global players has made us ignore one-sixth of humanity back home!

Only a miniscule percentage of revenues of our IT services companies come from Indian clients. But their entire business model’s been optimized and tuned for cost arbitrage – and the cost advantage disappears once the client itself is in India. Companies successful in the Indian market will be very different from the current ones. They’ll be the ones who’ve been setup with this market in mind.

There is a huge latent demand for solutions to problems that are uniquely Indian – but we haven’t looked at them hard enough. The Simputer is a wonderful application gone wrong – it still costs too much (last heard it was about Rs. 12000), and has not been marketed well enough, despite the hype. But it could have been a fantastic tool with almost limitless applications in India.

The spread of mobile devices in semi-urban and rural India has meant that those populations have leapfrogged the fixed land-line era, moving on from the telegraph straight to mobile phones. This is one area; there are scores others. Most of these solutions will lie in the areas of cost-effective infrastructure development, like low-cost community wireless internet, so we don’t have to criss-cross the country with costly, ugly and cumbersome optical fiber connections. If you’re in the mechanical industry, solutions like faster and safer train designs on the same track infrastructure will be immensely successful. Again, for the mechanical industry: startups that deal in low-cost solar power generators, or wind turbines are great ideas – these are products where 1.) there is a demand, 2.) there is ample Government encouragement – there was news of some sort of tax benefits for organizations which invest in producing wind energy, 3.) there is a huge chance that it’ll work – given that wind and sunshine are in no shortage in the subcontinent! – So early-stage funding shouldn’t be a huge problem.

Finally, we need to remember that Innovation does not mean Improve, it means Transform! In the words of Guy Kawasaki, part of the team that built the most innovative product of them all – the Macintosh computer:

“Jump to the next curve. Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points. Instead, they should invent laser printing. True innovation happens when a company jumps to the next curve–or better still, invents the next curve, so set your goals high.”

So Go, Innovate!