At Zoho, we have been banging the drum on the coming new era of competition, thanks to the cloud, in software and how that is going to pose a serious threat to the stratospheric 90% operating profits that Microsoft enjoys on its Office suite. And sure enough, the news that Microsoft Drops Prices of Cloud Apps caught our attention. Some excerpts (emphasis mine):
Microsoft has lowered the subscription prices for its cloud computing applications, and has announced new customer wins and broader geographic availability for the apps.
The software giant has lowered the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Office Live Meeting, from $15 a month per seat to $10 a month.
For Exchange Online alone, its email software-as-a-service, the price drops from $10 to $5. Microsoft also has increased its standard e-mail storage per user from 5 Gbytes to 25 Gbytes ...
...
Still, are Microsoft's cost cuts enough? Google Apps, by comparison, which includes apps for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, in addition to email, costs only $50 per user per year. Markezich's response is that Microsoft offers a scaled-down version of Exchange Online, designed for employees who aren't frequent PC users, for $24 a year, and a scaled-down version of BPOS for $36 a year. What's more, "we're not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office]," he [Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online] said.
Wow, wow, wow - Fake Office! That is indeed a badge of honor for us. We just have a polite suggestion to Microsoft: to be perfectly consistent, Microsoft should also label their Bing "Fake Search" - fair is fair, right? For the record, we actually think Bing brings a welcome dose of competition and we certainly don't think Bing is by any means fake, but with Microsoft marketing terming the entire competitive landscape to their number 1 cash cow "fake", we have to wonder if that would apply to their own effort at competing with the other dominant vendor.
While Zoho and Google are happily doing update after competitive update to our respective Office suites, Microsoft, with their "real" web office, is not actually making their web offering generally available.
Seriously, the whole "fake office" designation illustrates the main problem Microsoft faces. In their world view, with their quaint "Release to Manufacturing" rituals, the fact that a Zoho user has no CD or DVD to buy, no bloatware to download, nothing to install, simply just visit a web site, log-in (using Google or Yahoo accounts, if they must), and they are on their way to Work.Online, must all feel a bit, well, fake. But take it from us Microsoft: there is nothing fake about browser-based applications, no matter how you wish to keep the world on your "manufacturing" world-view of software, with your proprietary lock-ins and your 90% operating margins.
It is a new world now - I have called it the Google Era of Computing a while ago. At Zoho, we fully grasp this fundamental reality. That is why we are excited about today's other announcement, this one by Google: Single Sign-on to Zoho, Tripit, SocialWok and more from Google Apps.
As the Google announcement illustrates, cloud vendors are moving aggressively forward to establish a new competitive landscape. While Google is an existential force and a major competitor for Zoho, this new "Google era" also means tremendous opportunity for us.
Thank you Microsoft, for the "Fake Office" moniker. Please await our real launch of FakeOffice.org soon.
Not very often we see external videos talking about our products in detail. Palm Breeze CAFE did a three part series talking about Zoho taking a closer look into some of our apps. Instead of trying to explain what they talk about, let me just embed the videos here.
We'd like to thank Lee Keller, Kim Cavanaugh and their team for taking a deeper dive into Zoho. You can also download/view the videos on iTunes or on their YouTube channel.
TechCrunch has an interesting guest post by Vivek Wadhwa The VC, The Professor and The Valley of Death which talks about unlocking the huge commercial potential in academic research (emphasis mine).
As someone who spent almost 5 years getting a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, I am going to have to politely disagree with the implication he is drawing.In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those revenues include ongoing royalties from all of the research licensed over the past 40 years. The implication is clear. An astonishing amount of promising research is left in the lab.
Let's look at what drives the typical Assistant Professor looking for tenure, and hence the typical graduate student. It is widely known that there is a sharp fall in "paper productivity" once an Assistant Professor lands that magical tenure and its associated unfirable-job-for-life, so if we understand the hungry Assistant Professor and the hungrier graduate student, we will have understood how the University research system works.
In the commercial world, revenues and profits are what drive innovation, at least in normal non-bubble times. We are highly motivated at Zoho to innovate, because that is the lifeblood of our business. Yeah, I agree, very crass commercial, capitalist motive. In the academic world, that crass commercial motive is substituted with a noble quest for grant money, papers and ultimately, tenure.
Once in a while some interesting work comes out of academic research, but by far the vast majority of work I have seen is of the "Minimum Publishable Unit" variety, as in "What is the smallest amount of stuff that will generate a publication?" An entire ecosystem exists, underwritten by taxpayer money, whose Darwinian imperative is publish or perish.
In engineering disciplines there is another fundamental, existential problem. One of the secrets they don't tell you until you enter graduate school is that most graduate students spend a lot of time looking to find "the problem" to solve. The quest is so desperate that you often invent fake problems to solve; one usually safe algorithm is to make trivial extensions to an existing paper, which itself made some trivial extension to some other trivial paper and cloth it all up in fancy mathematical language so the whole lot of it looks more impressive than it is. A lot of mathematics in engineering has become the equivalent of Sanskrit of the priestly class, designed as much to obfuscate as to elucidate.
Yet, in my entire time as an engineer in the commercial world, there never was a time where I was lacking in interesting problems to solve. At Zoho for example, there are numerous challenges around databases, distribution, web services, security and so on that you only realize exist when you start doing real stuff. This is an existential problem: you don't know what the real problems in engineering are until you do real stuff, or as in Paul Graham's words "Make What People Want".
Bottom line? I am pretty sure the vast majority of that $48 billion is not going to generate a return. In fact $2 billion out of $48 billion sounds about right as the ratio of really valuable academic work to all the fluff that gets published. Of course, that is a crass, commercial way of seeing it.
WSJ carries the news that Twitter raises $100 million on a $1 billion valuation . We use Twitter at Zoho heavily, and we love connecting with users over Twitter; that does not give me any insight into whether the valuation is "justified" or not. But having watched silicon valley for several years, one thing I do know: high valuations make it very difficult to actually run a business. Here is a quote from Bill Gates (sorry, PDF!) in 1995 (emphasis mine):
One challenge Microsoft did face, and that Netscape now faces, is coping with a high market valuation. Netscape has little income, but investors have valued its stock at more than $2 billion. When a company's shares have a high value, expectations from investors, including employee-owners, are correspondingly high. Failure to meet those expectations can be damaging. If you're giving share options to employees so that they can participate financially in the expected success of a company, a high valuation hurts. If the market's already anticipated the great work those people are going to do, then their stock options won't appreciate much in value, if at all. This can make the options worthless. Many times in the past I have felt that Microsoft stock was higher in value than it should be. Subsequently I was proven, in a sense, to be wrong. Controlling expectations—whether about deliveries, product features or stock value—is often wise in a technology business. It's a lot better to under-promise and over-deliver.In Microsoft's case at least, Bill Gates turned out to be absolutely right: Microsoft's valuation was too high in the late 90s - the stock is trading at about the same level it was in 1998.
While Bill Gates addresses the problem of high valuation for public companies, I believe a lot of his critique applies even to private companies. That may seem counter-intuitive at first: who doesn't want a very high valuation? The conventional theory on how a high valuation helps a firm is that it enables the firm to raise a lot of money, which, assuming it is invested wisely, generates a good return for the shareholders. The problem with that theory is that a) investing large amounts of money is a lot, lot harder than investing small amounts of money b) companies driven by software do not need large amounts of money to begin with, making (a) even more relevant. The upshot is that it is hard not to waste money as a software company when large amounts of it is suddenly handed to you.
The key problem is that a very high valuation is primarily useful if the world ended today, or to put it in a different way, the company gets acquired right now. In that case, the high valuation is still a problem, but thankfully, someone else's problem. But if we want to actually continue to run the business, high valuation isn't necessarily a blessing. It can seriously get in the way of doing productive work. A company can go from an engineering culture to a spreadsheet culture - obsessively modeling, forecasting, projecting growth, more growth and evermore growth. Back in the real world, growth isn't so easily projected or tracked and spreadsheet models almost never conform to reality. Admitting that is difficult for any company, all but impossible for a company that creates sky-high expectations driven by sky-high valuations. I respect what Twitter has done as a company, but I don't envy them in this context.
Boomtown reports that Yahoo has put Zimbra on the block. Honestly, this came as no surprise at all to us at Zoho. I remember scratching my head when the acquisition was made; I didn't see how an enterprise/business focused open source offering like Zimbra fit with Yahoo, as a technology, as a business or strategically. Zimbra is an open source installable product offering primarily intended to be installed within medium to large organizations. Yahoo has never made an installed product in its history and is mainly focused on consumers, with an occasional foray to sell those consumer-focused applications to small businesses. Zimbra's service provider offerings made no strategic sense to Yahoo either, because Yahoo, being a service provider itself, has no interest in selling technology to other service providers like Comcast. Finally, we have been on both sides of the product vs web-service divide, and I can assert with confidence that it is not easy to take a product and make it into a scalable web service; in fact, the main reason Zoho Mail got delayed was that it was originally written as an installable product, much like Zimbra, and we essentially rewrote it to be a web service.
Most acquisitions fail, but I believe this particular one was particularly poorly thought out. The real cost of the acquisition is not just the $350 million paid by Yahoo. In 2007, Zimbra was starting to position itself as a cloud applications suite, a competitor to Zoho, and better known than Zoho. It is fair to say that today Zimbra is not our main competitor. The acquisition clearly slowed down them. Of course from the point of view of investors or management, the Zimbra acquisition made sense: they got theirs, so it is a "win" for them. It is unlikely that anyone would pay $350 million for Zimbra today, so for Yahoo, it is a clear monetary loss. Zimbra customers lose too, because both the original acquisition and now the de-acquisition inevitably lead to product delays and confusion. Ultimately, the Zimbra acquisition proved to be a negative-sum game, or value destruction. The price paid wasn't compensated by the value created to Yahoo or the customers.
Why do we care to write about this? Actually deals like Zimbra is why we never took venture capital and have said no to acquisitions. I know and respect a lot of venture capitalists, but I honestly believe the VC model is too "exit" focused. I would not say that VCs pressure companies to sell (that would be too simplistic), but the implicit understanding when you take venture capital is that you have to be working towards an exit. Well, for some of us, a company is not just a disposable commodity; it is an institution, a culture, and we prefer to build things slowly. In that sense, though we are direct competitors, I really admire the 37Signals crew and we really respect their view on this.
Douglas MacMillan @ BusinessWeek features Zoho's role prominently in a story about the online business productivity software market in the Asian countries, India & China in particular. Excerpts:
Prithwis Mukerjee, a professor of management at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in eastern India, needed a convenient and low-cost way for his students to create spreadsheets. But rather than turn to Microsoft, the granddaddy of spreadsheet software, he opted for a lesser-known maker of free, Web-based software that gives his students more flexibility than Microsoft's Excel. "Many people don't have Excel, and that becomes a big challenge," Mukerjee says.
Aiming to meet that challenge are two California-based upstarts. One is Google, owner of the most popular Web search engine, and the other is Zoho, the maker of online business productivity tools that won over Mukerjee as a customer.
Because many new computer users in India lack familiarity with Microsoft's Office and other desktop software, they're generally more open to the idea of cloud computing, says Zoho Chief Executive Sridhar Vembu. "There's a whole set of new companies that have no apprehensions" about Web-based software, Vembu says. "We are now starting to see this as a major market opportunity."
Since opening an office in Vembu's former hometown of Chennai, in 1996, Zoho has attracted about 400,000 users, or 20% of its base, in India and China. It now employs more than 300 workers in the office. In China, Zoho distributes its wares in partnership with local company Baihu. With demand for PCs, mobile phones, and broadband Internet growing more quickly in these markets than in the West, Vembu predicts that a decade from now the majority of Zoho's revenues will come from customers in China and India.
Businesses use the software to equip salespeople in the field. In 2008, Mumbai-based data hosting company NetMagic Solutions signed up to use Zoho's customer relationship management (CRM) software to help sales teams in different offices share information about customer leads. At first, a lack of connectivity in many parts of India was a problem. "There were complaints from the salespeople saying that they were unable to connect to Zoho" while traveling, says Jayabalan Subramanian, the company's chief technology officer. Now that AT&T is rolling out more of its 3G wireless broadband network throughout India, NetMagic says that has become less of a concern.
If you happen to run a business in India or China, we believe you are giving online services like Zoho some serious thought, for the economic and productivity benefits they provide.
Thanks to Doug & BusinessWeek!
Today in New York, Sridhar Vembu talked about Cloud Computing and Zoho on Fox Business. Here is a 5 min video.
Zoho, the upstart provider of online Web applications, seems to be continually integrating and upgrading its products in the cloud, says China Martens, an analyst with The 451 Group. Martens jokes that it's as if all of the Zoho developers sit in separate rooms for several months, each one pounding away at his respective application (Zoho Mail, for example, or Zoho CRM), only to have the walls come tumbling down just as the developers are ready to join their applications.
Unveiled at the start of July, the 2.0 release of Zoho Projects, the collaboration and productivity platform, reflects multiple integration efforts, as well as the following improvements:
- Twitter-like status bars enable project members to be more social within the application.
- Project-member activities are presented in a project stream, which is a visual representation of project activities.
- The integration of Zoho Chat and the enablement of group chat, through which project members can add tasks, assign them out, and even attach documents to them. Members can also move beyond Chat to create a discussion forum.
- An expansion of the user interface to allow project members to bring in external information, write notes on documents, and assign documents to a particular task.
- The ability to create a wiki for centralizing information, eliminating the need to import an outside Zoho Doc.
- The addition of a timesheet, integrated with Zoho Invoice, to log and track time spent on specific tasks, and to easily create, send, and track invoices.
Zoho also made some significant enhancements to its Zoho CRM product recently. With the Zoho CRM Mail Add-on, officially announced on July 21, Zoho CRM now integrates with email -- and not just Zoho Mail. The selection of any email account for integration will add an "email" tab to the Zoho CRM application. Users running off a non-Zoho email client can configure Zoho Mail to be the interface for sending and receiving. According to the company, the most significant element of the integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Mail is that the contact information involved in each email is automatically added to the Zoho CRM system, where a user can see all of the correspondence with a particular contact. Users can respond to email from within the CRM system, or even add tasks to a given contact.
Vinnie Mirchandani at Deal Architect blog has a great post TCO - Total Cloud Ownership which addresses how architectural and business model choices of cloud vendors influence pricing. This topic is near and dear to us at Zoho, and I wanted to provide our perspective. I also want to contrast our approach with that of Salesforce. Before I begin, let me make it clear that I really respect what Salesforce has achieved in making software as a serivce a reality. They are pioneers and paved the way for services like Zoho. My post is not about moral good vs evil, but about different ways of approaching this business.
To quote Deal Architect:
While most SaaS/cloud vendors look ridiculously cheap in most TCO elements compared to their on-premise competitors, in the next wave (sooner than you think), they will be compared against each other.So, last week in our conversation with Parker Harris of salesforce, the question came up – why would customers pay its storage costs compared to rates amazon and now Microsoft with Azure are bringing to market? Will it need to rethink its EMC infrastructure? From there the conversation moved to whether it needed the Oracle DBMS – whether it could afford to keep passing along those costs when vendors like Zoho and RightNow aggressively use open source components.
Cloud vendors have to take control of every aspect of their TCO. Like Google with its commoditized server chips. Like NetSuite imploring its reseller channel to deliver more services as software. Like Microsoft rethinking data center design and economics. Like salesforce going to market with smaller SIs like appirio, Model Metrics and others – not just the traditional SIs. Network costs. Systems management costs. Every aspect of the TCO.
That has exactly been our point of view at Zoho from the beginning. Our goal has always been to bring the efficiencies achieved by Yahoo & Google in architecting their infrastructure, to business & productivity applications - as an aside, let us not forget that it was Yahoo which began using commodity infrastructure components and open source software well before there even was a Google. Have you wondered why is it that Yahoo and Google (and now Facebook and many others) are able to serve hundreds of millions of users, with customized applications, with a lot, lot lower infrastructure costs than is typical in enterprise IT? When was the last time Yahoo went down?
At Zoho, we look at cloud economics in 3 dimensions: (a) The cost of developing applications (b) The cost of insfrastructure to deliver the applications (c) The cost of marketing and sales, of which (b) and (c) are particularly important. Our goal is to deliver efficiencies in each of these dimensions, so that we can offer real value to customers. In terms of development, we reap systematic efficiencies by using common components and frameworks across Zoho services. In terms of infrastructure, we use commodity servers with substantial redundancy, and by using open source components wherever possible. In terms of markeing and sales costs, our business model is to spend less on these and pass on the savings to the customer.
These three factors, particularly (b) and (c) explain why we are able to price our services so affordably. Zoho CRM is the classic example: we charge $15 per user per month for the CRM ($12) + Mail ($3) package, while Salesforce prices their comparable edition at $65 per user per month. We believe they are fundamentally inefficient in all 3 dimensions, and that inefficiency becomes a tax on the customer.
I want to emphasize that we are profitable at our price point, there are no gimmicks here. Contrast that to what Salesforce chooses to do (screen-capture from their pricing page at http://www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp).
That gap, or may be I should call it the Grand Canyon, between $9 per user per month and $65 per user per month is exactly what you have to resort to when you have a fundamentally inefficient business model that precludes you from dropping your price the honest way. They must really believe this can keep customers from defecting; I can tell them it is not working 
This is a re-post of something I wrote over 3 years ago. I was inspired to post it again, because of this thread in Hacker News about the school for poor gifted children in the Indian state of Bihar that coaches them for IIT entrance examinations.
Commenter Jacques Mattheij said:
The interesting part is that this experiment has been done, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu (the home of Zoho) - a massive, nearly 20-fold expansion in engineering education in as many years, which for the most part was unplanned, even accidental. I have long argued that it was this expansion that led to the improbable emergence of IT industry in southern India. I say improbable because societies with $300 per capita GDP (as India was in 1990) do not suddenly develop industries with average productivity of $40,000+.
What saddens me most is that scarcity of education makes this story possible. The fact that there are so few seats for so many candidates and that the rich have their own inside channels to getting their kids admitted are other reasons for being very careful.What really is needed is the lifting of this scarcity so that everybody can learn to the best of their abilities not just a handpicked few (and not just because they happen to be poor!)
“Basically, all poor lack confidence even if they have the brains,” Mr Kumar said. “You instill confidence in them, and the world is their oyster.”
Now my original post from 2006 which was written in response to NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman's articles and books on India's economic transformation appears below.
--- Repost below ---
I read newspaper articles, watch TV programs, and hear commentators like Tom Friedman of NY Times express views about India’s economic transformation, driven primarily by the IT and outsourcing booms. Here is a different perspective, from someone who saw it happen first-hand.
Many commentators in the West, including Tom Friedman, make an implicit assumption that somehow there was or is some kind of an institutional grand plan in all this. Somehow “India” (as a collective entity) focused on education, particularly in science and engineering, and there was a planned take-off. The IITs are mentioned often (I went to IIT Madras myself) as part of that master plan. I would say there is about as much foresight and plan on the part of institutional India in the IT boom as there was foresight and plan in the emergence of the internet industry in silicon valley - both are happy accidents of a lot of not-very-related phenomena.
The origins of IT boom in India could be traced to an accidental decision of mega-star actor/politician turned Chief Minister M.G.Ramachandran, affectionately known as MGR - he was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of that time and place - in my native state of Tamil Nadu. In the late 70’s and 80’s the state was convulsed with caste politics (”identity politics” to Americans), and reservation in educational institutions and jobs (”affirmative action” to Americans) was the hot item on the agenda. By early 80’s, the socialist system that Indira Gandhi foisted on India was visibly starting to fail, and the whole political debate was how to divvy up a stagnant or shrinking economic pie - reservation was just one mechanism the political class came up with, and it mixed well with “vote bank” politics. Since government controlled all higher education, and the number of seats in professional colleges like engineering and medicine - which offered better prospects of a job in a high-unemployment economy - was woefully inadequate compared to the number of kids graduating from high school, reserving seats was the rationing mechanism the political class came up with.
MGR, due to his very successful movie career in a variety of super-hero roles - like most Tamil boys of my generation, I was a huge fan, and remember campaigning for his party in my village when I was a 9 year old! - had built-up a wide support base that cut across caste, religious and class lines in the state. He instinctively grasped that a reservation system that apportioned seats in educational institutions and public sector jobs was going to divide society permanently. After he came to power, he started musing about moving away from caste-based reservation, and instead reserve seats based on economic criteria. This was the “third rail” of Indian politics and still remains to this day. He got himself into political hot water quickly. In a dramatic U-turn that would make Arnold proud today, he ordered a massive increase in the reservation quota - it used to be about 30% when he came to power, and he increased it to 67%, and for good measure, he made the vast majority of the population eligible for those reserved seats by expanding the definition of socially backward communities.
But to assuage his guilt, he decided to allow various private groups, primarily belonging to caste or minority religious organizations, to set up engineering colleges. That was about 1983-84, the time I was in high school, so I was paying close attention to this particular issue. Until that point, the state of Tamil Nadu, with about 60 million people, graduated only about 2,000 engineers a year - and it was considered one of the more educationally advanced states. His government liberally handed out licenses to start colleges, and more important, they could charge whatever fees they wanted. It became very, very profitable to start an engineering college - due to the massive pent-up demand for education. Within a few years, the number of engineering students had crossed 10,000 a year, and today it stands close to 70,000 a year. The state now has over 250 private engineering colleges, compared to 7 government-operated ones in 1983. All this is in just one state in India, with a population of about 65 million people. Other states, particularly in the South, including Karnataka (Bangalore is the capital city), and Andhra Pradesh (Hyderabad is the capital city) got in on the act. Together, these 3 states alone graduate over 200,000 engineers a year now, by my estimation, and together, they account for only about 20% of Indian population. Northern States were slow to get their act together, and what that has meant is that the IT boom is concentrated primarily in the South.
The quality of the education, as can be imagined, was and still is all over the place. But that is not important as I have argued elsewhere, see my post Placebo Effect in College Education. What these colleges produced is a generation of people, who at least have an exposure to technical ideas and a desperate need for a job, particularly because their parents had spent a fortune on their education. Most of us in India got into engineering not because we had grand visions of invention, but because it had better prospects of a job than the alternatives.
This educational liberalization in my state happened coincidentally at around the same time that Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister of India, succeeding his authoritarian mother. Luckily for India, he was a very different person from his mother. He had liberal (the true classical sense of “liberal”, not the totally distorted American sense, where it is almost codeword for “socialist”) inclinations. He was fascinated with technology, and thought it held potential for India. So he liberalized computer imports (which until then attracted duties in the range of 200%, to conserve precious “foreign exchange”). As an unintended and certainly unplanned consequence, companies like TCS and Infosys imported mainframes and started to provide services to western companies, in almost exactly the fashion of EDS a generation before in America.
It all started small. In 1989, when I graduated from IIT Madras, I do remember hearing about this small software company called Infosys that came for campus interviews. But the IITs didn’t graduate anywhere near the engineers (IIT Madras graduated 250 a year, including all branches of engineering) to satisfy the demand from these companies. So companies like Infosys went to the emerging private engineering colleges. I remember that in late 80’s, the dominant public sector companies of the era (now mostly dead or dying!) would not hire private engineering college graduates. So privatization in higher education in one state of India accidentally provided the fuel for the emerging private sector companies.
There was absolutely no coordination between the policies at the state level where MGR was backed into a political corner, so private sector education was an innovation he came up with on the spur of the moment, and those at the central level, where Rajiv Gandhi, fascinated by technology, liberalized computer imports. For those of you mercantalists, that trade liberalization, which first led to imports, eventually led to the emergence of the export industry.
So really government policy played only a “getting the hell out of the way” role. There really was no pro-active government role in the emergence of IT. Nor do I, as a libertarian, think government should play any such role.
So when well-meaning commentators like Tom Friedman use the competitive challenge from India (which is utterly meaningless because “India” doesn’t compete in any sense with “America” - these are way-too-broad entities to have any coherent meaning; only individual companies compete) to argue for more government “investment” in education, I blanch. If anything, my preference is for the government to get the hell out, and remove barriers to trade and investment.
And the one area where the American government is actively harming real industry in America (as opposed to the financial “industry”) is through faulty monetary policy, as the article by Eric Janszen that I posted about earlier explains. But Ben Bernanke looks all set to continue the harm, with his foolish (as in “only an ivory tower academic could come up with this”) monetary ideas. The credit bubble that the Greenspan/Bernanke fed has unleashed on the world is now a global monster, impacting Beijing and Bangalore as badly as Boston.
That pleasant attack-the-Fed diversion aside, the IT revolution in India really had its origins in the accidental privatization of higher education that was unleashed in one state in India. Even today, as a direct consequence, a disproportionate number of the workforce in the Indian IT industry as well as the Indian technology diaspora in the West, particularly America, come from Tamil Nadu, though other states are catching up quite fast now. And we have my childhood hero, MGR, to thank!
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