The new Koh-i-Noor
Go to any India centric forum on the web. It will be rife with comments poking fun at the familiar giants of IT outsourcing.
They joke about the shoddy quality of work produced by Indian IT companies, the (lack of) work ethic at these companies, about low quality engineers who could not find any other jobs and so ended up in an outsourcing company and so on.
To these comments, I have a slightly different take on the situation.
Imagine, for a second, that you need some plumbing work done at home - not an emergency, just something you have been putting off for too long. How many reviews of plumbers will you trawl through? How many friends will you solicit recommendations from?
If you are anything like me, the process of finding the best plumber for my job could take weeks.
Replace plumber with programmer and yourself with the global economy at large and you start to sense the scale at which the Indian outsourcing revolution has warped and upended business worldwide.
With just words, promises, the soft touch, geniuses like Narayan Murthy and Azim Premji were able to convince hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of companies that the BEST plumber to level that bathroom floor was some guy in some small town on the other side of the planet.
They opened companies and made pots of money by convincing Western companies that their future lay in foreign hands. And oh, they gave employment to hundreds of thousands of their fellow countrymen at first and now to people in other countries.
As I struggle to launch and gain traction for even the smallest app, I am amazed at how much these giants were able to achieve from a standing start in the 1980s.
In less than 40 years, the average American threw their lot with an isolationist, atavistic bombast because they saw their jobs moving overseas.
So, instead of laughing at the accent of the average engineer in an IT outsourcing company, we should realize how much of a jewel these companies are.
These really are the new Koh-i-Noors of India. The original was roughly a $100 million and is stuck in the vaults of the Queen of England. These new Koh-i-Noors make that much money every month.