To quote Chairman and Chief Software Architect of the worlds largest software maker Microsoft i.e. Bill Gates at the CII-CEO Forum in New Delhi: SBecause, we depend on India for manpower that is why we are scaling up operations here. Today, we have 3,000 people and
over the next 3 4 years, our total strength will be 7,000 strong. We are hiring as fast as we can. A percentage increase in employees that will be the highest in India, he promised, adding: SThey will play a key part in product development, research and support services.
Currently, with three centres in India, India Development Centre at Hyderabad, an R&D and Global Technical Support Centre in Bangalore, Gates stated applications for local use would be developed by local developers, and with regard to handwriting and speech recognition software, Microsoft would work with local experts to make sure it applied to all broadly used languages.
Tremendously impressed with India"s human resources, Gates said: SIndia has a fantastic pool of software professionals. The world needs to benefit from this. I never thought with so little produc.companies, software services sector would grow as strong as it has grown here.
Long before his munificent visit to India, the world"s richest man was not known for showing gratitude, humility or generosity. So, it is something of a real surprise when Bill Gates praises his Indian employees so very lavishly, and a trip to India is now increasingly redefined in terms of private aid and philanthropy. Today, he attributes his rising interest in India to the amazing contribution his great Indian employees" have made to Microsoft, suggesting it is payback time. But, was it so simple? And, why now? The following is a narrative of Bill Gates" Indian affair and how the Indian connection helped build Microsoft.
Chidanand Rajghatta researching the story of India"s info-tech rise for a book found the buzz in the industry was that Microsoft was the repository of some of the finest Indian engineering and programming talent. Seeking an interview with Gates, Rajghatta speaking to Microsoft mandarins heard them confirm and validate the Indian angle. Interviewing Gates in Seattle before his impending (third) visit to India, and warned to focus on activities of the Gates Foundation rather than on Microsoft, on healthcare rather than software, Rajghatta slipped in his question. SIs it possible his interest in India is spurred by the large number of Indians in Microsoft? Had he heard about the e-mail that spoke of Indians constituting 32% of Microsoft work force (of course, he knew the number was exaggerated)?
Much to Rajghatta,s surprise, Gates immediately and readily acknowledged the Indian angle of his story, using words like amazing" and great" in describing the kind of work the Indians had done. As for the 32%, that was a tad high, but certainly in Microsoft's engineering department, it was about 20%, which was huge, he said. Bigger by far than the 5 to 15% of Indians working for large corporations, such as Cisco, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Oracle.
And, Bill Gates" high regard for Indians, and through them for India, runs deep, going back a long way to 1981, when Microsoft was just another tiny start-up with less than 50-people, instead of the 50,000-strong behemoth it is today. And, the first Indian through whom Bill Gates was first introduced to India was Rao Remala, who joined Microsoft as its 39th employee, the first Indian on its rolls. A graduate of IIT Kanpur, Remala had done some projects for the upstart American firm - Microsoft. He ha.come to USA in 1981 to do some contracting work, when Microsoft hired him full time.
Gates liked the quiet, unassuming Indian, who simply went about his work with metronomic precision without ever tiring. And, Bill himself worked on some projects with Remala, the boss of the firm showing technological felicity as the two of them designed an extended memory architecture.
In 1982,1985, Windows 1.0 had Remala"s code all over it.
Just settling in his job, in 1983 Remala was joined by Microsoft"s second Indian employee, Vijay Vashee whose family had migrated to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) generations back. But, Vashee had returned to India in the 1970s after securing admission at IIT, and five years in Powai had made him as Indian as the.come. A much more flamboyant character than low key Remala, Vashee"s career at career lasted some 18 years, before he quit to pursue other interests. And, during his time at Microsoft, Vijay Vashee is credited with major contributions to Windows, Mouse, Works, Win, Excel and other MS products.
By the time, he left his position as one of the firm"s General Managers, he had helped make PowerPoint the number-one choice from its previous third place, and grown the business from $100-million to $600-million. For this reason and others, it was an achievement instrumental in enhancing Gates" interest in India.
Remala and Vashee were soon followed by a trickle of other Indian employees - Pradeep Singh, Suresh Ramamurthy, Anil Goel, Shirish Nadkarni, Deepak Amin, Chandan Chauhan, Paddy Mishra were some of the earliest Indian Microsofties who made fundamental contributions to Microsoft and helped it grow. But, even up till 1988, when Microsoft was about 1000-strong, there were only a couple of dozen Indians.
However, their work was impressive, and the impression grew that these guys from India were pretty smart. Around this time, Nathan Myrhvold, who later became CTO of Microsoft, proposed Microsoft go headhunting in India. SIt was inevitable, says S. Somasegar, now Microsoft Corporate Vice-President for Windows Engineering Solutions and Services, who had just joined the firm then. SWe were just a handful of guys in Redmond, but word had gone around about the talent from India.
The first batch of Indians (numbering around 40) recruited by Microsoft directly from India, and mainly from Wipro, itself a tech firm of MS vintage, came to Redmond in the summer of 1988. Among them was Suryanarayanan Raman, an ubergeek who went on to become Microsoft"s exalted Engineer Emeritus by 2000, before burning out and taking a sabbatical in India.
SInitially, there was a culture shock,recalls Vashee, who took the first group for an acclimatisation course with fellow honcho Jon Shirley. But soon, the Indian geeks began to make a splash. Like Remala in the early days, they were tireless drudges, who learnt fast, and rarel.complained. SThe spigot opened, says Vashee. SFrom that point on, Microsoft became a haven for Indians.
In fact, the Redmond campus became a real desi adda, with sometimes whole families working for Microsoft. Having joined MS in 1989, Somasegar soon saw his younger brothe.come to work at Redmond to head a Windows server team. Soma met and married Akila, also a Microsoft employee, while her sister Priya, who did some contracting work for Microsoft, in turn married Soma"s brother.
By the late 1990s, Indians had put a definitive stamp on Microsoft. Redmond was readily a curry campus. Cricket teams sprang up in the area and new Indian restaurants opened. The Indian influence was so significant that when Microsoft made a bid to acquire Sabeer Bhatia"s Hotmail in 1997, almost the entire process involved Indians from the Microsoft end. Bhatia himself joined th.company after selling Hotmail for $400-million.
In 1997, at the urging of his colleagues and underlings, Bill Gates made his first visit to India. By now, Microsoft employed thousands of Indians, including an elite few who had made their way to the higher echelons of the management and division heads. Gates" deputy Steve Ballmer, who had visited India many years earlier, and Mike Maples, the executive vice-president, were both gung-ho about the country. It was beginning to produce the largest pool of engineers, programmersHowever, it wasn"t till 1999 that the IDC began humming. Famously, Microsoft has a well- earned reputation of not being first of the mark or quickly of the mark. The corporation struggled to define a game plan. SOne reason for growing it slowly was we wanted to do strategic work there, not outsourcing. says Somasegar, who oversaw the project.
Meanwhile, back in Redmond, th.company began to lose a number of Indians in the top tier of management as they left to start their own little start-up firms at the height of the Internet boom. However, even as the top tier crumbled, the Redmond campus ramped up with Indians. With the H1-B visa cap raised from 65,000 to 195,000 over three years, Microsoft became one of the biggest hirers of Indian talent. According to some insider estimates, at least 10% of th.company's 50,000-strong work force is of Indian ethnicity.
But, then Linux happened and the threat of Microsoft getting beaten by the upstart, though a far-fetched scenario seemed real. The threat to Microsoft also came from another angle, and nowhere was the danger more apparent outside the United States than in India, the principle reason why Bill Gates decided to make his Indian yatra around this time.
India, home to half a million software programmers, a number expected to grow to more than a million in the next four years, making it the largest such force in the world. If the Indian software army started developing applications for Linux instead of Windows, it would help popularise the alternative system.
Not only would Microsoft begin to lose current revenue (estimated by some insiders in the region of $200-million) from sale of its products, but its future growth could also be stunted. And, the first red flags began to go up in Redmond, becoming apparent that Microsoft was losing ground in India on several counts.companies, such as Sun, Cisco etc. were hiring the best minds of the generation. On the other hand, the Linux fever was also catching on.
Backed by the government, several large Microsoft rivals were working on Linux initiatives in India, goading programmers to write applications for the new OS. One such corporation was Microsoft"s old friend and rival IBM, with a research centre in IIT Delhi. Not surprisingly, like with Microsoft, IBM too has several Indians in the top tier of the management, including two men, who had Windows in their line of sight. Ambuj Goyal was General Manager of Big Blue's software group. Deepak Advani was vice-president of IBM"s Worldwide Linux Strategy (he has since moved to the server division).
With IBM investing more than $ 200-million in India over four years to open seven Linux development centres and fou.competency centres in Asia, including one of each in Bangalore, where there was already a thriving ILUG (India Linux Users" Group), did not exactly the sound of a death knell, but Microsoft certainly began to feel the pain.
A visit by the Big Boss to drum up support in India was needed to stop the stab from becoming a gaping wound. And, then Bill Gates made Aids in India a part of his Microsoft India Initiative bestowing some of his millions to India, as chat rooms halfway across the world bitched about his motives. But, it is not so much the revenue flow from India that matter to Gates say Microsoft insiders, it is Indian brains.
From all accounts, he is now convinced that India has in it to be the next software hub. So, the new Microsoft strategy is not only to aim for the market, but just about every level of the playing field, from the central, state to the local governments, to schools, colleges and universities.
In his hunt for the next holy grail of technology, Gates surrounds himself with the best and the brightest. And, one such person is Dr Anoop Gupta, a Stanford don who joined Microsoft in 1997 after hi.company vExtreme was acquired by the Redmond giant. For a founder of a cu
