This week, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute released two years worth of thorough research on the economic ties between the Bay Area and India.  We were excited to find out that the report features a short excerpt about Monsoon and Badmash.tv.

The focus is mainly on the entrepreneurs and students from India who have shaped industries like technology and farming in the Bay Area.  A few things I learned:

- Indian-owned farms in California’s Central Valley produce 95% of the state’s peaches (why peaches?).
- There are more foreign students in California from India than anywhere else.
- In 1910, there were a total of 6,000 Indians in the US (imagine how tight that marriage market was)
- In 1990, 23% of Silicon Valley’s engineers were Indian.

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Until recently, I often wondered if the cluttered, loud websites that dominated Indian cyberspace were indicative of a cultural difference in design aesthetics.

Although I knew that the average Indian consumer doesn’t want every pixel on their screen to be blinking or covered with Bollywood gossip, I thought that maybe they had more of a tolerance for it.   In making Indian websites louder and busier, perhaps Indian designers were reacting (or overreacting) to what their audience wanted?

This was exciting to me, because it meant that a competing design sensibility could emerge from talented agencies in Mumbai and Bangalore.   Indian web design could emerge as a wholly distinct movement and compete with the current standard of minimalism synonymous with Web 2.0.

Alas, I was wrong.  With the clean, sensible redesign of the Hindu, it seems that Indian brands are moving towards the Western standard.  There will be no Indian web design movement for now.

On the bright side, reading Indian news no longer makes me want to hide under my desk in fear of clashing colors and flashing banners.

Satyam’s share’s plunged 77 percent on CEO’s Ramalinga Raju’s admission that 90% of the profit it reported simply didn’t exist (about a billion dollars). The NYTimes.com has more.  

In a world of family-run businesses, shady accountants, and growing corruption, you can’t blame us for asking.  Who’s next?

ThinkChange India with a great summary on the status of social entrepreneurship in India.

These days,  we often compete for projects against US-based companies whose prices are lower. Our clients are surprised and initially assume that when they show us our competitor’s prices, we’ll lower ours.

Instead, we assert that if experience and quality are taken into account, our prices are still 50% or less than a US-based team can offer (disclaimer: since we do project management and design in the US, we are a hybrid, not simply an offshore team, which means that our prices are generally higher than companies based only in India).

Before they understand the real difference, many people jump to the wrong conclusion.  IT outsourcing is dead in India.   It’s not cheaper to develop in India anymore.

Wrong.  It’s still cheaper to develop in India.  In fact, it’s now cheaper at several different levels of quality, which is an advance that helps everyone.

As many of our clients have come to understand, the disparity is not always about price.  It is now often about quality.

You can’t compare apples to mangoes.

Why did we change our name? 

On January 1st, we officially became Monsoon Company (after 7 years as BCM Digital). 

There was no obvious business reason for the name change.  We didn’t get acquired, change strategy, or get sued.   Instead, we changed our name for a much simpler (and perhaps more important) reason.

For too long, ‘outsourcing’ has being stigmatized as new and disruptive.  Due to political rhetoric and cultural biases, many of our competitors mask their Indian roots under an ambiguous identity (what’s an infosys?). But, the rhetoric doesn’t make sense.  

Global trade is as old as the monsoon winds that used to carry spice traders to India.   With our new name, we choose to celebrate our Indian team. 

And why not?  Their work has lead to long term relationships with Fortune 100 clients, dozens of innovative software products, and industry-leading expertise in development platforms like Vista, Ruby on Rails, and Facebook. 

Manish over at IndiAdRant summarizes a fascinating breakfast conversation between Narayan Murthy (Infosys) & Azim Premji (Wipro). After clicking over to the full interview, I was astounded at the striking similarity between Premji & Don King.

Jokes aside, a great conversation. The best quote comes from Murthy (he didn’t look enough like Don King to include his picture in this post), discussing the Tata-Corus deal.

To me, the confidence shown by Ratan and his people is, indeed, a watershed event in the business history of this country. When somebody writes the business history of India in the 2000s and 2100s, this will be described as a turning point in the history of the mindset of the Indian entrepreneur. That’s what I’m excited about.

Manish’s Summary

Full Interview