It’s
been not so long that Steve Job had left the world and honestly I would say as
a student I never knew who Steve job was till his stepping down from the Apple
and his dead last Oct 5, 2011. Hearing of him I was so engross to know about
him. This was When My mind struck me with a Question “Why there is no Indian
Steve Jobs?” comparing him I came across our home product HCL InfoTech
(Hindustan Computer Limited) India’s oldest computer company.
In
1976 Ajay Chowdhry and his colleague started a computer company. Hindustan
Computers Limited, as it was then known, by 1978 they managed to ship its first
home designed, home- built micro computer . Around the same time a Syrian-American college drop-out called
Steve Jobs had shipped his first microcomputer — the Macintosh.
This
was the predecessor of the PC. But IBM was to lay claim to that term, and make
it its own, Three years later, HCL roll out its first desktop PC. And of course IBM took a route to becoming the
world's largest technology company. And Jobs took Apple on a different journey
altogether, making it arguably the world's most inventive technology company,
and eventually the world's most valuable one.
Thirty six years ago, all three companies were
virtually at the same point in the industry's lifecycle. Apple and HCL, in
fact, were so similar, they could have been twins. Jobs started Apple in a
garage and Ajay Chowdhry and his friends started their company in a south Delhi
' barsati'. Apple took an off- the- shelf microprocessor and built a computer
around it. And then developed the software to make it run. HCL took an off-
the- shelf microprocessor and built a computer around it. And then wrote the
software to make it run virtually at the same time.
Four
decades later, the picture has changed dramatically. Today, HCL is among the
top five players in the country and has revenues of $6 in all the sectors that
it operates in. But Apple recorded net
sales (in 2010) of over $ 65 billion. In the stock market, at $ 350 billion,
Apple is nearly a hundred times more valuable than HCL. It is not just the top
player in its segments in the US — it is the top player in the world.
What
happened? Why did HCL get left behind, while Apple managed to surge ahead
unstoppably? Was the founders of HCL weren’t as genius as job. No! HCL too was
a powerhouse of invention. Not only did HCL develop a microcomputer at the same
time as Apple or a desktop PC three years ahead of IBM. HCL developed a working UNIX computer years
ahead of Sun and its own relational database management system ( RDBMS) ahead
of Oracle in 1981.
The key element which made the difference and the
reason why HCL's growth was stunted was that
HCL was an Indian company, working in Indian
conditions.
The
others were all American. And the ecosystem available to HCL and its American
counterparts was incomparably different.
In 1977, George Fernandes' quirky nationalism
drove IBM out of India, opening the doors for HCL. But over the next 13 years before
reforms started, government regulations and the licence permit Raj ensured that
HCL was left comprehensively behind. It could not make enough computers to meet
demand, because it didn't have the licence to produce the extra number.
When
it got the licence, it could not import the components needed, because foreign
exchange was short and you needed a separate permit for precious foreign
exchange. It could not move into other markets abroad because that was
controlled too. And so on.
HCL
can justifiably blame the lack of reforms for its lack of growth. But for
hundreds of thousands of would- be inventors and entrepreneurs, there are still
as many and equally insuperable hurdles, in their way.
From
a potter’s son from Gujarat whose ' rural fridge' wins him global awards and
recognition to a Kerala inventor reduced
to sending emails to journalists about his heat exchanger which does the work
of an AC at a hundredth the cost and the recently Face-book recruit of an
Indian student we can at least dream of a Indian Steve Job but nothing is done
for ionising the talents, the lack of an ecosystem which encourages and
supports innovation and enterprise is killing off the vision of thousands of
Indian Steve Jobs before they can be turned to reality.
What
if Jobs had decided to stay in India after his 1974 visit? What if he had
started Apple in India, not the US? Could a college drop- out have managed to
get the funding to start a company? Would anybody have taken the technology
developed by a non- graduate seriously? The answer is obvious. It is not just
enough to be inventive or even entrepreneurial if there is no viable ecosystem
which encourages new ideas, and rewards the intellectual innovation, we would
never be able to see a Indian Steve Job.
Two
decades down the reforms road, we have still not learned this lesson.
