Thursday, October 06, 2005

Indians good only at theory : Microsoft

"Computer engineers are more into theory and less in managing businesses, building businesses or writing source codes, the key to software development," Mundie told Business Standard.

I dont think this statement is wrong at all. Most of us are good at Mathematics but not innovating or thinking for what is needed to the market point of view.

That will continue to be a piece of cake for the college dropouts who will become future billionaires.

Google , I am afraid is heading towards the same direction.(This is a gut feel, and I humbly accept if I am wrong at this analysis of mine.)

Take for example Google Earth. Great Innovation.Great technology.But, What is the use ?
It'll just be a passing fad and an extra cost to the company very soon, like other products like Froogle etc.Or most of the Google labs products.

America, will continue to be the epi-centre of innovation.They are damn good at innovation.We will continue to be the service providers.

I am no education expert, but I think emphasis should be given more on assignments (like what the post graduate(ME,MTech,MS etc) students have) at the BE level itself. We can become better engineers.We just had 15 programs when some programs were first written/printed out in practicals book, later we used to understand them. Worse, we remembered them by-heart.

I remember the LRU method or the Strassen's Matrix Multiplication which was really complicated stuff.

All these boil down to having REALLY good teachers. I disagree that a large number of students can be autonomous at Bachelor's level, even if they have an IQ of Einstein.

See the whole article here

3 comments:

Dhimant Parekh said...

I agree on the part that we as Indians shall more or less continue to remain service providers. There is no doubt that the majority of the innovation happens in the United States (some of it done by Indians settled there thus qualifying as Americans).
I differ on your viewpoint about Google. I think its a very technologically strong company and has been looking ahead of its peers. Look at their products, including the acquisition of blogger. It has revolutionised the way we use the net (I suggest you read the "about us" section on google.com. It gives you a very good insight into the company). Their search engine is still the best. About Google Earth, well, other than being a fad, it did go on to show people that something like this was possible to do. This might get combined with something else and we might have yet another revolution on our hands. Usually a great idea starts off with a combination of two or more seemingly less-important ideas. The word verification system is waiting for me impatiently to finish this post and enter those letters. So off I go ....

sudeep said...


About Google Earth, well, other than being a fad, it did go on to show people that something like this was possible to do. This might get combined with something else and we might have yet another revolution on our hands.


Yeah this was something that didnt occur to me....Acquisition of blogger was a great idea, thats very true.But it was not a home grown product of Google Engineers , right ?Blogger became bigger than LJ because of google.

Time will tell if Google's passion and flair to theoretical research will continue to be the driving force behind its recruitments (like you have the BEST brilliant computer scientists at Google.They want IIT students only as far as India is concerned) or it will start doing acquisitions for survival. It has already started to go the Yahoo! way...and vice versa.....

test123 said...

Google didn't develop most of maps. It bought 'keyhole' and opened up the apis ( a very important thing ). The idea is that others can write stuff using these apis, and you see google everywhere. Very slick marketing/distribution technique is one way of looking at it.
Look at developer.yahoo.com and see the number of apis that Yahoo is now opening.

Google is the best at search?
Regarding search, and google being the best. That is definitely the popular view. But there are loads of parameters that you can use to compare, and best is pretty much an ambiguous term. I will cite one example of a parameter which was used for the best; 'They generally competed with Yahoo regarding bragging rights for amount of pages indexed. When Yahoo! latest numbers were way more, they said that they are no longer in this game of numbers!.' Or best could be that I find my answers in Google, and I don't find it either in A9, MSN, Yahoo!, then sure.

The key idea I think with google, or with any product company is/should be that when you release a product and when you are a 2nd+ mover, you need to have atleast a few USP's & market them effectively. Google has done that successfully in mail.
I don't know which is more important in the pipeline; great idea, code, managing code, marketing & distribution. Futile to argue about this begin better, for if any stage in the pipeline fails, the end result is a failure.

Anyway, I shall stop rambling now :D.