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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

India should at least start off by building aesthetically sound products that people require globally - not just functional products. Just like China did.

Vedanta-Foxconn, Adani-Tower, and now Zoho all collapsed because of questions around market viability. Sure, India has a large domestic market, but that is not reason enough for business consumers to buy Indian, nor is it a large enough market on its own. Semiconductor markets require global-scale markets, something the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese were able to break into with years of copying Western aesthetics.

India thinks it can be the market leader for the developing world's semiconductor supply, but when it comes to chips, the whole package counts, not just bare functionality. With all of the world's electronics manufacturing in either China-Japan-Korea, and others in Europe, India has a very limited consumer base for chips to be sold to.

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>now Zoho all collapsed because of questions around market viability.

When did Zoho collapse? It is privately held and seems to be worth over $10B [1]

I find Vembu being quite annoying these days with all his statements and comments, but all his companies (Zoho has many, like ManageEngine) are doing well.

Deciding that one new business is not viable is not a collapse.

[1] https://www.ndtvprofit.com/trending/top-10-bootstrapped-comp...

> Vedanta-Foxconn, Adani-Tower, and now Zoho all collapsed because of questions around market viability

Take it in context. All the listed are semiconductors projects. As companies, I'm sure Vedanta, Foxconn and Adani are doing very well.

What does this even mean? How much aesthetics are there in a dip or smt package?

> India has a very limited consumer base for chips to be sold to.

which should point to the gov't that their problem is a lack of a consumer base! And they ought to engage policies to increase this consumer base.

But i dont think that's being done, from what i can see.

Sure India have a large market, but 90% of them need BMW at the price of Maruthi Alto.

To be fair though, the Alto, while not aesthetically as great, is still more reliable than a BMW hah!

Alto is one hell of a car. Its tiny size allows easy parking in crowded places, and it sips fuel so that you can spend money on better things.

what do you mean by aesthetics?

Consumer electronic product design. India has some native consumer and business electronics manufacturing (with chips designed in China), but for an outsider to the country used to good product design, using them is an alien experience. They could have at least gotten the software part right, but nope, even that's dated.

There are some companies that are working towards that end though, but they still have quite a long way to go. And a lot of native manufacturers in India have faced financial issues, so that's another hurdle.

Sounds like industrial design [1] or, maybe, HCI design [2] (iow. UX design) then. Got it, thank you for explaining.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_interac...

What are some examples of bad hardware product design from India?

Practically any Indian electronics company. Many of them with extremely dated designs.

Take IFB for instance - it's a native heavy duty home appliances manufacturer in India. Their product is solid and resilient, and in many cases better than their Western equivalent, like Bosch (which I must add is going downhill). You literally get a Miele quality product at a much lower price (30-50%). Yet they lose out to the more "namebrand" companies because the UX is something that would pass for in the 2000s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFB_Home_Appliances

TIL IFB is an Indian company

IFB is the best, we rarely look at any other brand for cleaning appliances. Our washing machine has lasted decades. Those who've bought at least one IFB product generally swear by it.

Also, the latest appliances are fine; the UX is good enough. You don't need fancy stuff for the products in such a market; fancier UX might appeal to first-time buyers, but they get tired of all that soon and look forward towards saner options the next time.

I agree, but if IFB wants to be competitive with the likes of foreign brands in international markets, they really need to step up their game. Instead what I'm seeing is a retreat from international markets. IFB wasn't widely available abroad but it was available in the UAE back in the day, but now you can't get them from any major retailer.

Isn't this fairly common for Indian companies? I expect that's because the domestic market is large enough to not want to try expanding internationally?

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