The Hindu Business Line : ‘A place for dreaming, not saving’

The sight of an Indian Chief Minister ready with a power point presentation, to push the case for Microsoft to make his State its home in India, must have been sufficiently startling for Bill Gates in 1997 to stop and listen. What he heard, backed up by what he saw when he visited India in March that year, helped Gates and the senior management in Redmond, Washington (US) decide to look outside the US for the ‘Next Big Thing’ in software…. at the vast tal ent pool in India which has already given the company people like S. Somasegar, a veteran of operating systems from OS/2 to XP; like Srini Koppulu, a key member of the MS Office suite team.

Due diligence established that then Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, was indeed serious in backing up his claims of what Andhra Pradesh — and Hyderabad — could offer. On August 12, 1998, The India Development Centre of Microsoft was in business with all of 12 engineers. Koppulu had moved to India to head the centre — and last week he was still around, as its Managing Director, a 10-year-stint guiding what is now one of Microsoft’s largest R&D teams outside the US. In Hyderabad for the occasion was Somasegar, who as US-based Senior Vice-President for the Developer Division, now oversees Microsoft’s development efforts in Hyderabad and Vancouver Canada.

Presiding over the 10th birthday celebrations was another Chief Minister — Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy. Times and political leadership change, but the continued support of Cyberabad as a place to nurture high-tech, by successive state governments, was there for all to see.

“We never thought of India as a place for paisa saving but for dreaming,” said Koppulu during an interaction with eWorld, soon after the formal festivities were over and every crumb of the massive celebratory cake had been efficiently dispatched by 1,500 members of his creative team.

Somasegar, who was honoured by Anna University with an honorary doctorate, agrees: “Our mantra was incubate and innovate. You can’t do this unless you leave your people free to do so.”

At the Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC), the patter of little feet is not uncommon along the sunlit corridors of the third massive building, all of 6 lakh sq.ft that makes up the campus in the rugged Gachibowli area of Hyderabad: Family days are many; working hours can be flexible — at night the three tower buildings are often ablaze with lights, as brains and coffee machines work overtime. It recently won the Smart Workplace 2008 award — for its automated and green systems as much as for the smart people it housed.

These people are smart enough to know that all good things must come to an end — even the PC-centric computing universe that has proved such a mother lode for Microsoft these 10 years. Which is why so many of the forward-looking projects on hand have a mobile connection: Unified Communication or UC, the currently much hyped buzzword for a masala mix of modes: speech, text, fax, mail needs to design around the smaller screen of the mobile phone — without diminishing the levels of security, or the communicating experience.

Teams in Hyderabad have helped create Microsoft’s Version1 and 2 of Office Communicator for Mobile. When it came to enabling Silverlight (the company’s Web browser environment for providing a rich visual and graphical experience) on mobile phones, the task was addressed totally at MSIDC — and some of the designers shared the results with this writer.

Cannily enabled in Java as well as S60, the programme environment that the biggest handset maker, Nokia, uses, Silverlight will soon sparkle on mobile handsets from multiple makers.

So will ‘smart’ Net phones, which harness the Internet Protocol to make International voice calls without using the telecom networks.

By marrying the IP desk phone to the best of the Office Communicator, Microsoft IDC engineers created a compelling combination that recently won the Industrial Designers Society of America – Business Week Silver Medal for best design in communication tools. It has already been turned into a commercial product by LG-Nortel.

A ‘fnger in every pie’ might be a rude way of putting it, but some of the initiatives shared by Microsoft engineers seemed to exemplify the company’s desire to move subtly away from its core business centred around the PC and its software — to what ever looks like cool technology for tomorrow.

“We are into storage — but our focus will be on data protection, no matter where the data resides”, says Koppulu. Another deliberate direction being pursued in Hyderabad is in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). “A key piece of information missing in business processes is information about items (may be their location) as they flow through a system”, says Bindu Thota, Senior Programme Manager. “We have embraced RFID in Microsoft’s BizTalk offering.”

But tomorrow, get set to find RFID readers integrated into mobile phones. “Hey, where’s my house key/spectacles/purse?”. Quick memo for the prematurely amnesiac amongst us: Help is at hand… you can stick an RFID chip on all those accessories and track them with your phone.

“IT’s all getting on the Cloud”, says Somasegar. The Cloud is the latest ‘in’ jargon for what we knew as the World Wide Web (WWW). Microsoft’s own take on Cloud Computing is what its marketers call ‘Live’. Live Mesh. Live Search. Live Alerts.

The Gachibowli Hills (and one hillock that sits inside the MSIDC perimeter) are alive with the sound of young techies, livening up Microsoft’s applications for the Cloud. Principal Product Manager Ganesh Pandey would have us believe, even the ‘Office’, Microsoft’s heavy flagship suite, can ‘lose weight’ and go ‘live’ for mobile phone owners.

As I make my way out of the campus, in the late afternoon of MSIDC’s birthday, the balloon bursting, photo-taking, cola guzzling is still going on, as the revellers refuse to go home.

Tomorrow will be time enough to get heads out the cloud — and back into cloud computing.

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