The English Fallacy

Wikipedia ranks India as Number 1 in the list of English speaking populations with about 350 million people able to use English. I am deeply suspicious of this number. Infact, I am filled with disgust since this is yet another number disguising bitter reality.

Sample this :

hello sir iam a.**** i complited my b.tech and iam starting an industry and i want to join our party at the same time i want to meet our head ******* sir how can i get oppintment pls replay me

Humans , particularly Indians, have a tremendous ability to adapt and this trait should enable you to understand the true purport of the sample above. If you still don't , email me.

I got this message through a social networking website popular amongst young Indians. It is not the first time I have witnessed such radical use of English syntax and semantics. I have a feeling it won't be the last, either.

Numbers are what make Indians proud these days - be it demographics ,GDP or the sensex. But beyond the euphoria, one must take a deeper and closer look at quality.That is, the quality of English being spoken by the Indian masses. There are deep-rooted socio-cultural factors at play here. English has made the leap from the lingua-franca of the Indian elite to that of the Indian masses. About 350 million of them, to be precise. But the problem is not many of those joining the league want to accept that their English is not only imprecise, it is precisely defunct. They don't accept this shortcoming because it is "uncool", almost an embarassment in their social circles. These are the kids who never learnt English properly in their primary schools , mainly due to teachers who were incompetent. You will be surprised to know how many of the private school kids cannot speak or write correct English. These are the kids who will get found out , and will lag their peers by a margin.

Does it matter? I think it does. The services industry has been complaining for a while about employability of college graduates. A lot of it has to do with basic spoken and written English. No body wants Byrons or Shakespeares. But atleast ,pretty please, can we get the spellings right?

Technology and the Indian VC

Exercise1 : Look at the array of companies that Indian venture capitalists are investing or have invested in India. Name one company which truly excites you as innovative. And when I say you , think of a hard core risk taking technologist.

Let me try to explain it with a comparison.

Sequoia capital is a very respected global VC firm. It has teams set up to invest in 4 geographies, US, India,China and Israel.

Exercise 2: Check out two observations - for India and for Israel.

• How many partners of Sequoia have technology focus in India versus in Israel?
• How many Israeli investees versus Indian investees do you believe focus on a technological innovation versus business/services innovation?

I wouldn't go into numbers here since I personally don't know these people or companies. But let me just profile one Israeli investee for you. It is called ScaleMP.

http://www.scalemp.com/

ScaleMP has developed the versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture, a unique approach that enables server vendors to create industry-standard, high-end x86-based symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems. ScaleMP and its industry-leading partners team-up to deliver vSMPowered™ systems with superior performance at x86 server prices.

Mind you , this is just a software company. But look at how it can fundamentally change the rules of the data center game. This is hardcore technological innovation.

Let me also profile the Sequoia partner who led this investment.

Benny Hanigal

Benny Hanigal is a Partner with Sequoia Capital Israel and focuses on semiconductor and systems investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2001, he was a Partner in Star Seed, where he led the investment activities in Israel and abroad. Before establishing Star Seed, Benny was Founder and President of Lannet until it merged with Madge Networks where he continued as a SVP for Product Development and Marketing. Earlier, Benny was Co-Founder and Chairman of Alvarion (ALVR). Benny has BS in Electrical Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

What is the point you might ask? After all, Israel and India are apples and oranges. But my question is very simple - why are such companies not getting funded in India? Is it the case that Indian engineers are not capable of such innovation? Or is it that they are , but such startups have absolutely no hope of getting funded in the short to medium term? I think the answer is latter. If VC's are funding me-too travel portals and e-commerce websites ( I have no grudge against them; Infact, I think they deserve to be funded for creating value) then what do you expect the brightest engineers in India to go after?

Are the Indian VC's fundamentally risk averse when it comes to technological innovation? Will this be the major obstacle in preventing India from becoming a technology leader ? Is that good or bad?

The ountrepreneurs

The frontpage news of KPO/BPO/LPO companies doesn't tell the complete story about outsourcing. Revenue projections or the tom-tomming of India's leadership doesn't tell it, either. The real story , in my opinion, is unfolding in the small by-lanes of Bengaluru,Hyderabad,Pune,Noida and Gurgaon.

Silicon valley in the early-to-late 90's was probably similar. Everyone , from the retired pensioner to the school going teenager, thought he/she could build a hotmail and walk away with 400 million dollars. People who went through the tech bubble and subsequent bust talk about an invisible force , a certain madness, which had gripped everyone who knew anything about technology.

A similar scene ,albeit in outsourcing, is unfolding in India. "Show me a business model and I will show you where outsourcing fits in" say the ountrepreneurs. From editing to teaching to hiring to intellectual property , everything is up for grabs - for the right price. Having personally seen the kind of talent pool (and growing) we have and the kind of money they are willing to work for - it really borders on the insane. I looked at the Mckinsey report on Indian consumer projections and even by 2025 , only about 2% of Indians will earn more than 10 lakh INR per year. And the average annual income in US is today 16 lakh+ INR at today's exhange rate. Do you see the boom now?

And who is cashing in? Answer - everyone you dismissed as a nobody - housewives, college dropouts, second generation family businesses, also-ran graduates etc etc. These are the ountrepreneurs - who have understood the power of outsourcing and are using it to generate real value. Big outsourcing firms have their place under the sun , but these small operators , with 10-50 employees at maximum, will be the real drivers of the Indian outsourcing juggernaut. And they are distributing wealth much more than the bottom heavy , top light big Indian multinationals. Ironically, the word "outsourcing" still carries a largely negative connotation atleast in the circles I have been - you get into outsourcing because you are not good enough for the top IT MNC's. If you have a degree from premier institutes like IITs/IIMs , outsourcing is a complete no-no. Guess who is having the last laugh now?

iPhone uncensored.

The sight of humans in all shapes and sizes camping in front of an AT&T store for days , waiting for their beloved iPhone, was as amusing as I have ever seen in recent times. It reminded me of queues that Indians are ( or were ) quite familiar with - ration shops, community taps and voting. But few Indians would queue up for what is essentially a luxury item. And to buy luxury items, people (all over the world) typically want a luxurious experience. With one exception. If you a self-professed cool dude/junkie/geek/tech analyst , you will walk over hot charcoal to get first to that next bleeding edge technology product.

But wait, is iPhone really a bleeding edge technology product? People have their opinions on this but largely the answer is no. Still , People will buy iPhone because it is made by Apple and it has a catchy name which rhymes with iPod which most of them would already have. Some of them would even have iMacs. Or Powerbooks. Or some such expensive , sleek looking accessories. This is yet another feather in the marketing acumen ( some call it gimmickry) of Steve Jobs and Apple. They have perfected the classic art of mass marketing in the guise of niche marketing.

Blackle

All you google worshippers - try Blackle. No , its not a different search engine but your favorite one wrapped in an energy saving blanket. I think this idea in itself may not amount to much but it could be a trigger for rationalizing energy consumption on the internet. On a sombre note , all your Googling amounts to 450,000 servers ( @ conservative 200 Watt per server) burning close to 100 MW just at the data center. Now start adding the communication costs and the end user terminal power and numbers become frightening.

Stanford India Bio-design

SIB is offering a two year fellowship for medical technology innovation - the program is conducted by Stanford in association with AIIMS and IIT-Delhi.

I think this is a wonderful opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs and other players in the Indian biomedical industry. Please do check it out here.

The great Indian electronics opportunity

When I stepped into my first job after college, the one tag I never wanted from ignorant friends and relatives was that of an "IT engineer". IT is different, I claimed - Java,C++, blah blah. Every Tom,Dick and Harry could do "IT" but I was into "VLSI" - a priviliged domain. It was a tough task to explain the difference. After all these years, I have finally managed to convince my parents that I make ( rather , design but explaining that subtlety is not worth the effort) chips of the non-edible variety, and have nothing to do with website software.

Compared to giant leaps in software services of the Infosys/Wipro/TCS variety , the semiconductor industry in India has been relatively anonymous. But if Frost and Sullivan's report on Indian electronics opportunity is to be believed, the electronics consumption is at the cusp of an explosion - reaching a staggering 363 billion dollars , and still growing, in 2015. The majority of this demand would be fueled by cellphones, PCs, media players and consumer electronics. This translates into 40 billion USD worth of semiconductor opportunity starting from 3 billion in 2005 - a ten fold increase in 10 years.

Today , almost 80% of the revenues and workforce in Indian semiconductor industry fall in the embedded software domain. I suspect this percentage will persist or even increase as we move to 2015 , simply because chips are becoming smarter, more complicated to design, yet cheaper to manufacture due to increased wafer sizes, increasing yields and ultra efficient super-fabs. This paradox works well for those with deep pockets. Scale is everything in the chip design industry and those who don't achieve it either disappear or get gobbled up no matter how superior their design is on any number of parameters.

The biggest opportunities in the next 10 odd years would be
a) electronics equipment manufacturing ( 150 billion USD)- local production more cost effective, customisation for local consumption.
b) embedded software (30 billion USD)- endless supply of smart software engineers , customisation for local consumption.

EDA,VLSI and board design would also continue to grow but opportunity would be relatively limited at <10 billion USD. More importantly, newer players would find it more and more difficult to enter these markets.

As for chip fabrication, lets just say we are late into the game, notwithstanding SemIndia's persistence. After all, if one wants to speak Mandarin fluently, the age to start is 5 , not 25. Incidentally, the Chinese entered this game in early 1980's.