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Indian biggies...not entrepreneurial: Sabeer Bhatia

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE: Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, was in India recently to launch InstaColl, the Instant Collaboration tool that lets business professionals to communicate and collaborate securely over the Internet. He talks about his new venture, the Internet and India's problems in innovation with Sunil Rajguru from CyberMedia News.

Excerpts.




How big do you think web conferencing will be in future? What are the reactions so far to InstaColl?



The industry reaction has been extremely positive. This product has been out for less than a week and we already have major pilot commitments. IBM sees this as one of its strategic initiatives and is going to bundle it in all of the X servers. Intel also has supported us and it doesn't do it for all companies because it sees this as building its ecosystem. And we believe that at least in the corporate business environment, instant collaboration or web conferencing is going mainstream. It's just like what happened to the cellphone industry, you know when cellphones first came out, everyone said its too expensive too big, 'I don't want to be connected every time', but everybody has a cellphone today. So once people start seeing the benefits of this technology, which is instantly collaborating while they are online, InstaColl will go mainstream.







What are your other projects apart from InstaColl?


One is Naveen Communication that has a tremendous suite of products. One of them is Telepower that provides voicemail to prepaid users in India. Another is Telixo, which converts every cellphone into a virtual PDA. You can go to www.telixo.com and enter all your information like a calendar, contacts and tasks. After that, you can access all this information just by sending a text message. Then there's Hot seasons, a travel related Website.





Why didn't your venture Arzoo take off?


I think I hired the wrong people, at that time. In 1999, we could not hire people quickly enough. It was insanity in Silicon Valley. It's like what's happening in India today. People are switching jobs, getting multiple offers walking out of one office to another. That is not a healthy environment to start a company.





Bangalore is right now more of a services valley rather than a Silicon Valley, when do you think the shift will take place?


I think the reason for this is that many of the large Indian companies have not been entrepreneurial. Take all the big ones like TCS, Wipro and Infosys- they are not entrepreneurial. They have stuck to a business model, but they really haven't innovated on that - they haven't created new products. They are probably averse to risk and don't have a culture of innovation. They also think it's a diversion from their mainstay of business, which I don't think is true. I think one has to make that investment of trying to be a product company because the ultimate returns on the work effort come when companies start thinking of products. The returns per employee of any one of the corporations doing outsourcing, can never be more than $50,000-$60,000 a year. In product companies, the returns per employee are like $two million- $three million a year. There are very high rewards for being product oriented, but there are very high risks too, because only one in ten products really makes it.





Today Gmail and Yahoo Mail are getting more popular than Hotmail. How different would Hotmail have been, had it still been yours?










I think Hotmail has done a great job so far but I am aware that Microsoft for some reason is not giving the one GB or two GB of space to international users. I would not have allowed that to happen for sure, because Internet users anywhere in the world are equally valuable. Also, we would have certainly kept up with all the Gmail features and search technologies to make it more relevant and quicker. I think I would also have done a better integration with instant messaging.





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