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The power of an ecosystem

The late 90s to early 2000s were all part of Indias service economy boom. Everybody who was anybody became an engineer. Every engineer from mining to petrochemical became interested in IT services. If not anything, it offered a steady income for an aspirational country. But this interest in services also came at a cost. In my own experience, I found people thinking purely of work as a service, devoid of too much initiative or risk and spending their lives as it were on a spec sheet and clients orders. It also de-skilled people - unless they were careful about building a skill - it was an instant road of managerial anonymity and a career devoid of any skills.

Along the way, for those who are familiar, were lamentations from people that all these services are not enabling India is not producing the next Microsoft or even a web browser. There were IT services giants, but they were not producing any products. And such it went that people argued that services was an industry while others said how unskilled it was an industry and about how Indians were wasting their lives working in BPOs and so on.

Needless to say, all these lamentations did not lead anywhere. A slowdown came about in 2007/8 and then the cloud killed many basic manual service work streams and RPA did what ever else was left. And all those who claimed the primacy of Indias IT service industry continue to do so, but by now it is clear that there is no services industry - atleast no future glory. It is a steady and sure decline, but somehow it does not seem to matter for Indias tech industry today.

So what happened? That is my next piece - the power of an ecosystem....

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