[Hamara-devel] hamara-linux - a lateral integration

[shirish]

Hi all,
I should have sent this mail about a month back but for number of 
reasons wasn't able to do it, so apologies before-hand, it will be a bit 
long so read it when having your favourite chai/coffee or whatever makes 
you rock :).

I had heard that some of the people were less enthusiastic of the 
hamara-edu concept and thought that it might be a waste of time and 
resources and probably would be better-served by putting resources in 
existing venture/work processes only.

While there is certainly merit in that thinking but I think Vikas 
decided to forego short-term gains for a longer-term stability and profit.

While I can't assume or even presume to know Vikas's POV, here is what 
my limited understanding of business and consulting tells me.

As all of us know, the marketplace is a brutal and ever-changing beast. 
What works today might simply not work tomorrow. We cannot rest in the 
idea if we have a solution today which works in the market today, we 
would be competitive 5-10 years down the line. While we would love to, 
that's not given. So, in order to be competitive in the market-place 
it's better to have two products than one. Even if for reason, we lose 
the ball on one, the other will make sure that we are sustainable.It is 
and would be similar in sense to a shop-keeper having more than one 
object in the hopes that a customer would come in and the possibility of 
cross-selling or/and up-selling is there. More the number of products, 
higher the possibility, of course having quality maintained would and is 
an issue but then as we put up systems in-place that could be looked after.

Once that is/was understood or known to him (probably for months or 
years), the next question was probably what next. Getting into hardware 
is unthinkable as capital needs and time-pressures are much more than 
software. Same goes for networking. So apart from software itself and 
integration of software where there is already expertise, it would have 
taken lot more time and efforts to get into software development which 
again is an uncertain business. So that doesn't leave much.

Now most of us who have worked with FOSS know that with all its welts 
and faults it still is a much better solution, a much better way of 
doing things than other existing methods. So he had to have a FOSS 
solution.

Now, if you have been working on and with any GNU/Linux distributions 
you would realize it's pretty chaotic and there are no standards or 
statement about quality of products. There are softwares which are 
competitive right at the top (think web servers, mail servers, databases 
etc.) to middling quality to lot of unknowns.

Now, while it's hard to read why he chose education as the place to be 
where education is a real mess, it might not be if you think of the 
Asian sub-continent itself. The first five languages that Vikas shares 
is spoken by significant number of population in other countries besides 
India, so our customer base is/can be that larger.

Also, if you look at the technical expertise and competence needed, you 
will find it has significant overlap with serving the needs of a fortune 
500 company and even more so. While a Fortune 500 company would be able 
to have a team of sys and network admins, schools don't have that choice 
or luxury, at the most they have a kid/person who might have done a 
diploma and simply knows what value to put at x place or Y place and 
that's about it. Also as he has children of his own, he also must have 
seen how inefficient both public and private education are because :-

a. Their accountability is zero. Both due to different reasons, but net 
net is the same.

b. Most of the education either in primary, secondary or even higher 
education is not upto standards if the standard is to have gainful 
employment.

Also the education market in India is booming. just few links should be 
enough to prove the point.

http://www.ibef.org/industry/education-sector-india.aspx

http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/indian-education-sector-market-size-to-be-110-bn-by-fy15-113012100537_1.html

and 
http://indiainbusiness.nic.in/newdesign/index.php?param=industryservices_landing/359/2

There is one significant sectoral report made by technavio

http://www.technavio.com/report/online-education-market-in-india-2015-2019 
but is behind paywall and is significantly priced.

While the report is about online education looking at the creaking 
infrastructure now, don't see it changing any time soon unless some 
policy decisions are reversed and improved but that's a different 
discussion for a different time.

I do hope the above ideas and arguments make it easier to understand 
some of the things he might have been thinking off.

He is not just thinking about himself but also about the whole company 
because when bad times will come (sectoral collapse) or anything else he 
wants to make sure that the company survives no matter what.

I do hope the e-mail is disseminated widely within techblue. If people 
have still have doubts, they can come on the mailing list or even catch 
me off-list via my gmail a/c shirishag75 at gmail.com . I would be more 
than happy to discuss any pros and cons you might have of the current 
situation.

I, for one do believe it's a good road he has taken. It might be a bit 
long, but in the end I believe we will reach there.

Also while at it, please see 
https://blogs.hamaralinux.org/2015/05/birthing-pains-of-a-foss-distribution/ 
.

Lastly, as vikas has shared, would be nice if everybody took Debian 
jessie for spin, both techies and non-techies alike. We were all 
non-techies at one point of time or other and being techies sometimes 
blindfolds us to problems/issues faced by everyday users as we are 
already armed to some extent with our know-how of workarounds and things.

That's all for now, sorry for the longish mail.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org