Why the Great Indian Media Companies will Fail on the Internet…..
Since my move to India in 2004, I have worked with several of the Telecom and Media giants in India at a very strategic level and spent a year at Yahoo! India after the Zimbra acquisition. Over time my belief that the Online Media industry in India is in big trouble has been reinforced time and again. Every single meeting I have had with stalwarts in the Media space continue to reinforce my beliefs as I can see the “cluelessness” in their minds about the online space. The big three tend to believe that their brand will carry them through the digital era and they refuse to believe that powerhouses in the worldwide Print industry have fallen prey to the smaller, nimble highly technology savvy digital companies which is what will happen in India if they fail to wake up from their slumber. While these large media companies continue to invest in their digital businesses heavily the results are shoddy. Even the true Internet players from the early days of the Internet era in India like Rediff and Sify continue to underwhelm the market with poor product offerings and declining ad sales. Let us take a closer look at the digital industry in India:
1. Rediff.com - considered to be the grand daddy of the Indian Internet industry is really starting to show its age. They are really old in the way they think and execute thanks mostly due to their aging leader Ajit Balakrishnan who is considered to be the father of the Indian Internet industry. I think we should honor him with the title of grand father of the Indian digital media industry now. I have had the honor of meeting him personally in 2006 when we were starting Zimbra in India and after the meeting I could only walk away saying ” what an arrogant man full of himself”. Confidence is a great virtue in a leader but arrogance just shows that the person is afraid…..very afraid of young companies just disrupting what Rediff does and he is just trying to intimidate them so that they don’t take up the challenge of competing against Rediff. I compared notes with several valley startup founders to be told the same story that I had experienced with Ajith. All of these companies rose quickly in the last 2 years and built incredible valuations while Rediff continues to decline and Age. Even Zimbra sold to Yahoo for US$350M may be 11 months after we met Ajith. For a company founded in 1996, to achieve enterprise value of US$42 million in 2009 is a joke. Their profit margin is off by 61% YOY and operating margin is down 44% YOY. Their quarterly revenue growth declined by 40% year over year and they are running at a loss. Hmmmm… if this is the state of the best in the industry we need to wonder how the rest of the digital media companies are doing. Rediff truly believes they are the Google of India. Ajith has boasted openly about how Larry Page and Sergey Brin come to his office to meet him. My meeting with Ajith actually taught me an important lesson, Indian media companies don’t have the slightest clue about the Internet. They believe that they can fast copy what great startups in the US do and try and launch it in India and start getting traffic. They do not believe that having great technology and technologists is an asset. They continue to hire people that are under qualified and operate like the services industry (fill the ranks with 100s or 1000s of below average people) an then wonder why they can never produce anything cool that consumers love even after fast copying and why it costs them so much to build something.
2. Indiatimes.com – Indiatimes was a customer of ours and I have great respect for Vineet Jain. Vineet is a visionary and lives and breathes the Internet. However, he lacks a decent team to support his vision. We supplied Zimbra to Indiatimes in 2006 and they did a huge launch around email in 2007. I was very impressed with their ability to market and create a buzz. Where Indiatimes is lacking is people at the leadership level. In the 3 years that I worked with them, they have hired and fired 3 CEOs and not to mention the rank below the CXO level. In one of my articles I wrote about how I had worked with a large media house that had hired a conman as their CTO. Well! that company was Indiatimes. The digital media industry in India is filled with people who started their careers in print and TV and then moved to the Internet and then grew along with the industry. They do not have a background in Technology and the Internet. They take technology and innovation for granted. They think brand and content is king. I just did some analysis on one of the most trafficked financial sites in India and found that only 1% came there to read news. So, there goes your content investment down the drain. Content has become commodity. I would argue that 2 years from now most Indians will get their news update from Twitter and not from any of the news sites. For example, I read the TOI yesterday and did not gather that George W Bush was in India for the HT Leadership Summit. When I logged into twitter, I was surprised to see a tweet that Bush was in India.
3. Web18 – I have a lot of respect for this group. They have done amazing things in India in a short period of time. However, I believe that they also lack the leadership to create a huge Internet giant in India. My assessment is based on what they deliver to the end users (the user experience sucks) and the technology investments and competence of their teams.
4. The Rest – I think we can safely throw the rest into a bucket called “the rest” which don’t really matter as they are purely noise and don’t have a shot like Sify.com etc… If the top 3 companies don’t have what it takes to achieve Internet greatness, then it is not worthwhile talking about the rest.
So, why are the Indian Media Giants failing on the Internet???
1. Top Down Management - In every media company I have worked with, I have seen a cultural difference between how a valley startup is run and how these top heavy Indian companies are run. I think by now we should all acknowledge that the biggest baddest companies of the Internet were built by 20/30 somethings and not by 40/50 somethings. In all the traditional media companies I see the whole company rallying around a 40/50′s something person (“the leader”) or in the case of Rediff (“60 something”). The whole company does something just to satisfy this one person. I experienced this when I was working with Indiatimes and launching their mail platform. It was always about – hey we need to do this because MD wants it this way even if it was something that did not make sense. The younger Internet savvy individual contributors literally have no say. They are just there to satisfy their masters whims and fancy. Zimbra deployed a 80+ server system distributed in 2 data centers, wrote migration scripts, migrated 800K mailboxes and architected and deployed a system to scale for 3.5M users for Indiatimes.com in 4 months with 3 employees who worked for me all in their early to mid 20s. In comparison there was an army from Indiatimes which was assigned to our project who could not even configure a load balancer correctly. I saw the same pattern at Rediff where it was all about satisfying Ajith. Let us all understand that if Top Management always intimidates their ranks and the ranks cannot freely share ideas with them, they are not going to be able to bring the best of everyone out. The greatest ideas often come from the ranks and not from the leadership. Intimidation only gets you a bunch of ”Yes Men” and not a bunch of young innovators. As long as Indian media companies try to function in the top down manner we cannot see them scale the walls of greatness.
2. Taking Technology for Granted – None of the Indian Media companies I have worked with in the Indian Media space have demonstrated any technical competence. The Rediff management seems to be too caught up in the NIH (not Invented Here) syndrome. If it is not invented in the Rediff labs then it must be no good. Unfortunately Rediff Labs is filled with below average people. When I was hiring for Zimbra we received numerous resumes from Rediff and not one made the cut. The CTO at Indiatimes was an industry joke. He claimed to be Scott McNealy’s right hand at Sun etc etc but could not spell Java and turned out to be a conman. If the CTO was that bright, one can imagine how the rest of the tech team would be. That should explain why I have not been able to sign up to Indiatimes for the last 3 weeks. Their Integra registration/SSO engine fails every time I try and register. If they lose users at registration due to technology imagine what rest of their site is like. I think I have made my point. None of the Indian Digital Media companies attempt to try and build a young, vibrant high tech culture which is so very vital to creating great companies.
Here is some interesting data per Alexa:
- 57% of the sites on the Internet are faster than Rediff.com
- 84% of the sites on the Internet are faster than Indiatimes
- 88% of the sites on the Internet are faster than in.com
So, why is it that we don’t have a single online media company in India that can optimize a site to be fast and deliver that amazing performance to users?
3. Lack of Innovation – It really amazes me to see the Indian media companies launch product after product that are a poor copy of the core US idea. Can someone please point to anything they thought was new and innovative in the media products that are peddled to us. Almost all the media houses saw the social media trend emerge and made investments – Digital Martini of HT, iTimes of Indiatimes, BigAdda of the Big ADAG group. If you go look at the usage numbers it is appalling. Most Indians continue to throng to Facebook and Orkut.
3. Belief that Brand is everything – Brand is hugely important when reaching out to consumers and the Media companies do enjoy huge brand affinity. However as proven in the western world, young nimble and dynamic tech companies can easily and quickly disrupt this. I would argue Google is probably the most important brand on the planet today and it is a matter of time until facebook achieves huge brand recognition. Both companies were started by 20 somethings and have built a brand faster than any traditional media company. New York Times is arguably a very popular media brand with a legacy of 150 years. But, my 3 year old nephew in the US recognizes Google and uses it and has no clue about NYT. Inspired by the movie “Wake up Sid” I would like to say “Wake up Indian Media Industry”.
4. Belief that Content is everything – Several media companies I have met argue that content is king. I agree….. but what type of content is king today in the era of blogging where every human on the Internet has the ability to become a journalist with an audience. Editorial Judgement is valuable but a lot of individuals better qualified than Journalists in their areas of interest/expertise are starting to express their opinions and people are starting to follow them. So, it is arguable if there will be rockstar journalists to look up to in the coming era of blogging and micro-blogging. For example, I have just started writing about the technology startup industry recently and there is an audience that is slowly attaching itself to my blog around a very narrow area “high tech startups”. This audience should have been getting this information from the online tech channels but they cannot. So, I am slowly starting to build up an audience around a very narrow niche. This is the long tail. This is something the Media Industry has to learn to leverage or lose eyeball time. Citizen Journalism, aggregation of good personal blogs and creating a revenue sharing model around these will ensure that Media companies stay competitive. Let us all face it, most media companies are consuming news from wires for a fee and then repurposing this content with their own editorial judgement and then peddling it to us under their brand. How long before the human race evolves and starts to consume these wires directly. I can argue that with the advances in the Internet man has evolved to be able to process information at a faster pace than the pre-Internet era. We can all now seek information in an instant, get millions of points of view, digest it and form our own opinion from the Internet. We automatically are being trained to look at many points of view. The Media industry’s premise is that their point of view is the most important. This is no longer the case in the digital era. Don’t fight this trend. Blend with it and you win!
5. Big budgets – big plans – lack-lustre execution – Most of the Indian Media companies identify leading trends, create big plans, big budget but flounder when it comes to execution. They lack the design and product finesse required to deliver something compelling to the end user and technology execution is just very underwhelming. I really pity the VCs who have put money into these media houses. I am afraid that all of them will have to write it off or try to offload their investment at a throwaway price and book a loss.
6. Too much focus on Eyeball time and Ads as opposed to creating valuable transact-able events for the user and growing networks – If you go to some of the most trafficked media sites in India they suck primarily due to the generous smothering of Ads which hugely annoy the audience. The Media companies know how much this sucks but suck it up to the advertiser just so they can keep their measly handouts from these companies alive. If you analyze this a little it is obvious that the Media houses know that they have nothing compelling to offer to the end user as they were a “me too” site to begin with and their product and technology is not good enough to attract huge audience. In the absence of compelling services, the best one can do is to spread oneself really thin and try and do it all where each service lacks in quality and fails to draw the right audience. So they try and plaster advertisements on literally every page they generate to capture some of the crumbs left behind by Google and Yahoo. If you really look carefully at the Industry all the Major Indian Internet players are crumb eaters.
7. Lack of Audience Intelligence- The Indian digital Media industry universally (except rediff I think) uses Google Analytics to get insights of their audience. Guess who has the advantage in learning about their customer base – Google – not the media houses! They see it immediately as a part of their global numbers and can use it to their advantage. If the media industry had the technology muscle to build their own analytics and profile their own users they could be so much more valuable to advertisers.
I still believe the Indian Digital Media industry holds great promise and I came back to India with the hope that we can create quality companies in India that apply technology and innovation to cool services that consumers love.
My message to the young, innovative type graduating from colleges is to seek out small startups that are doing quality work instead of working for the big name media houses just to be resume worthy. Resumes really don’t matter…. what you learn and achieve matters a lot.
My message to startup founders is that if you have a great idea please don’t short sell yourselves to any of the larger Media houses. Most of the business/ corporate development teams in these Media houses don’t have the people or the ability to identify big opportunities, teams or technology and end up signing really crappy deals with a bunch of small startups mostly opportunistically. How many times have you been in meetings to be told that you (startup founder) need to guarantee revenue if you want to partner with these media houses and that they cannot provide you anything else in return other than their brand. Challenge them. What brand? What are you numbers? Ask for revenue guarantees. Don’t sign bad deals with them as it could kill your company. Ask them to separate their numbers for Digital from Print or TV and then watch the fun. Every single Internet Media company in India is losing money. They just don’t want to talk about their digital businesses standalone. They always try hard to mix it into their overall group numbers so they don’t look ugly. Think about this…. If Rediff is the most trafficked Internet site in India and has a enterprise value of US$48M with cyclical revenue decline of 40% YOY then where do you think the rest of the Industry is at. Don’t be intimidated by them. They are just hiding behind their past glory days. Time has come for small startups to kick butt.
Terrific, indepth article.
The Indian Travel websites seem to be an interesting contrast to the media websites, right? They were new startups, not started by established travel houses?
They are much better in usability, performance compared to the media sites.
I agree with you that – all the large media websites seem to be doing is promote horrible layouts, graphics, sensationalism driven news and outdated technology.
When I first observed this regarding Indian media websites in 2007 (after returning back from the U.S.) – I was told by an expert that ‘..In India, the tastes of people are different vis a vis the U.S. internet users..!’ I almost believed him.
Amit
Amit Paranjape
November 1, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Most of the travel sites were lame until Cleartrip emerged and cleartrip’s founders were from both a design and travel background. So the site was crisp and usable. Most of the other sites had to catch up. Unforunately I think Cleartrip did not have a tech co-founder and last I heard was that they were floundering with tech and losing all the great people they had assembled. Thanks to thier VC Sherpalo who handed them a crappy java team based in Banagalore. I am a direct beneficiary of Cleartrip’s screw up
Abinash Tripathy
November 1, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Cleartrip is no exception to your 20 something rule. Cleartrip was built by a very very young yet extremely hungry team and it did disrupt the market. I guess somewhere along the line they lost the way due to services sector types. But again I guess they have reached to a level where they are doing good and want to consolidate
ranjan
November 2, 2009 at 1:10 am
Nice article , presents the true facts of the industry. I like the last para
chaitannya Mahatme
November 1, 2009 at 8:19 pm
I too agree that nobody presents the true facts of the industry. I would also like to say it’s very easy to talk on blogs about industry and revenues and it’s equally difficult to generate revenue of one rupee independently. You can try it out without being an employee of any company. To run a business/industry is not a cup of tea!!
Jaiprakash M
November 19, 2009 at 11:36 pm
I agree with this. Most ideas dont even get to the stage where they have any users. And a very small percentage of products which have users make any substantial money.
My current job helped me a lot in attitude transition from getting excited by just the fact that an idea is cool, to also taking the money making part into consideration. I have many friends who have spent years working fulltime on one after other cool ideas where there wasn’t an iota of a chance to make money.
Anand Prakash
November 20, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Amazing article, truth in every word. Couldn’t agree more with each bit.
Amit
November 1, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Pretty good points there, but good luck trying to preach that gospel to the people who matter. In accepting the reality, the whole castle of cards will come crashing down. Now, nobody wants that. So it won’t happen either. Disruption will eventually have to happen from the outside here. The ‘if’ and ‘when’ of it is debatable, but that it won’t happen at the big companies is not debatable.
Copy from the west, paste in the east is a major problem here. As I’d once jokingly said, if our product team needs to innovate, block access to Mashable and Techcrunch in the office and the sites they referr traffic to. Everything form concept to design will come to a grinding halt at that moment.
The trouble is that the market potential that drives the whole valuation game here can’t be realized with the current crop of products. Our products are overwhelmingly for the English-speaking elite. The larger market is a different ballgame from that. All the Rediffs and the Web18s won’t wrap their heads around that basic fact. So you’ll continue to see a line of products that the majority of the population can’t identify with or be engaged with in the longer term.
Indiatimes firing 3 CEOs? Recent history only has MS and DW.
“MD wants it” has so many stories attached to it that you could write a book about it! The mail platform could fill another two books. It has an illustrious history.
It is true that the bane of digital India is largely due to a raft of refugees from other domains who landed here without really intending to. And there is still no attempt anywhere to encourage real leadership or growth.
CJ won’t work in India as the escape-to-freedom business model. Have first-hand knowledge of it. In fact, CJ has the same problems that mainstream media has when it starts becoming something more than a niche. Most importantly, it does not scale in a cost-effective manner.
Measurement and instrumentation: perish the thought. Then again, if you can measure your assumptions, it will also call out your massive bullshit. Nobody wants that.
Shyam Somanadh
November 1, 2009 at 11:43 pm
I love your style. You should author some posts with me
Well MS, DW and SR for a short time. And now I hear RK and the industry joke is that he is qualified to be a senior designer at best and not a CEO. So, it seems like Year 4 will have a 4th new CEO at Indiatimes.
Abinash Tripathy
November 2, 2009 at 12:02 am
Thanks. I’ve written quite a bit about these problems and tried my own version of jihad at many of these places before, which had zero effect.
Honestly, I am less interested in criticizing what is already there (between the stalwarts and the crazy VCs who without a 100cr a year revenue bullshit story won’t even look at you, innovation is not going to happen) and more interested in seeing if a parallel ecosystem can be set up (no matter how tiny it is) to see what can actually be done.
So it is put your head down and build mode now.
Shyam Somanadh
November 2, 2009 at 9:00 am
My intent is not criticism but to sound an alarm bell. All of us Industry Insiders know the state of the Industry and Silence will only further this trend. I do agree with you that disruption will happen from the outside. I have seen a huge outflow of quality folks from the Industry doing interesting startups and I believe the next 2 years are going to be interesting. Either my predictions will be true and a few companies will emerge or the industry will be forced by its Investors to get its act together. The later seems highly unlikely though.
Abinash Tripathy
November 2, 2009 at 9:33 am
I agree, the first option is more likely to happen. It still does not take a massive amount of cash (compared to traditional industries), to set up something like a Web18 or an Indiatimes. The key is in finding the right people at the top level and at least by the law of averages, someone is bound to get that right. Existing guys, with current leadership is going nowhere. Major imagination deficit.
Shyam Somanadh
November 2, 2009 at 9:40 am
Sorry, forgot to post this. But why is the 300 pound gorilla called Yahoo! India not on the list? Not too many people have signed content syndication agreements at a whopping figure pulled out of thin air by the content producer, just because they could afford to do so.
Shyam Somanadh
November 1, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Yahoo! India definitely belongs on this list but they are not Indian. I couldn’t last one year at Yahoo! India. The amount of BS that floats in the Yahoo! campus is astronomical in scale. It makes all the Indian media companies seem like Google.
Abinash Tripathy
November 1, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Yup! Yahoo! India not to be included as they are not Indian. If we can ask Internet not to transmit the data of Yahoo! India as they are not Indian, that will be so great and nice, though this may require lot of research and development from nationalist people like you!
John Polaski
November 19, 2009 at 11:47 pm
[...] ahead and enjoy the article — Why the Great Indian Media Companies will Fail on the Internet. You’re warned – its a longish article but worth a [...]
Why the Great Indian Media companies will fail on the Internet - Brajeshwar
November 2, 2009 at 12:07 am
Glad to read your web-log. Keep writing such nice articles. My wishes!
Fellestein Bolvanski
November 19, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Indian Companies need to Build Solid Products based on IP ,even global media companies like yahoo ,aol are able to value their IP with respect to their patent portfolio.
what we need is not copy cats,but a Solid Product
Solid Products Come from Solid and Passionate Product teams which is directly driven by deep technical passion.
The First Step is “Consumer – Individual or Business” is completely different in India and US.
I can have a 14 year old shell out dollars for an iPhone App,but never in India(Unless it is Really Really Damn Mandatory).
Understanding “India Centric” Business Models and Building Relevant Products to generated Revenue in India will take time as “Indian Consumerism” is no way close to US.
Simple Note: the Population of US is less than 1/4 of India but the Overall Consumption level is 6 times more than India.
Satya Ganni
November 2, 2009 at 9:53 am
Agree with your observations on the need to build solid products. Totally disagree on your thesis of the iPhone and about consumerism in the US. Consumerism in the US is really high for the traditional brick and mortar world. How does it apply to the virtual world where everything now is almost free or below free. If and when the iPhone achieves the right pricing in India and /or cheap Android phones flood the market, then see how the Internet numbers will look like in India. Today the industry whines about really small head of the funnel numbers. I think a major disruptive change is around the corner. And if this happens, none of the big media companies are ready to ride it.
Abinash Tripathy
November 2, 2009 at 10:07 am
gr8 insights…njoyed d article…
chaman raj
November 2, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Bingo…You have put it in words and have done it very incisively.
Having worked on New Media in a big name regional newspaper brand, I can tell you that the biggest problem with these big brands is the big brand name itself. So there are traditions which you can not touch, there are certain (slow) ways of doing things which you can not bend etc. Plus, there are senior managers who can not differentiate between RSS and a website and an epaper, and who are at the helm of the affairs. And yes, there is this ‘…because the boss said so’ syndrome.
You are also right in saying that technology will lead the transformation of consumption habits of the people. But are there any good tech guys who prefer to work with a poor Indian startup and do not look at the outsourced dollars?
Nice post.
Ganesh Kulkarni
November 2, 2009 at 2:38 pm
We are assembling a group of hungry, bright, young and fresh minds at Infinitely Beta. And yes there are groups of great people who are not hungry for outsourced dollars….. though not a lot. It is a challenge to find these people but again it does not take a huge army in tech to disrupt a sleeping giant.
Abinash Tripathy
November 2, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Hey! Nice to learn that you are based in Pune.
Ganesh Kulkarni
November 3, 2009 at 9:09 am
The reason why you don’t read about an HT event on TOI is simply because they’re competitors. Most news tweets are sourced from sources like Rediff, TOI and HT.
Hemant
November 2, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Well in.com opens really fast for me, even faster than Yahoo homepage. [on a 256kbps connection]
debasish
November 2, 2009 at 5:14 pm
You may want to write to Alexa and challenge them. My data is from Alexa.
Abinash Tripathy
November 2, 2009 at 5:18 pm
humm i see … then they are really wrong on this one [Alexa], in.com is indeed fast.
debasish
November 2, 2009 at 6:40 pm
You and alexa are correct for US audience because they are measuring site loading time from USA and not India. Rediff and In.com in India are superfast for an Indian user because they data is routed through Nixi and other ISP2ISP gateways. Moreover Rediff uses akamai for assets so thats very fast.
ranjan
November 2, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Hi Ashish,
very indepth article, I was working with rediff.com…and its nothing like the company runs for one man n stuff…
and about optimization, I totally agree most ppl aint going for it and burning money on bandwidth.
I also took some sessions in barcamp called it web dieting…
so let me know in case someone is interested.
atul
November 2, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Spot On.
Somehow all these people got into internet when in began and when they thought that it was really cool place to be in. The problem is that lot of them are sitting in ivory towers and have lost touch with users in India. Some of these CEOs mentioned in your post and both of them think that RSS is too techie for them. One of them trashes everything his Indian Product Managers say and is happy to embrace it with two hands and two legs if the same is recommended by some fat paying US consultant or US product manager.Then they go out and preach about the lack of internet talent in India in conferences and all. The problem is not that there is no good talent that can think innovatively in India or in these companies, the problem is that they find it too hard to survive in the current system of sycophancy and lala minds in these companies and create world class products.In each of these companies each product is like a prostitute that is “RAPED” by each and every department and thrown aside till the next prostitite comes. Consumers use internet for entertainment and communication and they will go to alternatives like facebook if they offer better ways of entertaining & communicating.None of these companies will ever achieve internet greatness and will be taught in Indian B Schools 10 years down the line as business suicides.
PS:I was working in one of this big media companies you mentioned and quit sometime back to work for a small startup and I think that I made the right decision though people think that I am crazy to leave a brand name like that.
Blackberry
November 2, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Very well written article. Straight shooting.. no mincing words.
I have been so disappointed with the way Indian media sites have evolved.. that I find myself reading their articles only on my RSS feeds. The only good thing that happened was when HT tied with WSJ for Mint and they redid their site along WSJ styling.. but it has since degenerated into a ad-filled nonsense.
Sulekha started well – and had this “NewsHopper” thingy, which in my mind was a precursor to Digg and reddit.. but they just messed up the site very soon.
I didn’t know the inner workings but after what you say it all fits in.. because I have found the tech platforms of most Indian media sites lousy… design equally useless. But since there are so many of us desis/Indians, these sites keep finding audience!
About content, I disagree that Twitter will be the “king”. It plays an important role but it will be secondary to the main content. However, I agree that content from professional journos will no longer be the best thing out there .. unless you bring in bloggers. And even for the content, Rediff has let the best ones – most popular ones – go away.. like Varsha Bhosle. She had a cult following… that’s the kind and type of writers media companies need to compete against blogging..
Either have passionate writers and be a HUffington.com or have real class and become an NPR.org.
Unfortunately we have neither!
Cheers,
Desh
Drishtikone.com
Desh
November 2, 2009 at 7:39 pm
I am not eligible to poke my nose here as stalwarts have already made their presence felt. However if I may add that one very important factor which is not in India’s favor is the education system.Our education system, unlike US education system does not prepare students for leadership, innovation and risk taking.Therefore, money making and not risk taking is the hallmark of one’s professional achievement, along with a flat in suburb, expensive car, travels and compulsory nanny; did I miss english speaking kids and wife( please change the order).
You see if one has to think about so many things, then one can not think about trivial things such as innovation and product development.Also we Indians excel at examinations. It’s like we know everything about Internal Combustion Engine, but when it comes to build it or repair it we look elsewhere.
Look what Zoho did with its university, hiring students from small towns and villages and training them to become world class product developers.It might be amongst the very few Indian companies working with the strengths of India and not always cribbing about it.
It will be interesting to see what happens in future.
Abhishek
November 2, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Nice Article Abinash. Good to see you alive and kicking as I somehow lost touch after you moved to Pune with Zimbra. I’ll try and give you a shout on my next visit there!! cheers, Roshan (you may remember me from myzus – we were introduced by Manav at VSNL)
Roshan
November 2, 2009 at 8:16 pm
got the link frm twitter… agree with most of your points… very well put.
prakash
November 2, 2009 at 9:10 pm
@ranjan now i see, thank you for explaining, i never thought of that aspect of indian datacenter or cdn use.
debasish
November 2, 2009 at 11:36 pm
I wonder if you think this is just the problem with the Indian digital media.I just it extends to the entire Indian internet scene.Only the travel and matrimonial sectors seem to be doing something reasonably good,nothing groundbreaking but I at least see some usable stuff.The most used Indian site for me(after my netbanking) is IRCTC – which is a pretty sad state of affairs.
Vivek Krishna
November 3, 2009 at 12:23 am
The user experience and technology delivery seem to be the issues plaguing the Indian Internet industry. The issue is that most of the larger Internet companies either bring in tech co-founders who have worked in the Services Industry or are asked by their VC to bring in the older, mature tech co-founders who do not want to take any risks. They will not experiment with schema-less no-sql databases as they fear they cannot hire anyone with those skills. Most of them will stare blankly at you when you ask them if they have heard of Erlang, Scala, Haskell, Clojure or any of then new breed of languages developed from the ground up for Internet concurrency. They will push back and say what is wrong with PHP or Java. They may have read about nginx and memcached architectures but they are unwilling to take some risks and experiment due to the comfort of the tried and tested path. Their attitude is “if it ain’t broken then don’t fix it”. My belief is that the technology world improves in capability every 8 months and if you don’t take advantage of the advances in tech, you are going to be left behind. The nature of the industry is that things just keep getting better, faster, cheaper. Now if you are stuck with a tech platform that was architected 5 years ago and you have not re-visited it every 8 months to see what more can be done then you are just sleeping. To give you an example, Zimbra proactively kept looking for advances in technology and replaced several key pieces in the architecture with better technology as it became available and as a result the customer base enjoyed the benefits. I am not a theorist and everything I write is based on our own experience. I cannot talk about what we are doing at Infinitely Beta yet but I can tell you we are seeing great results building on top of no-sql databases with clojure backends and tornado/python front-ends, nginx/memcached as our webservers instead of apache, tomcat, jetty etc. So, we took the risk to experiment and you will see the clear difference when we launch in a few weeks.
Abinash Tripathy
November 3, 2009 at 9:21 am
As much as I love technology and have rolled them out quite a bit in big shops (Lucene, Solr, Carrot, Openfire etc) it is not always that easy a call.
Companies here don’t believe in paying good money for tech talent or in training them. You get to work with pretty basic level talent and seen from that point of view, it is easy to understand why they’d not be too chirpy about throwing out PHP and porting an entire app to Scala (they would do that, only if it was recommended and rolled out by a TCS for 5-10 crores).
Lack of talent and instrumentation also means that most technology guys don’t know which piece is actually production-ready. I know tinkerers who will push out anything they see on Google Code into production, which is not the best idea either.
From what I’ve seen, I’m happy even with a good team who knows how to architect an application from the ground up even in LAMP, than go no-SQL or Clojure.
Shyam Somanadh
November 3, 2009 at 9:39 am
@shyam somanadh I don’t appreciate your viewpoint that people dabbling in the latest technology are tinkerers. I don’t write about something if I have not fully understood the potential of the technology and proven that it works. We need to encourage the startup community to adopt technologies that is really going to help them differentiate. Infinitely Beta is currently building some products using no-sql databases and some of the technologies I have mentioned. Let us re-visit this after we launch our products and see if your argument holds. We are planning to share everything in our Blogs all the way from tools to working code to help Indian startups to see a very different world.
Abinash Tripathy
November 3, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Do accept my apologies if it seemed that you are writing about things you don’t know about. I’ve not seen your work to be able to comment on it, nor was I trying to do that.
There are a handful of people who grasp what a Redis can do, but most of them don’t work in the big companies, which is what I’d commented too. Probably I was not clear enough on that point.
I will certainly keep an eye open for IB’s products and hope you will do a great job with it.
Best,
Shyam
Shyam Somanadh
November 3, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Technology choices per se are far less important than how they are leveraged. Technology choices per se are never appropriate or inappropriate – the context in which they are made makes them appropriate or inappropriate. One startups technology experience is not necessarily relevant to another.
The technology choices the industry makes is a function of the particular company and project’s access to customers, talent, immediacy of revenue streams, its ability to absorb risk (attempting to be innovative vs. conventional) etc. Even people in the know will stare at you blankly when you talk of erlang, scala, haskell, clojure, or schema-less no-sql databases because speaking of wanting to use them really makes no sense without putting a context around the problem you are solving.
So there are horses for courses, there are technologies for contexts. Lets not talk up technologies without specifying the contexts. And oh yes, apache, tomcat, jetty continue to be valid choices for a number of contexts.
Dhananjay Nene
November 3, 2009 at 7:10 pm
@Dhanajay Nene – Totally agree. However, the point I was making is that even if you as a senior architect understand the problem and recommend a solution that makes the best use of technology, the media companies will not even understand the value of what you are proposing. The technology folks at these companies can’t even figure out how to leverage a good open source CMS to serve fairly static content at the fastest possible throughput. How, do you expect them to develop technology to do anything transactional.
Abinash Tripathy
November 3, 2009 at 10:55 pm
I wouldn’t know since I haven’t ever had a chance to interface with media companies. However given my understanding of the talent pool, its very hard to stay up the curve. If there was a way to broadcast a question to all IT developers in say Mumbai/Pune – how many can actually decide when to use functional programming (erlang/clojure) vs. imperative programming and then be able to use it effectively, or when to use an asynchronous web stack such as nginx+tornado vs. a synchronous stack such as apache+django, and who can describe the right questions to ask when to use sql and when to use nosql, I suspect the number of hands that go up might be substantially overwhelmed by the number of IT companies. (I could’ve extended the question much further but constrained myself in the context of the specific technologies you mentioned).
Having said that I both appreciate and respect the underlying point you are making. Especially in the Indian technology context, I suspect the issue runs far beyond media or internet companies alone.
Dhananjay Nene
November 3, 2009 at 11:57 pm
I feel that it is an overkill to experiment with non-standard technologies at an early stage of startup. From what I have seen very few ideas get to a stage where they start reaping the benefits of no-sql databases and tornado vs LAMP. At an early stage, time to market should be the most critical factor. A good architect will design it in a way that it would be easy to replace the LAMP stack with no-sql databases and tornado without much effort (or whatever is the best technology atleast one year from now when you start feeling the pinch of scale with LAMP and need them – some of these technologies get redundant so fast).
I am speaking this from experience, where I built a crawler which crawled (open crawl and not a list based crawl – much tougher problem to solve) 1 billion pages using 6 commodity machines in a month, also built a map-reduce architecture in 2005 which did a page level ranking for a billion pages, distributed file systems, messaging architectures. This helped us built a search engine better than MSN search at that time. This was supposed to support a product which sadly did not take off.
We tried a number of product ideas after that and I am glad that we did not spend a large amount of time experimenting with cool technologies but focussed on time to market. Many of the ideas did not click, but am glad some did (http://www.smsgupshup.com) and some other being launched soon.
However, now that you are trying all these cool technologies, I would love that you post your experiences on the company blog, so that the whole ecosystem can benefit from it.
Anand Prakash
November 5, 2009 at 8:29 pm
@Anand Prakash Yes. You are absolutely correct in a way but product re-architecture could be life or death for startups. In the same token in what way is LAMP a standard. I know large media houses in India that are based on ASP. So, ASP should be the standard for them – correct. There is no such thing as standard when it comes to programming. As @Dhanajay Nene pointed out, you just have to use the best available tools at that given point to solve a problem elegantly by weighing all the risks. We found people who were already experienced in LISP, python etc. We are pre-alpha now and the results we are seeing blow us away. At the right time we will definitely share our experience with the world. It is too premature to share them when lots and lots of people are not using our product.
Abinash Tripathy
November 5, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Glad to know that both of us agree that fast to market is more important than experimenting with cool technologies given that most products don’t reach the stage when they actually need to reap the benefits. Of course it makes sense to use what you are using given that you already have expertise.
BTW I see that most of your team is from Shivaji college, is this a crazy coincidence or is there more to it. GupShup is hiring and planning on doubling the engg team, maybe we should start targeting Shivaji College too
Anand Prakash
November 5, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Now that we agree, let me just tell you that Colleges and degrees mean nothing while hiring, it only helps you make pre-conceived assumptions and makes you biased. Each person you want to bring in is unique and have a unique set of experiences. Their life experience makes them who they are and not their paper degree. In fact, I did not know that most of them were at the same college until you brought this up. Please read several off my posts that address this squarely. Be open and you will find great people to work with.
Abinash Tripathy
November 5, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I hope you do realize that it was just a light humored joke
Anand Prakash
November 5, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Ofcourse I saw the smiley
But, I just can’t resist it when something I deeply believe in is brought up!
Abinash Tripathy
November 5, 2009 at 11:28 pm
We just happen to be a few of the saner guys to come out of Shivaji University, don’t read too much into it
Baishampayan Ghose
November 6, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Hmm .. and I thought a strong controlled streak of insanity was essential ingredient for artists and those writing cool apps in a cool way
Dhananjay Nene
November 6, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Anand: Our technology choices are all driven by the need to decrease the “time to market” and not the need to use something cool, etc.
The expertise of the team is not in LAMP or Java or ASP.Net so it won’t have made sense using any of those. We are a very small team of passionate developers and we always try to use technology that makes our lives easier.
We chose a non-relational (aka NoSQL) database because we hated dealing with SQL and didn’t want to spend a lot of time in managing the DB cluster while maintaining great performance characteristics.
The reason behind using Tornado was that it is a very simple but highly performant pure Python webserver. Nothing like that had existed before and we adopted it as soon as it was released (after reading the code and evaluating it, of course).
The above and more have considerably decreased our time to market and has let us concentrate on more interesting problems.
Some times it really pays to use a more modern but not yet Enterprise-grade technology than something which is proven yet riddled with historical artefacts.
Companies like Facebook don’t and can’t run on all those proven technologies, so they constantly push the boundaries of the state of the art by building awesome technology in-house (Cassandra, for example). We being smaller companies at least should be prepared to adopt those (if not build more awesome technology).
At the end of the day, it’s technology that can make or break your Internet startup.
Baishampayan Ghose
November 6, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Hi, Baishampayan. I agree. Its key to play to your strengths. I know an awesome Python programmer who used Django to launch a website (http://www.vakow.com) with way lesser resources and much lesser time than Java based technologies would have taken.
I took a look at Cassandra a few months back and am very bullish about it, because this just gives so much scale opportunities to a small startup which doesn’t have scalability expertise available, like Facebook has. When Cassandra is more mature in a 12-15 months timeframe from now, it could potentially have been used by twitter and they would not have faced the scalability woes are they needed to face (and are still facing).
BTW which nosql database are you people using.
Anand Prakash
November 6, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Great article. But don’t you think we have always over-evaluated the coming of internet generation. We guys sitting in metro offices don’t know that penetration is still very low in India. The fall of these companies might be because of this reason. Supply exceeding demand.
saurabh
November 3, 2009 at 11:21 am
Disagree. Urban and semi-urban India is about 300 million people which is equal to the population of the US. Let us please not get hung by the lame excuses made by the Indian Digital Media companies.
Abinash Tripathy
November 3, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Abinash – Agree. If good websites are available – there is no dearth of number of people in India who will be online more regularly. The key is ‘value’. Value in content, workflow and other uses.
Just look at the mobile phones adoption!
Amit
Amit Paranjape
November 3, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Thanks Amit. Another rant I have heard from the Industry is that they need to localize the content in regional Indian languages to reach the rural audience. My pushback is why have you not done it???? All US software companies localize their products for many markets. Heck Internationalization and Localization are offered as services today for very little money. My gardener who earns Rs. 5000 sends his kid to an English school. The only reason we have the BPO industry in India and not in China or any other populated region of the world is because of our English Speaking Population. So, all the rant about not enough English speaking population seems BS.
Abinash Tripathy
November 3, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Abinash,
Lot of what you have said is true. But, it is easy to talk. Let’s see what you deliver and how many of the folks you have written about get left behind in the dust.
Folks like Shyam can talk and complain about VC’s,leadership, media companies, lack of talent etc etc but frankly, they are useless and as much a part of the problem. What has Shyam built? His blog is a joke and his jargon filled tweets are pure fluff.
You should watch the “arrogance” too. Zimbra was a flaming success but you were in the company of masters. Stay grounded.
All the best!
Rishi Khiani
November 3, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Rishi – I honesty have not formed any opinions about you and was just relaying what is being discussed in the Media circles. It is great to hear from you and I love a challenge. Let time tell how we all perform in the market. I guess our work will speak for itself. That is the nature of the Internet. Honestly, I would love to see the Indian Internet Media space emerge and bloom into a flourishing industry. If not, all of us are doomed. Thanks for your post.
Abinash Tripathy
November 3, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Rishi (if that is really you, which would certainly make it quite odd),
What I’ve written is that there is too much complaining (including me) and little that is done in a positive direction, so it is time to probably address that than to keep on complaining.
Let us hope things are different from what they are now.
Shyam Somanadh
November 3, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Good article. My experience suggest that most editors become managers and managers are ususally afraid of new ideas. The base line for them is just to hold their fort intact. Too big in their own boots they never look for new ideas and new authors.
Bollywood and cricket, fashion, night out and glossy parties of the rich is of no use for most audience beyond a point. Visit http://www.nrifm.com if you can. Cheers.
Vijay Rana
November 3, 2009 at 5:12 pm
This is so so true!. Rediff can’t even copy well. They tried to rip off facebook platform in june 2008 and they have not launched it till now. (It never will). More info here http://www.manu-j.com/blog/rediff-rips-off-facebook/25/ and here http://www.manu-j.com/blog/rediff-platform-is-dead/34/
The ripoff was so bad that it was painfully hilarious. Their documentation was copied directly from facebook and they just changed FBML to RBML etc but there were places where they had forgotten to make the change!
Manu
November 3, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Excellent article. Cant agree more on the terrible user experience on the Indian media sites. Sites look spammy filled with ads. no thought on layout/design.
Your comparison of Google and New york times is not fair. New york times still produces the best content. Maybe google news with nytimes would be a fair comparison. but then google news doesnt come out a winner.
I started working on this site (http://www.desitrack.com) as a news aggregator of best desi content for the indian diaspora. Being in the valley, I find it hard to navigate multiple sites to look for content that interests indians living abroad. Any feedback on the site appreciated!
Vinayak
November 4, 2009 at 12:18 am
One question: Google adds spoil the look or deface many of the websites. Does anyone make reasonable amount of money, accept the Google?
Vijay Rana
November 4, 2009 at 12:40 am
Hmmm.. I think it takes much more to be successful in India than to be successful in the US. (I too am a returnee from the US.) Although I may not agree with how Indian media companies are run, I have a lot of respect for them. It also feels like a lot of the success comes from chance events, but some like Web18 have truly earned it.
Once a brand is successful in India, they have it much easier though, since consumers are less fickle, and can take a lot more abuse than in the US. So who cares if something doesn’t quite work right. Hence the room for perhaps eccentric behavior at these companies (although my experience is quite the opposite.)
In my view, since the market is largely captive, it makes sense for media cos to only have features / functions that have been proven in the US than experiment with new things here – the cost / benefit ratio seems to be too high for trying out new stuff.
My 2paise
tulshi
November 4, 2009 at 9:05 am
@tulshi If you are not already working for one of them, you should seriously consider sending your Resume to them.
Abinash Tripathy
November 4, 2009 at 9:14 am
Abinash,
A very well written article I must say.
I won’t say it’s shooting from the hip, cos i’m sure you intend to encourage the startup spirit in our sub-continent and ofcourse I hope its an eyeopener for the big boys of the indian internet industry.
I’ve worked with most of the companies mentioned and completely agree that all of them are devoid of a strong tech. platform and are overflowing with “Yes men”, but then again, good talent is attracted by greenbacks+perks and over a period, some of the ‘good men’ transform into ‘yes men’ and the rest move on(with hope), armed with their ideas and talent.
India is brimming with ideas and potential entrepreneurs, but one needs strong tech. to back it up…
Personally, in all my interactions, with so called(or self proclaimed) tech fellows, I’ve yet to meet someone who can simplify an issue and provide sound advice and solutions, on business decisions involving technology.
Charles
November 4, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Your writing is good and informative butplease work on paragraphing, its hard to read when its collection of lines and not a presentable ones. Great info.. looking forward for future posts..
Arun Srini
November 4, 2009 at 5:24 pm
“Most of the business/ corporate development teams in these Media houses don’t have the people or the ability to identify big opportunities, teams or technology and end up signing really crappy deals with a bunch of small startups mostly opportunistically.”
—–
Very True
Arun Thomas
November 4, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Quite interesting post. Lets put it this way that “I exactly” know what you talking about here and I second your opinion on that.
But was just wondering where you got those stats from Alexa i.e.
“57% of the sites on the Internet are faster than Rediff.com; 84% of the sites on the Internet are faster than Indiatimes; 88% of the sites on the Internet are faster than in.com”
Cheers
@Sampad
Sampad Swain
November 5, 2009 at 2:24 am
Hi Abinash, very nice to read this stuff.
I wonder what emotion made you write this.
Is it that you got frustrated with implementing Zimbra within these companies; or not getting the required/target revenue. any way good to read your stuff.
Raj
November 6, 2009 at 12:19 pm
[...] Why the Great Indian Media Companies will Fail on the Internet: by Abinash Tripathy (via Karthik). “Even the true Internet players from the early days of the Internet era in India like Rediff and Sify continue to underwhelm the market with poor product offerings and declining ad sales.” [...]
Weekend Reading
November 7, 2009 at 5:30 am
Wow , for the first time I have read a post on the Indian Internet industry where I cannot disagree to anything.
1. I came/went to India in 1999, when Rediff was a startup, for want of a better word.
2. Since then, time and again I became frustrated with exactly what you have posted. CTO’s are just placeholders, they have no innovation, and they take no risk. Risk in ideas or driving the company forward.
3. They simply adopt packaged products, they will not put their neck on the line, and they will not invest/innovate
4. I have just seen a post that reliance is getting into the hosting industry, and then fell of my chair when I saw who they partnered with…Microsoft
5. I was in India when Zimbra launched with Indiatimes, my old blog, actually wrote to Indiatimes at that point, and told then they had wasted money. I saw Zimbra back in 2004, and wrote to several CEO’s in ISPs, (Note: at this point I had left the ISP co-founded Net4india/Net4domains), telling that that Zimbra (I am not one to kiss ass) was the best thing since sliced bread, NOT because of email, but because of all the other things it could do. And guess what Indiatimes launched with Email…which is faster. Geez. They could have linked the salesforce plugin and launched a package for all SME’s in India for their small business. they could have plugged in Asterisk etc etc
6. I know of several companies with 100Cr in funding, who are building and using tech from the dark ages, and they will follow the same business cycle as what happened in the west with that tech. When ISPs launched in India they went dial up, when the rest of the world already knew that dialup is not a successful business model, unless the telco shares revenue…But we still did it.
7. Rediff is a dying monster, everyone knows it, like other portals, they all want to build the next Facebook…NOT the first Facebook. We have VC’s who invest in search engines like Gurujii (what 18 million odd), rather than looking deeper into the products being built
8. Old websites like Naukri are a waste in recruitment, they no longer work, niche websites are now being built.
9. Telco’s do not wish to work with startups and launch their products, they believe they can build themselves…which is actually rediff’s problem also
10. Large comps are just sales focused, Airtel is a prime example, there is zero innovation, everyone is in Sales. What they do not realise is that companies like MS, Google all have innovation not just internally but even more externally, with the typical platform adoption approach.
11.Media house are like any other large house in India. They all look down on the small startup, and they always believe that if a 2 man team can build it so can they, and it is they who are doing the startup a favour.
12. VC’s are just as much to blame, I would ask why VC’s like sequoia would invest $8million in a social network like minglebox. Do they not know social networks need a focus, a reason for people to become “friends” rather than just a software platform, and then expect people to fill it.
13. At the end, its all about people, someone mentioned education above. I agree. I have been in the process of working on Image recognition, and I contacted a University in India, and spoke to 4 professors, and not one of them had a clue, not one. I was amazed at the tech they were using to solve there problems of OCR. they had no clue about the open source platforms which were already doing what they were trying to build.
14. The old excuse about PC penetration is the most overused excuse for not doing anything I have ever seen. I would counter that argument and ask them what was the PC penetration in the USA when the founders of Ebay went with a begging bowl for funding, or when someone decided to sell books online, or when Msql (yes NOT MySQL) was first release, or social networks were formed on Usenet, Or NCSA web server was first released, or when we used sednmail, or installed exim, and tried to write a web based email system.
15. In the last 10 years I have seen so many startups start in india, and its great, in fact awesome, and I for one will be happy when they do breakthrough the “old media” houses, after all if Rupert Murdoch is worried (2 london newspapers which were free and now closed), then they should be. Look at HT, they have a investment arm, what have they invested in…..jobsite, social network, and I am sure there is a classified and dating website somewhere in the mix.
16. That brings me onto hiring. I can hire a iphone coder with my eyes shut in London, In india, try and find a good one. In 1999, I had to teach most of the skills, having said that I got real lucky with alot of the hires, but it took time. Unfortunately I think the price has gone up and the skills reduced. All the good guys for some reason want to sit and write input/output scripts for databases as long as they work at Wipro, Infosys etc. This is still not to say there are not some awesome guys out there, I have met a few in the past few months, but they are in the 100′s not 1000′s or 10000′s. CV’s that you get are a waste, they all seem to have coded in like 5 languages, but they could not write a helloworld in 1 without a book. The problem solving skills are useless, if Google cannot give an answer in first or second search, they will give up, let alone try to use dorks or anything that complicated.
17. I do little in tech anymore
, and more on the other side, but to me if India really want to move forward, they need to stop hiring suits, and start hiring jeans. Take a gamble, waste some money. Great things are happening dimdim out of India, slideshare out of India…but how many comps in India are using.
18. Power houses like Indiatimes, Rediff, Naukri, need to lead this innovation, and lead the debate, and listen to the newbies….
Iqbal gandham
November 7, 2009 at 8:44 am
Awesome bro
GBS
November 15, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Great post. Almost totally agree. Almost
Will come to that later.
1. About Rediff, in 1998, Ajit wanted to be India’s Yahoo. At an event that we had hosted and where he was speaker, he actually showed Yahoo and Rediff screens next to each other, and pointed to the tabs on Yahoo, which had yet to come on Rediff. And now he wants to be India’s Google. Unfortunately, in all this, he never became a “rediff”!
2. Indiatimes on the other hand, with all the opportunity that they have and had, probably suffered because they had the cash cow TOI to bank upon. For everything. Sometimes riches hurt than help. Would they have created a more sustainable model if they did not have TOI to go and splurge on? Perhaps. Their ambition in life seemed to be to do the billion dollar IPO. And with Vineet Jain’s financial acumen, if the markets permit, they may yet swing it at some point. But do they deserve it?
3. While both of them did everything that portals needed to do, they did not acquire leadership in any vertical. Other leaders emerged and became destinations, be it in Jobs, Matrimonials, Real Estate, Ticket Bookings, or whatever. The two big boys remained jack-of-all-master-of-none. That does not build serious value!
Coming to why I think you are “almost” on dot, but not completely, it is about your over-emphasis on the age factor. Like everything else that you mention that cannot simply be imported from US and converted to an India model, same may be the case with this age part. I only have issues in the over-emphasis of this factor. Both ways. That you need to be 20-something to crack it. And that if you are in older bracket, you are already lost. My age MIGHT have something to do with this view, but that is not the only reason I say this. I believe its those other factors that you mention (points 3 and later in your post) which are crucial, and age has nothing to do with those!
Anyway, great read!
Sanjay Mehta
November 7, 2009 at 8:47 am
Presented a beautiful picture of the insight of the Media Companies with respect to their technological far sightedness. What I feel is that contents are important compositions of any media house, but then it should not be just YELLOW JOURNALISM. Personally I feel that neither Rediff or Indiatimes match to that standard, both in terms of any substantial technical enhancement or content. It is just that since they are there for some time, people remember them as a brand. But the real users (Power Users) who really are also equally keen to understand the content or for that matter the ral technical inputs which they put on would be really concerned with that.
Thanks for this valuable information and in fact for bringing it to a Public Domain
Suraj Radhakrishnan
November 7, 2009 at 11:01 am
Excellent article.I completely agree. The homepage of Rediff.com is a shame. I can’t believe they still use pop-up ads. Every time I see I visit the homepage makes me want to cry-” For GODS sake! Grow up!!!!”
Hashname
November 7, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Very true though you have gotten a bit overboard in the piece I worked at rediff saw this happening and have now moved to a startup
Abhishek J
November 9, 2009 at 6:47 pm
[...] From Actionable Insights into the World of Indian Startups [...]
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November 9, 2009 at 11:03 pm
[...] post on the failure of Indian media companies online. For any business to be profitable, the cost of producing content should be less than the [...]
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November 10, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[...] Why the Great Indian Media Companies will Fail on the Internet….. from: Abinash Tripathy [...]
Satya Murthy » Why the Great Indian Media Companies will Fail on the Internet…..
November 11, 2009 at 12:05 am
Apart from blaming top management i would blame two other things:
1. large sections of the talent pool in India is itself under-qualified for a high-tech environment. If you sit in a job interview, the thing that will be most frequently asked is syntax. people try to mug up syntax but woefully lack in problem-solving and logical reasoning. most people can’t write a proper flow-chart!
2. quantity is preferred over quality. complexity is preferred over simplicity. if a web page can be done with 3 text boxes, they won’t go with it since the users/payers will think it’s too simple/pedantic. So, they will add 10 other things (dropdowns, flash etc.) that completely screws up the page and confuses the users.
my two cents.
raag185
November 14, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Can you make change this commenting system to Disqus or intensedebate? That way it’ll be organized with proper reply mechanisms. 75+ comments and a bit overwhelming and I can’t follow most of the replies
Cherian
November 15, 2009 at 11:41 am
Brilliant article.
Having met and interacted with several companies/ppl mentioned in your article, couldnt help but smile at the similarity of experience and judgment that I had developed ever since.
Very well written and article, a bit too harsh at some places, but overall sending the right message across.
I’m with you buddy,
Aloke
Aloke Bajpai
November 16, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Very interesting read! So true that most of the internet companies in India are mere copy cats and failing behind innovation despite having some deep pockets.
I worked on a team who made a text to speech system for hindi for scratch couple of years back, as part of startup. if we could do that, why not biggies…
As part of Microsoft working on projects like Win7, i know why Microsoft have been successful, its not ‘yes boss’.
Hoping to change things at india…
Ruchit
http://www.eventNu.com
Ruchit
November 16, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Your gave brief about few of the internet companies in India. wht do u say about Info Edge India ( Naukri.com), which is the only listed internet company in India. whts the future of company like Info Edge in Inida?
Nian
November 16, 2009 at 6:45 pm
No idea as I have not worked closely with them. They seem to be doing ok from what I read.
Abinash Tripathy
November 16, 2009 at 11:52 pm
that’s a very good quality analysis, with the attitude of the current indian internet media, i guess its safe to conclude that the indian media space online will be used by the foreign companies in the future…
Uttoran Sen
November 29, 2009 at 8:37 pm
An excellent overview of the Indian Internet/Media Industry. I couldn’t agree more!
Linked you from my blog mate!
Ramesh Koneru
December 7, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Couldn’t agree more. I think everyone who has spent some time in the US, worked on “products”, really knows what product management means has felt the exact same thoughts. Its a shame and I am not sure there’s much we can do to change the current companies. Its akin to the political scene – no way to get rid of the current problems without getting rid of the people who don’t “get it”. So I think a fresh start is what it would take. Lots of ifs and buts remain … but I hope you are able to make a difference.
I would somewhat disagree though, that lack of technological innovation is the problem. Technology is an enabler. I believe what is lacking is an understanding of how to build a good product. Once you “get the product right”, then good tech matters as we learnt from the Friendster saga.
Vaibhav Domkundwar - BetterLabs
December 11, 2009 at 4:56 pm
nice article, from the nice blog. I hope u still keep the good job. I guess social media in the future is still the right place to us to make our blog popular. I have always took inspiration from your cute cute blog. keep blogging.
thanks for sharing
Indonesia Travel
December 27, 2009 at 2:11 pm
I worked at rediff for almost 2 years and I must tell you that people were superb. IIT engineers and IIM graduates for product management (most of the times). The major problem I found with the Rediff is lack of Innovation and lot of politics. People heading the technology team are just good at commenting others and making sure to kill the new ideas right at the origin time. Most of the innovative employees were frustrated with the Rediff’s environment of lack of innovation and excellence. In coming years, you will see many startups from Rediff ex-employees as people are venturing out on their own to create something different, which Rediff did not allow them to do.
Amit
December 30, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Forbes.com
“India’s Rising Tech Stars”
Sramana Mitra, 01.08.10, 06:00 AM EST
Indian entrepreneurs are building product companies and growing beyond outsourcing roots.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/07/infosoft-software-orangescape-intelligent-technology-india.html
These are examples of companies that have successfully bootstrapped their early phases without letting capital constraints be a hindrance, amply proving that it can be done. These entrepreneurs–Nadhani, Rajappan, Mehta, Sambandam and Doraisamy–are at the forefront of a new movement in India in which the entrepreneurs have dared to think beyond outsourcing.
They deserve attention from the Indian media, normally occupied with the Nandan Nilkenis and the Amabani brothers.
Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sanjay Mehta
January 16, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Good Article !!!
But you never when the veteran (Ajit Balakrishnan) would come up and shuffle all the cards. Old age daddy with new age ideas and as much i know him he has always welcomed new ideas and technologies untill they are not affecting the reputation of the company. Seems google also fuck ups and say sorry on the name of a BETA product whereas Rediff seem to be approaching youngsters in his way which is true when he came up with “SONGBUZZ” songbuzz.rediff.com and also he intriduces a new minimalistic version of rediffmail keeping in mind the youth.
I think he is going on his way !!!
Anand
January 23, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Every single word put in this blog is a reality. Copying from the US sites and fitting the functionality somehow is the maximum level of innovation done in the India media companies and the top management believe so much in the idea that they expect a revolution out if it every time.
Rish
November 21, 2010 at 11:10 am
[...] Tripathy lays it out, in pretty good detail, the litany of things that are wrong with the great Indian media companies [...]
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