Software products from India

Some people are of the opinion that we do not have any good, world-class, commonly used software product (like MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Autocad) created out of India. I agree to this completely. But then apart from the US, which other country can boast of many commonly used software products? I think only a handful. And that is because, most of the products are standards driven and all standards come out from the US. The US universities do a lot of technical research and create standards. This means that they are the ones who dictate how some new technology is going to work. India has a lot of engineers. But they are not researchers. They do not create new standards. Rather, they study the standards and create software as per the standards. Manpower is our strength. Unless we develop good research facilities which come up with new technologies and standards, it is very difficult to get into the product space.

Yet, some of the Indian companies have developed application oriented products. Case in point I-Flex which has FlexCube product for the banks. Infosys has Finnacle and Polaris has the Intellect product. There are some products in the ERP and CRM domains also. But these are not commonly used products. These are used only by a select few customers. So the product potential of Indian companies is not widely known yet.

But why this question is asked only relative to the software sector in India? Which other consumer product was invented in India? Was an automobile invented in India? Was a washing machine invented in India or a microwave oven for that matter? No. Today we are capable to manufacture consumer products but none to my knowledge has been invented in India. And most of these inventions came from the US again. This is because they had pumped in money and effort into such research long back and started working on them. Indians have never been big inventors. But we have been very resourceful! So, we pioneered the usage of washing machine for making lassi (example of Indian “Jugaad”).