NYT says India’s pace of IT innovation slow. How is Pakistan doing?

[Neo]

NYT says India’s pace of IT innovation slow. How is Pakistan doing?

Mar.29, 2010 in SW Industry, innovation

Pepper.pk's location based Blackberry app, BerrySnooper

The New York Times published an interesting article on the state of IT innovation in India. In a nutshell, the Times found that while India continues to be a low-cost offshoring destination, Indian companies are not being able to truly innovate and create compelling new products. Within India, there appears to be an overwhelming focus on being a low cost body shop for western businesses while the environment remains unfriendly to innovation and risk.

Years ago, as India’s offshoring market was picking up, many analysts wondered whether India would eventually “learn the business” sufficiently to start producing innovating product focused companies that could scale. It appears that despite over 20 years of providing low-cost development services, the answer is still no.

Nadathur S. Ranghavan of Infosys, as quoted by the New York Times, explains:

“The same idea, if it’s born in Silicon Valley it goes the distance,” said Nadathur S. Raghavan, a investor in start-ups and a founder of Infosys, one of India’s most successful technology companies. “If it’s born in India it does not go the distance.”

Mr. Raghavan and others say India is held back by a financial system that is reluctant to invest in unproven ideas, an education system that emphasizes rote learning over problem solving, and a culture that looks down on failure and unconventional career choices.

Why is this? Personally, I think this phenomenon has taken hold because the skills necessary to create contract software at a low cost are completely different to what you need to dream up and create compelling and innovative products. When you’re implementing someone else’s vision, you really never have to think about Product Marketing questions, or exercise your imagination concerning new and unique capabilities you can deliver to users. You are instead focused on simply implementing a product definition as quickly and cheaply as you possibly can. Software product development requires a lot of creativity and it appears from the Indian experience, that this creativity is never allowed to develop or flourish in a body-shop environment.

So, how is Pakistan’s smaller but vigorous IT industry doing in comparison? Have we learnt any lessons from the Indian experience. It might be too early to tell, but it appears so. In recent times, I have hardly spoken to an IT entrepreneur in Pakistan whose goal is to build a services company. Everyone is talking products. And interesting, innovative ones at that. Now that enterprise software is not as hot as it used to be back in the early 2000s, thanks to open source alternatives and a resistance amongst F500 companies to freely spend on multi-million dollar licenses, applications with a more broad consumer appeal are back in the limelight. This is precisely where the Pakistani software industry appears to be focused.

Powering this significant shift within the Pakistani software industry are young and innovative companies like FiveRivers, TkXel, White Rabbit, Naseeb Networks, iScrybe, Pepper.pk, MindStorm Studios, GenITeam and others. iScrybe, for example, developed a marvelous personal organizer that attracted funding from Adobe. Naseeb Networks built one of the region’s largest job boards (Rozee.pk) and has raised multiple rounds of funding from US investors including Silicon Valley based ePlanet Ventures, which is managed by one of the top 10 VCs in the world. Pepper.pk, TkXel and GenITeam are developing mobile products and an application developed by Pepper recently made it to the Handango Top 10 mobile apps list. White Rabbit just launched a promising Facebook game which has a good shot at catching on. And Mindstorm’s excellent Cricket Revolution 3D game has reportedly been signed up for distribution by a world-renowned gaming company.

These are all very promising and positive signs, but there is a long road to travel still. In the coming years it will become clear if the Pakistani software industry’s new focus on products and innovation is able to deliver dividends and create fast-growing, globally competitive software businesses.

http://www.techlahore.com/2010/03/29...akistan-doing/