Effect of Technology Pioneers
Sometimes a software company changes the industry landscape in many ways that it should be called foundational change . Take for example Google and its search or snapchat and images or Amazon and cloud compute or Netflix and guaranteed streaming . Its is not that these companies always invested the basic technology behind the examples cited here . But they developed and deployed them in a way that it changed the industry forever . Not only did these services-products became our default experience expectations .They also pushed the boundaries of tech .But most important is that they made all these technologies mainstream . This elevated the level of the ground we stood and operated on for the entire community . Pioneering and mainstream are main reason why startup are important .
United states was very luck here .Starting bell labs.. sun microsystem…hotmail ..twitter . That is why it is important for a country to have internet companies that operate at foundational level . A well operating company is better change agent than university professors .
After US its is only China and Russia that have companies flourishing in this foundational area.
India missed the bus
The situation in india was that of a missed bus .A flourishing IT industry ,nascent open source contributors and buzzing startups .But not many companies that offered foundational elevation of the playing ground .An world class email or search or social network or cloud compute or even programming language . A thing that is foundational and took something mainstream. To be fait the many unicorns would have secondary good effects .
But India’s is also story of failed attempts . Few ,i can cite are : the Indian distro of unix which never picked up. Simputer : a hardware+sofware pioneer from the same timeline as that of android but not as lucky .Onmobile which 15 years back attempted voice/NLP capabilities . and few more
The Surprise contributor
However in recent past we have seen that government bodies have become surprise contributors .They have not only done foundational work (is system-method-framework style work as we use it in patent lingo) but also made it mainstream . This is akin to how we repay our technology debt in software project .Here is my list with note
Aadhar : billion people scale biometric authentication . Only facebook can claim this scale and apple can outmatch the security . Also the fact that it is also acting as world biggest KYC infra is noteworthy . The fact that one can human verify ones efiled tax return with just one sms-opt is the smooth experience product managers dream of .
UPI : Nobody has paid bigger compliment to unix than unified payment interface .The fact that you can create email like aliases (plural !!!) and make payment from some one who is not your bank ,while your bank and their APIs work in the background to make it happen ; is tallest story of digital transformation .UPI also has its brothers and sisters in bills ,account aggregator and open lending .
ONDC : Open network for digital commerce .While this still under wraps ,from the news we know this is going to be shopify with lots of open elements to it .That includes discovery ,payments, onboarding and fulfillment .One need to also note that the main aim of ONDC is include the uncovered sellers than rival amazon or flipkart . Getting build on the lines of UPI this is probably also first of kind aggregator that is open and not for profit !
GPS story : Just few days back indigo air flight landed using homemade GPS system . One must also note that ISROs gps buvan was launched decade back . Delays aside ,this is not a nationalistic cheer . Once you have cheap and open GPS technology that is tuned to local needs a lot many companies and secondary tech can come up . Mapmyindia is one good example who has google comparable retail map app .Not only that , is also by in many commercial car companies .It is matter of time that someone come up with india based automatic driving software .This will be significant moment not because its indian but there are many situations and use cases in autonomous driving that exists in Asian/third world countries that it will important event .
While these examples are few but they are foundational . Coming from government bodies it is also important to note how this contrasts to US style Macho man/Tony stark kind of hero driven innovation and making a dent in the universe type of discourse .This is a healthy model and its occurring is akin to india paying back the software world its debt .
Afterthought
I had some good stories to cite from japan,uk,france,israle but this one isnt essay on software vs countries .I also had good urge to cite hike and postman but again this wasn’t essay on indian companies . But i would love to see a post someday on significant open source contribution by companies operating in india .