The Indian Rupee has made some staggering progress against the U.S Dollar in the past couple of years. This has happened mainly due to bad performance of the latter. I guess most Indian’s would rejoice at such news. It could only mean good things right ? Not quite if you are a IT professional. According to a news article on the Times of India it is going to be tough to get a job.

“IT recruitment firms say hiring across the board has gone down by 5% in the last two months. Most of them are now resorting to ‘just in time hiring’.” - Strong Re slows down hiring in IT, Times of India.

But something is wrong isn’t it ? I mean why would a strengthening currency have a negative effect on IT companies ? I have one word for you! Outsourcing. This seems like a wake up call to all the big IT firms in India. If firms in the United States of America stop sending their projects to India then from where will the income for these IT firms come from ? How many other countries are willing to outsource their IT requirements to India ? I don’t think too many. It is a shame really. I remember reading news of Indian IT companies taking over the world and IT companies in India being some of the best in the world. All of it collapses as soon as one country starts reducing the amount of projects they send out. Now this reduction has not been reported as such. But reports of a gradual reduction in hiring of software professionals reflects somehow that things are not as rosy as they might seem. It’s hard to tell though from just a few percentage figures.

So what’s the big deal if outsourcing starts coming to a halt ? The large amounts of profits which these IT companies report every quarter must have been used for sustaining themselves. Right ? No. At least I do not think so. This is where I feel the mighty IT companies of India have made a mistake. I cannot understand why it is that these large companies cannot develop a software product that they can market all over the world. Why can’t we have a Google or a Microsoft or an IBM right here in India ? Why can’t these large firms transform themselves into a product company and not just be a selling ground of relatively cheap labour. I don’t know why and I really have no clue as to how this problem can be solved. But maybe it is not a problem. Maybe India is destined to be a outsourcing hub. Maybe doing monkey coding for software architects in the USA is all that Indian developers can achieve. But I don’t think that’s true. An example of an Indian participating in the development of a product has to be Sabeer Bhatia, co founder of Hotmail, later bought by Microsoft for $400 million. But these large companies are only interested in making a profit. An article on Rediff written in around 2004 I think still holds true. Maybe less so now then 3 years ago but it does still hold true. Here are some excerpts from the article in which the author compares companies from Silicon Valley(USA) to the IT companies of Bangalore (referred to as Coolie Valley companies in the article)-

“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.

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.

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.” - Bangalore : Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley, Rediff.com

Now I may not be the best person to write about something so complicated. I maybe completely wrong. Maybe Infosys or Wipro are secretly working on something big in their huge complexes. Or maybe this reduction in hiring and a possible reduction in outsourcing is just blown out of proportion. But either way I just hope that one of the software bahemoths decides to launch a software product of somekind that people all over the world use. That will be really pleasing to hear in contrast to things like -

“But ever since everybody in North America cheaped out and started sending all the work to India the mailing lists of every major product have been polluted with the Sanjays and Prashants of this world asking questions that make me wonder why the hell we’re sending out our prized projects to these seemingly incompetent people.” - Indian outsourcing is killing IT, Arsenalist.

Alright so I slipped in a quote from a blog post but please do read the comments that post has received. In the end all I want to say is that by no means should this blog post be thought of as an attack against the IT companies of India or Indian software professionals. They have done an amazing job. But I just feel that some of them have to take the next step and start developing products that can be marketed all over the world. World domination should be a realistic target.

Addendum : Infosys has announced that it will lower it’s dependence on US customers through faster growth in other markets. (via Times Of India)