Where does IndiaWorld go from here? Its a question we ponder on quite
a lot. There are no right or wrong answers. That only time will
answer. But being in the midst of it all, one develops insights which
can be quite different from what someone on the outside sees.
IndiaWorld began with content for NRI audiences, went into website
development, then created more sites for a growing domestic audience
and an international audience which wanted more than just news. The
wheel has come a full circle. The domestic audience is the key to the
success of a Web service, and that is something which few web masters
seem to realise. Everyone tries to target the NRI audience. The
numbers are there, but little else. Other than a handful of banks,
finance companies and financially-constrained real estate companies,
there isn’t really anyone else for whom the NRI clientele matters a
lot, AND who are willing to pay. Yes, the NRI audience gets hits on
the site, but not money. We began with NRIs because they were the
only ones who are out there. But we must not stop with them.
It is very important to create services which also interest the
domestic Indian audience. This group does not want to go online to
read newspapers and magazines, which they can buy for what they’d pay
to read a story online (the difference being the payment is for
telecom, and not content). And that is exactly what we have strived to
create in the last 10 months. Expect more of this in 1998. In the US,
one talks of audiences in terms of millions; in India it is still
thousands. And that will not change easily because the telecom
infrastructure will take time to improve. We don’t want to build a
business which is dependent on external growth constraints and policy
on which one have no control over. We need to go to where the eyeballs
are.
The Eyeballs are on the Corporate Desktop. This is where a significant
opportunity in India lies. Unlike abroad where there are many sources
of information between 9 am and 7 pm, in India there are no practical
ways to get information while you are at work. You still wait for the
9 or 10 pm news to find out what happened during the day on the
political front, and the morning newspapers as to what happened in the
world of business over 12 hours ago. India needs an information
service delivered over a phone line to the Corporate Network and
delivered on the Desktop via the Web front-end. That’s because
Corporate India, while being state-of-the-art on the LAN front, is 7-8
years behind on the WAN front. That’s where the opportunity lies:
Near-Real-Time Content Delivery on the Desktop over a nationwide
dial-up network. Use the Net for what it is: a distribution vehicle.
Another growth area is in Internet Strategy and Implementation. An
Internet Business Strategy does not mean a website on the Net. It
means envisioning the future (remember the last 2 lines of
Part III: your biggest competitor two
years from now might not even exist yet). It means ensuring that
email is present on every desktop in the organisation. It means
everyone in the company can access the Internet for mission-critical
website, and over dial-up (since leased lines are still way too
expensive). It means integrating the External website with an Intranet
and an Extranet, the former for employees, the latter for
customers. It means extending the system for business-to-business
commerce.
Developing Internet Vision is perhaps the most challenging aspect. How
will the Internet revolutionse your business? How would you do your
business if you started now, with the Net in place? This is where
organisations need to think through their strategy from first
principles. And perhaps, look at IndiaWorld’s example. India’s largest
Network of websites, reaches out to over 75,000 people via the Web and
an email service, generating 100,000+ page views daily, and arguably,
India’s only profitable Internet venture. It did not exist three years
ago!
We didn’t set out to do all this three years ago — some of it just
happened. We began with a belief that if we are in the business and if
we are close enough to our customers, the ideas will automatically
come. And they have!
The Internet is not about technology, it is about being better
informed, it is about communicating, it is about doing business. The
Internet is about doing the things that you do everyday — better,
faster, and without barriers. And in the process, perhaps radically
change — or create — a new industry. That, for us at IndiaWorld, is
the real essence of the Internet: the capability to translate ideas
into action rapidly, the knowledge that we are making a difference to
many thousands worldwide, the belief that we are at the forefront of
what is perhaps the most important development of our generation, a
conviction that battles of the future will not be decided by size or
money, but by the ability to out-think the competition. Three years
on, we feel we have just begun.
