Recently there has been some talk about immigrant/Indian entrepreneurship and the Indian startup scene. Dharmesh Shah has a couple such articles here and here. As he notes, the scene in India is changing fast and startups are mushrooming around the tech hubs in India. But the so called Silicon Valley of India is still thriving mostly on the outsourced jobs and "off-shore" development centres of major corporations.

 

When I was working in a well known software services company in India, we tried to push hard into being a product company. The drive went on for about 3 years after which profitability of the whole effort was reviewed by the execs. The initiative was soon cancelled and projects mothballed.

 

Apart from the reasons Dharmesh highlights for why consumer software products did not take off in India, I think the mother cause of it was the need. A software product is just simply an effort to reduce the manpower requirement in doing things and India has never felt a need to do that thanks to its billion strong population. That's also the reason why the indispensible vacuum cleaner that you find in every home in the western world, is a hard sell in India . If the data entry operator can do the job for me cheaper, then why would I invest in an OCR software and workflow system, which needs some manual intervenation anyways?

 

This I think has some positive side to it as well. This way the wealth of the new economy is trickling down to the masses. Hopefully reducing the gap of haves and have-nots by some amount.

 

Generally I'm not much into fiction but when a friend recommended Microserfs as a fun little book about early days at Microsoft, I thought I should give it a shot. The book is an easy read for a layman without any arcane references to the computing terms. The writing style is so immersing that after a while you feel like you have known Karla, Dan, Susan, Michael etc for a while.

 

There are a couple of gripes though. Since I was reading a fiction I kinda expected something dramatic, *fictional* to happen. Instead this book just went on like a real story and ended without much of a climax. Also the main reason why I wanted to read this was to see if I can get a glimpse of the early Microsoft days but since most of the story happens in the Bay Area, it was a bit of a letdown.

 

Still I'd recommend it as a comfort read for a geek.