Coolie Valley?

I had read this article on rediff a couple of months ago via a link on slashdot and wanted to comment on it. The comment section looks like everyone in the world had an opinion. Well I decided to join the world.

Coolie is a Indian term which refers to a porter at a place of public transportation like a railway station. I have no idea why people refer to them in a denigrating fashion. After all they are doing a very nice job. Imagine you are 65 and have a good amount of luggage. What harm is there in paying someone to carry it?

Getting back to the article it stresses that India does not bet on innovations. This is something I disagree with, however, not entirely.

The majority of companies in Bangalore provide a service. They provide an army of cheap programmers for a fee. I do not see anything wrong with that. There are R & D outfits of some major companies in India as well, albeit, in a smaller number. The fact is that services is a huge market and business is about making money. Even a company like IBM, which cannot be called "not innovative" is focusing on services as a sector.

As far as patents in software are concerned, I believe they should not even be allowed, but thats my personal opinion, although, I have nothing against intellectual property.

India as a country has developed supercomputers, ICBM's, nuclear weapons, Satellite Launch Vehicles, Linguistic software and many other things indigenously. None of these were originally created by them, so they were not responsible for the idea. They however, are responsible for the technology inside these which are in most cases unique. It would be prudent to also point out that India invented the zero and the basis of quite a bit of mathematics. Albert Einstein said, "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."

I do have issues with the term "Silicon Valley of the East" basically because it is a mimicry of the West which we need not do for everything. Bangalore is neither a valley nor a city of silicon, which, was initially associated with companies manufacturing hardware.

As far as innovations are concerned, yes, Silicon Valley is ahead but lets not forget what should not be considered an innovation in the software sector which is attributed to companies like Sun, Apple, IBM etc.

1) Virtual Machine - Popularly recognized as something done by Sun, this was originally done in the early 60's with Lisp and later with Smalltalk. Lisp and Smalltalk both have superior VM architecture to Java despite being languages that are over 20 years old.

2) Garbage Collection - This is something that was necessary for C programs to run stable. There are many many languages with very good garbage collectors all dating way before Java was even concieved.

3) GUI - Usually attributed to Apple, this was originally developed at Xerox Parc, a place where a lot of innovations came from. The mouse also came from Xerox.

4) OOP - Xerox Parc again with Smalltalk. Even today Smalltalk is a better language than Java, C# or C++ which are the 3 most popular OOP languages, however, because of its diminishing popularity it has less libraries which can also be said of Lisp.

5) Frameworks - CORBA begat COM that begat DCOM that begat .Net. J2EE also emerged from this pile. It is standard practice in OOP as well as functional languages to build frameworks first. Developers in these languages are used to it. There are many well known frameworks in other languages as well although they do not try to sell things based on marketing and world domination.

What I am trying to say is that just because a company exists in Silicon Valley does not mean its innovative, just like companies in India are not necessarily just cheap labour as the article points out. Managers reading Gartner reports really do not help with that either which covers most of the US as far as innovation is concerned.