Subcontinental Smackdown

On November 11, 2002, the William and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a commitment of $100 million towards HIV/AIDS prevention in India. The announcement came on the eve of a highly publicized visit to India by William Gates himself. Timed for release with his arrival there, Microsoft announced it would be “deepening its India commitment by making investments of approximately $400 million US over the next three years in several aspects of its India business including education, partnerships, innovation, localization and the Development Center.” So, did it work? The better question might be: how could it work?

Here in the US, spending on information technology (IT) is notoriously down. Although there's a great deal of whining about this by CEOs and IT technology suppliers, the conditions hardly compare with those in India, where the $600 US price of a cheap PC might amount to a year's salary.

No doubt the cheap, black-market pricing of Windows' earlier generations did much to allow Microsoft to spread as far as it has in India. But the New York Times reports the distance isn't all that great, because there still are only about four million PCs in a country with a population exceeding a billion (and expected to pass China by the middle of the century).

But unlike earlier versions of the OS, Windows XP is built not to work unless the user calls or logs in to have the software turned on by Microsoft's authentication process. If Microsoft has its way, all copies in India will be paid for.

Windows XP isn't cheap. And even though it's competing with a free OS, Gates said Microsoft had no plans to discount the OS beyond the usual breaks for educational organizations. Given the competitive situation, how can Microsoft win against Linux in an economy where MS goods carry luxury pricing?

I don't know, and I don't much care—that's Microsoft's problem. What's interesting to me is the other stuff that borrowed interest in Microsoft's problem brings up, such as the potentially leading role that Indian developers are likely to play in the Linux movement.

There are some very ambitious Linux developers in India. Take Rajesh Jain, for example. After I wrote about India on the Linux Journal web site, a reader wrote to clue me in about what Jain is up to with his new company, Emergic:

Here's how Jain describes his plans:

Jain wants to drive the cost of hardware down to $125-150 US or less and software down to $5-10 US/month. And he wants to do it by leveraging old computers as thin clients for running applications, all the usual Linux suspects. He explains:

He's counting on broadband and talking mostly about enterprise environments:

There's a lot more to his plans, but rather than focus on them, let's look at some other things that are happening in the culture itself. For example, consider the work being done at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Writes Peter Day in BBC News:

They are gathered under the auspices of the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Innovation. The acronym spells Sristi, the Sanskrit word for creation.

Sristi is the creation of Anil Gupta, a professor from the Institute whose Honeybee Network has been collecting creative ideas from around rural India for the past ten years. The idea database now exceeds 10,000.

Then there are Dr Sugara Mitra's hole-in-the-wall experiments (see “Natural Forces” from the March 2002 issue), by which street urchins in New Delhi and elsewhere around the country learn computing from free public kiosks.

My points: 1) We're talking about highly resourceful people here—a lot of them. 2) We're also talking about values very much in line with what Linux, free software and open source are all about. That's why I wouldn't be surprised to see Tux beat Bux in a big way here, first.