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For an entrepreneur who has witnessed the countrys IT landscape change
over the last many years, Ajit Balakrishnan comes across as a simple individual,
focused on the domain in which he operates. After commencing his entrepreneurial
journey by starting an advertising agency called Rediffusion and trying his hand
in IT as the director with PSI Data System, he started Rediff.com on Christmas
Day in 1995. Over the years, Rediff.com has become a flagship site for news,
blogging, and much more. The site has literally pioneered the concept of the
Internet in the Indian sub-continent.
From being just another site in the IT space, Rediff.com has consistently
proved to be one to reckon with by offering services such as chat, blog, etc
with the changing times. In a freewheeling interview with Dataquest, Ajit speaks
about the advent of the Internet in India during the days of Netscape to the
present day of Mozilla. Excerpts
In the mid nineties, Netscape ruled the market and a few managed to use
the IE. Did you customize to suit the browser settings of both IE and Netscape?
Netscape is reborn and you see Firefox coming out of that old code. A lot of
people debated why Netscape failed, and it is generally attributed to the wicked
ways of Microsoft. But that is not so. The first codes of Netscape were written
by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, but they did not know how to architect them.
It was called the spaghetti codes and when you update the versions, it can be
very long, running into about 5 mn lines in browser. It could not keep up with
that and getting to the next version was difficult.
What Microsoft did well was to architect these codes and thats what they do
for a living. They licensed it from the work Anderson and others had done from
the University of Illinois. They partitioned it in such a way that they could
improve each piece and thats why Netscape could not keep up with IE. Netscape
had about 98% plus market share, but in three years, it just came down to single
digits. Flash has about 98% today but Microsoft has a good answer to that. These
battles will continue and game developers already prefer Microsofts Silverlight.
For a little while when IE and Netscape were not compatible, consumer pressure
was such that both were working out the same thing. I dont remember any time
when customers had to change the browser setting maybe for half a day.
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Ajit Balakrishnan
chairman, Rediff.com |
Despite the presence of myriad websites today, Internet penetration is
still below par and we still suffer from infrastructural issues. How do you view
this scenario in the future?
We have 27 mn users in India and thats growing at 25% y-o-y. No other
market is growing, so the issue is that we have lost a long period when the user
base did not grow at all, and we are paying the price for that. From 2005,
objectively, good work has been done by BSNL. What they have done is that they
have taken the Internet to small towns. BSNL has enabled phone connection. For
instance, when I went to Cannanore in Kerala, there was Internet connection. The
broadband offer made by them is catching and its economical.
If you were to pin point areas where the user tends to use the Internet
currently, vis--vis 2-3 years back, what would those be?
I think, 2-3 years back, people primarily used the email messenger, but in
the last 18 months, social networking sites have mushroomed up well. Orkut,
which earlier saw a surge, is now seeing a decline and users are increasingly
switching to Facebook. We had an early entry into this arena with the social
networking site, called Connections, which has an active base of about a
million. But I think what has taken off is Boy meets Girl social networking
and there is no other purpose than to try and get a connection. Social
networking is the real phenomenon in the last 18 months. Video is another trend
that has come up and sites such as iShare and YouTube have made video
distribution channels a big thing. Currently, these are the two mega trends. In
all these moments, you must understand that the original design of the Internet
has always been to facilitate communication.
Convergence is the name of the game, especially in areas such as radio and
mobile or even a mobile and the Internet. How do you view this scenario in the
coming years?
We have used mobile as just another device but today it looks different. An
Internet connection is a dream and cost economics is not that great at the
moment. Once thats sorted out, people would prefer the Internet through
mobile-based applications. Mobile-based Internet is the way to go. The
challenges are spectrum and WiMax. Wi-Fi was seen as an alternative and it
exists only inside the office. Though it is not a significant part yet, it would
happen and there is no doubt. Owning a spectrum is like owning land and the same
land bid is going on.
Rediff.com today is more than just a website and offers not just content
but gives a medium to socialize and interact. With malicious practices coming to
the fore in terms of people misusing this medium, how do you monitor this
situation?
There is a great amount of moderations which is expensive. What happens with
Orkut, cant happen here and we are super cautious about it. We have been very
careful; after all, we run a business in the Indian social system and cant do a
playboy in India. We moderate the message board, and you can report abuse. When
you have millions of users, we cannot have one team monitoring them all the
time. All of us are there, all the time. A lot of effort is going in to it but
you can never do it perfectly.
Being an entrepreneur yourself, how do you view the scenario of budding
entrepreneurs?
To set up an enterprise, there would not be a better time than today. The
climate is right and capital is available, and thats the new thing in the last
5-7 years. This would only increase in the future. There are markets for young
people to strike out. The missing gap today is that not many people are willing
to be angel investors or micro investors. You need help at the early stages.
Prasad Ramasubramanian
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in
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