Gates to greatness

How nice of Natwar Singh to have timed his resignation with Bill Gates8217; fourth India sojourn. We can get back to talking about some important stuff, instead of despairing over when yet another politician will see the writing on the wall.

Sadly, the writing on the computer monitor isn8217;t that great for India. Feted in the West as an IT superpower-in-the-making and given to frequent self-congratulation, we tend to forget the embarrassing gaps between the story and the reality. Computer and internet penetration in India is abysmally low. Officially, a little over 20 per cent of Indians are poor. But the middle class is supposed to be double that proportion. The secular increase in middle class purchasing power has radically expanded all kinds of markets, but not that for computers. Pricing could be a factor. It8217;s too early to say whether the sub-Rs 10,000 PCs will make a difference. But those PCs have one feature that Bill Gates should think about. To price the PCs moderately, vendors have loaded them with the free, open source Linux operating system OS. Gates8217; Windows OS and other proprietory software push up PC prices. Microsoft has been an arch critic of open source software. But three things are now challenging the copyright/highly priced software paradigm. First, the open source system, inviting anyone with programming talent to improve the software, is producing some wonderful results. Linux is the most celebrated example. Firefox, an internet browser that is quickly becoming popular, is another.

The second challenge comes, ironically, from thieves. Piracy is so widespread and seemingly unstoppable that many smart IT gurus have started asking for software to be distributed free and money to be made from selling add-on services to customers. The third challenge is from 8220;thin PCs8221;: just hardware shells which work by accessing free software from the net; users8217; files are saved on secure servers, not on hard disks. Vendors make money via advertisements. Microsoft itself is in this game. The spread of this computing depends on the expansion of affordable broadband internet connections. That, and the other features, make it a high end computing revolution. But the message for the low end is the same8212;expensive, proprietory software is yesterday8217;s solution. Bill Gates is an epoch-making entrepreneur and a generous giver. But the gates to true greatness will not open till he opens Windows for all.