**********
Yes, it's 1998 for the sector of the Indian population that has the right skillset.
Meanwhile, in America... Well, we all know that story.
But here's what occurs to me just now about the so-called "Indian tech boom" -
For so many Indian techies to be devoted to providing services to American and European firms suggests that there is an insufficient domestic infrastructure to absorb this kind of labor.
The Indian tech boom is the services version of the effective durable goods export strategy of Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan and so forth.
If I'm remembering the history of this correctly, these nations developed industries for export while doing little (at first) to nurture domestic consumption. So it's true that S. Koreans, for example, are now buying the much nicer Hyundais on the market but this wasn't always the case.
The export of "knowledge work", made possible by the Internet among other techno/social factors appears to be the computer age equivalent of those earlier triumphs.
The question is, can India and the rest of the 'service export tigers' (far from an excellent turn of phrase but servicable) turn all this outwardly directed software and hardware engineering talent into something of value to the wider society as the East Asians did with manufacturing, machine tools and high tech.
DRM
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com