From Carbon to Silicon Rohan Narayana Murty
Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber operate in spaces where companies run on traditional business models. Yet, these new-age companies have differentiated themselves from traditional companies by employing novel software systems, illustrating a truth that lies at the heart of every industry: every company, at its core, has increasingly become a technology company—one that is fundamentally reshaped by software. For example a bank of today is a software company that lends money. Software lies at the very core of transformation in every industry. Software creation is a creative endeavor requiring imagination, patience, and careful thought. Hence, until about the late 1970s, several computer scientists believed that to successfully build a large software system, the entire team of software writers must be geographically co-located and in constant communication with each other in order to coordinate effectively on software development. The early 1980s shattered this artisanal view of software creation. The development of the global delivery model, one of modern India’s great inventions in the technology world, changed the way software was built. It distributed the art of writing software across large teams of people around the globe, running relays to build complex software systems. Teams across the US, Europe, India, and Japan transcended geographies and time zones to create a twenty-four-hour working day. This required fundamental innovations in software engineering as software creation had to become less of an art form and more of a process. Its goals and steps needed to be clearly defined and broken down into smaller tasks, which could then be allocated to teams across the globe. This evolution was an example of industrializing software creation, and it has been India’s contribution to the software world, as well as its technological history, for the better part of the last thirty years. It also explains the birth and Harvard South Asia Institute 67