When Vinnie met Vivek...

I was reading vinnie mirchandani’s excellent article on India’s inflexion point in terms of our `illusion of control’ ( Vinnie credits Vivek Paul with that coinage ). Read and enjoy. Some excerpts -

“ I met Vivek Paul at the Enterprise conference a couple of weeks ago. Vivek, now an investor, was the number two guy at Wipro and helped grow its US operations rapidly in the first half of this decade. Vivek ribbed the work I do for clients in helping source technology - "You give customers the illusion of control".

We both laughed, but I walked away thinking Vivek's "illusion of control" was a more apt description of where Indian firms like Wipro find themselves after the last few years of sustained success. Their growth was particularly striking in contrast to the flat or negative growth at many Western firms.

The core strength of Indian firms continues to be in application maintenance. They have not made meaningful dents in the systems integration market - especially in projects which call for complex program management, industry knowledge or change management (something their focus on engineering talent has actually prevented them from developing organically).

But as Vivek would say - a good first step would be to get over their "illusion of control" over the IT services market.”

A real good read on the current Indian IT scene.

I have always maintained that when at least 15% of our population ( 1.1 billion that is ) take to internet for at least 50% of their daily needs of education, healthcare, shopping, career, business, leisure, travel etc., we’ll have our internet inflexion point.

Currently it is widely held that less than 2% of our population are active computer users. Most of it still use it only for routine word processing, e-mail or IM chats. This needs to improve significantly to make a dent.

That said, my benchmarks for an inflexion point/era in Indian Internet space should be viewed from a mass adoption perspective. It could be when -

a) even a kirana shopkeeper is as efficiently networked with his suppliers and customers as much as the back end of a large shopping mall.

b) we show the world how to start "positive" internet epidemics of their own in new applications ( like how we try to ape Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook etc.). The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly.

c) The ideas and local talent available tempt even Valley VCs ( the John Doerr, Paul Graham, Peter Rip types ) to open their de facto branches in India, shifting in with their bag and baggage.

d) A few internet startups made on shoestring budgets end up making hundreds of millions of dollars and we are not surprised.

Is that too much to ask ?

.