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Journalism of Courage
Can India produce a Bills Gates?
Innovations will happen here when problems and the ecosystem come together. The ecosystem must be therethe research capability,the funding. So far,most people have been going abroad to do research. Its a question of the right opportunity and going forward. Given the kind of opportunities that we have,more people will become entrepreneurs and will be willing to risk trying out new things,as opposed to simply taking on a job. It will happen. The US has been investing and innovating for centuries; in that sense we are a relatively young nation.
Are you able to see technology ten years on?
I cant really predict the future,but if you look back you will see that not every technology that has come in has made a big impact. There are only five technologies I can think of in the past 50 years that have had a big impact. The first is the mainframe computer because it made automation possible. The second is client server technology because it gave business users access to the technology. The third is ERP because it made the life of CFOs easier,the fourth is the Internet,which had a profound impact on the world and the fifth,I would say,is the Microsoft Office. No one in the business community today can live without a spreadsheet or PowerPoint; it changed the way people started to do things. None of us could have predicted ten years back the extent of the impact that mobile phones,the Internet and e-mail would have. In the mid-Nineties I used to send my reports from abroad by fax because not everybody was into e-mail. Today we cant switch off! I think in the next ten years technology will have an impact that we cant comprehend today! Virtually everything will be real time. Social computing will be big.
Why do you think social computing will be so important?
Im closely observing the trends in social computing,although Im not part of any site myself. I think these sites will become powerful in creating opinions because like-minded people debate. Once you say there is a platform,it can be put to use for a hobby,for thought and for serious stuff. There is need to belong to the communitythe club mentalityand social computing sites create virtual communities that are very powerful.
In my opinion,social computing will have a profound impact.
Will the Indian IT industry focus more on R&D and become more inventive?
Yes,certainly that will happen because we have matured,built scale and moved up the value chain. The quality of work that we do for clients today is very different from what we did ten years back. Were already creating intellectual property and will create more in the next ten years. Also,the adoption of technology in India is going to be a significant factor because wherever there is a problem there will be more innovative solutions. One of the solutions we have created for cooperative banks is an example of cloud technology and there will be many such solutions that get incubated,piloted,and scaled up in India first,because in the Western world many of the problems dont exist.
How do you read the trend in the IT industry in the next few years?
I dont believe there is a demand problem for the industry as a whole and India has a big role to play because of the scale that we have; demography also supports us big time. The age dependency ratio is improving continuously and the tech industry in particular will be polarised toward the working population.
