Ruby on Rails Development Companies in India | Hacker News Reader

Ruby on Rails Development Companies in India

nitinh.com

22 pointstheone13 comments

I think the reason is simple and goes beyond this. By and large, when developing a brand new product, it's best to have a domain expert in that specific field or have personal, tangible experience with that product.

American, European, and Japanese developers have an advantage because as consumers as well as producers in the world's biggest marketplaces, they'll always have a more fundamental sense of where money is to be made, what software is missing in what niche, and more contacts, which means more dollars to chase when it comes to potential users of a product.

Could someone from India have developed something like Basecamp? From a technical perspective, no doubt. But from a "wow, there are a lot of small companies in the US that don't need these industrial sized solutions, maybe we can exploit that niche" - I think this gap is a lot harder to cross.

I think this asymmetry will go away, as India continues to modernize. I bet there are tons of unexploited business opportunities that could only happen in India, and no where else in the world. American developers would be totally clueless on this, and if the roles were flip-flopped, and the dollars were in India, we'd see the same article about American developers.

In my opinion as far as software companies are concerned, the gap is bridging. As computer/internet user base from India will increase the gap of consumer will fill up. For instance few years ago we didn't had and e-tax filing website, but as e-return are catching up, few players have come up in this market as well.

I agree. Though it'll be interesting to see the direction it takes. India doesn't have a lot of small to mid-size tech companies - the true "disruptors". Business in India seem to be one of 3 types: 1) Huge offshoot of American company 2) Huge family house (Reliance, Tata, Birla, etc.), 3) mom-and-pop.

The first two have tremendous hierarchies and face the same disruption "problems" that any American company faces. The smaller mom and pops don't have the resources to compete.

It's hard for me to see where the Teslas, the Segways, even the MySQL's step in.

I think the reason there are lesser product companies compared to services companies in India is two-fold, culture and lack of easy access to capital.

To start a product company, you have to forego cash up front for a bigger payout (either acquisition or organic growth in a lifestyle biz) later in the game. I think most Indian kids coming out of college don't lack ambition or entreprenurial spirit but it is hard to justify (especially to your parents!) giving up a steady paycheck for the risk of a startup, and that's where not having easy access to VC or angel capital becomes a problem. And then there's the issue of competing with the large software sweatshops on salaries...

This: http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2007/04/episode_...

and, this: http://twitter.com/amitranjan/status/742763842

make for interesting food for thought.

One major factor I think is what we study. We do not have SICP course in comp sci, instead we study C, C++, java. I had not even heard of lisp, till I came across SICP course from Berkeley web casts. Of course I do not think even in US, they teach ROR, but as PG says, startups and latest and greatest of technology comes around places where there are good universities. I am in no way suggesting that places like IITs are not good, but most of Indian IT industry is not from IITs, that reflects in percentage

To some extent I do agree with you, but in my opinion the problem is a little different. The main problem is that, the gap between software companies and college is very wide. During our course we don't even know what is happening in software industry. This gap can easily be bridged by making some sort forum where student can have a direct contact with live software firms.

I mean, a killer idea is a killer idea, no matter what language you use. It's great and their are inherent advantages to using Lisp, RoR, Django to develop your idea, but at the end of the day, it's a means to an end. Facebook is in PHP. Outside of the internet, most software is still written in Java or C++. There are lot of these startups in the US as well.

To some extent I also agree with the author. Product development scene in India is really bad.

May be this also because of brain in India.

not worth reading. the article is poorly written, the content is completely summarized by the title and the 'data' the author has collected is merely the result of him crawling a few job search sites.

its strange that all comments are from Indians. It would be great if someone from US gives their opinion on it.

It is extremely difficult to get funding for a product in India. VC's there seem to prefer verticals, if you are working on a vertical product you have a better chance. If all the YC funded were to try and get funding from Indian VC's I am pretty certain not many would have gotten it. This especially true after 2000. It is also got to do with past history, most of the successful companies in India have so far been in those who have developed products in a certain niche. All this might change once we see few successful products that more generic.

Why do they always say its because of VC/funding. Just tell me how many good startup do you know (from india) those are stop due to loss of funding. Actually the main reason is that there are no genuine effort in production development from india.

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