"Innovation doesnt matter much in India"

This is a reply to a very pertinent comment made by Aditya, to my last post.

>I am not sure whether we are ready to say India stands for Innovation. Well, I have seen innovation doesn't matter much.
>We are a country ruled by money, short term gains impair us from seeing long term visions.

Aditya, *every* country is ruled by money. The only reason some countries seem to have more innovations is that the cost of taking a risk there is much less.
In the US (I assume that you're copmparing India with the US) it has been possible to start up a garage company, try to implement your idea, live off one's savings for a while, and abandon the whole thing in a year if it doesnt work out. The moment one thought his idea wasnt working he could forget it and jump into a job waiting for him. There're jobs in plenty waiting. What is the result of this freedom? Ten thousand people start up little firms. 5 of them have good ideas, good people and good marketing, and survive to become the next Microsoft. The remaining go back to some job.
This was not the case in India. Leaving a secure job was unthinkable here till recently, because it was difficult to find another one. Besides, the hassles of starting a business scared anyone without contacts (anyone else watches Office Office here? :) ) You didn't have ten thousand people in a position to take a risk on their idea. That's why, as you say, we had to concentrate on the short term.
Now, look at the situation today of an average software engineer in an outsourcing company in India. He's been earning decently for the past few years and has probably got some savings. He is up to date on the markets, and has ideas on what might work. Best of all, with the BPO boom, he knows there are a half-dozen jobs waiting for him if his idea doesnt work. It's the ideal climate. And there are millions of these people, all wanting to do something big. Of all of them, there will be atleast some who will try it and make it. My mom used to say "Bhookhe pety bhajan na hoye", meaning you cant chant hymns on an emtpy stomach. You cant think of long term visions unless your short term status is resolved. And it is being resolved, for more and more people.
To prove my theory, I point you to the number of new innovative products that came out of the US during the recent downturn. It was way, way less than what you'd expect. (okay, I cant give you number, but as a fellow techie you know what I mean) Why was that? Because the risk associated with leaving your job was way too high. Also, your savings were not enough to let you start your company. What has happened in the US to techies since those 3-odd years was about the same as the Indian economy since forever, more or less.

>To make money you don't have to be creative. Just keep your eye and ears open. When you spot someone's innovative idea, copy it, mass produce it, market it.

Agreed, agreed, agreed. You might say the same thing for Microsoft - google for all those things like Windows and Excel which they copied off other innovative people. Microsoft's genius is in packaging, not just innovation. So what's wrong with that? Happens everywhere. Packaging and selling is an integral part of having a product, not just dreaming up ideas. If you think Indians are good at it, more power to us.

>In software industry, guys with ideas aren't valued. Guys who get more work from client are.

This is the problem with Passive voice - you havent stated "guys with ideas arent valued" by WHOM. That makes all the difference. Your statement is true if you're talking of managers of Outsourcee companies doing the valuing. I mean delivering to the client makes their company run, so of course they're value such people. It is false for companies that live on ideas, like the startups owned by people who left their jobs and took risks on their own ideas.

I know, I know, these startups are few and far between. But they're no longer considered crackpot ideas - as the Rediff article proves, they are considered A Good Thing To Try. Now more than ever is the time to use your experience to try out your own idea.

Virtual Windsock

Rediff has an series of article on Indians starting up their own companies and making innovative products. The first is here :How to succeed, Whizlabs style.
This sort of vindicates my last post, about product companies becoming the new trend. Not the fact of the company existing - but the fact that the trend is considered newsworthy by Rediff :). You are going to see this sort of articles by the dozen in all the papers soon.

PS. I've been remiss in updating this blog for a while now. Thank you to all the concerned messages you sent. The main reason was this competition I'm entering : Stories around the Coffee Table. I'm almost done with my entry, wish me luck!

The Great Migration

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A Happy Diwali and New Year to all of you!
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A friend of mine, who was assigned to my project after joining my company, got fed up with the work in about 6 months. He originally wanted to work in embedded systems, and had heard that my company had a couple of projects in that area. But there wasnt space in those projects, and there was an 'urgent requirement' in mine, so he landed up here. To make things worse, he was put into the QE section because that's where the requirement was - even though he didnt want to do it.
Six months of testing drove him up the wall, and he quit. When I asked him where his new job was, he replied that he didnt have one yet. But he had a good idea of what he wanted from his new job - he wanted to work in a small company, he wanted to work in embedded systems, and the company had to be a PRODUCT company. He'd seen enough of service/consultancy type companies to realize their problems. After leaving work, he bought a couple of books on embedded systems, learnt about the field, and started applying to companies that fit his criteria. Happily, he found a job in a company he liked, in a few months.
This story would have probably ended differently if it had been 10 years ago. Our hero would have eventually joined some other service company, because nearly every software company in India then was a service company. And he would have been ridiculed by friends and colleagues for being impractical. That isnt the case today.
My friend isnt the only one. More and more people are realizing that there's no such thing as a techie career in a service company. Many of them are also realizing that if there's no company working in the area they like, it doesnt mean the end of the road - it means an unfilled niche. They are using the experiences they gained from their outsourcee days to start up their company and do what they like. And they're finding people like themselves who want to work in just such a setup.
All this reminds me of the way service companies mushroomed all over India, about 5 or 6 years ago. Ambitious kids who wanted to start their own business left big service companies, took some clients with them, and started their own garage service companies. Darwin helped separate the good managers from the bad ones, and a big crop of service companies came up. We're seeing the results now. The sad part is, the bad managers of those days, the ones who couldnt run a company and eventually joined a bigger one, were probably very good technically. But the environment was not favourable for product development, so they couldn't go anywhere else.
Ironically, all the hype around outsourcing today has given Indians the confidence to think they can create their own product. The American media, which used to project India as a land of dhoti-clad paupers drinking tea, now talks of us a super-intelligent programmers who are comparable to Americans. It makes India software products much, much easier to sell.
As a result of the Indian Geek's dissatisfaction with outsourcing, and of the environment putting him in a favourable light, he thinks of himself as deserving a better deal. And the more adventurous ones of his ilk go out and start a tiny garage product company. The less adventurous ones wait till the company is established, then think of joining it. They dont want the domain knowledge gained from their current project to go to waste. But even the most timid of them will eventually notice that their friends in such product companies are doing better intelectually and financially than they is. And they *will* eventually want to move, if they're capable of it.
Look around you. While service companies are growing more and more desperate to grow in size without taking on complex work, product companies are creating ever more relevant technologies. The former are now hiring anyone who can use a computer, and training him to be an obedient code monkey. And the latter are coolly hiring the best people in the market - because the best people are sick of being faceless, replaceable workers in service companies. The supply of jobs in product companies is less than the people trying to get them. And the other way around for service companies.
Here's a third angle. Ten years ago, if you wanted people in India with enough experience and knowledge to develop a product, you'd have a hard time finding them. But since the outsourcing boom began, computer science graduates are everywhere. Thes guys have been working for the past few years. And today, if you want a clutch of people with very specific domain knowledge, you will find them. A few months of working with you, and they'll be a world beating team.
To summarize : The market for Indian products is developing. The would-be entrepreneurs have worked long enough to be a part of the world market and decide to develop products for it. The workforce to implement these new products is being created in outsourcee companies.
Expect to see outsourcing become the second-grade industry it is, soon. Expect to see product companies take the limelight. Soon.

Effect of the US Election

BTW : Blogger's been acting weird the past few days - wouldn't let me post anything. Hope to catch up with my writing this week.

Now back to our scheduled feature :
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Matter Bhai raised an interesting question in his comment to the previous post. I'm sure this thought is on many minds right now - How does the recent election affect the outsourcing scenario in India?

Let me say at the outset that I'm not very conversant with the finer points of the Republican and Democrats' election promises, beyond their stands on outsourcing. I do know that Kerry gained some brownie points with the public by promising to shut down outsourcing; but he had to back off later. In case he'd won, he would probably have had to back off even more, and things would have pretty much remained the same. Let me explain.

I'm reminded of an old editorial cartoon, published shortly after Bush Sr.'s appointment as president. He's surrounded by a bewildering array of levers, buttons, switches, leading off into all sorts of machinery. The machinery is labelled "US Government", and Bush is having a hard time managing it. He says, "Gosh, all this looked so easy when I was one of the cogs!"

The short of it is, running a government involves a lot of things - many more than making election promises. I'd guess that keeping the economy running smoothly figures in the top ten. The recent rise of outsourcing was never a political decision. It was always an economic choice, and is partly responsible for the US economy doing reasonably well after the 2000-01 slump.

If a company is outsourcing to India, and thus producing software in half the time and in lower budget, it gains an edge over it's competitors. Which company would agree to stop this outsourcing? And if the outsourcing is stopped in the US, European competitors would then have the advantage. In my mind, a consortium of big, tax-paying companies has more influence in government policies than a few jobless workers walking around with placards.

This means that whoever is running the US government (assuming he wants to stay in power) will have to keep the companies happy. If Kerry had stepped into the Presidents shoes, he'd have found that stopping outsourcing would have gotten him into bad trouble, and wriggled out of it. To answer your question - I don't think the recent election will make any difference to the outsourcing scene. Outsourcing is a reliable method by which a company can reduce its costs (never mind the details I talk about in other essays here). As long as there's market competition, as long as sending work to India helps a company, it will happen in one form or the other.

Mulford quoth

Here's an interview with the US ambassador to India, David Mulford, on the eve of the US Elections. Mulford talks of a lot of things, including the public debate in the US over the loss of jobs due to outsourcing. Interesting reading.

A relevant quote for our blog:

Because, at the moment, we are outsourcing jobs lower down the spectrum. If that begins to change—it probably will to some extent because of India’s great competence and tremendous human talent resource pool, as well as other countries—it will probably become something of an issue in the future. But it will be a different kind of an issue, I think. And, it’ll demand stronger education, training and so on. And it will be better prepared for it.