NYT columnist Thomas Friedman says Americans need to emulate Asian and desi nerds:

The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they’ll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid’s idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

It’s tough to pity the guy – CNN.com – ‘Mr Hotmail’ seeks new challenges – Aug 26, 2004.

(CNN) — As the inventor of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia is the pin-up of India’s IT revolution; the boy from Bangalore who went to Silicon Valley and made his fortune. Bhatia was in his mid-20s when he developed the idea of web-based email accounts in 1995, raising $300,000 in investment to launch the revolutionary service the following year. Within 12 months Hotmail had 10 million users and Bhatia had sold his creation to Microsoft for $400 million.

Launching his new company in 1999, a one click e-commerce venture called Arzoo.com, Bhatia claimed it had the potential to be twice as big as Hotmail. By mid-2001 the dotcom bubble had burst and Arzoo had folded.

“The last couple of years I was quite depressed because I didn’t have an idea or a vision or a goal that would be world-beating like Hotmail. I often wondered if that would be the only success that I would have at the end of my life.

“I would rather not be known as Mr Hotmail anymore,” he says. “What is in the past is over. Now I’m looking for the next big thing.”

Don’t get me wrong, I have respect for Hotmail and Mr. Bhatia BUT, can’t he and his fawning masses attribute just a tad of his fortune to Timing and Luck? Hotmail was one of the keystone companies of the bubble – no revenue but lots of eyeballs. In any other world, it wouldn’t have been a name-making $400M venture….. There’s a helluva lot of Attribution Error goin’ on…

Maybe I’m just jealous. 😉

N.R. Narayana Murthy, billionaire CEO of Infosys, an Indian outsourcing giant, used to be a socialist until an encounter with a Frenchwoman on a train didn’t turn out quite like Before Sunrise:

Back in the early 1970s, while traveling through Europe by train, Murthy was seized by police in a town near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. He had been chatting up a fellow passenger in French, and he believes that her boyfriend complained to a cop. Murthy was kept in a room in the train station for 72 hours and shipped out on a freight car. “There was no going back to communism after that,” he says.

Ah, nothing like the smell of a burned convert in the morning…

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p dir=”ltr”>There was a brouhaha over Kashmir in Windows 95:

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. “It cost millions… Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world…”

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Veteran journalist Om Malik of Not Really Indian outed a tech startup on his blog, to great effect:

Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was on what she thought was just a normal trip to the offices of Business 2.0 magazine to show the editor her new search software. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog. “He called me to say he’d done a ‘blog’ on us, and I have to confess I was disappointed as it didn’t sound as good as an article,” Rittweger reflects. “Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.

Nice job, Om. (Btw, I’m writing about a guy writing about himself writing about a startup. Death by echo!)