Made in India

Bill Gates was asked on a talk show on NDTV24*7 during his visit to India, if he sees big software products coming from Indian companies his reply was for next 3-6 years No!,but next 10 to 15 years – YES!!! Given the fact that in 2002 India had meager 0.2% of the US$ 180 billion global software product market share and MADE IN INDIA brand has low acceptability and reach when it comes to software products we have a way to go.

There are software products coming out from Indian Companies trying hard to get the market share, take for instance Pramati Technologies(winner of NASSCOM Distinguished Technology Product Company Award) which had to form partnership with E-biz consultants like Yasu Technologies to get its WEB SERVER sold to customers. With biggies like IBM and BEA in the web server market it is targeting only 4-5 percent of the web application server market in US.

Cranes Software winner of Distinguished Application Product Company Award at NASSCOM Product Summit 2005, played a beautiful innings by buying up products for Systat Inc.(its US subsidiary) in three stages where each acquisition, from the US-based SPSS Science, was bigger than the size of Cranes at that time. The story how it did it is as interesting as the growth of the company which had revenues of around Rs. 1,633.8 million in FY 2005 of which 80% came from selling propriety products.

Ramco's fight with SAP and Oracle to take on global ERP market took around 10 years for it to get into profit mode, its first product was incidentally launched by Bill Gates as it was first ERP system to run on a Windows Server while SAP the ERP market leader had its own platform. The Adaptive Enterprise Solutions built on Ramco VirtualWorks has helped Ramco achieve a turnover of over USD 50 Million.

And not to forget Yasu which ranked 178th in The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2004 and is recognized as one of the top 50 technology companies in the Deloitte Technology Fast50 India 2005 program.

Product development is on the higher side of innovation and has higher risk proportion than usual service based projects carried out by bulk of Indian companies, but more than that the lack of understanding of what a big “Made In India” brand can do to India is what is stopping other Indian companies to enter global product market.

Do you feel you are superior than others?

There could be many reasons for one to feel superior over others.
And it is more so in India with many diverse cultures existing together.

A Hindu feels he is better than a Muslim because of religion. A Tamilian thinks he is above a fellow non-Tamilian. A South Indian feels he is always more progressive than a North Indian. A IITian feels none of the private college engineers can be in anyway better than him. A IIM graduate may be getting 4 times the normal pay for the same work because not only he but his employer also believes he is great compared to other MBAs. A girl is mostly thought of as a poor student when it comes to Maths and Physics. A Indian is not considered as sincere as a Japanese. All this just means even before i meet a person the person has already formed a opinion about me based on my Sex, my Mother Tongue, my home town, my Nationality, my Caste(taking a idea from my surname), my Religion, my Education and the College i passed from. That explains why people add the name of their institute to their mail ids or why blog writers mention where they passed from. Brand carries a lot of weight when people interact with you but here the brand is not made by you, it has been added to you right after your birth and could depend on your career choices also, like if you are working in a well known company it adds to the image you have.

But do we miss out on quite a few beautiful relationships or experiences just because of this prejudiced way of meeting people. The idea of seeing every person as a new person gives you the chance of getting new friends and well wishers every where you go. But its a hard thing to do we have been fed with constant doses of wisdom which tell how to know a person just by his religion or state. And it takes new forms once our ego comes to play.

Valentine's Day

A boring day for new channels with no major story, Valentine's day dominated the English news channels today, truly it brings good luck to everyone. Shiv Sena gets the much needed publicity as the only day of year it is active is Feb 14^th and News channels and Serial Makers get a extra event to add in their usual bulletins and soap operas. Earlier Holi and Diwali were the only celebrations in a TV soap family but now all of them go to Valentine's day parties to find their valentine. And while all those lucky people who have found their love are enjoying at parties, singles are busy voting for SMS polls on NDTV judging if Valentine's day is relevant or ridiculous.

Indian Idol saw the exit of Panna Gill, one of the top performers, true in a democracy like India the contestant liked by majority is always the imperfect one. Audience hates perfection, those who present themselves as perfect seldom get the votes. The idea is to present oneself as a normal person right from your neighborhood or be prepared to voted out. Cry ,shout or yell but prove that you have limitations and janta will come to your rescue with votes.

Why Job Hopping is so common in India?

In India its very common for someone working in a software industry to have changed three companies in three years. The number of jobs available in market is one thing which facilitates it. But still why are Indians not loyal to their companies? Are companies recruiting wrong persons in wrong jobs? No one would agree to that as most of the big companies have elaborate rounds of interviews which screen the candidate at various stages . Still most companies have not been able to come out of this problem and when talking of engineering college grads from so called Top Colleges in India most of them leave their first job within a year of joining.

The problem lies somewhere when a future engineer starts thinking about his engineering career or even before that. As soon as a student leaves 10^th class and enters +2 his journey into a future which wont be guided by his interest begins. He starts preparing for engineering entrance exams without being sure he wants to be a engineer at first place, next comes his engineering branch which is decided by his rank and not by his interest and then it continues with a job he gets where he is not sure what work he would be doing. And though there are strict selection process for selecting engineers the pressure from parents/friends/ego/competition makes many work hard and get into engineering even if they don't like studying it. And so is the case with companies recruiting engineers even if they put all kind of tests to screen out the employees who wont prove to be good. Now from the point of view of a company a good employee is one who would work in the company for a longer period and has the minimum necessary skills required for working there, which most of the times is a non-issue as the work done in most Indian companies can be done by anyone provided he can effectively communicate with everyone in the team. Then why do companies test the engineers for technical skills so vigorously? The reason is studies tell that a person will stay in a job if he is working on something related to his interest field. So companies ask a lot of technical questions to know if the person is really interested in Software or not. Clearly put if you want to be in software industry you should be interested in software and if you are interested in software you should be having a good amount of knowledge of software. That means the testing of technical skills is only to know if the person is really interested in choosing software as a career. But this method does not work so well in India as it would have done outside India as here we can do anything to get money and studying some topics to get a job is not something big for us. Yes some companies have found some innovative solutions to this problem. Like you would be seeing many companies that tell we take people from IITs only, this does not mean the work being done there is very good, but it serves two purposes very nicely. One is IITians hate to work with non-IITians and they feel great when they are working with IITians. They feel they are at a great place and to prove themselves to other IITians they work very hard. HR people understanding this thing either go only for IITians no matter how the job aligns with the person's interest or if the job really needs people with good aptitude. The second way HR managers have found is to recruit people who can do the job but are not all ambitious or come from college where even getting a job is big thing. So they remain faithful to the company and work hard as they got a job they would have never thought of having at first place.

Those who go into IIT or other top colleges after lots of hard work and dreams of achieving big success in life develop a sense of superiority complex which makes them feel they are level above the other normal people who could not perform so well during pre-engineering days. And this makes them believe they should be paid more. And for a engineer whose first wrong choice was either this career or his branch of study makes his next mistake by going for a job where he would be working with IITians but something which wont give him any satisfaction of having accomplished great things. This can lead to more job hopping or dissatisfaction.

It is very much true that you cannot change the jobs available in economy but the courses of study like engineering should also be oriented according to needs of the industry. And may be with opening up of career opportunities in other areas and with them getting respect things will change in future where a person would not be forced to do things he doesn't want to do in life.

Thumbs down to Times Now

Times NOW turned out to be dumber than expected, they too like other channels carried one exclusive story followed by the so called impact it had on everyone. This new phenomena called IMPACT(the old one being Breaking News and JustIn) was started by NDTV and was taken miles ahead by CNN-IBN with new operations almost everyday. Today it was Operation WaterRat on CNN-IBN which exposed how easily Indian Coasts can become the source point for RDX and other explosives but at the same time NDTV 24X7 had a good debate on India and Pakistan, though the topic is old the content was good. TIMES NOW has a slow kind of feel, its not as aggressive as CNN-IBN. One very important differentiator now a days is the priority given to stories and NDTV 24X7 is the winner here as it puts the stories in the rank they deserve. Every English News Channel has a sports bulletin at 19:30 hours and Face the Nation kinda discussion at 22:00 hours and all these were started by NDTV and no one wants to break this trend it seems. TIMES NOW gives more weightage to the story it thinks is exclusive, like today it was on the Expose on letters sent by PMO to other ministers which somehow shows that no minister is listening to what Manmohan is saying even though the hot topic today was Airport Privatizations and was well covered everywhere.
TIMES NOW lacks what ZOOM had, there THE TIMES OF INDIA focused on its strength which is Masala but here it is trying to create a image of channel which is good at journalism which definitely TIMES group is not. Has Times forgotten the basics it learnt in Newspapers, YOU NEED NOT BE THE BEST TO BE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL,BUT YOU NEED TO FEED THE VIEWERS WHAT IT WANTS AND IN INDIA IT IS MASALA.