I do think there is a cultural component to innovation. My fascination is India. There is so much software development talent there. I know a lot of developers from India who participate in the success of international firms like Adobe, Google, and Microsoft, but I'm surprised that we've yet to see that sort of company, a real, international powerhouse of software, emerge from India.
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>I do think there is a cultural component to innovation. My fascination is India. There is so much software development talent there.
Yes, but also so many mediocre, I-cant-believe-those-people-are-paid-programmers too.
Maybe the problem is that the most talented Indian programmers tend to go working outside India.
>I know a lot of developers from India who participate in the success of international firms like Adobe, Google, and Microsoft, but I'm surprised that we've yet to see that sort of company, a real, international powerhouse of software, emerge from India.
Dunno. Do we even see some "real international powerhouses of software" emerge from the US that often? You mention Adobe, Google and MS, but all three are over 12 years old, and Adobe and MS are actually more like 22 and 30 years old.
Not to mention that while MS and Adobe are "software powerhouses", Google is much less so. It might have a lot of talent nowadays, but 95% of its success lays in its initial foray into the search engine market, which was the work of a very small team, and owned much to network effects, ability to get funding and infrastructure etc, and much less to raw programming chops. And modern success stories like Twitter and Facebook are even less "software powerhouses" -- more like glorified web services, where most of the problems are related to scaling and administration of a large server base.
I agree so much. Somewhere in my head is the idea to start a company there, taking advantage of the local talent and the less expansive life costs.
I try to reason myself, saying there is so much rote learning that the applicants might not be very efficient or innovative, that the country is already too evolved and stable to offer many groundbreaking opportunity (Eastern Africa - like Kenya - that's where big opporunities are), that there is too much legal cruft and regulation.
But I just can't shake it off. If it doesn't work in NA, I know where I'll start my next project :-)