As per alexa, China top 50 sites has only three global companies in there – Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live/MS – rest all seem to be Chinese companies. By contrast, India top 50 includes Google/Orkut, Yahoo, MSN/Live/MS as well as sites like youtube, blogger, rapidshare, wikipedia, tom(!), megaupload, monsterindia, xboard, facebook, screensavers, ebay, starware, digitalpoint, imdb, flickr, hi5, imagevenue, uusee(!) and wordpress.
Why is it that the Indian landscape has allowed for far fewer categories to be led by Indian businesses? One clear reason seems to be that english is the dominant language being used on the internet – even as local languages begin to grow, this balance is unlikely to tip in next few years.
The other interesting part is that all web 2.0 oriented sites (italicized in above list) are global sites – the fact they are making it to top sites means that usage is there. Is it that we are overlooking the opportunity around web 2.0? or, just looking at it too late? is our better connectivity into the global community driving this (in which case, perhaps Indian entrepreneurs should look to embrace this phenomenon.) Or, are we beginning to lag behind on “state of the art” on the internet, in terms of web 2.0 pieces of technology, and in terms of imbibing the consumer-involvement model of web 2.0 businesses? I have long felt that the quality of user experience on most Indian sites falls short of global standards. Falling behind on the UI expertise, technology and business models that lead internet growth globally can have a serious impact on future entrepreneurial potential of this space in India.
what do people think?
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Well written alok. I think your article illustrates the point that the web is global and its not whether apps are developed by indians or by americans its how easy does that application make my life! And on the aspect that indian sites lack usability that is because the first generation of indian entrepreneurs never grew up using the internet whereas its the opposite in the US where entrepreneurs that are behind apps like orkut, facebook, digg are in the 20’s. While in India offline advertising and media companies and entrepreneurs are looking to make money through the web and thats why the lack of concern or focus on usability. I strongly feel the million $ and billion $ internet companies by indians would be in the making right now in the heads of 17-18 year olds doing their college and who are hooked on facebook or orkut, facebook and digg and are unknowingly increasing their knowledge of how usability affects websites and also various online tools.
The Chinese markets are A) more idiosyncratic and B) large enough to sustain China-only sites.
This is not the case in India. You have to ask 2 fundamental question to determine if India-only sites can hold their own against global competition
1) Do global sites diminish or add value for Indian users? This basically means the very fact that Indian users can browse non-Indian content or non-Indian users makes the site more useful.
This is almost always true in the case of social networks. Most Indian Internet users today have contacts outside of India and they in turn will have non-Indians in their contacts. Since people want to add all of their contacts sites like orkut, facebooks and linkedin are likely to continue dominating.
Ofcourse this is true due to the language issues but there are categories that are better off being India-only sites. Transactional sites like jobs, tickets, matrimonials, auctions have value in being India-only. Hence in the Alexa top 40 list you will see many such companies (see http://techtrends.in/2007/06/26/a-look-at-the-top-40-indian-internet-sites-today-per-alexa/)
2) Can a global incumbent go-to-market and/or attract visitors more easily?
Again for social networks that grow virally having users globally that start to invite users in India is a competitive advantage. For transaction/retails sites there is lower inter-country virality and a stronger offline component where Indian businesses have the upper edge.
Finally, Alok you make a good point, the whole English speaking world should be our market. Some companies like SlideShare, Zoho are doing that. Israel has done as excellent job with this. I hope and expect to see this happening more in India as more people with product building experience come on board. However it’s not going to be easy to build global social networks, widget or sites in other mature Internet categories of today, because the other companies/countries have a large head start.
Long story short, it’s no surprise to me there are no social networks and mostly Web 1.0 content and transactional India sites that are seeing more success. Given where the Indian market is today, I believe this is the sweet spot for the near term.
Alok,
I’ve reiterated this point over & over again..We need more innovation & ‘product companies’ ….Agreed that currently all the money is in services, but with the rising wages, how long will India hold on to its edge ?
besides innovation, I’ve always wondered why UI and usability are never given due importance — even portals like Rediff disregard usability.
lets hope things change for the better.
Alok -could it be to do with the fact that with 135 million + users, Chinese web ventures have critical mass to make a profitable business where Indian numbers of even 30 million + continue to get questioned and therefore perhaps not tempting enough for bigger investments?
Agree with you Neeraj – a website is no different from another consumer product – its same as an iphone in that sense. Entrepreneurs in India need to have the same sense of skills and quality as they might if there were competing with a high end consumer product, because the marginal cost of reproduction here is zero.