It’s their written language that’s the main part of their problem. It’s non-phonetic. It means that in order to acquire a basic vocabulary—of, say, 2,000 or 3,000 words (the content of their average newspapers)—- children have to learn uniquely-shaped characters (whole words) which have no, or very little, relationship with their utterance. A Chinese or Japanese child can learn to speak his language quite as readily as children do the world over, but learning how to read or write each individual word takes many years. And there’s only one way, unfortunately for children, and that’s by rote learning. And thousands of hours of rote learning over many years under the strict discipline of slave-masters in the schoolroom doesn’t do anything for the creativity of young minds—or for older minds for that matter because the basic mental skills are aptitudes are thoroughly laid down before puberty.

The Chinese and Japanese governments are well aware of the damage that rote learning is doing to them—and say so quite frequently. Although both countries can churn out ten of thousands of science and engineering graduates every year, there’s scarcely an independent mind among them. Independent ‘garage inventors’, as we have in the West, are as rare as hen’s teeth in China and Japan. For example, Japan has been industrialized for over a century—only a decade or two less than other Western countries—yet it has only won 15 Nobel prizes in the science subjects. Compare this figure with those of America (261), the UK (91) and Germany (88). China has only won 10! However, this comparison is unfair because China’s have only been won since it woke up in the 1970s. America’s number also needs to be modified because about a third of its prizes have been won by foreign-born scientists who became American citizens after migrating there.

It’s all Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s fault (yes, the same as is famed for his terracotta army). Once Qin had conquered several countries and unified China in 221BC, he standardized as many things as possible—from weights and measures and currency through to the written language. All the various scholars throughout his empire, speaking scores of different languages (some with and some without a written form) were forced—on pain of death—to produce a composite, but common, written language. And this could only be non-phonetic, of course. Even the mighty power of Emperor Qin couldn’t force millions of his subjects to learn a new common spoken language but he could certainly force his relatively few scholars to produce a new common written one. One popular penalty in those days was to cut someone through his midriff, mount him on a platter of hot tar and take him around the town, gesticulating and shouting before he expired.

And herein lies a paradox, because the industrial revolution in Europe would never have happened without starting from a basic stock of scores of innovations—such as canal locks, differential gears, sowing grain in rows and so forth—that had drifted in from China along the Great Silk Road over a period of centuries. However, this doesn’t signify that the Chinese had been more inventive than Europeans. But its common written language had meant that when one innovation—say a wheelbarrow (very important indeed for both China and Europe)—had been invented by a genius in one tucked-away corner of China, then the local mandarin could write and tell hundreds more all about this wonderful new device.

But what once had been an accelerator for both Chinese and European civilizations actually became a retardant for China when the Western Enlightenment and scientific revolution stirred into life in the 1600s and 1700s. The Chinese had no way of encapsulating these new ideas. A Chinese mandarin visiting Europe in, say, the 1700s or 1800s, and learning about the new exciting scientific ideas (if he’d learned Latin or another European language of course) had no way of disseminating them widely in China because there he had no method of writing them down in Chinese words that would have been instantly recognizable by fellow Chinese scholars or engineers. He could only convey the new ideas vaguely by speaking of them face-to-face when he returned home.

Thus Japan (which had inherited thousands of Chinese words) and China were left behind by the industrial revolution in England, Germany and America. They didn’t begin to catch up in earnest until the the 1870s (the Meiji Revolution) and the 1970s (the Deng Xiaoping Revolution) respectively. And this is still—largely—where they are today. Both the Chinese and Japanese governments are trying to phoneticize their written languages but only very slowly, such is the cultural conservatism of two thousands years to contend with.

What might be significant in China (though not yet happening in Japan), is that all their college and university entrants have to learn spoken and written English these days. All their top government officials speak English and most business and science faculties in their universities use English widely in their seminars. Also, thousands of their brightest young post-grad scientists go to America or England for research experience and qualifications. Indeed, once they are here for a few years they become quite as inventive as Western scientists (if not more so when you look at the authorship of many papers in heavyweight subject, say genetics or particle physics). Unfortunately for the Chinese and Japanese governments many, if not most, of the most innovative scientific minds elect to stay in their adoptive countries rather than to return.

But the problem is even more serious for China and Japan. Almost as important as are the original ideas of innovative individuals is the necessity of other individuals who will give a welcome to new ideas and help to develop them. And it’s this open-minded hinterland which is still limited because of their deep, conservative, authoritative cultures. Goodness knows, new ideas often have a hard time being accepted in the West. Even here, the crazy ideas of yesteryear sometimes have to wait until its die-hard opponents are dead and buried and a brand new generation appears. Only then are the ideas seen to be not so crazy after all.

There we are then. Japan came close to hollowing out America and Western Europe 30 years ago with its superbly made (Western-invented) products. China is threatening to do the same in the coming years. But the innovative momentum is still with the West and this sort of cultural momentum takes a century or two to die down—if it ever does—or a century to acquire—if it ever does in China and Japan.

Just BTW, many Indians would read the title of the post “Why China won’t win . . .” and subconsciously insert India in the context. India’s chances of going anywhere has been put paid to by the Congress-led UPA governments. That’s a shame but then it is hard to avoid the realization that Indians elect criminals to government.

It’s all karma, neh?

The release of 251,287 US State Department documents starting yesterday and ranging from the secret to the embarrassing was the coup de grace of the modern nation-state. Well . . . not exactly . . . not yet . . . it’s only a way-station . . . but Julian Assange’s peccadillo will make its way into the history books as one of the notable events when the fate of the nation-state is finally described.

Newspapers have been prying into state secrets ever since they were invented. And then, for those old enough to remember, we had the release of secret documents about the Vietnam War in 1971 (the “Pentagon Papers”) by Daniel Ellsberg. On that occasion the US government tried to prosecute him and jail him for many years but public opinion, and the newspapers and court judges, were on his side. Finally the US government — rather laughably — “lost” the wire-tap evidence against Ellsberg and he lived happily ever after. Indeed, he’s still with us, aged 79 — hopefully hale and hearty. No doubt similar attempts will be made to incarcerate Julian Assange in the present case.

But why the death of the nation-state? The answer is very simple. The world has become too complex for any nation-state to understand. Real-world information can’t get to the top of the political pyramid quickly enough and accurately enough for a modern government to respond in the way that they ought to. Built like an army — indeed, its origin owing much to the structure of armies during the 19th century — the top-down pyramidal control by the nation-state, passing down through many ranks, is failing. The sort of secret diplomacy which came to the fore with the nascent nation-state during the Middle Ages has now largely gone for good. Nation-states are leaking like colanders. There is only one remaining nation-state — North Korea — which is still largely impenetrable to prying eyes.

We’ll always need governance, of course. Basic justice and basic protection against violence (whether local or from afar) still needs to be maintained, but many other control functions that nation-states (particularly their civil services) have assumed in the course of the industrial revolution are now melting away. Nation-states, like all power institutions before them (organized religions), will take a long time to die because substantial proportions of their populations have a direct financial interest (jobs or perks) that they should continue as long as possible.

Nevertheless, although nation-states may have been ‘fit for purpose’ in the days of large and affordable armies, as they were for the first half of the 20th century, they are now being overtaken by all sorts of laterally organized, trans-national specializations such as innovations, businesses, science research, interest groups, personal activities, cultural fashions and even, so help us, criminal gangs. Increasingly, these are taking their own decisions (including, importantly, economic ones) and have their own methods of influencing public opinion — which, of course, the Internet is now accelerating.

Paradoxically, even though nation-states had almost completely extinguished Common Law and Mercantile Law in the last century with untold volumes of Statutory Law (including attempts at International Law), even their civil services are increasingly unable to understand or fairly apply the laws that they themselves have formulated (given half a nod and wink by the politicians whom they largely manipulate). Or, as often happens, their laws have counter-intuitive effects. Thankfully, however, just enough of the former laws, tested and honed over millennia, survive. When, for example, two large businesses are in dispute they are still turning to New York Common Law or London Equity courts to resolve matters. The recently formulated World Trade Organization (although making heavy weather of it at present!) is actually a revival of Medieval Mercantile Law (the important principle here being that there is no top-down authority involved but lateral arrangements between parties).

I could go on, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that this morning’s thoughts were prompted by the financial fiasco that’s been going on in Brussels over the week-end and the interim solution — the printing of yet more money, albeit heavily disguised with verbal garbage in order to mystify the punters. And then there’s the fiasco that’s still going on in America where, unless unemployment magically diminishes in the near future, Ben Bernanke threatens to release yet more money by all sorts of clever methods. The day of the wheelbarrow being taken to the supermarket is not all that far off.

****

The above is by Keith Hudson. I am happy to report that his book “A Species in the Making” will hit the stores soon.

Useful Tips and Resources for Indian Students Seeking to Study Abroad in the United States

Brian Jenkins
July 2010

The United States is one of the most popular locations for Indian students who want to study abroad. The Unites States offers a high quality college education. Shown below is a variety of valuable information and resources for students who want to attend a college in the United States:

1. Popular colleges: In descending order, the following list shows the most popular schools in the United States for international students: University of Southern California, New York University, Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Purdue University. The state of California has the largest number of international college students. New York is second and Texas is third.
2. Colleges – High percent of foreign students: Some of the colleges with the highest percentage of international students are the University of Maine – Fort Kent 25% (Fort Kent, Maine); University of the Ozarks: 18% (Clarksville, Arkansas); Dordt College: 16% (Sioux Center, Indiana); Cooper Union 15% (New York, New York), East-West University: 12% (Chicago, Illinois); Lake Superior State University: 11% (Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan); University of Charleston: 10% (Charleston, West Virginia); Union College: 9% (Lincoln Nebraska); and Marietta College: 9% (Marietta, Ohio).
3. Selecting a school: Some of the best websites for finding U.S. colleges and universities which offer desired educational programs are: College Board, The Princeton Review and US News.
4. USA government source: Education USA is the only official U.S. government source for higher education opportunities. It has a informative web page which offers a variety of information for international students. Education USA also has a useful web page which provides information on undergraduate study, graduate study, specialized professional study, searching for colleges and universities and other topics. The questions and answers page allows students to ask specific questions.
5. Placement services: The Institute of International Education an independent not-for-profit, organization established in 1919, offers placement services which strives to match each student with the best possible academic program. Each year the Institute of International Education places more than 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students from over 175 countries into colleges and universities located in the United States.
6. Engineering programs: Quality engineering programs meet the minimum education standards set by the Accredited Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Most employers prefer to hire engineers that completed an ABET accredited program.
7. Community colleges: There are close to 1,200 community colleges in the United States. They provide two-year degrees and certificates. They offer low cost, high quality courses. Community colleges also offer career specific training programs. Completing the general education courses of a bachelor’s degree at a community college is a great way to save a substantial amount of money. Community colleges have easy to meet admissions requirements.
8. Student visa: In order to obtain a student visa, applicants are required to provide the following: a form I-20 which is acquired from a U.S. college or university; a completed nonimmigrant visa application form (OF-156) along with a photograph of the applicant; a passport valid for at least six months after the proposed entry date into the United States; and a receipt for a visa processing fee. Applicants should be prepared to provide diplomas and transcripts from previously attended institutions; standardized test scores and evidence of financial support while studying in the United States.

Resources

• Education USA
• United States – India Educational Foundation
• American Society for Engineering Education (ASSE)
• American Association for Community Colleges

Brian Jenkins writes about Systems Software Engineering Careers for Braintrack.com.

Alexis Bonari
July 2010

PM Singh refers to Maoists as India’s most pressing internal security threat, and it’s going to be difficult for the CPIM to rid itself of that label. Violent attacks with increasing frequency have damaged a police station and the home of a Congress leader this month, and on June 29, 26 members of India’s Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed by Maoists. It’s easy to see why India is taking serious action, deploying over 60,000 paramilitary units into Maoist territories and flirting with the idea of removing its helicopters from U.N. patrols in Africa. These helicopters would be used internally instead, enabling India to keep a closer watch on Maoists and create a stronger show of force. But it’s unlikely that military force alone can quell the underlying rebellion.

Underdevelopment Spurs Violence

The Maoists emerged in the late 1960s when they were forced to defend their land, which was in danger of being seized. Increasing poverty in rural Maoist states has caused desperation to escalate in recent years, especially when the natural resources of these areas began to be exploited for coal and other minerals. Rural Indians have, in many cases, been left behind politically and economically by the greater country’s urban development. Such neglect, either real or perceived, has had a negative effect on rural Maoists and has fueled their violent rebellions. There is certainly no excuse for the grossly over-reactive acts of Maoists, but an understanding of the reasons behind their actions may be helpful in ending the rebellion and enabling India to continue growing in geopolitical strength.

India’s Reaction: Rural Development May Supplement Military Efforts

Violence from the Indian government is exacerbating the situation by eliciting even worse reactions from Maoists. There’s no doubt that India’s military should be involved and that Maoists should be brought to justice for their crimes, but the real problem lies deeper beneath the surface. The fear of losing land, resources, and a way of life can cause extreme anger, which can easily be channeled into uncontrolled violence. India will have to take underlying causes of the Maoist problem into consideration if the rebellion is to be fully eradicated.

Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She often can be found blogging about education and scholarships for college. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

A Bi-polar Population
by Keith Hudson

What was the first assembly track in the world? This is perhaps not the most gripping question that can be asked but, in answering it, a fascinating glimpse is given of the past and important questions of the future are posed.

In the early 1980s I had the opportunity of leasing a large, empty Victorian building in Coventry in order to run some skill-training schemes for unemployed young people. Quite suddenly, starting in 1979, and for the first time since WWII, a whole tranche of school-leavers found themselves with no job to go to.

I had had my eye on this building for some time. It lay in an old industrial area which was destined for redevelopment, but the worsening economic conditions at the time had put this on ice. So it was available — and at a very low rent, too. Why I was so fascinated with it, however, was because it was the site of the most revolutionary development in manufacturing in the early 19th century. It had been Rotherham’s watch factory and the first assembly track in the world in which parts that had been manufactured elsewhere were finally assembled on one long belt-driven carousel. (It is now a watch museum and much to be recommended if you’re ever in Coventry.)

It had beaten Henry Ford’s car assembly track by at least a hundred years. However, I hadn’t realized then that assembly track methods had been perfected even earlier than Rotherham’s — by almost precisely two thousand years, in fact. Reading about the Terra Cotta Army in the Smithsonian Magazine last night, I discovered that Qin Shi Huangdi had done it long before Rotherham or Ford.

After declaring himself Emperor in BC221 (after defeating half-a-dozen disparate countries) Qin set about standardizing everything that could be standardized — weights and measures, currency, the written language and a great deal more. But what of the thousands of soldiers of the Terra Cotta army that populated Emperor Qin’s tomb? They’re all different aren’t they? Some have said that they were all unique and were fashioned on real individuals.

Yes, indeed they are all different. Each one is a permutation of different parts — ears, noses, eye brows, mouths, arms, fingers, feet, moustaches (or not), hairstyles and hats. They had all been made in specialized workshops. Is that enough? Probably. Permutate from all these, and stick the clay components on one armature and you have thousands of different figures — before they are clothed in body armour and weapons.

In fact, thinking about this further as I write, Emperor Qin had anticipated assembly track methods that have only been developed since the 1980s. This is of those now making customized cars or PCs, among others. A basic frame is placed on the track and different combinations of parts are then bolted on according to individual customer orders. It’s highly computerized, of course. Come to think of it, this even applies to family groceries. Not so very long ago, a housewife would go to her corner shop and buy pretty well the same package of basic foodstuffs that every other housewife was buying. Today, she goes to a supermarket where she can select from 30,000 different items — or even more.

This even applies to house mortgages. A house buyer can choose from thousands of different mortgages. If he selects well, or is advised well, he can choose exactly the right payment conditions to suit his income and future prospects, or what he thinks future interest rates and other matter might be. The list of such individualized choices is endless so I’ll stop here.

While all this seems to be a consumer paradise there is a much more serious side of the equation. While production methods are being increasingly routinized and automated, requiring more and more highly educated specialists and administrators at the top end, the jobs of the majority are being increasingly dumbed down. Whereas in the 1950s and 60s it seemed as though all levels of society were proceeding upwards in status and prosperity at a regular pace, since then a steadily yawning gap — in education, income, social status, culture — has been widening between the “do-ers” and the rest.

Given a continuation of present technological trends, it is difficult to see how the gap can be reversed, try as many developed governments have been doing in the last few decades, particularly in trying to upgrade education. Pretty well all social and educational research points to one basic problem — cultural poverty in the earliest months and years of a child’s life. By the age of about 5, intellectual development has already been blunted in an increasing number of children. By the age of about 11, clear divisions in aspirational and educational potential are so wide as to remain fixed in most cases for the rest of their lives.

To my knowledge only one attempt at a radical solution has ever been tried. This was the baby nursery system that was tried in the more socialist Israeli kibbutzim soon after the state was instituted in 1947 in order to release parents for almost full-time work (they were “allowed” to see their children for an hour or two every day). The children were given the best of care and educational stimulation but the experiments failed within a few years. The parents wanted their own children back in their own homes.

Thus it seems to me that a new sort of caste system is now emerging in developed countries and I can’t see how it can be reversed. One possible flaw in this argument is that the top-end “do-ers” will still need a reasonably prosperous mass market to sell to (or exploit, depending on one’s political viewpoint). But even this argument doesn’t add up. Competition is already so great that profit margins — however large the market — are being driven down to zero in an increasing number of goods and services. At the same time, automation and small run production methods (not to mention nano-technology) are growing such that mass markets will no longer be as important as they have been for the past 200 years or so.

I would suggest therefore that a permanent educational — and thus social — separation is already beginning to take place within advanced country populations. Modern biological research is clearly showing that human evolution has been, and still is, proceeding at a rate that has never been appreciated since Darwin’s time. In particular the male’s Y-chromosome is a hot bed of genetic mutation. It is the results of the more beneficial of these in terms of skilful behaviour from which the female selects when choosing a future lifetime partner and possible father for her children. Speciation seems to be inevitable to me.

It’s a sort of a reversal to the caste system of the days of yore, only now it’s the backward classes who are the privileged sort, with access to education and perks at any of the country’s institutions. The most premier of these, the Indian Institutes of Technology, have a 22.5 percent reservation for backward classes. Even as the wisdom of this decision is being debated, the country’s HRD Ministry is proposing to increase the percentage to 49.5. While the government is looking at the issue entirely in terms of its vote bank and its popularity with the lower classes (who make up a large chunk of the voting majority), here are a few reasons why this move could be considered detrimental to the general education policy of the nation:

• For starters, the standard of education is considerably lowered when institutions of the highest standards admit students on any basis other than merit and ability.
• Statistics show that around 20 percent of students who enter IITs through the quota system drop out without completing their degree, a figure that supports the argument that they are not prepared for the rigorous and harsh schedules and standards that these institutions set.
• While the IIT institutions are bound to set aside 22.5 percent of their admissions for students from the backward classes, they are not compelled to fill all those seats each year. Only those students who meet the institutions’ relaxed admission criteria for backward classes are eligible for admission. If the colleges are unable to fill the reserved number of seats, they are not allowed to allocate them to deserving upper caste students, thus doing them a gross injustice.
• The quota system in general is discouraging to backward class students since it does not motivate them to do their best. They are secure in the knowledge that they do not have to work as hard as their counterparts from the higher castes in order to be able to secure the same kind of, if not better, education opportunities.
• The quota system does not set rules for people belonging to backward castes in name only – they are extremely rich and enjoy all the luxuries in life but still hang on to their lower caste status only because it gives them an undisputed advantage in the field of education.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of top online universities. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

Last Fall, I wrote a widely read piece called Venture Capital in India, in which I pegged the Indian venture boom to be largely in Real Estate, Retail, and to an extent in Consumer Internet, not much in actual technology.

Last week, Sujai Karampuri made a well researched case for technology product companies in India.

In the recently concluded Philippe Courtot interview series, we discussed at length the various ways in which India and China could undercut US companies, and Philippe acknowledged that in his business (Qualys is an outsourced managed security service provider, a SaaS play), it is quite possible that an Indian company could come up with a vastly lower cost structure, and customers would switch immediately, if they are convinced about the reliability of the service.

Just to set the economics in perspective, Qualys has invested $65 Million to build an infrastructure that “is at the scale of the planet” to monitor, audit and report network security problems.

Let me throw a challenge in the direction of the Indian entrepreneurs: Go figure out how to build this same business for $30 Million, and I can tell you, you will have an absolute winner in your hands.

ps. You can read the Courtot interview here:

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10] [Part 11]

R.A. Mashelkar once said “Even if India does not do anything it is inevitable that we will emerge as the knowledge power in the next 5-10 years. If you look at our successes in the past and our emergence in the field of software technology, then this is fairly clear”.

It didn’t appear a tiny bit clear of how India will emerge as the “knowledge power” when I read this way back in 2003. Only thing that was happening then was, India was getting lot of call center/BPO work along with some outsourced IT work. If this is to be dubbed as “knowledge power”, it is not clear what the benefits of becoming one are. If all Indian kids who are playing gully cricket start to play tennis will we be called “Tennis Power” even though none of us even qualify to Grand slams?

Why is everybody tooting the “IT super power” horn over the past few years? It is simply because we could not do anything great in the Manufacturing/Industries sector and bring development to the country. Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, after traveling on Indian roads sighs like any other westerner: “A journey to Pune, 115 miles southeast of Mumbai .. by road.. I had been told that the Mumbai-Pune expressway is a modern construction. I would rank the six-lane, barely-divided Mumbai-Pune expressway a B-minus, at best. The exit experience was even worse than the approach — a tedious drive on low-quality local roads — overall, a driving experience that left me exhausted, head spinning, and with a sore back. If this is progress in closing India’s infrastructure gap, the problem is even worse than I had imagined.” On another occasion, “India’s infrastructure gap is almost beyond comprehension — inadequate roads, deficient power supply and transmission facilities, and not one good airport in the entire country.”

The India Infrastructure Report 2004 says it all, “…even relative to our income, our failure in water, roads, sanitation, schooling, and electricity is woeful.” The industry/manufacturing sector does not look promising in India as infrastructure is below par which holds back supply chain management and delivery capabilities and doesn’t encourage FDIs. For example, India did not seem to have taken advantage of the post WTO quota regime in textiles. We lost a great opportunity whereas Chinese geared up for it by transforming Dongguan. One of the trade fairs held in the Chinese province seemed to have drawn 30,000 professional buyers!! Because of pathetic growth in the Indian manufacturing sector, the job growth in the sector is just 2% per annum over the decade.

Thanks to high yield crops, Agriculture is doing good enough to meet internal demands). But with fickle monsoons and an exponentially growing population (which pushes the internal demand), this sector is not likely to take India to any great heights.

With manufacturing and agriculture not presenting a rosy picture, all jumped to the IT/Knowledge power bandwagon. Let us go straight to IT/Services work, which seems to be our strength and certainly is the tight rope on which our GDP growth seems to be walking nowadays.

As the fruit (IT industry) gets bigger and older, it has started to rot. Any doubt? Take two whiffs of the reek, please.

1. A big company slashes pay for reasons unknown and shrugs off the massive outrage.
2. CEO of a famous billion dollar IT firm bullshits “IT pros earn handsome salaries, they should be taxed more to improve the infrastructure of Bangalore” and does not bother about these sensible queries.

The two most insensible things that are happening now in most Indian Software companies are Forced Ranking (Appraisals) and Process (CMM) stuff.

Apprisals – In one of the leading companies, there are SET percentages for each ranking. “10% (for eg) should be given top rating of 5 (on a scale of 5) , 40% should be rated 4 and 40% rated 3 and 10% rated 2”. I can’t understand how they argue that only 10% are top performers. What if more than 10% are top performers? Is that not possible? In addition, how are they agreeing that 10% of the company is low performers? Aren’t they ashamed of this? Guess what the folks who got a low rating do? They mostly switch to one or other big companies and those big companies think they are hiring the top 5%“. This forced ranking is a shameful copy from GE which had different intentions behind the implementation

Process – The main idea behind Indian IT companies going for Process certifications (CMM etc) seems to be to woo customers and not to enhance quality. There is not enough tailoring of the standards mentioned and on most occasions, it presents itself as a pain rather than as a facilitator to quality. I wonder why Indian vendors alone go for this and not the foreign counterparts. Google, Yahoo, IBM etc do not seem to have this.

Then there are other debaucheries like the bonds for not leaving the company, haphazard promotions etc. Other dishonorable thing is the implementation of social activities, the only reason for these seems to be to get the PCMM and hog some limelight in the media. Of course there are exceptions to this like Infosys who generously gave 5 crores to the Tsunami from its own pocket where as other Indian IT companies where busy setting up the intranet page to enable the employee to login and donate from his salary. Some companies take advantage of the huge number of freshers who come out each year and employee them for cheap salaries. There are other malpractices like employ a guy and take in only his part of his previous experience, the guy only gets to know when he gets confirmed an year after and doesn’t get a deserved promotion. Then they try all tricks possible with the salary structure with terms like “Cost To Company” etc. These tricks may seem silly to talk about but when we think on the broader scale, it just appalling. An entire nation is (wrongly) pinning hopes on few Indian Software companies who by involving in hoodwinks is not likely to shape anything. If all the companies are short sighted to just look at their margins/ balance sheet without any ear to all the stakeholders’ expectations, it is not going to hold for too long. Its this shortsightedness that is keeping Indian companies transforming themselves into a Google (35 billion market cap with just 3500 employees), a Yahoo, a Microsoft etc.

You might be in a third world country if you don’t believe in Abraham Lincoln’s quotes – “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”

For the record, I am including the rest of his thoughts on the matter. He raises a set of extremely important questions that nobody interested in the telecommunications sector can afford to ignore.

The purpose of my post today is to ask whether telecom and IT suppliers and service providers in India are planning appropriately as what they supply — what were, by convention, once referred to as “services” — become increasingly “commoditized.” The products of this industry today are increasingly viewed as multidimensional — something that is clearly evident from the manner that members on this list show their concern for issues beyond price alone, such as reliability and quality issues, billing issues, customer
care issues, service provider identity, etc. This level of consumer savviness, when it permeates down to the non-techie level, will clearly augur very well for India as it develops into a consumption powerhouse on the backs of its huge middle class and rising economic status. In addition, this list has also demonstrated a clear commitment to making IT and telecom (ICT, generally) technologies accessible to those less fortunate, those living and doing business in rural areas, those who don’t speak English, etc. These are all admirable goals and the social imperative underlying them cannot be overemphasized. Therein rests, I believe, an important responsibility of those with the know-how on this list (and other such socially conscious and savvy groups) to see those goals through.

Experience tells me that the diffusion of telecom and IT services (both wireline and wireless) through Indian society will, at some point, be driven by market forces that no amount of regulatory control or oversight can shape. That is the point at which consumer tastes and preferences will increasingly determine what gets provided and on what terms, and the importance
of a paternalistic public policy system will wane (although it may never completely disappear). Are suppliers and service
providers ready for this or, better still, encouraging and actively planning for it? My impression is that, in the early stages of transition from a stultified, patronage-ridden, monopoly system to a competitive market, it matters very little what consumers want or care about. Developers of new services have the upper hand and, frankly, for many, the apparent business model (and raison d’etre) is to exploit opportunities for regulatory arbitrage rather than to generate genuinely new business opportunities. But this cannot endure, particularly in an environment where the sizeable class of tech-savvy (and suitably skeptical) early adopters can see beyond the surface packaging or the price and demand that service providers pay attention to various other attributes of what they provide. Again, the recent discussion about broadband services or the Simputer on this list convinces me that a core group of informed and demanding consumers already exists and can help to shape the future of this industry in India.

Businesses need to plan, particularly if they intend to be in the market for the long haul. They need, if not perfect foresight, at least a reasonable ability to take the temperature and the pulse of actual and potential consumers to guide their decisions about what, how, and for whom to produce. Historically, when POTS and a few other things marked all that the telecom industry could offer, and competition neither mattered nor caused uncertainty in the market, forecasting consumer demands and needs was an exercise that relied relatively little on prescience or acumen. As telecom and IT services get commoditized, however, and competition inexorably leads to product differentiation, forecasting demands and needs will need to get increasingly sophisticated. Are service providers today planning for this or doing anything about it? I’ll be curious to know and to hear directly from service providers, some of whom, I’m sure, are represented on this list.

Yes, this is certainly a matter of market research, but research with a difference. The techniques of such research have advanced significantly over the last two decades. For example, it is well understood that forecasting future demand (or diffusion) for brand new services (which have no analogues or precursors in anything else that has ever been available) can be a very challenging assignment. Traditionally, market researchers in these circumstances have resorted to large-scale (and frequently costly and/or ill-designed surveys) to generate those forecasts. Some examples of the futility in this regard:

1. trying to predict ridership on new suburban transit systems by asking only those who actually commute on those systems about their ridership habits without making statistical adjustments for the fact that the survey samples so generated are self-selected or “endogenous”;
2. feeling compelled to rely on prohibitively expensive large-scale surveys on the grounds that only such surveys have statistical validity;
3. framing questions in surveys that subconsciously or otherwise bias respondents toward answering
   in a manner most likely to favour the business model being proposed; and so on.

Even the conjoint analysis techniques that have found wide application (and are still popular in some quarters) are not without their critical defects. My personal experience with a survey econometrics technique known as “rank-ordered logit (or probit) modeling” tells me that
there are now well-established and more accurate survey techniques available for forecasting demand and simulating market shares for multi-dimensional and brand new products for which no historical precedents exist. This technique cuts down drastically on the need to conduct large-scale surveys and, therefore, on cost, and allows great insight into how consumers sort out their own internal priorities about various features and attributes (including, of course, but not limited to, price). Are service providers in the IT and telecom industries in India using these techniques to better understand what consumers (at least, the early adopters) want before they roll out new services? Are they drawing on the potentially rich data that can come from assembling needs and preferences from diverse groups of actual and potential consumers? Are they, in the process, contributing to a wider education of society and its participation in the development of the future of this industry? Nothing would delight me more than to learn that this trail is already being blazed in India.