From Thomas J Watson Jr. very famously predicting, “I think there is a world market for about five computers”, in 1943 to more than 4 billion computing devices being used at this very moment, we have surely come a long way in the world of computing. Beyond computing, in several other segments or domains in the hi-tech sector covering telecom, internet connectivity, enterprise IT systems, digital services, software applications, etc., we have witnessed transformational changes.
The markets for these looked like small niches but have within few decades gained global scale and the expansion is relentless. And yet it feels like we have just seen the first act when you think about the over 4.5 billion humans who remain untouched by the hi-tech sector. For them the hi-tech sector offers stuff that is not useful, affordable, accessible, and usable. So how do we then overcome these adoption barriers currently seemingly insurmountable?
First let us look at how we overcame these barriers when we went from a mere five to 4 billion computing devices.
Moore’s Law was at work that made it cost-effective to pack much higher processing power and to rapidly shrink the size and form-factor of the computing devices. Adding to this was the magic of economies of scale that leads to ever decreasing unit costs of manufacturing. Coupled with a globalised supply-chain integrating suppliers from across continents leading to ever decreasing operating costs covering shipping, distribution, marketing, retail, delivery, service, and support. Together they rapidly reduced costs thereby significantly reducing affordability barriers. However this era saw widespread adoption of computing by enterprises or businesses whose primary use was boosting productivity by offering computing to their professional workforce. This team was skilled in the usage of computing which eased usability barriers.
Then came the era of personal computing whose leadership in the marketplace was enabled by the emergence of the Wintel architecture with Windows software and Intel hardware. Computers as everyday tools for everyone in every walk of life was a powerful vision to drive forward the expansion of the market to the millions. Software with very low marginal costs was ready to do the jobs previously done by more expensive hardware, leading to plummeting fall in prices of computing devices. A pig punch was landed on the usability barriers too apart from now making computing devices more accessible. However we were still in the domain of enterprise or professional users.
Enter Steve Jobs and Apple with the vision to put tech in the service of every human and to bring within the scope of personal everything that humans do in life and at work. What makes computing useful to the billions of humans was redefined. Usability was transformed by bringing hardware, software, content, applications, design, connectivity, and services together to create a revolutionary user experience. And combined with the ever onward march of Moore’s Law, design and manufacturing capabilities to reduce much smaller devices, moved computing from the desk to our pockets.
In relative terms, the extent of success we have seen in lowering utility, usability, and accessibility barriers has not been matched with the affordability barriers. One major development has been the emergence of ‘Software-as-a-service’ paradigm as well as business model. ‘Pay-as-you-use’ on the basis of time, number of features, number of users, etc., made it possible to break away from the risks of buying expensive software, not sure as to its utility and usability. Google pushed it even more giving software away for free, enabling adoption, and then monetizing on the basis of usage but from third-party advertisers, developers, etc.
In India getting to 800 million mobile connections would not have been possible with only the post-paid model. Pre-paid connections are about 90% of the market and that is an example of the pay-as-you-use model working to crash affordability barriers.
The failure of the much hoped for Simputer experiment with the vision to bring affordable computing into the hands of rural Indians can also be attributed to its business model being based on the ‘purchase of the device’. What if they had tried a pricing and revenue model based on the ‘usage of the device’? Would that have lowered the risk perceptions of the target consumers who may have perceived the Simputer to be a cheap computer?
So Simputer should have been Computer-as-a-service. Just as your TataSky box shuts off without prepaid charge, so will the computer if you don’t pay for its usage. Ubiquitous connectivity now (perhaps the one reason why this may not have been possible to do in 2002 when Simputer was launched) along with IoT making it possible to continuously monitor usage of the device, I am thinking why not make Anything-as-a-service?
Computing devices is just the tip of the iceberg. At a broader level, tech adoption in India goes way way beyond. How are we going to solve the problems of poor quality, low efficiency, and low reliability that is seriously limiting the progress and success of our MSME manufacturing sector? Through rapid advances in ‘creative tech’ in diverse domains as IoT, industrial automation and robotics, intelligent machines, connected devices, advanced computing, precision agriculture, etc., we now have the ability to solve all of this and much more.
From assisted living to waste disposal, predictive maintenance to energy savings, food processing safety to women safety, the need for devices is only getting bigger and bigger. Devices that have computing are intelligent, connected, and highly user-friendly. But unless we crash the affordability barriers we will end up with the same fate as the Simputer. What’s our answer to this? Well seems like Anything-as-a-service it is.