 | Posted: January 12, 2010 3:57 AM by: Jan Pabellon |
I was inspired to write this post while reading Sachin Dabir's blog, Sr. Manager at Red Hat Asia Pacific, where he poses an interesting question: “Why Indians can not make good IT products, but make good solutions.”
He writes:
Indians are good at services and solutions but can not make good IT products – this is the old problem that we keep hearing about in the industry.We are good at creating ’solutions’ – solutions that can be tweaked whenever there is a problem. We love to solve the problems and we are very comfortable in the world of ambiguity. But this mental state is not good for making products. Products need state of fixed input and predictable output. Somehow, I realised that we, Indians are not good at being “exact”, “precise” “to the point”. We like giving “big picture” solutions, giving broad views.
Just think about the conversations that we have most of the time – about politics, economics, life. We love to talk a lot but without being precise. Ok this is a very generalised view and there are many good and precise thinking people in India. But the fact is that our brand, image as Indians is not like that. We as, people, are not known to be precise and exact. Hence the buyers dont find trust in capabilities to build great products.
Without surrendering to stereotypes, its funny how I share the same views but this time as it applies to my own country men–Filipinos. Filipinos share many traits with Indians (such as a language and culture that is stilted towards generalities and imprecision). Case in point: in our native language our subject / nouns are generally genderless–unlike Western/Germanic languages which almost always associate gender with an object (ie a ship is a she, etc). We are also imprecise when it comes to telling time and distance, often in conversation we will set meeting times as “later” (mamaya) or use frustratingly unhelpful words such as “near” or “far” (doon lang, malapit na, malayo pa, dyan na lang sa kanto) when describing the distance to a lost stranger’s final destination.
I was thinking some of the barriers to success for our countrymen in some fields may be rooted in our cultural background and upbringing. This was pursued in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers–he explains how plane crashes may partly be explained by the cultural heritage of the pilots and their “power distance.” (See the chapter on the Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes or just read about it here).
But on the upside I notice that unlike Singaporeans, Indians and Filipinos generally excel in services, entertainment, the arts–areas where creativity and right brained thinking are valued and not seen as a hindrance. Daniel Pink has an interesting book called A Whole New Mind which posits that we are moving to the Conceptual Age, and in this coming new era, the “scatter-brained”, imprecise but inventive, empathic right brainers will have an advantage. And I know some Indian companies who have been able to overcome cultural hindrances or barriers to marry left-brained, product-oriented precision, and marry this with their innate creativity to go and develop innovative, and fairly successful product companies. Companies like Adventnet and their ManageEngine and Zoho product lines; with more on the way with interesting Indian startups like Druvaa, Vembu, Cynapse and others. Hopefully we Filipinos can one day do the same.
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Steven, I think we may have a blind spot here being so U.S. centric. There's likely to be clones of Google, YouTube and Facebook for other nations.
Just for example, Filipinos were very early in the social networking game with their adoption of Friendster. Americans were actually a bit late with myspace and then Facebook. Other nations, say like Brazil tended to favor networks like Orkut. How does Facebook differ from myspace or even Friendster. At its core, not much. But it has its root, the elite class in U.S. society. Success in this space goes beyond technology, but more on social engineering.
Youtube, again you had video sharing networks everywhere. It was just the easiest to use, but for the longest time, the legality of the service was and is questionable.
@Carlos: Do you mean that, in order to come up with a Google/Youtube/Facebook of our own, we have to make a product that targets that "elite class in US society" you mentioned? Is the alternative not feasible: to build up a market that will be competitive to the US?
Back on topic: I think one major reason why we Filipinos are not inclined to making our own products is that we tend to make do with what's available, looking for work-arounds for existing products/services instead of making our own tailor-fit version.
I think you can re-phrase the question and still have the same answers: "Why Filipinos can not make good products, but make good solutions."
This discussion does not need to be limited to IT products. This phenomena is even more pervasive outside the IT industry.
so will this mean , that Filipinos are not "creative" enough to build new products? They just want to tinker with the creation of others? Most major inventions are not intended, they are accidental. Encouraging adventurism (exploring the unknown) helps in so many ways. Culture have something to do with it, and I am inclined to think that we are very reserved. Singapore have ventured to adventurism when they parted with Malaysia, and the Americans are explorers and adventurers eversince they founded US.
Also dependency on foreign products have influenced this a lot, that we just use those products and find solutions to problems related to their use.
What I've observed is that the talent level and energy required to create a software product is vastly different from the work typically required for consultants. The gap is even much wider from software product developers and internal IT staff.
In other words, you may have a lot of professionals in IT, but very few of them have the technical capabilities to build a product. Now add to that fact that you can't build a product with just a few talented people, you need a whole team. If you can't organize that team because you can't source them from the local environment, then you aren't going to be successful.
So to be competitive in this global environment, you need to consider sourcing not only local talent but from anywhere else in the world. The success of Winston Damarillo's companies is that he is able to recruit talent from all over the world and complement that with local talent.
As a person that evaluate and sees start-ups on a weekly basis, software start-ups are not just build by coders, but actually a composition of 2 major functions: 1) Engineering 2) Marketing and BD.. One cannot exist with another..That is one thing I think that is lacking in our IT infrastructure, it this merger of the 2 worlds.. where someone who has an idea can actually think of scalability, execution, funding, first market, customers all while building a great product. Again, the question is "scalability" again... will a customer in the US and the customer in Brazil will like to use your product even if you are a Philipine based company? I think, its always to build a great differentiated product is the key factor to have great Filipino IT companies.
Isn't the problem because most Filipinos think like consumers than as creators?
I always believed in creating products. I got a product under my belt. It's software that enables you to send SMS using your computer. Launched EnableSMS Suite last Nov. 2009. http://www.enablesms.com/. No rocket science here but the product is very useful for SMEs even individual entrepreneurs and it's purely Philippine made.
Based on my experience, it's the lack of capital. And, Filipino companies need to change their mindset and believe that developing products will reap more in the long run.
Lack of capital is a barrier to entry. But I take it as a challenge so I had to create the capital needed myself :)
Going back to the article, I believe it's not about being creative or building a new product. Filipinos are creative in a "resourceful" kind of way, always looking for a (cheap?) workaround for a problem (i.e. Traffic? Ok, counterflow). It doesn't have to be pretty (or legal?) as long as it works. "Pwede na".
Maybe that's where the problem is to begin with, "pwede na" mentality. Any product will never get enough traction by being something that is "pwede na". As soon as something hits the market that is better/easier to use at right price. Then the product is dead.
As Earl mentioned, there are 2 components to building a good product 1) Product development (engineering) and 2) Customer Development (Google "four steps to the epiphany" by steve blank). The two should work side by side in order to build a good product that customers are actually willing to pay for.
The old mantra "build it, and they will come" doesn't work anymore. Products are getting cheaper and cheaper to build as new technologies like cloud computing, and new APIs make it easier for any coder to a build and deploy a product on.
The trick then to building a good product, would be to continuously find out what your customers need (customer development) as you are building the product (product development).
Has anyone heard of ERIC ERP and Gurango software? Those were Filipino products that sold overseas.