Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Talking of levellers

If you look at technology, irrespective of the field of application, you will notice that technology is a great enabler. Two-wheelers and four-wheelers enabled people to travel independently (I mean without having to depend on public transport like buses and trains). Photography was once the domain of photographers. And then came digital cameras. Their piggy back on mobile phones had a great symbiotic effect - the mobile phone user base was much larger than that of camera, but it provided a ready territory for selling. So almost everyone who had a mobile phone became a photographer, just by buying a new mobile instrument that had a camera.

On a whole new dimension, I found something interesting. Technology became an enabler for countries too. India has enough consumer information technology that it is soon catching up with the US. So it is a leveller in a different sense. I always thought that businesses were migratory - towards where they had low cost / high profit / both opportunity. So were business people - you can find many Gujaratis in Africa, US, many Punjabis in the UK, Andhrites in the US and so on. Domestic migration too is not uncommon. There are many Saurashtrians in Tamilnadu as well, living for many generations. However such migrations were due to trade. These days it is technology that is driving migration. It is not very uncommon to see foreigner knowledge workers working in India. These knowledge workers have been migrating, just because companies migrated owing to technology availability in India. During the protectionist era, various sections of Indian establishment complained of brain drain. Now India is facing the reverse brain drain. Now issuing visas is a two way process - Indians moving to the West and Westerners, to India.

Isn't technology a great leveller?
More later,
K Venkatesh

1 comment:

muralikrishnan said...

Am working as a business development executive in a system integration company, providing IT infrastructure services.I came to know you by read your book. Am not able to provide the solution for the customer queries in the areas like virtualization,storage,security,data center solutions.
There are numerous books in IT technical side but lack of books in IT infrastructure sales side.As a mentor recommend me what are all the books i need to read to increase my sales skill in IT infrastructure.

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