Can there be a Indian Steve Jobs??

             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.