In the 90s it was the coming of the internet to every household. In the 00's it was the emergence of mobile technology. Coming in to 2012 most tech guru's predicted that the next few years will see an emergence of "the ecosystem", where all our devices will run similar software and communicate with each other to make our lives more seamless. They claim that the change has already started and that it will soon take over our daily lives. While I wholeheartedly agree with them I only have one problem; this revolution isn't hitting India just yet.
The problem with this revolution is that it hinges on two key element, the first of which is the internet, something that, believe it or not, is very much in it's infancy in India. I am on one of Airtel's "high speed" internet plans which gives me internet speeds of 2Mbps, until I hit 30GB when they limit my speed to 256Kbps. Every month, without fail, I cross my high speed limit and an relegated to dial-up speeds. While there are better plans most are too expensive for the average consumer to choose and generally top out at 4-8 Mbps. In the US an "average" plan offers speeds of 42Mbps and download limits of 300GB. If the so called broadband in our home isn't slow enough for the coming revolution, the speeds we're getting on our mobile devices is far, far lower. With not even 10% of the country switched over to 3G, while many countries are looking to switch to 4G, we truly are in the dark ages of mobile internet. It take upwards of half a minute to load up the Facebook app on my phone!
The concept of the ecosystem is that all our devices are in some way linked. When we get content on one device it magically appears on all the others. This brings me to my second problem with this "revolution". When we have the ecosystem set up all around us we need something to fill it with. In India there is almost no way to legally download digital media. The furthest companies have gotten is allowing us most apps which aren't banned in India by their developers. If they haven't realized, maybe they soon will, that this is why most people download pirated songs and videos. This is why the music industry is suffering so badly in India.If there were a way to purchase music legally at a reasonable price I'm sure most people would, after all we know that the artists deserve compensation for their work. But there isn't.
The ecosystem is meant to make our lives easier to use but the key aspects are missing in India. Why has India been relegated to the back end of the revolution when there are 1.2 billion people who can potentially take part? The era of the ecosystem will come but first India has to truly undergo the changes other countries have experienced in the last 20 years, we need the Internet to become a ubiquitous entity without someone holding us back and we need access to the content to fill our ecosystem. If companies like Apple, Samsung and Google try to bring their ecosystems to India they WILL fail at capturing the larger audience because they will be too early.
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