Netxpress Mar Edition 2002
Is all the IT hoopla just hype or is there some flesh and bone to it?
It has been almost an year now that hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear the heartening news of our country all geared up to jump up in the wonder world of IT and we are going to pull ourselves up to the level of the most advanced countries of the world by preparing an army of IT professionals.
Such an easy way of getting out of all the economic troubles that have been haunting us for decades and nobody thought of it? Our universities, colleges and professional institutes are preparing the group of Tech Gurus, which will come, see and make a lot of software to conquer the world.
How I wish that it all was as pretty as it sounds, sadly enough it isn’t, I am afraid many realistic points are simply being ignored by the people on top. Let me list them down for convenience.
1. Please forget about the IT revolution, Internet honeymoon, the dot com age, the time when a team of three undergraduates maintaining a four pages website getting a VC funding of 30 million dollars, it’s over, this isn’t 1999 it is 2001. Welcome to the real world, at least half of those dot com are permanently shut down and the left over are fighting a war for survival and that is happening in the heart of IT, the great United states of America (Recent events of terrorism will surely have more negative impact). Companies like Compaq are being sold, CNET the pioneer of web portals hardly breaks even, Amazon the father of Electronic Commerce have been reporting heavy losses, Microsoft so far have failed to convince it’s user on the prices of Windows XP, and when SAP declared a profit in the last quarter there was a an Inquiry ordered by the German Parliament. Tech. Jobs are being slashed down to 60% and we are dreaming to stage our economic come back on Information
Technology? I would suggest we wake up. IT is no more “The Industry” it is just another industry.
2. For a moment lets consider we do succeed in getting those one million IT “Experts” prepared, what then? First a university graduate is not an expert by any means even if the University happens to be MIT or CALTEC, it needs a grind of at least two years if not more, secondly where will they get the professional training to participate in some productive development activity, to be more precise where will they find a job, top of the line Pakistani companies (and please forget about H1bs they are simply not there) with the exception of one or two, are suffering from the worst crisis they have seen, having expanded their operation in the last few years they are going through an absolute nightmare, most of them are running on the bare minimum staff so if you find an IT Guru on the road don’t be surprised. I am afraid there is no concrete plan of where to get the business from, “if” there is any substantial amount of business available to accommodate this extremely elevated number of “Experts”. I think we are going to create worst type of unemployment among those graduates who would be forced into Computing on the assumption that a bright career awaits them despite the fact that many of them might not have the aptitude or flair for computers at all and probably would have done a whole lot better in some other trade.
3. Do we seriously believe that the difference between us and a developed or at least an economically established country is just the number of people who can write code in Java, the example of India is successfully quoted here. In the perspective of pure software development let me correct a common misconception here, the foundation of India’s computing industry was not software development it was merely data entry nothing more, yes there are a lot of Indian companies who make software and good software but this not the area which generates the 70% of the revenue. Data entry is a field, which requires minimum amount of trained pros and can be done effectively enough by a small company of having four to five computers; this is one spot in my mind we should concentrate on. Besides all this, the true application of automation exists only in a country which has conventional industries, United States for instance is rich in all sort of industries this is where they need automation, computers, software, electronic commerce, it is years of built up which has lead to this electronic revolution, we on the other hand seem quite content to ignore the whole journey and trying to concentrate on the last step which is computerization, the information technology and all that geeky stuff. Do we have an infrastructure in our country, which requires automation on a very large scale? We hardly use electronic typewriters in 90% of our offices. Do we have any real need for the software industry for our own good? If yes then is there any explanation why the local software market is almost non-existent. The point here is a little bit out of the scope of this article or even this magazine may be that “If we have to grow as a nation we have to grow in all directions, depending on a single industry will simply land us in a hopeless situation”
4. In the current situation what I can foresee is that the market is bound to come back and it will, but having said that it won’t necessarily do any good to us because the IT companies in US are striving for business and they will provide better quality work than us on competitive prices so we are in contest with the locals. Why did I say “better quality”? It is quite debatable, well dear reader can you name just one Pakistani Software Product that has international recognition? I am afraid you can’t either. Have you ever thought, Why do the companies in the US or UK or India for that matter make shareware and freeware software? They are not NGOs working for the welfare of common computing mankind, but the whole effort is to get them recognized amongst the users so when the time comes they can remember the name of the company from which they want to get their work done. What we should have done is to take the long path of making products, even free products, so the potential clients at least had face recognition, having used our goods, they could have had the comfort level with us and in the long term it meant recurring business. We haven’t done it and if it isn’t too late we can still rethink our long term strategy because merely providing services or hunting for a project(s) all over the place is just riding on your luck.
