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Articles: Development | Chairman Speak
- Mr. Sekhar BC
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Now why is Microsoft investing so much in this? We think as more people move up the economic ladder, as more people learn to use computers, in the long run, its good for the socio-economic development of India and its good for us. We believe that learning to serve poor rural communities profitably will give us insights into the next 5 billion of the world’s consumers and help us in innovating new business models.
We see some other big opportunities as well, which would help us to realize India’s potential. For instance, how do you leverage IT to overcome deficiencies in the educational system? We spend 4 % of GDP on education. That’s just the government spend. Middle class families spend hundreds and millions of dollars on education and tuitions. There is a large opportunity for entrepreneurs who crack the code on how to get a small share of this spend. Likewise there are 8 million SMEs in our country ….only 25% of whom have a computer. Many of these will not survive globalization of our economy. Some will become global companies. We think technology is going to be one of the determinants for who prospers and who doesn’t. We believe that IT will be critical both for productivity and to integrate with the global supply chains of Toyota and Walmart.
The way we are all going about selling to SMEs’ today is unlikely to help their cause. What SMEs need is affordability, ease of deployment and easy to manage out of the box solutions. The solutions must be vertical. The affordability factor must encompass the ability to pay for hardware, software and connectivity on a usage or on a monthly basis. In addition, the IT skills training will be a big driver of success. This will require a combined effort of hardware players, ISVs, services companies. This is exactly what we are attempting to do under Project Vikas which Bill Gates announced last December. And we hope to have successful pilots in 5 clusters by the end of this year.
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