The big small fry

Three people I met last week have once again set me
thinking. The first one was an old man of 71 years who retired from a technical
post in Indian Oil. For several years after his retirement he had nothing to do,
but read newspapers in the morning, played with grandchildren, and did small
errands. He had to depend on whatever pocket money his children gave him.

But two years back, the PC and the Internet connection at
his home completely changed his life. Today, he is a prolific though small time
investor, who spends a big part of his day buying and selling shares on the net.
He has invested about Rs 65,000 and manages to make about Rs 2,000 every month.
His dependence on his kids has gone down, he sometimes buys small gifts for his
grand­children, and is charged up throughout the day watching script price
movement and business news on the television.

We hear of such stories everyday-sometimes it's the
grandfather or the old uncle, a housewife, or a little son. There are increasing
stories of how unexpected people are using the PC, and how many of us are coming
up with unique applications. I met an 'imam' (priest) of a small mosque
sometime back in Delhi, who, instead of buying audio cassettes for teaching
Quran recitation to children, was downloading world class renderings from the
net, and then playing it on his old PC, which someone had donated to the mosque.
The 'imam' says that most of the 'madarsas' or the Islamic religious
schools in the country are planning to acquire PCs.

I was in the hospital in a town of UP, after a family
member suffered from food poisoning, where I met this very interes­­ting
person. He has an interesting business model. He has a PC and a dial-up
Internet. Children call him for a write-up or pictures of Mughal kings and
architecture, which they need for school projects; college students call him for
entrance exam sample questions; and university students call him to down­load
published research papers. He charges between Rs 10 and Rs 50 for these
services, depending on the nature of search and number of printouts. He makes a
clean Rs 200 to Rs 250 per day. During the exam season he earns even upto Rs 500
and more every day. Is this not another emer­ging and potential vertical, that
you will find across the country.

It has been more than two decades since India has been
using PCs. But we are still struggling with sales. Talk to the biggest PC
vendors and they are not selling more than a few thousand systems every month.
They find not too many markets opening up, and they believe that price is still
a bottleneck.

I agree with everything the PC vendors have to say.
However, I find that they are not being 'out of the box' in their approach.
They are still banging their heads in metros and class A and B cities. They are
still running after enterprise users. And there too the hot vertical is what
they always seem to be trying to push-BFSI, telecom, IT, and so on.

From my daily life experiences, I think there is a
fundamental flaw in their approach. For one, I believe that there is no dearth
of markets in India today. There is this big emerging category of new type of
users-and then there are these new verticals, which perhaps do not even figure
in the list of verticals PC vendors ever plan to focus on.

Clearly, there are people who have money, there are people
who have ideas, and there are those who have the will. But no big PC vendor is
looking at them. Wherever people have got exposed to IT and tasted its utility
and benefit, they have gone ahead and acquired technology. Unless our PC vendors
are able to see these as potentially big opportunities, unless they are able to
find ways and means to help them acquire PCs, the number challenge will
continue.

Ibrahim Ahmad

(The writer is the editor of Dataquest)