The Great Indian Debate

INDIA THREATENS WORLD ORDER

The $600 billion Indian economy is set to make a huge splash on the international front. Set to expand at a phenomenal 6+ per cent in the near future (8.2 per cent in 2004) the unleashing of the Indian behemoth on an unsuspecting world has governments in the first world worried.
Not that the USA is in for an overnight coup. Considering that the USA GDP is pegged at $11 trillion (2003) it will take India quite a while to overhaul the world leader.
Having realised that their business interests are endangered, numerous agencies in Europe and USA have been commissioned to find out the nature of the threat as well as the deadline when India will start hitting them where it hurts.
From the IMF to America's National Intelligence Council which represents a number of governmental spy agencies including the CIA, to the US Chambers of Commerce representing three million companies and even England's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown have been forced to plead with their countries' businessmen to start preparing for the "growing strategic threat' to their markets.
While India has already laid the basic foundation for its quantum economic leap, especially in the tech sector, the only thing that is acting as a weight is the fact that India does not have the money to pep up its infrastructure including electricity generation, railways, telecom and highways. In fact, India is set to drive its economic growth on the back of its technology.
Also, India's very low R&D-spend is affecting its desire to spread its wings.
The reason is not that the funds aren't there, the fact is that the money is being directed to unproductive sectors of the economy.
To get its infrastructure up to par with Asian giants like China and perhaps Japan, India needs $150 billion till the year 2015. Not a huge amount by any standards but in an era of countervailing political pressure on the decision-makers for vote garnering and lining their pockets, getting that amount from the greedy hands of the assorted politico-bureaucrat nexus will be difficult.
Anne Krueger, First Dy Managing Director at the International Monetary Fund has even gone to the extent of saying a double digit growth is possible provided Indian politicians can stop bickering and find the right mix of policies to attain that goal.
All said and done, the question in the end is not whether India will rise, the query is actually when the sub-continental giant will reach its place in the Sun.

INDIA CAN BE A SUPERPOWER BY 2050

From where we are at present, being the most developed nation by 2050 does not seem likely. For starters, we have amongst the highest rates of poverty in the world. With massive corruption, close to a third of the population living below the poverty line and a vast majority of the people without access to clean drinking water, sanitation, electricity, health care, basic education and the notion of being the most developed nation in the world appears far-fetched.
We could well end up having the largest economy in numeric terms but this does not mean the same thing as being the most developed nation.
The jewel in India's crown, at least at the moment, is the IT industry and exports and economic growth have come largely from this sector. While we have made a mark in this field, and have put ourselves on the map, we are still in the business of providing services. Though we have provided manpower to fuel development of products, systems and innovations worldwide, we do not hold patents on such technologies and have not invested sufficiently in R&D.
Domestic demand of the skills we export is low, so our risk of exposure to events beyond our control increases significantly.
A recent shift in the vision of our IT companies, as is evident from their quarterly and annual results, have been to move away from high-tech to the lower end of the scale; that is towards BPOs where the focus is on cost savings. Such cost savings may be short term as this vision is based on the exchange rate of the Indian Rupee vis-à-vis the major world currencies. While the model provides employment, both direct and indirect, in large numbers its sustainability is suspected.
Such policies are good in the short term and have helped in developing our IT industry rapidly. For the long term though, our offerings must not just be about cost savings but about tangible value.
Growth in specific sectors leads to islands of development, increasing the urban-rural divide and causing a new urban-urban divide. The only way to become a developed country is if development is across the board, across all sectors, and if the fruits of development percolate to all sections of society.
Investments must be made not just in infrastructure but also in society as economic development is sustainable only with social development. Such social development can come about only if those who are currently benefiting can look beyond themselves and their material needs and start contributing to society as well. Such contributions do not mean giving money to charitable causes but sparing time to pass on knowledge to those less fortunate without looking at "what's in it for me"?

FORGET AMERICA, INDIA CAN OVERTAKE CHINA

Now that the world has identified India and China as two of the most powerful emerging nations who can actually become strong enough to threaten the cushy universe of the First (Caucasian dominated) World, it becomes imperative to undertake a comparative view of the strengths and weaknesses of both.
While India is a democracy, created as a republic after the passing of the rule from the British in 1947, China, ostensibly a republic, wad forged on the anvil of a Communist takeover under Mao Zedong. It established a dictatorial socialist system that survives in most forms except for one marked difference, an open market system economy that is free in as much as the Politburo lets it be. This system was put in place under forward-looking leader Deng Xioping in 1978.
India on the other hand worked for almost 40 years under a socialist pattern under a democratic system that laid the foundation for its nascent infrastructure. But it was during the 1990s that a liberal economy was inaugurated and the resultant bounty is still being reaped.
In fact, continuous changes in policy pushed India to increasingly merge its economy with the rest of the world.
In fact, India has grown steadily at an average 6% since then. While India has an economy that is growing from the grassroots, China's economy's roots are not set from the individual up but from the government down.
The Chinese economy is not really demand driven, it performs/produces under strict guidelines set down by the government. The kind of position and image both enjoy in the eyes of other countries can well be imagined. Foreign investors look at China as a relatively short-term opportunity, where political or internal unrest can wipe out everything at one blow. India on the other hand offers long-term possibilities for growth, even though the returns may not be that huge in the short term.
A few parameters should clear the air
While India is just one-third the size of USA, China is almost as large as the USA. With this as the backdrop India has an irrigated land area that is larger than that of China. India is at 590,000 sq km, while China is at 525,800 sq km.
India's strength for so many years and the foundation on which industry and services sectors grow is better. It won't take a genius to figure out which direction India is heading. And although this is offset by a population that is just 200 million short of China's 1,298,847,700, nevertheless, India's median age is just above 24 years while that of China is into the early thirties. This can translate into a population that is still in its youth and thriving while the Chinese population is in middle age.
The benefits can stretch right across all parameters of the economy as the more vibrant Indian population can be more innovative, modern in thought, willing to take profitable risks, identifying the future much more accurately and a go-getter.
However, it must be remembered that India has outpaced Germany, Japan and the UK as the third most attractive place for FDI currently (from sixth earlier). India also edges in front of China in the fact that it has an educated workforce, state-of-the-art managers and a very favourable regulatory mechanism.
China's attraction is mainly a huge infrastructure and cheap labour. However, on the transportation front, India (63,140 km) comes out as a behemoth as the relatively small country has a rail network that is almost as large as that of China (70,058 km). The same disparity occurs in India's favour when it comes to highways: India's 3,319,644 km vs China's 1,402,698 km.
The same cannot be said of electricity production where India's 533 billion kWh compares infavourably with China's 1.42 trillion kWh. China also scores over India in oil production. India's 732,400 bbl/day to China's 3.3 million bbl/day. Considering that India has to import large quantities of oil and pay through its nose for imports, China is much better off by fuelling its growth with its own energy source.
But in terms of natural gas, India's production at 22.75 billion cum is good against its neighbour's 30.3 billion cum. In terms of putting all these together and showing results in terms of performance, both the nations are neck and neck with India's 8.3% real growth rate looking good vs China's 9.1%.
However, while India has a low inflation rate of 3.8%, China betters that with 1.2%. If the Indian government does not show greater frugality and puts emphasis on productive investments, the future can be a chequered one. In fact with India's public debt standing at 60% of GDP and China's being half of that managing profligacy acquires emergency proportions. India's budgetary revenues stand at $86.69 billion vs expenditures of $114.6 billion.
China on the other hand beats India hollow with $265.8 billion and reasonable expenditures of $300.2 billion. The upshot of the whole argument is that a David vs Goliath scenario emerges and while India is behind in many parameters, it scores hugely in the fact that its key sectors are outperforming China especially in the emerging IT sector, where China is a novice. While the battle will rage on for a long time India edges ahead simply because of its democratic set up against China's totalitarian one and the fact that India has read the future better and is much better prepared to profit from these opportunities.

INDIA - VS - AMAERICA -- LET THE BATTLE BEGIN

After taking cognisance of the economic threat posed by nascent tech-savvy, highly educated countries like India, the USA and the rest of the First World have initiated the process to study the danger and perhaps even take retaliatory steps.
From the CIA to the various educational institutions that act as the think-tank for the American establishment, to the mainstream media, all have moved quickly to analyse the situation. A lot of money is being spent and a huge amount of manpower and other resources are going to be dedicated to this campaign.
In fact, comparing it to preparations for a battle will not be misleading. Till date America has shown that it is capable of taking stock and then unleashing its economic might and political power wielded right across the world to bring down any usurpers to their hegemony.
Will it do so to India too?
Take a gander at what Bob Greifeld, CEO of Nasdaq said, "Our competitive countries' (India and China) research and development has grown dramatically," and went on to add that, unless the US enhances measures to hike its commitment to R&D, it will not win the global competitive challenge."
Not so very long ago, a flourishing Japan had beaten the US hollow across almost all economic indices, and yet today Japan is a mere shadow of that promise. Reason: The virtual anti-Japan crusade launched by the US to peg back the Eastern rivals ride to greatness. It saw the implementation of a number of policy initiatives across a spectrum of sectors, backed by the corporate-politico nexus that succeeded to such an extent that Japan, today, is no longer in the news as a rival. America has in fact, after beating them, co-opted them as a colleague. So much so that, Japan has been forced to hire a number of American CEOs for companies that once were leaders in their fields, be they auto majors, pharmaceutical, electrical or appliances companies.
World leaders once, hangers-on now!
The same process has now been set in motion against India, albeit it is in its infancy now. However, if India keeps making progress at the rate it is going, will the USA unleash a similar strategy against the sub-continental major?
In a modern world that still rests on the maxim of 'Survival of the fittest', India should gird up for a challenge. For, the coming years will see an America vs India face-off.

AN UNSTOPPABLE DANGER LOOMS OVER INDIA

It may look dazzling to the readers if I print that India is going to be one among the leaders of the future world, but unfortunately the proposition may sound a little overstated.

Economic growth does not put a country at the forefront of the world order, it requires much more than that. Does India possess those qualities? We should try to understand the question. A large number of analysts have discussed in detail about the poverty, corruption and moral degradation aspects, which are serious obstacle towards our progress.
Every average citizen of India is aware of the facts, but still we all hope that one day, may be one day the unthinkable will be achieved. The optimism is valuable, the growth is encouraging; but is it enough? The fact of economic progress is undeniable and a vast amount of population is benefited, but there are other stories which are nightmarish.
I am certain that the majority of the people in India are completely unaware of one of the silent killer of modern time which slowly but steadily will destroy the entire society of ours into oblivion if not immediately checked. The killer is AIDS. If serious steps are not taken immediately, all progress and growth will sound a myth to the Indian generation of late 21st century.
We have a mission to accomplish for our future generation. How do we do that? Do we have enough resources to battle the fight is to be the question our generation must answer, because that will decide our stand in the new world order. A country can become one among the leaders of our future generation only when it acquires supremacy in all sectors of progress, science & technology, economy, military and art & culture.
The history of human civilization bears the signature of this truth. But we must remember that more than the achievement, it is the power to maintain the supremacy makes a country superior. A country is tested only when it is under adversary, not when it is on the rise. Time and time great countries like Germany, England, France, Italy, United States, Russia and Japan etc. have survived the catastrophic blows and raised again to the top.
The real task will actually begin at that point of time. Will India be able to consistently withstand the vulnerability posed by the threats of enemies? Most importantly, will it be able to recover a catastrophic blow from an enemy if and when it occurs?
The blow may not be from a military angle, it may come from economic point of view, from cultural point of view, from technological point of view, or worst from all angles.
Will India have enough strength to sustain from those blows or will it succumb to the cause? The answer lies in the way we shape our future at this time of the history. But unfortunately the way our present generation is glorifying our miniscule advancement in a few sectors of progress is dangerous for our progress.
The advancement is certainly not redundant but is definitely over hyped. Moreover the key for a nation to prosper is to be critical about every achievement. If a nation feels satisfied with anything, it stops its progress. We have a duty to change that. We have a duty to let people know that the key to our progress lies under the auspice of a never faltering concept of change. We need an enormous change of our social characteristics, without that every progress will remain stagnant forever and we will loose our accountability to our future generation.
The enemies of coming year's prosperous India is invisible today but the enemy of our present progress is right in front of our eyes. The cases of HIV in India are growing in an alarming rate.
But still the social stigma is holding our tongue to declare the truth. If our society remains tight lipped against such enemy of our future generation, how do we propose to protect our imaginary future glory from the claws of unknown future enemies?
The entire story is not as dark as it appears, because there are numerous devoted individuals and organizations, who are fighting hard against all odds to confront the epidemic of this devastating disease. Unfortunately the combat is battled only at the level of the secluded society, where the epidemic of HIV is taking its highest toll. What about the rest of the society?
A society where sex is a prohibited concept, in spite of the fact that India bears a burden of a billion people, how can one go to the common people and document AIDS cases? We need big changes.
Change in our social system. We need to address the issue of AIDS and HIV from its core. The possibility of a horrific strangulation by the grasp of this epidemic, which is capable to destroy the society entirely, is kept unknown from the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens. A poor advocacy against the danger of such epidemic was primarily due to the age-old misconception and misrepresentation of sexual desire by our past and present generation.
In our society sex has become a commodity rather than an integral part of universal reproduction system. The thinkers of India need to come forward and spread the concept of sexual instinct as nature's method to create human being. It is the duty of the scientists to provide explanation about this natural phenomena and it is the duty of our social scholars to introduce to our ignorant population the real beauty of sexual instincts.
Once people understand the concept of reproduction, we can introduce the concept of safe and unsafe sex. We need to educate people, young and old alike, that sex is not a taboo in our society and we all can talk about it freely and knowledgably. Half of our work to eradicate AIDS will be done right there. The rest half is on the shoulders of scientists, doctors, film- makers and leaders.
Scientists are trying hard to bring cure to the ailment. Doctors are working to treat the patients as well as promoting the concept that AIDS is not a curse, but just a disease. It is a non-contiguous disease like many but only deadly.
Now, the filmmakers, who enjoy the maximum leverage upon the present society, needs to be accountable. They need to stop making sex a commodity. They have a greater role to play in this huge process of the nation's progress. The change is possible, the only thing we need right now is a bunch of unselfish and accountable citizens, who will not quiver under pressure.
This change in our social concept should be the first milestone to the path of our progress. No economic growth, no scientific achievement and no technological mastery can bring supremacy to a society with enormous ignorance. The epidemic of AIDS is most pronounce in the two parts of India, Bombay and in the states of Tamil Nadu.
Mumbai and its surrounding areas are among of the most economically progressive places in India. In contrast the state of Tamil Nadu seems to emphasize the concept of traditionalism to the strictest order. Therefore it is quite clear that neither economy, nor traditionalism can effectively battle the enemy of our future progress. It is probably the awareness and rational thinking that can bring us back to the path of progress.
In contrast to Mumbai and Tamil Nadu, two areas in India are keeping substantial check on the advance of HIV infections. The two are New Delhi and Kolkata. Both of these two places are considered as the cultural Mecca of India. Among the two Kolkata and its surrounding areas, where consciousness about unsafe sex has been relentlessly promoted from very early. "Sonagachi project" is one of the pioneering projects undertaken by Dr. Samarjit Jana, has already produced promising results. New Delhi has also taken innumerable measures to educate the common people by its rich political hierarchy. Kolkata is certainly among the top losers in the enormous economic growth in our country.
The economic growth in New Delhi is also not among the top. In spite of all these shortcomings in economy, these two places and many such places are able to handle the grievous situation which may completely destroy the fabric of the entire country. The growth we talk about is all superficial, because one of the major concepts of supremacy lies in innovation. We require innovation in every sector of the nation.
Dr. Jana's dream does not only attempt to eradicate HIV-infections but also wipes out the ignorance among the common people about the disease. This is a well-orchestrated innovative idea and we need to learn from it and apply similar method in other areas of our nation.
Science is another important area where the resonance of innovation is never questioned. Today scientists in the CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) sponsored institutions are trying an innovative idea to build a bridge between traditional medicine and modern drugs.
Dr. Mashlekar, the Director of CSIR, has taken extraordinary steps to make a "Golden Triangle" between traditional medicine, modern medicine and modern science. Once Dr. Mashelkar lamented "... our own India research is invariably focused on the leftover problems of the West". It is not only in science, every sector of our modern society feels proud of mastering the leftover techniques of the west. We have an obligation to change the trend. Dr. Mashelkar has taken the measures to make a change, Dr. Jana has taken the measure to make a change.
This Is progress. Being satisfied with the flashy growth in economy will lead us to nowhere, we must take that lesson from the last year's election of Andra Pradesh. A flashy growth in technology apparently did not make any change in the society as a whole, and the downfall of one of our most promising CEO of most promising state of India. We don't want to see that happen in our bigger picture. We must stop for a while and start thinking rationally. Every part of our society needs to understand that imitating others will only produce a mass of Unorganised, unethical bunch of slobs. Imagination and innovation are the keys to reach at the top, not imitation. It is not only in science and technology, even our popular culture is growing on the residual properties of Western culture. Imitation can never build a great nation. We have to turn the trend around. We must take a vow that we must never imitate, we must never get satisfied upon our achievements on residual work of others; we have to learn to understand the intellectualism of the great nations and pave our path by our own concept. It is a great time in history where we need to look back and indulge ourselves to constructive self-criticism, a concept that Western civilizations has been using for ages to achieve excellence.
It is time that we discard the old rotten concept of our dark past and bring back the innovative concepts of long-forgotten ancestors of Mahabharata. At that ancient time (both real and mythical) when science, economy, literature, art, architecture and military were at their highest levels ever, sex was not a taboo, women were leading from the front, and India rose to the highest echelon of the world order.

Can India become superpower by 2025 ?

India can become the superpower of the world in a matter of 15-20 years if we can elect a good leadership to lead us and rule us. It is the leadership of the country that moves the country forward or backward. Indian President Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam in his famous book written in 1998, envisions that India can become a developed country by 2020.
'The evils that we see in India today like corruption, public sector inefficiency, religious tensions, lack of development, poverty, illiteracy, poor infrastructure, and shortages are caused by corrupt leaderships that place their interests over the interests of the Nation. Corruption is the root causes of India's backwardness. The damage caused by corruption on the country's economy and progress is unimaginable.
India has all the human and material resources that are required to become a superpower; it is only a question of management. The natural ingredients necessary to become a superpower are: 1. Adequate geographical size, 2. Adequate population, having a good level of natural intelligence, 3. Reasonable level of natural resources, 4. Will of the population to be superior.
People must be ambitious; they must have high desires. India is pretty strong on the first three requirements and that is why India can become a superpower. Indians are among the most intelligent people of the world.
India has an immense resource of experienced, high calibre professionals in all spheres of knowledge and technology. There is no goal that these professionals cannot achieve, if the right conditions are provided, because they are as good as anyone else in the developed countries.
The achievements of India and Indians worldwide in areas of space technology, nuclear technology, agricultural research, and software development gives a glimpse of what this sleeping tiger is capable of. India has economically and industrially advanced to a level from where further development can be much more accelerated.
India has immense capital that is lying dormant with individuals due to lack of awareness about investment instruments as well as trustworthy avenues for investments. Gold in the possession of individual families is an example as well a result of this situation.
The Indian market is very huge and it can support any degree of growth. The country has much more natural resources in comparison to many other developed countries. Considering these strengths, if India is ruled well with the right economic and social policies, India has all the potential to achieve a growth rate of 13% which would take the 1999 per capita income of $1600 to $34,000 by the year 2025, which would be equal to the UK per capita income in 2025, assuming that the 1999 UK per capita income of $22,000 grows at 2%. This 2% growth rate is considered to be a realistic long-term growth rate for a developed country like UK. Empires rise and fall.
The British Empire where the sun never set does not exist any more. The mighty USSR has disappeared. There is no historical reason to believe that the richest and the strongest nations of today will remain like that forever.
India and China are poised to take those positions. Why India has not achieved the goal yet and what will prevent India from achieving this goal in future? We focus too much on social and religious matters and too little on economic matters. Non-economic issues like temple-mosque disputes determine the outcome of national elections in India. This trend is now changing and focus is turning to economy and that is why India has good prospects to develop economically. As a result leaders who focus on economy and the country rather than religious and social issues will rise.
The ascension of Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam and Manmohan Singh as President and Prime Minister is a clear indication of this welcome phenomenon. I would define developed country status as follows. Over 90% of the population will be living in modern houses having toilet, electricity, pipe water, fans, cooking gas, television, telephone, and a fridge. More than 50% of the population will have a family car. The roads will be of international standards. Buses and trains will be neat and fast, keeping time. Electricity will not fail and telephones will work always. Towns and cities will be clean. People will get good and affordable education and healthcare. Taxes will be reasonable and prices affordable and stable. You will not have to bribe any one. To achieve all this in a short span of 15-20 years, in a predominantly rural economy like India, agricultural produces should fetch much higher prices, similar to industrial products. Therefore farmers will be able to pay high wages to agricultural labour, thus elevating the masses of India to a higher economic standing. The increased buying power of the rural sector will boost the industrial and urban sector, thus setting off a chain reaction of economic development, catapulting India to superpower status.

GOOGLE CHIEF ON WHAT'S DIFFERENT

The accelerating impact of digital technology on how businesses are organized and managed is beyond question. E-mail, BlackBerries, instant messaging, blogs, Web conferencing and wikis are all part of the mix. Are these tools to jump-start innovation and collaboration, or mainly an always-on distraction?

There is a debate. Yet companies are increasingly embracing the new technology and habits, fostering a hurry-up workplace that has been called Enterprise 2.0.

Google, of course, is the iconic example. During a lengthy interview at the corporate campus, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, touched on managing amid rapid technology change, among other subjects.

A few weeks later, he amplified his thoughts, in an e-mail message, to a question posed in the interview, “So what really is different now?” — Steve Lohr

What Is Really Different Now?

Eric Schmidt

December 2007

Google has developed a culture that reflects the unique ways people live today.

We know we can’t predict a future invention, but we can manage the innovation process. To do that we’ve done a few things:

First, we’ve updated portfolio theory: instead of pitting two internal teams against each other, we now wait until a new idea blossoms and then move forward. Second, we’ve adapted “trust but verify”; we’ve found that there is nothing like inspecting people’s work and the reality of their vision. And finally, we’ve identified that everyone and everything has a short attention span; we make decisions more quickly and use our culture and values to set the tone.

We’ve recognized, and now embrace, our biggest challenge — the changing nature of time. The relentless pace of technology improvement continues to make time management more and more critical for business leaders. While this has certainly long been true, the big difference now is the immediacy of information and action. Technology’s primary role has long been to speed up the transfer of information but now we increasingly contend with its unpleasant byproduct, information overload.

There are distinct consequences to this new age of “Instant Information.”

A) No falsehood can last. Everything can be and usually is checked, even as you are saying it. I remember during our I.P.O., a Google executive made a statement about the Sarbanes-Oxley rules that didn’t make sense to me. I checked the regulations while he was speaking and learned immediately that he was wrong. While I was clearly empowered by the instant information I had in front of me, I also faced a moral dilemma: correct and presumably embarrass him in front of his entire team or send him a private e-mail with the correction. (I chose the latter ... was I wrong?)

B) People expect an immediate answer. If you don’t answer almost immediately, they bombard you with queries. Why is it that they can define your time instead of you defining theirs? The traditional pyramid of power has been inverted by e-mail. At Google almost everyone is simultaneously in a group meeting and using their computers; what is rude to outsiders has become the norm in our culture. I worry that the need to answer immediately ultimately leads to less thoughtful decisions.

C) You can measure everything. At Google, we measure revenue, productivity, engineering. Every week our engineers post what they are working on as a way of allowing us to measure 70/20/10 time. One day Larry Page pointed out to me that the engineering management summary of our strategy and activities did not jibe with what the engineers were really working on. He had been reading the engineers’ weekly “snippets” of their activity and I had been listening to their managers. Larry’s point — and my mistake — offered me yet another lesson in the power of direct measurement.

D) Managers need new ways to listen to information and uncover the gems. These might include: transparency within the company, “best practices” where people are always suggesting better ways of doing things and 20-percent time so people are free to try out new ideas. Additionally, it’s important to realize that managers have traditionally been restrictors (of information) and access (to the boss). These days they need to become smart aggregators of such information and help spot the trends and issues in an information-overloaded world. You might say that you now have to “over-communicate” to get promoted.

E) Managers need to devise clever strategies to obtain everyone else’s information, even as they risk sinking in the proverbial sea of information. The best way I have found to effectively filter information for my own tastes and interests is the social graph, a method of representing the relationships between people in a given context. Even with that model, we still ask ourselves every day, how does the boss learn about a pure, new discovery or the development of a completely new idea or fact? Google has legions of associate product managers who search for everything new; how do we get all that information into one place?

Of course, many challenges and opportunities for managers and leaders are the same now as they were 50 years ago. The need for leadership, for hope, for a vision, for motivation are the same in every generation. In fact, you might even say the biggest difference in the workplace from 50 years ago is the presence of women and the lack of smoking in the office.

The bottom line is people everywhere want hope for the future and we want to be the engine of that hope. While this is surprising to existing managers, it’s more natural to our next generation. Just remember, when you see a teenager walking down the street in baggy pants and the iPod, remember that he or she could be your next boss.

GOOGLE GETS READY TO RUMBLE WITH MICROSOFT

A CEREBRAL computer-scientist-turned-executive, Eric E. Schmidt has spent much of his career competing uphill against Microsoft, quietly watching it outflank, outmaneuver or simply outgun most of its rivals.

At Sun Microsystems, where he was chief technology officer, Mr. Schmidt looked on as Scott G. McNealy, the company’s chairman, railed against Microsoft and its leaders, Steven A. Ballmer and Bill Gates, as “Ballmer and Butthead.” During a four-year stint as chief executive of Novell, Mr. Schmidt routinely opined that it was folly for any Microsoft rival to “moon the giant,” as he put it; all that would do, he argued, was incite Microsoft’s wrath.

At Sun Microsystems, where he was chief technology officer, Mr. Schmidt looked on as Scott G. McNealy, the company’s chairman, railed against Microsoft and its leaders, Steven A. Ballmer and Bill Gates, as “Ballmer and Butthead.” During a four-year stint as chief executive of Novell, Mr. Schmidt routinely opined that it was folly for any Microsoft rival to “moon the giant,” as he put it; all that would do, he argued, was incite Microsoft’s wrath.

Then, six years ago, Mr. Schmidt snared the C.E.O. spot at Google and today finds himself at the helm of one of computing’s most inventive and formidable players, the runaway leader in Internet search and online advertising. With its ample resources and eye for new markets, Google has begun offering online products that strike at the core of Microsoft’s financial might: popular computing tools like word processing applications and spreadsheets.

The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.

But in a lengthy interview at Google’s campus here, Mr. Schmidt, 52, follows past practices. He soft-pedals. As he coyly describes a move that most of the industry views as Google’s assault on Microsoft, he does his best to say that it is something entirely other than that.

No, he says, there was no thought of a Microsoft takedown when, earlier this year, Google introduced a package of online software offerings, called Google Apps, that includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets. They are simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft’s lucrative Office business, and Google is offering them free to consumers.

Still, Google Apps aren’t anything other than a natural step in Google’s march to deliver more computing capability to users over the Internet, Mr. Schmidt says.

“For most people,” he says, “computers are complex and unreliable,” given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then “it will be a real improvement in people’s lives,” he says.

To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?

“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”

Mr. Schmidt clearly believes that the arcs of technology and history are in Google’s corner, no matter how hard he tries to avoid mooning the giant. Microsoft, of course, isn’t planning to merely stand still. It has spent billions trying to catch Google in search and Web advertising, so far without success. And the companies are also fighting it out in promising new fields as varied as Web maps, online video and cellphone software.

“The fundamental Google model is to try to change all the rules of the software world,” says David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. If Google succeeds, Mr. Yoffie says, “a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.”

At Microsoft, Mr. Schmidt’s remarks are fighting words. Traditional software installed on personal computers is where Microsoft makes its living, and its executives see the prospect of 90 percent of computing tasks migrating to the Web-based cloud as a fantasy.

“It’s, of course, totally inaccurate compared with where the market is today and where the market is headed,” says Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, which includes the Office products.

TO Mr. Raikes, the company’s third-longest-serving executive, after Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer, the Google challenge is an attack on Microsoft that is both misguided and arrogant. “The focus is on competitive self-interest; it’s on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do,” he says.

Microsoft, Mr. Raikes notes, has spent years and billions of dollars in product development and customer research, studying in minute detail how individual workers and companies use software. What they want, he says, is the desktop programs and features of Microsoft Office, and the proof is in the marketplace. “I mean, we have more than 500 million people who are using Microsoft Office tools,” he says.

Indeed, Microsoft is the wealthy incumbent with a huge lead in the market for personal productivity software, with a share of more than 90 percent. But the Google challenge, industry analysts say, is not so much a head-to-head confrontation with Microsoft in its desktop stronghold as it is a long-term shift toward Web software, which operates with different principles and economics.

Analysts note that Google is a different competitor from others Microsoft has dispatched in recent years: it is bigger, faster-growing, loaded with cash and a magnet for talent. And the technology of the Google cloud opens doors. Its vast data centers are designed by Google engineers for efficiency, speed and low cost, giving the company an edge in computing firepower and allowing it to add offerings inexpensively.

“Once you have those data centers, you want to go out and develop complementary products and services,” says Hal R. Varian, a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is Google’s chief economist. They can be offered free or at minimal cost to users, he says, because they bring more traffic to Google, generating more search and ad revenue.

Google, it seems, has a promising opening against Microsoft. But tilting at a giant and taking down a giant are very different things.

Microsoft, of course, isn’t standing still. Just as it squelched the first Internet challenge in the 1990s by linking Web browsing software to its mainstay products, it is now adopting a similar strategy for cloud computing by adding Internet features to its offerings. It is moving cautiously on this front, however, to avoid eroding the profitability of its desktop franchise.

More than any other Google foray, providing Web-based software to workers for communication, collaboration and documents promises to be the acid test of how far Google can go beyond Internet search. Will two of its formulas — its distinctive, hurry-up model of building products and services, and its rapid-fire approach to recruiting and innovation — succeed in new arenas?

Google’s quicksilver corporate culture can be jarring for some employees, even for Mr. Schmidt. He recalls that shortly after joining the company and its young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, he was frustrated that people were answering e-mail on their laptops at meetings while he was speaking.

“I’ve given up” trying to change such behavior, he says. “They have to answer their e-mail. Velocity matters.”

VELOCITY does, indeed, matter, and Google deploys it to great effect. Conventional software is typically built, tested and shipped in two- or three-year product cycles. Inside Google, Mr. Schmidt says, there are no two-year plans. Its product road maps look ahead only four or five months at most. And, Mr. Schmidt says, the only plans “anybody believes in go through the end of this quarter.”

Google maintains that pace courtesy of the cloud. With a vast majority of its products Web-based, it doesn’t wait to ship discs or load programs onto personal computers. Inside the company, late stages of product development are sometimes punctuated by 24-to-48-hour marathon programming sessions known as “hack-a-thons.” The company sometimes invites outside engineers to these sessions to encourage independent software developers to use Google technologies as platforms for their own products.

New features and improvements are made and tested on Google’s computers and constantly sprinkled into the services users tap into online. In the last two months alone, eight new features or improvements have been added to Google’s e-mail system, Gmail, including a tweak to improve the processing speed and code to simplify the handling of e-mail on mobile phones. A similar number of enhancements have been made in the last two months to Google’s online spreadsheet, word processing and presentation software.

Early this month, Google released new cellphone software, with the code-name Grand Prix. A project that took just six weeks to complete, Grand Prix allows for fast and easy access to Google services like search, Gmail and calendars through a stripped-down mobile phone browser. (For now, it is tailored for iPhone browsers, but the plan is to make it work on other mobile browsers as well.)

Grand Prix was born when a Google engineer, tinkering on his own one weekend, came up with prototype code and e-mailed it to Vic Gundotra, a Google executive who oversees mobile products. Mr. Gundotra then showed the prototype to Mr. Schmidt, who in turn mentioned it to Mr. Brin. In about an hour, Mr. Brin came to look at the prototype.

“Sergey was really supportive,” recalls Mr. Gundotra, saying that Mr. Brin was most intrigued by the “engineering tricks” employed. After that, Mr. Gundotra posted a message on Google’s internal network, asking employees who owned iPhones to test the prototype. Such peer review is common at Google, which has an engineering culture in which a favorite mantra is “nothing speaks louder than code.”

As co-workers dug in, testing Grand Prix’s performance speed, memory use and other features, “the feedback started pouring in,” Mr. Gundotra recalls. The comments amounted to a thumbs-up, and after a few weeks of fine-tuning and fixing bugs, Grand Prix was released. In the brief development, there were no formal product reviews or formal approval processes.

Mr. Gundotra joined Google in July, after 15 years at Microsoft. He says that he always considered Microsoft to be the epicenter of technological development, but that the rise of cloud computing forced him to reconsider.

“It became obvious that Google was the place where I could have the biggest impact,” he says. “For guys like me, who have a love affair with software, being able to ship a product in weeks — that’s an irresistible draw.”

Another draw is Google’s embrace of experimentation and open-ended job assignments. Recent college graduates are routinely offered jobs at Google without being told what they will be doing. The company does this partly to keep corporate secrets locked up, but often it also doesn’t know what new hires will be doing.

Christophe Bisciglia, a 27-year-old engineer, qualifies as a seasoned veteran at Google, having worked there for four years. Mr. Bisciglia has done a lot of college recruiting in the last two years and has interviewed more than 100 candidates.

“We look for smart generalists, who we can be confident can fulfill any need we have,” he explains. “We hire someone, and who knows what need we’ll have when that person shows up six months later? We move so fast.”

MR. SCHMIDT readily concedes that cloud computing won’t happen overnight. Big companies change habits slowly, as do older consumers. Clever software is needed — and under development, he says — to overcome other shortcomings like the “airplane issue,” or how users can keep working when they find themselves unable to get online.

Yet small and midsize companies, as well as universities and individuals — in other words, a majority of computer users — could shift toward Web-based cloud computing fairly quickly, Mr. Schmidt contends. Small businesses, he says, could greatly reduce their costs and technology headaches by adopting the Web offerings now available from Google and others.

“It makes no sense to run your own computers if you are a small business starting up,” he says. “You’d be crazy to buy packaged software.”

Still, in order to succeed, Google needs to win a broad array of converts, including corporations. That effort is led by Dave Girouard, the general manager of Google’s enterprise business, who joined the company in 2004, shortly after it decided to move beyond its search business and consumer focus.

Gmail, introduced just after Mr. Girouard arrived, illustrates Google’s strategic evolution as well as its increased willingness to take on Microsoft.

Paul Buchheit, a Google engineer, started on what became Gmail as far back as 2001. At the time, there was resistance inside the company to the project. Back then, Google was providing search service for Yahoo, a useful source of revenue for the young start-up, and Yahoo had its own Web e-mail system. Another concern was straying into Microsoft’s territory.

“Definitely one of the reasons people thought it was a bad idea is that it could incite Microsoft to destroy Google,” recalled Mr. Buchheit, who left Google last year and now works for a start-up.

Gmail, a full-fledged Web offering built by Google, took time to develop. Features had to be added and tested, and hundreds of Google engineers had to use it and approve. The company’s arsenal of data centers — highly efficient and designed by Google engineers — had to be equipped to offer ample free storage for users.

And as Google grew in size, profitability and stature during those years, riling a giant was less of a worry. By the time Gmail was ready, Mr. Buchheit says, “Google was much more established, and they were more comfortable competing with Microsoft.”

In the corporate market, Google sees itself as a powerful agent of change, breaking down old barriers. “For the last 30 or 40 years, there has been this huge Chinese wall between business and consumer technology,” Mr. Girouard says. “That was historical and no longer valid.”

Google’s push into the business market began in earnest only this year, but Mr. Girouard is already encouraged by the results. About 2,000 companies are signing up for Google Apps every working day, he said. Most are trying the free version. That’s fine, he says, because those users also generate more search-related advertising revenue for Google. After a 60-day free trial, companies with more than 50 users are beginning to sign up for the Google Apps Premier Edition at a charge of $50 a year per user, which includes customer support.

These applications are minimal, task-oriented tools that lack many of the features in Microsoft Office, but, Google managers say, most people use only a fraction of those fancier features anyway.

“If you’re creating a complex document like an annual report, you want Word, and if you’re making a sophisticated financial model, you want Excel,” Mr. Girouard notes. “That’s what the Microsoft products are great at. But less and less work is like that.”

Google’s entry, he says, has ignited interest in bringing cloud computing into corporations. Senior technology managers of large corporations, he says, are “talking to us every day of the week about where Google is going and what we can do.” A few large companies, notably General Electric and Procter & Gamble, have said publicly that they are at least trying out Google Apps.

Next year, Mr. Girouard predicts, “a lot of big companies” will be adopting Google Apps for tens of thousands of workers each.

Microsoft dismisses Google’s optimism as wishful thinking. Microsoft’s competitive tracking of the corporate market, says Mr. Raikes, the leader of the Office business, finds nothing like the momentum for Google that Mr. Girouard portrays. “It is not in any way, shape or form close to what he is suggesting,” Mr. Raikes says.

COUNTLESS decisions by corporate technology managers, office workers, university students and rank-and-file computer users of all kinds will ultimately determine Google’s success. How easy and inexpensive will it be to do e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and team projects on Web software? Will high-speed network connections soon become as ubiquitous and reliable as Google seems to assume? Will companies, universities and individuals trust Google to hold corporate and personal information safely?

At the corporate level, inexpensive, low-stress e-mail is the initial lure of Google Apps. About 160 employees of BankFirst Financial Services, a small bank in Macon, Miss., have been using Gmail for about two months, happily substituting it for an older system that had been overwhelmed by heavy traffic and spam. Bank workers are also using Google Apps’ instant messaging and calendar features to get immediate answers to customer questions and to set up meetings online.

But BankFirst isn’t using Google’s online word processing, presentation and spreadsheets, a package known as Google Docs. Like so many other companies, it still relies on the Microsoft Word and Excel programs for those tasks. “I really don’t see us migrating from that,” says Josh Hailey, the bank’s computer network manager.

According to Compete.com, a research firm, Google Docs is gaining popularity. It had 1.6 million users in November, seven times as many as a year earlier. That’s a nice lift, but the Microsoft Office suite, containing programs like Word and Excel, is nearly two decades old and runs on some 500 million PCs. The reality is that even if Mr. Schmidt and Google are right about the potential of cloud computing in the workplace, Microsoft is still seen inside most companies as the safe choice.

Another crucial battleground for both companies is the university market, where the stakes are less about making money and more about winning the loyalty of students who might become valuable customers later in life. Google and Microsoft each offer free Web-based e-mail to universities, for example.

When Arizona State University, one of the nation’s largest with 65,000 students, decided last year to choose a new e-mail system, it had concerns about the security and privacy of student information and messages stored on Google servers. “It’s like the virtue of banks over mattresses,” explains Adrian Sannier, the university’s chief technology officer. “You feel like keeping the money in your mattress and defending it with your own gun is the right thing to do.” But Arizona State decided that Google, with all its expertise, could do a better job than the university’s own technology department.

Microsoft, Mr. Sannier notes, also offered free Web e-mail to Arizona State, but for an online service the university decided Google was the smarter choice because the company is totally committed to Web software. “We saw Microsoft as a company that is divided on the issue of cloud computing,” Mr. Sannier says.

The university’s switch to Google-hosted e-mail has gone smoothly, and Mr. Sannier estimates that the school is saving $500,000 a year by not handling e-mail itself. Students, he added, also get more than e-mail. They have access to Google Apps, and thousands of them, he says, now use Google’s Web software for calendars, word processing and spreadsheets.

To be sure, Microsoft is not ceding cloud computing to Google. It is investing heavily in huge data centers and Web software. Inside Microsoft, there are engineers and product managers who sound a lot like Googlers.

Ellie Powers-Boyle, 25, a graduate of M.I.T., works on Microsoft’s Web e-mail products. In the last three years, she says, there have been a dozen significant upgrades of the Web e-mail product, and she has worked on three or four new features each time. “We iterate quickly,” she says. “For someone of my generation, the whole idea of waiting years to see if you made the right product makes no sense.”

The challenge for Microsoft is not the ability to do much of what Google does. Instead, the company faces a business quandary. The Microsoft approach is largely to try to link the Web to its desktop business — “software plus Internet services,” in its formulation. It will embrace the Web, while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine. That is a smart strategy for Microsoft and its shareholders for now, but it may not be sustainable.

Assuming that competition heats up, Office may continue to be an outstanding product, but Microsoft may not be able to charge as much for it — just as low-cost personal computers eventually undercut the mainframe business, and traditional publishing and media companies have grappled with Internet distribution. The traditional products remain popular, but they become much less profitable.

FOR its part, Google faces its own set of challenges: competition from Microsoft and from Web-based productivity software being offered by start-ups like Zoho and Transmedia as well as more established players like Yahoo. A recent report by the Burton Group, a technology research firm, concluded that it was “unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it’s accelerating.”

Is Google “really committed to the productivity of information workers?” asks Chris Capossela, a vice president in Microsoft’s Office group. “Boy, there’s no question that we are. No customer on the planet thinks about Microsoft without thinking about Office. It’s part of the DNA of Microsoft.

“Needless to say, we are going to do everything we can to remain the leader in this space,” he adds. “And whoever comes our way, we’ll certainly be waiting for them.”

FASTER CHIPS ARE LEAVING PROGRAMMERS IN THEIR DUST

When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the “software spiral” — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.

At Microsoft, from top, Craig Mundie, Burton Smith and Dan Reed are working on the next generation of computing power.

The potential speed of chips is still climbing, but now the software they run is having trouble keeping up. Newer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software that breaks up computing chores into chunks that can be processed at the same time.

The challenges have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.

The company is mounting a major effort to improve the parallel computing capabilities in its software.

“Microsoft is doing the right thing in trying to develop parallel software,” said Andrew Singer, a veteran software designer who is the co-founder of Rapport Inc., a parallel computing company based in Redwood City, Calif. “They could be roadkill if somebody else figures out how to do this first.”

Mr. Grove’s software spiral started to break down two years ago. Intel’s microprocessors were generating so much heat that they were melting, forcing Intel to change direction and try to add computing power by placing multiple smaller processors on a single chip.

Much like adding lanes on a freeway, the new strategy, now being widely adopted by the entire semiconductor industry, works only to the degree that more cars (or computing instructions) can be packed into each lane (or processor).

The stakes are high. The growth of the computer and consumer electronics industries is driven by a steady stream of advances in both hardware and software, creating new ways to handle audio, video, advanced graphics and the processing of huge amounts of data.

Engineers and computer scientists acknowledge that despite advances in recent decades, the computer industry is still lagging in its ability to write parallel programs.

Indeed, a leading computer scientist has warned that an easy solution to programming chips with dozens of processors has not yet been discovered.

“Industry has basically thrown a Hail Mary,” said David Patterson, a pioneering computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, referring to the hardware shift during a recent lecture. “The whole industry is betting on parallel computing. They’ve thrown it, but the big problem is catching it.”

The chip industry has known about the hurdles involved in moving to parallel computing for four decades. One problem is that not all computing tasks can be split among processors.

To accelerate its parallel computing efforts, Microsoft has hired some of the best minds in the field and has set up teams to explore approaches to rewriting the company’s software.

If it succeeds, the effort could begin to change consumer computing in roughly three years. The most aggressive of the Microsoft planners believe that the new software, designed to take advantage of microprocessors now being refined by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, could bring as much as a hundredfold computing speed-up in solving some problems.

Microsoft executives argue that such an advance would herald the advent of a class of consumer and office-oriented programs that could end the keyboard-and-mouse computing era by allowing even hand-held devices to see, listen, speak and make complex real-world decisions — in the process, transforming computers from tools into companions.

The chip industry will continue to be able to add more transistors to a silicon chip for the foreseeable future, but the problem lies in the amount of power they consume and thus the amount of heat generated. That will limit the rate at which processing speeds increase.

The need to get around what the industry is calling the “power wall” has touched off a frantic hunt for new computing languages, as well as new ways to automatically break up problems so they can be solved more quickly in parallel.

Although the Microsoft effort was started about five years ago by Craig Mundie, one of the company’s three chief technical officers, it picked up speed recently with the hiring of a number of experts from the supercomputing industry and academia.

Mr. Mundie himself is a veteran of previous efforts in the supercomputer industry during the 1980s and 1990s to make breakthroughs in parallel computing. “I’m happy that by hiring a bunch of old hands, who have been through these wars for 10 or 20 years, we at least have a nucleus of people who kind of know what’s possible and what isn’t,” he said.

The more recent arrivals at Microsoft include luminaries like Burton Smith, a supercomputer designer whose ideas on parallel computing have been widely adopted, and Dan Reed, an expert on parallel computing.

Dual-core microprocessors are already plentiful in consumer devices. For example, both Intel and A.M.D.’s standard desktop and portable chips now have two cores, and even the iPhone is reported to have three microprocessors.

Microsoft sees this as the company’s principal opportunity, and industry executives have said that the arrival of manycore microprocessors is likely to be timed to the arrival of “Windows 7.” That is the name the company has given to the follow-on operating system to Windows Vista.

The opportunity for the company is striking, Mr. Mundie said, because manycore chips will offer the kind of leap in processing power that makes it possible to take computing in fundamentally new directions.

He envisions modern chips that will increasingly resemble musical orchestras. Rather than having tiled arrays of identical processors, the microprocessor of the future will include many different computing cores, each built to solve a specific type of problem. A.M.D. has already announced its intent to blend both graphics and traditional processing units onto a single piece of silicon.

In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant.

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”

There are those who argue that there will be no easy advances in the field — including some inside Microsoft.

“I’m skeptical until I see something that gives me some hope,” said Gordon Bell, one of the nation’s pioneering computer designers, who is now a fellow at Microsoft Research.

Mr. Bell said that during the 1980s, he tried to persuade the computer industry to take on the problem of parallel computing while he was a program director at the National Science Foundation, but found little interest.

“They told me, ‘You can’t tell us what to do,’” he said. “Now the machines are here and we haven’t got it right.”