OK..as of now almost 5 years have passed but Bangalore’ss coolies companies are still coolies companies, and may be on the brink of become extinct. Where are the startups and where is the ‘stuff’ ? Y’know what bugs me most..the word TECHNOLOGIES..after every coolie company’s name..it should read TATA Coolie Company, Infosys Labour Hire, Wipro Code Coolies Ltd. etc.

So what say you now?

The business is evident. So its difficult to get out of a comfy chair. But one will come back to the question – does Infosys ‘know how’ to make products or does it ‘know what’ products to make. We go to the top of the IT mountain and shout loudly – Give us your development work, we are cheaper and better. But what we dont realize is that we are still using Outlook, ASP, JAVA and MS for our development and daily tasks.

I think Indian Tech companies should take up challenge to prove to the IT community world wide that we are not purely good at services and we have what it takes to develop fundamentally ground breaking products. Starting from the concept till the final delivery, we have can do it all.

can you suggest me what can i do

i got here due to my friend sarsij, who told me that one of his friend has started his own venture teckriti, so i was interested as i’ve also started my own venture by the name “Alfione Technologies”, though i’m still in my final year college at BIT Mesra but i like to be independent and the bug doesn’t leave me anyday.
coming to the topic of discussion , betweenb a service company and a product company…
as most of you people have already mentioned that services is fast way to earn money and it’s easy to do because u easilly get cheap labour and some work,
ya that’s true because i don’t think u earn money for your neighbour so the main motto behind doing anything is money … and that’s the catch to survive so even i do the same provide software consultancy.
but who cares if TCS,INFOSYS,WIPRO… don’t then why me but it’s not that with me atleast i think of setting a software company and not a software consultancy not because i know that i’m the best, or i have the expertise, or i can do a great product — you know why i’ll be able ti turn my venture into the real software firm because i have an idea which is as innovative as anything , it’s a great idea becoz my product will be useful somewhere and if i’m successful with the implementation at the right time i’m history.
so friends it’s not that we can’t develop products we can do everything and the requirement is just a path to lead and not to follow.
I have been with the computer since i was a kid and my first computer was a 286 and i have the latest one today, you know what it has made me feel throughout my life that indians are not adventurous and risk takers and that is the hurdle which we need to cross to be what is needed.

because i don’t wanna be a TCS or a Infosys or a wipro or satyam or any other indian it firm i want to be like Microsoft or SUN or Apple.

develop enthusiasm and innovation and not marks.

I am not saying that Mr. Dasarathi’s points are baseless. I would have whole-heartedly agreed if he had just said that, in India, the number of services companies is a order of magnitude more than products companies. But I felt that this article was demeaning the accomplishments of the very companies that brought India on the world map – something that I reacted against.

My point is that – it’s mostly the market which drives the kind of innovation a company does. For example – it’s much easier to create a products company in the US – not only because of the availability of more resources but more because of the proximity with the market the product is being created for. It’s much much harder to create a product for the Indian market – so even any Indian product company will be targeting the global (US) market – they do have a bit of dis-advantage against their counterparts in the US.

Similarly, India has an advantage over US in services business – because of the cost and because of the manpower.

I didn’t think that the author was making a fair comparison. What was the ‘choice’ of these Indian IT companies was being projected as their ‘compulsion’ and ‘incompetence’ – something I voiced against.

I read that article too , the points that author has highlighted are not totally baseless but he has sort of oversimplified things.

For instance as you mentioned that innovation can’t happen in service is an untrue claim.

The majority(& biggest) of the IT players are services company as of now but that does’nt mean product companies are inexistent in Bangalore. Some other examples that come to my mind are NetScaler, JamCracker. Emuzed , Navini Networks, Aarohi Communication etc. They are all pure product companies started by Indians serving a global market.

If today there are less % of product companies does not mean that this situation is going to extend like that. Moreover there are indication which suggests it is otherwise, for instance large number of VC firms ( in the last 8 months) are queueing up in India seeing huge potential of product companies based out of India.

I moved to bangalore from gurgaon last year around this time and in the last one year & I have observed that bangalore no doubt has tons of software service companies but it also has the highest number of product companies and is very well poised in the next 3-5 years to be the silicon valley and be home of some of the best billion dollar tech companies.

Cheers,
Rajan