Hypothesizing is always fun. It does not
cost, and is always out of the realms of what is possible. You damned well know it.
Trouble is, so does everybody else. During the endless 'blue-sky thinking' (that is what
goofing-off is being referred to of late) that we did for this special issue, some of the
young 'uns came up with hypotheses clearly preposterous, until somebody asked for the
classical 'emperor's clothes'. All hell broke loose and some semblance of order was
restored only after we decided to institutionalize the chaos. When we sat down, the
inevitable question was what if...We said enough was enough...let us think aloud and share
with our readers some of the history's many quirks...and were there?
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John Sculley Had Stuck To Selling Sugar Water
Surely two things would not have happened. One, Apple might not have become such a runaway
hit that it became and neither would it have dropped so low. If anything, it was Sculley,
who ran Apple and successful at that. So much so he was able to retain that mystique of
romance that Apple had and created armies of macolytes who lapped up everything that the
company had to offer. However, if Sculley had stuck to Pepsi, possibly Apple might have
found somebody else, who might not have been so romantic, but would have created a solid
organization with structures and leaders, and not scores of tech-crazy, cyber-junkies who
probably had little experience in running companies. Also mistakes such as Mike Spindler
might have been averted and Steve Jobs might not have had to do his Sir Galahad act again,
something that he probably enjoys but his customers may not. Another blasphemy that Apple
might have averted is the $ 150 million dole from their 'evil empire' Microsoft and its
monarch Bill Gates. Is not this similar to Russia going to America for aid? Oh, yes, one
last laugh. Had Sculley spurned jobs at the beginning, the latter might not have been
jobless later.
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Microsoft Had Continued The Joint O/S Development With IBM
Dave Cutler and his NT might have remained a dream. Better still-depending upon whose side
you are on- Microsoft might not have got such a bearhug on the global computing scenario.
Bill might still have become a billionaire, but some of the famed arrogance might have
taken time to emerge. Imagine a world where there is no Win95 or NT, no shouts of Mac '88
from Redmond-baiters. However, on the flip side, there is also no justice department
investigations, no FTC probe, an emotionally unemployed Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison,
and horror of horrors, the view from Redmond is without Windows till you are Blue in the
face...Stop smiling!
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Sanjay Gandhi Had Not Died
The 'Gentleman' might have replaced Rajiv Gandhi as India's first tech-savvy Prime
Minister who understood the importance of IT. And perhaps, would have been instrumental in
giving the Indian IT industry its first policy statement on infotech which his brother
did, something that this industry still cherishes. More: he would have made Maruti the
major IT user than anyone else. But then Suzuki's contention would not have been on
Bhaskarendu's appointment as Maruti MD but on the appointment of Maruti's IT division
head.
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Vinay Bharat Ram's Sony Deal Had Not Been Canceled By The Indian Government
The original IT entrepreneur, Vinay Bharat Ram, clinched the major deal to manufacture
electronic calculators in a tie-up with Sony, the license for which was suddenly canceled
by GoI. Miffed, Bharat Ram, created DCM Data Products, which went on to create India's
first indigenous computers-the Galaxy series. Prior to that what was more important was a
precocious twenty-something who saw an opportunity to fulfill his dream and took off from
DCM to create another computer company. Shiv Nadar might have realized his dream elsewhere
but for the GoI's instrangience. Even today, the industry is peppered with ex-DCMers who
found their grounding in the old warrior.
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Rochester Had Not Been In Minnesota But California
Story has it that Rochester Minnesota is generally cold and the honchos from Watson's days
at IBM HQ never wanted to go to the Rochester labs. As a result of this, Frank Soltis,
decided to work on a revolutionary new architecture for a medium-range system. Due to
relative independence from the Blue suits, the architecture and the system built around
that went on to create history, and continue to do so. There are many in the Rochester
labs, who still believe that AS/400 might have been 'too revolutionary' for Watson's
brigade and might have died a premature death had it been located in the cradle of
technology 'Silicon Valley'.
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FC Kohli Had Stuck To Power Industry
At heart he still considers himself a power engineer. This grand old man of Indian
industry has been responsible for guiding the destiny of one of the India's largest
software companies. More importantly, he is the wise man in an industry of youngsters. Had
he not shifted into TCS from Tata Power in 1968, Indian software might have lost out on
the initial kickstart. Software's loss would have been power industry's gain.
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Sukh Ram Had Been Animal Husbandry Minister
Hawala at Delhi might have been followed by Gawala, extending the impact to Bihar. Look at
it this way. The telecom reforms might have happened faster. Vittal might have stuck
around for some more time and HFCL might have turned in a sober bid for the Basic
services. One thing is sure, several companies might not have got their order book filled
from DoT and we might have opened out fodder and cowdung for participation from MNCs.
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Narayana Murthy Had Trekked The Other Way
Infosys Founder and Indian software's most celebrated entrepreneur trekked all the way
from France to India. Imagine if he had trekked... but the other way... Silicon valley
would have been the gainer and it might have been an NRI Murthy who would be addressing
seminars on how Indian software 'should' enter the US market. Instead, this unpretentious
Mr Ethics founded Infosys in Bangalore and set up a welfare company which is also a blue
chip at the stock market. The in-house wag is only questioning one thing: Did Murthy trek
the right way or the wrong way?
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George Fernandes Had Been A Capitalist
Two other capitalists would have been happier-the late Roberto Gouizeuto of Coke and John
Akers of IBM. On the other hand, many IBMers might not have sauntered into the Indian IT
the way they did, like Prem Shivdasani, Shashi Ullal etc. The biggest loser might have
been Ratan Tata, whose IBM joint venture might never have happened. And IBM might just
have been the largest IT company in the DQ Top 20 ranking.
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Pradeep Gupta Had Stuck To Writing Software In HCL
You might not be reading this piece. Twenty-seven-year-old Gupta was approached for advice
by a friend for a magazine on livestock and realized "if there can be a magazine for
a thousand bulls, why not for bits and bytes." Birth of DATAQUEST.
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Rajendra Pawar Had Not Taken The Summer Break In Mussorie In 1981
NIIT was born out of Pawar's solo trek to this hill station when he tried to crack the
problem of how Hindustan Computers Ltd and the Indian industry would continue to get IT
manpower. Interestingly, if Pawar had not gone to Mussorie, neither would Aptech, arch
rival, been there, as the man who made Aptech was originally in NIIT.
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World War II Had Not Taken Place
IT revolution would not have taken place until World War III. As the basic stimulus to
computing initiated and sustained the effort in the World War II. It produced the ENIAC
(Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)-the world's first electronic digital
computer. One of the extraordinarily important tasks which devolved once the war started
was the preparation of firing and bombing tables for the Army. As the war intensified and
new types of weapons were being churned out from the allied war factories at a very fast
pace, the computing group at Aberdeen just could not keep pace with the demand for
detailed firing and bombing tables for each type of gun. To overcome this problem, the
Group had to turn to a machine and thus was intensified the need to build ENIAC. If this
need had not arose the ENIAC project would have died out due to lack of funds at its
parent the Morse laboratory. And maybe the death of the project would have resulted in the
computing industry itself which was still being born!
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The Big Brother Ad Had Failed? Or George Orwell Had Never Written 1984?
The book that foresaw the Newspeak omen of Communist hegemony actually turned out to be a
dramatic marketing coup of all time. IBM was the Big Brother that controlled all computing
mankind and Apple was the rebel. The rebel that finally emerges the winner. The ad went a
long way in establishing the legend around the Mac...an image that still endures in
certain die-hard pockets. What if the ad would not have been created or would have failed.
One thing is certain if the ad would have failed, it would have certainly resulted in the
creation of Windows being delayed.
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The Millennium Bugs Would Not Have Been Conceived
The millennium bug which considered one of India's biggest export opportunities, would
have made India lose its share from the total global market estimated at over $ 12
billion. Analysts say it will suck up most of the expenditure to be made in IT by the big
firms in the next couple of years. The magnitude of the problem is such that the whole
industry has come up around the bug. All this would not have been possible but for the
miserliness of the early-day COBOL programmers.
In an effort to save precious memory the
COBOL programmers of yore simply settled on the last two characters of the year. That is
why early programs had the mm/dd/yy format. The early programmers saved a couple of
thousand dollars on the cost of memory. But the same thing has heavily come back to hound
those companies. However, nevertheless, in the process has created a multi-billion dollar
industry.
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Apple Had Licensed Its Technology:
Apple Computers is today fighting to survive in a world dominated by the Wintel
juggernaut. Ironically, Apple has to share at least a part of the blame for creating this
monolith that has today all but swallowed up the company. For Apple, was the first one to
come out with a GUI-based front-end. In those days, PCs were clumsy machines running on
the pretty boring DOS interface. The company made the computing world far more interesting
by launching the GUI front-end in 1984. The Macintosh was an instant hit and the company
sat back to roll in it. But somewhere down the line, the company did not go the Intel way
of freely licensing out its technology to other firms. So the only option for other PC
manufacturers was to get onto the Intel bandwagon and supply the very slow and very cludgy
Windows 1.0 GUI interface from Microsoft. Windows was no match to Apple, but the key lie
in the numbers. Windows, because of its larger number of vendors, won a greater
marketshare and had more application developers developing programs on it. By the time
Apple woke up to the licensing fact, it was already too late.