China is 10-15 years behind India in service and product industries

The global recession may be bad news for global companies, but for Shouvick Mukherjee, who heads Yahoo R&D in India, troubled times also open up new opportunities. Like other companies hit by a slowdown in core markets, Yahoo has shifted considerable attention to ‘emerging’ markets such as India.

Mukherjee, perhaps the most important player in moulding the company’s approach to this market, shares his insights, plans and expectations on India and the Indian techie with Sreejiraj Eluvangal. Excerpts:

What exactly do you do at Yahoo R&D in India? Do you dream up projects yourself or do you get tidbits of work delegated from the main office? 
When I started off in India four years ago, exactly what you said used to happen. Every morning, you will wake up and wait for the call from the US and they would say ‘you should do this, you should do that.’ From that stage to where we are today is a huge leap.  We have much more freedom today. We sit at the table where the strategy for the company as a whole is discussed, coming up with roadmaps and then coming up with the technologies for that.

Since when has this happened? 
Things started changing three years back. We started having product management, having high-end marketing… I would say that over the last one year, or two years, we are seeing huge deliveries of significant impact to the company happening out of India.

Can you give some examples? 
Oh, there are lots. All of Yahoo’s multimedia [images, audio, video] search happens from India. The cricket site, the movie site for emerging markets, our hot jobs products got developed in India… A lot of the search advertising [mechanism] got developed here. 

Today, we have a good number of VP-and-above designation people in India. India R&D is the second-largest in terms of number of people, number of products and number of projects. Every top-level executive who has joined Yahoo in the last year has spent time with the Bangalore team.

Besides implementing product ideas, does the Indian team also think up new products? 
There are two levels to it. At a very senior level, you identify a market. Then you have to figure out how to go after it, what products need to be built. This happens in the US and India. This is the top-down approach. 

The other one is bottom-up innovation, where someone from the team suggests an idea. If it can be funded from here, we do it. But if it’s a large project which needs a lot of funding, we have to go to the US.

You worked for four years with Yahoo in the US before moving to India. What difference do you find in the high-tech talent of both countries? 
The biggest difference between India and the US is that the internet as a domain [of expertise] is very new to India. In the US, it’s been there for 10-15 years. Here, it’s more difficult to get people who have been working in this domain for long. The raw talent is equally good. 

Other than that, I would say the hunger to do something is highest here. I have worked in many parts of the world and the passion to prove or make something successful is higher in India that anywhere else in the world.

There is a criticism that Indians in India are not very innovative — we are good at services, but have no product companies and tend to imitate the West. Have you noticed that in your Indian staff? 
I don’t think the approach to a problem is very different, but there is a difference. Indians tend to think through a problem much more before they come in front of you. It has its positives and negatives. The positive is that the depth of thinking you get is much higher in India. The downside is that many times, you think for too long before you decide to act; you become too cautious. 

For internet companies, what will be the role of India in the future? How do we compare to China?
First, India as a market will grow tremendously. That will foster new innovations and new products for this market. That has to come from here. 

Second is that 10 years back, we saw a lot of innovation in the IT services industry. The next wave is going to be start-ups and product companies. You will see a lot many products — not just for India, but for the world — come out of India.

As for China, I think it is still 10-15 years back as far as the service and product industries are concerned, primarily due to lack of English language skills. In addition, the local market is complicated by government regulations.

Has Yahoo grown middle-aged? You don’t seem to be much in the headlines compared to your competition...  
It’s more of a matter of people getting to know about the innovation we are putting out. For example, after we introduced our new homepage six months ago, volume from India jumped 40%.

Another reason is that Yahoo was always like, ‘We don’t have to go out and talk about innovation. People will get to see if they are getting what they want’. Others, however, are better at using creating the buzz. We are realising that we need to do a little bit of that. Every product [at Yahoo] has gone through innovation. What we have not done is have a great go-to-market strategy. That’s a learning curve and that’s something we have to fix.