[IP] Bangalore: Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [rediff.com] - Bangalore: Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>, Declan McCullagh <declan@xxxxxxxx>
Organization: -ENOENT
An interesting article.
http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/mar/03guest1.htm
Bangalore: Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley?
G V Dasarathi | March 01, 2004 | 13:45 IST
Politicians, bureaucrats and residents of Bangalore take pride in the fact
that they live in what they call the Silicon Valley of the East. The city
is considered high tech because of the number of software and software
services companies located here.
But is Bangalore really Silicon Valley?
California's Silicon Valley
In 1933 Frederick Terman, a professor of engineering at Stanford
University, mentored two undergraduates named Bill Hewlett and Dave
Packard, and was instrumental in getting them to start a company.
They went on to form the company Hewlett-Packard. This was the first seed
from which Silicon Valley grew.
Today around 2,000 electronics and information technology companies, along
with numerous services and supplier firms, are clustered in the area.
Silicon?Valley contains the densest concentration of innovative industry
that exists anywhere in the world, including companies that are leaders in
fields like computers, semiconductors, lasers, fiber optics, robotics,
medical instrumentation, and consumer electronics.
Some products that went from dream to reality in Silicon Valley are the
first video game, the ink-jet printer, the video recorder, the mouse, the
personal computer, and much else that we take for granted in the
information age.
Here's a sample of some Silicon Valley firms, familiar to most of us
because of their products: Adobe Systems (Acrobat Reader), Apple Computer
(computer), Hewlett-Packard (printer), Intel (the CPU in your PC), Netscape
(Internet browser), Seagate Technology (the hard disk in your PC), Yahoo
(Internet portal), VeriFone (credit card terminals in shops), Symantec
(Norton anti-virus software), etc.
Such firms are called technology companies, because their chief resource is
the technologies that they develop and own, not the real estate that they
are sitting on or the equipment that they possess. Stocks in a technology
company are called 'tech stocks.' Scientists and engineers working in these
companies are called 'techies.'
Indicative of the inventive spirit is the fact that residents of Santa
Clara County, which includes San Jose and other Silicon Valley computer
hotbeds, were granted 27,617 patents during the 1990s.
Silicon Valley thrives on risk. Business in the Valley is about placing
bets on people, ideas and inventions.
If the Silicon Valley were an independent country, its economy would be
about the tenth largest in the world.
Bangalore or 'Coolie Valley'
If you ask the president of any of Bangalore's software development
companies what his company does, he'll say "We provide end-to-end solutions
for Xxxx." Xxxx could be any or all of these -- e-commerce, banking,
telecom. . .
What he means to say is this: 'We'll do the software coding in any of these
areas for you. Just tell us what you need. We have a huge mass of engineers
who know various programming languages.'
These companies do not develop any technologies or products. They provide
development services. They have engineers who specialize in programming
languages rather than in technologies.
Their chief resource is the huge mass of low-cost labour that they have
taken the trouble to recruit.
Ask them about patents, and you get the reply "Huh, what's that?"
These companies start with zero risk. They do not bet on their ideas or
inventions. A company is started after getting some contracts in hand.
A typical engineer in these companies has no specialization in any
technology. He does not use his engineering knowledge. You could say his
body is employed, but his brain is severely under-employed.
Here is a sample of some prominent Bangalore software companies with what
they specialize in: Tata Consultancy Services (end-to-end solutions), Wipro
(end-to-end solutions), Infosys (end-to-end solutions)
DSQ Software (end-to-end solutions), Kshema Technologies (end-to-end
solutions), Ivega Technologies (end-to-end solutions), MindTree Consulting
(end-to-end solutions).
The comparison
Silicon Valley companies are based on 'know what.' They know the market,
they know the technology and they know what products to make to earn money.
Coolie valley companies are based on 'know how.' They do the software
coding for other companies that have the 'know what.' If you tell them what
to do, they know how and will do it for you.
Silicon Valley companies invest huge sums of money on R&D. They generate
new ideas and are constantly developing new ways of doing things.
Coolie Valley companies have nothing called R&D. They do not generate any
new ideas.
A typical Silicon Valley engineer is a specialist in a particular
technology, like inkjet printing or virus detection. He spends all his life
working in this technology area.
A typical Coolie Valley engineer is a specialist in a few languages. He is
not concerned about the technology that he is working on and is willing to
develop any software with the languages that he knows.
A typical Silicon Valley engineer's education and work experience all
relate to a technology. When he changes jobs, he changes to another company
working on the same technology.
A typical Coolie Valley engineer's work experience does not teach him any
technology. He may be a mechanical engineer currently working for three
months on?banking software, and then the next three months on?shoe
retailing software.
Silicon Valley is all about the excitement of creating things out of
nothing. Companies like HP actually started in the garages of their founders.
Coolie Valley does not know the meaning of creativity. Some?companies are
started by people who quit other companies and take some of the parent
firm's software development contracts with them.
Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs bet on people, ideas and inventions.
Coolie Valley's entrepreneurs bet on certainties. They start a firm after
getting software development contracts.
Silicon Valley's firms are about technology management.
Coolie valley's firms are about man management.
It is extremely presumptuous to compare Bangalore with Silicon Valley, so
all you Bangaloreans, please do me a favour and
* Don't call your city Silicon Valley ('pub city' or 'garden city', I
have no problem with -- lots of pubs and lots of trees, but very little
silicon).
* Don't call one of your new software companies a 'high technology
start-up.'
* Don't call your engineers 'techies.' They've forgotten their
engineering long ago.
* Don't say you've invested in 'tech stocks' ('body stocks' maybe ?).
If you are from Delhi or Mumbai and encounter a Bangalorean 'techie'
spouting off about his work or about his Silicon Valley, you no longer need
to develop an inferiority complex.
G V Dasarathi is?director of a software products development company
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