Indians are good at services and solutions but can not make good IT products – this is the old problem that we keep hearing about in the industry.
I have been meeting software companies in APAC in last one year. I meet lot of small and medium size companies. One common thing that I hear about them is that all of them have clients in APAC or Europe or in USA. These are small companies 10 to 50 people – not very big. Yet they manage to find buyers in other parts of the world.
Actually it is other way round, customers in other countries trust these products and companies.
There are many companies in India bigger than these companies. Why is it that Indian companies do not instill confidence about Indian Product capabilities, when Indian skills are very well acknowledged, Indians are respected in IT industry.
After spending one year in APAC, I have my perspective. Though this is not a comprehensive view but one of the issues.
We are good at creating ‘solutions’ – solutions that can be tweaked whenever there is a problem. We love to solve the problems and we are very comfortable in the world of ambiguity. But this mental state is not good for making products. Products need state of fixed input and predictable output. Somehow, I realised that we, Indians are not good at being “exact”, “precise” “to the point”. We like giving “big picture” solutions, giving broad views.
Just think about the conversations that we have most of the time – about politics, economics, life. We love to talk a lot but without being precise. Ok this is a very generalised view and there are many good and precise thinking people in India. But the fact is that our brand, image as Indians is not like that. We as, people, are not known to be precise and exact. Hence the buyers dont find trust in capabilities to build great products.
This view was strengthened when I learned about the schooling system in Singapore. The way questions are asked and way students are supposed to answer develops thinking in the direction of being precise, being exact. Where as in India we encourage students to be creative and think out of the box. While it is good in many fields but it has not created a image of being precise.
Now it is a different question whether we should capitalise on our “solutions” and “Creative” brand or should we strive to build the products. I am not getting into that at this point.
And finally if you find above writing to be very generalised and lacking preciseness, well you have got my point.
Mind (and) Your Business 
Hi Sachin
Funny how I share the same views but this time as it applies to my own country men–Filipinos. Filipinos share many traits with Indians (such as a language and culture that is stilted towards generalities and imprecision). Case in point: in our native language our subject / nouns are generally genderless–unlike Western/Germanic languages which almost always associate gender with an object (ie a ship is a she, etc). We are also imprecise when it comes to telling time and distance, often in conversation we will set meeting times as “later” or tell directions to a stranger and use words as “near” or “far” when describing the distance to the destination.
I was thinking some of the barriers to success for our countrymen in some fields may be rooted in our cultural background and upbringing. This was pursued in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers–he explains how plane crashes may partly be explained by the cultural heritage of the pilots and their “power distance.”
But on the upside I notice that unlike Singaporeans, Indians and Filipinos generally excel in services, entertainment, the arts–areas where creativity and right brained thinking are valued and not seen as a hindrance. And I know some Indian companies who have been able to overcome cultural hindrances or barriers, and leverage their innate creativity to go and develop innovative, and fairly successful product companies. Companies like Adventnet; with more on the way with Indian startups like Druvaa, Vembu, Cynapse and others.
This Is Bang On:
“We are good at creating ’solutions’ – solutions that can be tweaked whenever there is a problem. ”
The rest of the post fairly circular and unprecise — so you havent proven your point really. Would love to read another post where you do because you seem to be on the right track. I keep thinking about the same problem.
I think Indians are Engineers. When Engineers turn Managers they dont really” become” Managers they still want to do the same things — sit with engineers and control the timelines in which they would deliver. As Managers they dont think of Strategy they still think of tactics of delivering the next small thing. Products require big picture thinking, solutions require the next set of tweaks…
Hi Sachin,
I agree with you and there are valid reasons for it!!
All through my career, I worked with product companies… In this process I dealt with lot of other product partners, Indian as well as International. There is a lot can be talked / debated on this issue… I will quickly share my observations…
1. We are never sure about price / value: Indians have developed fantastic products but when it comes to marketing these products we fail to create value for ourselves. In most of the cases we are not sure about what value we are delivering to customer and hence what price should we charge… More often we end up in selling our solutions at low price.
2. We fail to create solutions: We develop great products. But we lack solution evangelists who can create solutions using available products as tools. Instead we argue with customer about how he should change his business process according to the product function (that was developed for someone else!!) or we develop exactly the way customer wants (without considering long term impact on product design). In both these cases we deviate from path of creating solutions
3. Most of the sales deals are treated as incidents: When sales delivery organization (not only the sales person but marketing, pre-sales, consulting, implementation) treats sales as an incident, we are over with one transaction. We don’t work towards total experience and hence fail to create value perception in the stakeholder mind… I know an Indian IT Product company where sales guy has to part with his commission if they involve pre-sales consultant. In such cases, sales guys try to close deal without getting to details about solution fitment and risk assessment. He is more interested with his commission arising out of that sales incident.
I am trying to focus on the issue of “Made in India” tag of the products. When solutions developed by Indian, implemented and maintained by Indian is an accepted norm in IT industry worldwide, why not “Made in India” product. One of the reasons is image or perception of Indian minds.
You raise multiple issues and attempt to collect all the threads together into weaving a pattern. That’s good. So, let’s begin with schooling. In India, the entire reason for the education system to exist is to enable that a significantly small %-age of the population can get the chance to learn-things-by-heart. The other part about schooling in India is that it is tuned to be individualistic ie. it romanticizes and cherishes the notion of a lone winner in a rat race. So, students who go through such a grind and then expect to emerge as ‘team players’ or ‘group thinkers’ in areas of R&D and related fields generally end up being miserable. Put a rat-race winner in a game where the sum of the parts count and you will end up noticing a difference between how things work. Having said that, the one reason Indian schooling methods seem to be taking roots in places like Japan is that it manages to cover a vast area of topics and sub-topics and do it in such a way that technological aids aren’t important.
The other aspect towards lack of products could be the absence of a ‘social safety net’. As a society, we cherish and nurture success and look down upon failures (primarily financial). With that cog in the wheel, it becomes imperative for a business to achieve a yardstick of success, to ‘arrive’. The oft repeated reason of ‘lack of seed capital’ is there, but what is important in that is that those who do provide capital aren’t doing so in the same manner that is done when VC funding is done at other places. Services show a recurring accrual of steady and predictable revenues with probably not much capital investment. The lack of funded R&D (with appropriate Intellectual Property bits) is what is stopping more product companies from landing up. Add to that the thin line between what is a product and a service.