03-12-2004, 06:27 AM
From the NY Times. FYI:
OP-ED COLUMNIST
<b>The Great Indian Dream</b>
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 11, 2004
BANGALORE, India
Nine years ago, as Japan was beating America's brains out in the auto
industry, I wrote a column about playing a computer geography game with my
daughter, then 9 years old. I was trying to help her with a clue that
clearly pointed to Detroit, so I asked her, "Where are cars made?" And she
answered, "Japan." Ouch.
Well, I was reminded of that story while visiting an Indian software design
firm in Bangalore, Global Edge. The company's marketing manager, Rajesh
Rao, told me he had just made a cold call to the vice president for
engineering of a U.S. company, trying to drum up business. As soon as Mr.
Rao introduced himself as calling from an Indian software firm, the U.S.
executive said to him, "Namaste" - a common Hindi greeting. Said Mr. Rao:
"A few years ago nobody in America wanted to talk to us. Now they are
eager." And a few even know how to say hi in proper Hindu fashion. So now I
wonder: if I have a granddaughter one day, and I tell her I'm going to
India, will she say, "Grandpa, is that where software comes from?"
Driving around Bangalore you might think so. The Pizza Hut billboard shows
a steaming pizza under the headline "Gigabites of Taste!" Some traffic
signs are sponsored by Texas Instruments. And when you tee off on the first
hole at Bangalore's KGA golf course, your playing partner points at two new
glass-and-steel buildings in the distance and says: "Aim at either
Microsoft or I.B.M."
How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to
the brainy country that is going to take all our best jobs? Answer: good
timing, hard work, talent and luck.
The good timing starts with India's decision in 1991 to shuck off decades
of socialism and move toward a free-market economy with a focus on foreign
trade. This made it possible for Indians who wanted to succeed at
innovation to stay at home, not go to the West. This, in turn, enabled
India to harvest a lot of its natural assets for the age of globalization.
One such asset was Indian culture's strong emphasis on education and the
widely held belief here that the greatest thing any son or daughter could
do was to become a doctor or an engineer, which created a huge pool of
potential software technicians. Second, by accident of history and the
British occupation of India, most of those engineers were educated in
English and could easily communicate with Silicon Valley. India was also
neatly on the other side of the world from America, so U.S. designers could
work during the day and e-mail their output to their Indian subcontractors
in the evening. The Indians would then work on it for all of their day and
e-mail it back. Presto: the 24-hour workday.
Also, this was the age of globalization, and the countries that succeed
best at globalization are those that are best at "glocalization" - taking
the best global innovations, styles and practices and melding them with
their own culture, so they don't feel overwhelmed. India has been naturally
glocalizing for thousands of years.
Then add some luck. The dot-com bubble led to a huge overinvestment in
undersea fiber-optic cables, which made it dirt-cheap to transfer data,
projects or phone calls to far-flung places like India, where Indian
techies could work on them for much lower wages than U.S. workers. Finally,
there was Y2K. So many companies feared that their computers would melt
down because of the Year 2000 glitch they needed software programmers to go
through and recode them. Who had large numbers of programmers to do that
cheaply? India. That was how a lot of Indian software firms got their first
outsourced jobs.
So if you are worried about outsourcing, I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is that a unique techno-cultural-economic perfect storm came
together in the early 1990's to make India a formidable competitor and
partner for certain U.S. jobs - and there are not a lot of other Indias out
there. The bad news, from a competition point of view, is that there are
555 million Indians under the age of 25, and a lot of them want a piece of
"The Great Indian Dream," which is a lot like the American version.
As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this tech
thing was their private preserve is over. This is a wake-up call for U.S.
workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do
that, he said, it will spur "a whole new cycle of innovation, and we'll
both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose."
OP-ED COLUMNIST
<b>The Great Indian Dream</b>
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 11, 2004
BANGALORE, India
Nine years ago, as Japan was beating America's brains out in the auto
industry, I wrote a column about playing a computer geography game with my
daughter, then 9 years old. I was trying to help her with a clue that
clearly pointed to Detroit, so I asked her, "Where are cars made?" And she
answered, "Japan." Ouch.
Well, I was reminded of that story while visiting an Indian software design
firm in Bangalore, Global Edge. The company's marketing manager, Rajesh
Rao, told me he had just made a cold call to the vice president for
engineering of a U.S. company, trying to drum up business. As soon as Mr.
Rao introduced himself as calling from an Indian software firm, the U.S.
executive said to him, "Namaste" - a common Hindi greeting. Said Mr. Rao:
"A few years ago nobody in America wanted to talk to us. Now they are
eager." And a few even know how to say hi in proper Hindu fashion. So now I
wonder: if I have a granddaughter one day, and I tell her I'm going to
India, will she say, "Grandpa, is that where software comes from?"
Driving around Bangalore you might think so. The Pizza Hut billboard shows
a steaming pizza under the headline "Gigabites of Taste!" Some traffic
signs are sponsored by Texas Instruments. And when you tee off on the first
hole at Bangalore's KGA golf course, your playing partner points at two new
glass-and-steel buildings in the distance and says: "Aim at either
Microsoft or I.B.M."
How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to
the brainy country that is going to take all our best jobs? Answer: good
timing, hard work, talent and luck.
The good timing starts with India's decision in 1991 to shuck off decades
of socialism and move toward a free-market economy with a focus on foreign
trade. This made it possible for Indians who wanted to succeed at
innovation to stay at home, not go to the West. This, in turn, enabled
India to harvest a lot of its natural assets for the age of globalization.
One such asset was Indian culture's strong emphasis on education and the
widely held belief here that the greatest thing any son or daughter could
do was to become a doctor or an engineer, which created a huge pool of
potential software technicians. Second, by accident of history and the
British occupation of India, most of those engineers were educated in
English and could easily communicate with Silicon Valley. India was also
neatly on the other side of the world from America, so U.S. designers could
work during the day and e-mail their output to their Indian subcontractors
in the evening. The Indians would then work on it for all of their day and
e-mail it back. Presto: the 24-hour workday.
Also, this was the age of globalization, and the countries that succeed
best at globalization are those that are best at "glocalization" - taking
the best global innovations, styles and practices and melding them with
their own culture, so they don't feel overwhelmed. India has been naturally
glocalizing for thousands of years.
Then add some luck. The dot-com bubble led to a huge overinvestment in
undersea fiber-optic cables, which made it dirt-cheap to transfer data,
projects or phone calls to far-flung places like India, where Indian
techies could work on them for much lower wages than U.S. workers. Finally,
there was Y2K. So many companies feared that their computers would melt
down because of the Year 2000 glitch they needed software programmers to go
through and recode them. Who had large numbers of programmers to do that
cheaply? India. That was how a lot of Indian software firms got their first
outsourced jobs.
So if you are worried about outsourcing, I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is that a unique techno-cultural-economic perfect storm came
together in the early 1990's to make India a formidable competitor and
partner for certain U.S. jobs - and there are not a lot of other Indias out
there. The bad news, from a competition point of view, is that there are
555 million Indians under the age of 25, and a lot of them want a piece of
"The Great Indian Dream," which is a lot like the American version.
As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this tech
thing was their private preserve is over. This is a wake-up call for U.S.
workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do
that, he said, it will spur "a whole new cycle of innovation, and we'll
both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose."