Kolkata: India has done a great job of developing the IT services business, but it has failed in world class product development for the software industry, says Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail.com.
"While India has done a great job of developing the services business, in reality we have completely failed in product development. There is no product that is developed in India for the world market. And that is where all the opportunities are," Bhatia said at an interactive session organised by TiE Kolkata Monday evening.
"Think the case of Apple, where I had started my career. With just 8,000 employees, which is the one-tenth of the number of employees of Infosys or TCS, its market cap (market capitalisation) is eight times. That is in terms of total value per employee, it is 80 times more valuable than the Infosys or Wipro," he said.
He said companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS were providing tremendous employment in India, but their operating mode was "hire people at a certain price and sell their services at a much higher price elsewhere - in the US or the UK or Middle East".
The Indian IT entrepreneur, Bhatia, who co-founded the free e-mail service 15 years ago, said if the software industry in the country has to develop, it has to create products for the world market.
"If the software industry in India has to truly develop, it has to create world class products. And we have the opportunity to do that. Because the mobile space today in India is the second largest in the world," he said.
Stating that India has talent and audience market for innovation, he said, "Once we have a few successful entrepreneurs, I think that will open the door for thousands of others to come and develop great products…whether it is in the internet or mobile platform."
On JaxtrSMS, co-founded by him and Yogesh Patel, an application that allows users to send free text messages anywhere in the world, Bhatia said, "We are already in 210 countries. We think we will cross one million users, including 300,000 in India, at the end of this year and if we continue at this rate of growth, we will hopefully cross the 100 million users by the end of next year."
"We will promote ourselves in the UK and also in the US. Those two are also large markets for us," he added.
JaxtrSMS, launched in November, allows users to send a text message from their mobile phones to any other mobile in the world, even if the recipient does not have the application.
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