Leadership during Tough Times – Cash & Customers

Business Guru Ram Charan in his latest book “Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times” has extolled the importance of cash & cash management during tough economic times.

Apart from Cash, there is one more key component for success during tough times – customers. Put together, I call it “Focus on Cash & Customers as the key to success”.

Cash is king. No doubt about it. Without customers, there will be no cash and without cash, company will die. Thus the mantra ““Focus on Cash & Customers as the key to success”.

Many companies have lost their entrepreneurial sprit

All businesses are stated by entrepreneurs who have a definite idea of meeting the customer needs and know how to make money by doing so. Entrepreneurs always have their minds & hearts set on creating customer satisfaction profitably. As a startups the founders know the importance of cash and they tend to have a maniacal focus on cash.

As the company grows, the need for capital increase, which forces the company to seek outside investments. The new investors have different objectives than the original entrepreneurs. Thus slowly the founders make way for professional management. Thus with growth, companies tend to lose its entrepreneurial shine. Focus on customer gets replaced by focus on Wall Street. Focus on cash gets replaced by focus on EPS.

During tough economic times, companies that have a close connection to customers are the ones that survive and those companies that can focus on cash and the customer will thrive.

To illustrate take a look at some of the struggling companies today: Nortel, Mervyn’s & Motorola. If these companies were to disappear tomorrow, not many would shed a tear. For most customers, these vendors have become irrelevant. This is a real case of losing customer focus and thus stumbling for a big fall.

On the other hand look at Apple, Intel, Wal-Mart, & Costco. These companies have lots of loyal customers and customers feel the need for these vendors.

Basics of Business

To understand the importance of Cash & customers, one need not go to fancy B-school. Even running a corner coffee shop will teach this basic lesson.

Years ago, I knew a businessman whose nickname was “Cash”. He ran a small business (roughly ~$1-2 million) of supplying computer parts/peripherals in Bangalore. Given this of business, most of the sales was on credit – thus putting an enormous strain on this working capital. As I knew him well, he shared his thoughts on the business. At all points of time, he exactly knew his cash position, his cash requirements for the week, and the expected cash flow for the week. He also knew which customer owed him how much and when to approach the customer for the cash. His maniacal focus on cash led to the nick name “Cash”.

In today’s Wall Street driven companies, I have not seen such an entrepreneurial focus either on customers or cash. Managers in these large companies are more focused on process (rather than customer interests), managers are driven by different sets of expectations – net sales, product development, efficient operations etc. Thus losing focus on the basics of business.

Even in my current organization, I once asked for financial data regarding my product line. I wanted to know the income from sales and the net costs associated with the product. In most large organizations such data is hard to come by. Similarly in my company also the data was either not available or the process based bureaucracy prevents such data being shared. Therefore as a product manager, I cannot exactly say how profitable is my product? Instead I have to rely on an educated guess. Given such an environment, it is hard to make information based decisions.

In one situation I have seen a complete breakdown of customer focus. Customer on one hand wanted a new version of the software released with a set of features, but since we do not have the financial information to make a decision, we negotiated to a smaller set of requirements based on the engineering resources we were willing to deploy. The account manager who is responsible for the sale was interested in seeing the product release as a milestone and not the features/customer needs. Corporate businesses have developed tones of management mumbo-jumbo to mask the internal failures and show a failure as a success. In the bigger scheme of things, a large fortune-500 company lost focus on the customer thus antagonizing the customer.

Large companies can afford to lose a customer once a while and still prosper as new customers are added continuously. BUT during tough times adding new customers becomes tricky and thus losing existing customers can quickly snowball into a disaster. So chasing short term revenue at the cost of long term customer relationship will only lead to failure.

Closing thoughts

Economic recession is merely an indication of changing times which causes hardships. It is vital to keep focus on the basics of business at all times – even more so during tough times. This even means disregarding the advice from the Wall Street when necessary. Costco resisted the demands to increase its prices when commodities price soared in mid-2008, thus earning customer loyalty instead of focusing on quarterly results.

The best way to survive and thrive during tough economic times is to build an entrepreneurial culture which encourages managers to focus on cash & customers, and then allowing them to make decisions. Managers & leaders from various departments are perfectly capable of making the right decision if they have the right guidance and information.
Always remember that it is the customer who provides the vital cash needed for the company’s survival, so focus on the customer such that your cash position is comfortable.

Surviving Tough Times – Master the art of Pricing

Today, Jan 14th 2009, Nortel Networks filed for chapter-11 bankruptcy protection, Google announced a small lay-off, and the bad news on the economic front continues. This recession is nothing different than the past ones, surviving tough times takes lot more business prudence and guts.

Companies that survive such tough times are the ones that are still relevant to their customers and are the ones that still provide value to customers. Where “Value” is defined by the goods/service provided for a fee – which the customer considers as value. To be more precise, the price of the sale – determines value.

Companies typically tend to make two major mistakes when it comes to pricing:

1. Over-pricing the product.
2. Under-pricing the product

In both cases, the results can be devastating – if the mistakes are continued for a long period of time.

In this article, let us examine the case of two technology titans that are suffering today due to pricing mistakes.

Case of Over-pricing
Companies such as Nortel Networks stumbled in 2001 – when the tech bubble burst, and since then they still haven’t got their pricing strategy right. Customers feel that Nortel’s prices are too expensive and are shopping for alternatives from Huawei, Cisco, & other vendors.

Nortel Networks sold networking & telecom equipment for a long time, and over the period, it developed several proprietary technologies which enabled it to sell at a premium price, but as IP networks became pervasive, the technology advantage of Nortel stated to erode. But Nortel had built an expensive base and the company refused to embrace IP technology wholeheartedly. As a result, the cost structure at Nortel was high – which in turn forced Nortel to sell at a higher price – and that ultimately eroded the customer value.

Case of Under-Pricing
SUN Microsystems is another struggling company today – which is expected to file for chapter-11 bankruptcy protection soon. The company suffers from twin pricing problems: Over pricing on their server products and under pricing on their software offerings. Sun mainstay is their proprietary servers based on its UltraSPARC® processors and Solaris® Operating systems. Initially when these servers were introduced 20 years ago, they had a huge performance lead over the competition and customers loved its products. During the heights of the DOT.com bubble, SUN servers were so pervasive that SUN called itself as the DOT “.” in the “DOT.Com”. With the advent of Linux & powerful Intel processors, the technological advantage enjoyed by SUN began to disappear and soon customers came to realize that they can replace the expensive SUB servers with cheap Lunix-Intel based machines. Thus SUN started to lose its value proposition.

If losing the server value proposition was bad, SUN committed blunders by creating JAVA – a free to use software. JAVA was created by SUN, but it could run on any hardware platforms including Intel server platform and was free. Customers loved the “free” concept and started developing JAVA based applications for Intel platforms – which resulted in zero revenues for SUN. Adding more to this blunder SUN opened its Solaris OS to Intel platforms – for “Free”. This allowed small time vendors to create powerful servers based on Intel/AMD processors and with Solaris OS. All this meant that SUN will not make any money from this. Lastly to rub salt on its self-inflected wounds. SUN decided to buy MySQL for ~$1 billion, thus throwing valuable cash in exchange for a non-revenue generating product.

On the software side of its business, SUN was leaving lots of money on the table. On one hand SUN was spending money to develop & maintain this software and was getting very little in return. Thus under pricing its offerings to a point where it was suicidal.

Art of Pricing

Every businessman – including the roadside food vendor knows about pricing his wares, but few really master the art of pricing. Pricing is very complex because value is very subjective and is solely determined by the customer. As a result most business are guilt of either over pricing or under pricing ( mostly under pricing & leaving money on the table).

In a large complex business, pricing is often so opaque that hardly anyone in the organization can really justify the price. So people resort to cost plus margin based pricing, which is easy to understand – but has almost no bearing on the value delivered to the customer.

Leaving Money on the Table

Probably the biggest mistake one does when it comes to pricing is leaving money on the table – i.e., providing freebies to the customer. The next common mistake is to under price or offer unnecessary discounts by wrongly packaging & thus under pricing the offering.

I do not claim myself to be a master of pricing, but I do know the basics of price theory. I can also confess to the mistakes of leaving money on the table.

The most common reason why companies leave money on the table is “Customer service” or perceived customer value by offering free services. This mistake often happens with large customers. Companies are so enamored with such large customers, that they are willing to offer several freebies in the hope of keeping the customer happy. This practice in turn makes the customer even more demanding and that can soon turn into a death spiral if things are not brought under control.

Surprisingly, there is a very easy way to control this problem – Say “Yes – we can offer that (service/product additions) for a fee”. Customers tend to push the supplier as much as possible and they will push till the point the vendor says he will have to charge for it.

Under pricing

Under pricing occurs when the vendor is willing to sell a product/service at a price point below what the customer is willing to pay. For example, the customer is willing to pay $100 for a product, but the vendor has marked the price as $75. In such cases, the customer appreciates the discount provided and quickly grabs the product. Such pricing errors are quite common in everyday business – especially when it comes to intangible services.

Couple of years ago, I happened to meet an entrepreneur – Shankar Subramaniam who runs a consulting/training firm called NineDots. Within the first few meetings, I became clear to me that Shankar was under pricing his services. We then looked at the service offering and repackaged/re-branded it as results driven consulting services. This simple exercise helped him raise the fees by almost 3x!

How to catch pricing errors?

Pricing errors happen in almost all businesses and is often difficult to catch small errors. But big mistakes such as Over pricing or heavy discounting is easy to catch - via accounting data.

If a product/service is over priced, then the demand for the product/service drops at a rate disproportional to the industry standards, thus indicating over pricing error. Folks at Nortel know that the demand for their products is falling or their market share is falling. Customers were opting for Huawei or Cisco equipment. Even the investors knew it and punished the stock price, yet the management could do little.

In small businesses, entrepreneurs know by instinct that when demand drops disproportionately, they need to lower the prices. But in very large businesses – things are not that easy – but that does not mean that it can’t be done.

In case of under pricing error, the demand raises rapidly and to a point that it can overwhelm the company. But entrepreneurs know that when demand increases beyond a point, they have to raise prices. The easiest way to catch such pricing errors is to do a basic Du-Pont analysis for your business line & compare it with that of the nearest competitor. Simply stated if your ROI (return on Investment) is lower than that of the competition, then there is a pricing error. Du-Pont analysis helps in determining if the errors exist, but it does not tell much on correcting it, so it is a good starting point.

Multi-Part pricing & Dynamic Pricing

Thanks to world of computers, today companies can run sophisticated pricing models which allows dynamic pricing. Sabre Systems developed by American Airlines allows AA to reprice tickets every 6 minutes based on the demand & capacity. Similarly there is complex software for pricing for retail clothing, commodities etc. This system of dynamic pricing allows little pricing errors.

Multi-Part pricing is another way to reduce pricing errors. Multi-part pricing allows for pricing at different levels: One price for product acquisition, another price for maintenance and another price for service etc. Gillette is a very good example of multi-part pricing. Gillette sells razors at a discount and makes money on the blades. Similarly HP sells printers at a very low price (sometimes at a loss) and makes money on the cartages. Similarly Oracle, SAP etc have developed multi-part pricing for their products.

Closing thoughts

Pricing is an art. Of the 4 P’s of marketing, Price is the most complex. To get the right price almost requires the 5th P – Prayer. If you are in business, then spend great amount of time on regular basis to determine if you have got the right pricing.

My marketing professor once told me “As a marketer, your best friend must be an accountant” This lesson is not to be forgotten – so if you are involved in making pricing decisions, then befriend the accountant and go through the valuable accounting data to come up with your pricing analysis, and from that analysis develop your selling price.

In tough economic times, it is vital to get the pricing right. Correct pricing and aligning the operation costs with the price becomes the key for success in these tough times. Take this opportunity to revisit your pricing and cost structures so that you can emerge out of this recession stronger and better than your competition.

Barriers to E-Learning

Today companies are spending enormous sums of money to train & retrain their employees. Employees have an extensive range of training programs delivered in multiple ways. The competitive pressures and market forces are driving companies to keep their cost of training low. Note that training costs should also include the loss of productivity during the training period

The need for having a wide range of training programs and the pressures to manage costs and also increase employee satisfaction has led to rapid growth in E-learning.

E-Learning emerged a decade ago – in late 1990’s and has grown significantly since then. However the success of E-learning has been mostly limited to USA. In rest of the world E-learning is yet to succeed.

The barriers to success of e-learning in other countries are as follows:

• Language barriers: Most of E-learning content was developed for US audience, hence the language & accent is in American English. E-learning content has to be localized to account for local languages.
• Mindset barriers: For many people, learning has to be face-to-face – i.e., person to person contact is essential. E-learning is seen as too synthetic and impersonal. The general perception is that e-learning is not true learning.

However, employees do not find any technical barriers to e-learning in the organizational level. This is mainly because employees today broadly have the same level of computer skills.

Requirements Gathering For New Product Development

Developing a new product is a daunting task. If the product happens to be new to the market or new to the world, then developing a new product is even more challenging. There are no fool proof methods. Having worked in Silicon Valley with startups & highly successful companies, I can give a few pointers towards successful new product development.
The first step in successful product development is requirements gathering. Requirements’ gathering is a complex task with various sub tasks and levels – which is usually accomplished through several iterations.
New products typically have their roots in an idea. The idea is then developed into a product concept (see: Innovation Management - Taking Ideas to Concept). Once a product concept is developed, the next stage is: Define the product requirements.

What is a New Product?
First let us define what is a new product? A new product in context to this article means “new to the world” type products – i.e., such a product is being introduced for the first time: First time for the company or first time to the market. Examples of such new products include:

• Google Chrome:- A new type of browser – and the first one for Google.
• SMART Car
• World Mate Mobile software
• iTunes:- iTunes was first of its kind in music store/distribution system.
• Motorola’s Iridium
• 3M’s Post It
• Blackberry Pager
• Cast Iron Integrated Appliances

New product Requirement Gathering

Requirements for a new-to-the-world product will always be vague. Therefore the best strategy is to capture the requirements – however vague they are in a document. New product requirement gathering starts with identifying needs of various stakeholders:

• Customers & Users
• Promoters
• Developers

1. Customer & Users

The need for a new product comes mainly due to the shortcomings in the existing products. As a result, current products in the market are unable to meet the customer needs. So the first step is to identify the customer needs. For a new-to-the-world product, we need to capture the perceived customer needs.

1.1 Perceived Customer needs

Identifying customer needs for a new product is often tough - In most cases, many customers are able to express their frustrations with the current products in the market & identify the shortcomings in the current products, but customers cannot express their needs for a new product. Therefore one must be prudent enough to derive the customer needs.

There is a well established method to capture the perceived needs of the customer – called as Product Opportunity Gap (POG) analysis. POG analysis can be used very effectively to discover the latent needs, the current shortcomings in the existing products and future needs of the customer. For more information on POG see: Product Management - Developing breakthrough products

For example, let us take an example of developing a personal video/MP3 player. The customer needs for a personal video player are:

1. Large screen size – but small enough to carry around in a pocket.
2. Battery life to last at least for 10-12 hours.
3. Removable battery for replacement
4. External battery charger & internal battery charger – i.e., user should be able to charge the battery while the battery is inside the device.
5. Universal power adaptor – should work on both 110V & 220 V systems.
6. Easy/intuitive user interface.
7. Ergonomic design for comfortable handling. Anti-Slip hand holding areas.
8. Splash proof & water resistance
9. Connect to PC via USB & WiFi, connect to TV via HDMI or S-video
10. USB host interface so that user can connect other data storage devices.
11. Ability to read data from other data storage devices ( Pen drives, portable hard drives, video cameras, etc.)
12. Connect to headsets via Bluetooth.
13. FM player, MPEG3, & MPEG4 decoder i.e., multi format audio/video decoder
14. Digital Video Recorder – ability to record TV programs.
15. Rugged construction so that the product does not get damaged when accidentally dropped.
16. Stylish design with interchangeable colored cases & Hip carrying case

These are some of the basic requirements for any type of personal video players. Data storage technologies can then become additional requirements can be used to create different types of products:

1. DVD player or Blue-Ray player
2. 100-300GB Hard drive to store movies, music & photos
3. 32GB or 64 GB, extendable up to 256 GB Flash memory via memory cards.

1.2 Intended Operating Environment

A product will operate in some operating environment. Often times, this operating environment is pre-existing and can be well defined. The intended operating environment must be well documented in the product requirement document – so that the developers should well understand and if required the operating environment can be reproduced in the development labs.

Understanding the user environment is crucial for the success of the new product. All persons involved in developing the new product should be able understand the user operating cases and use cases. This helps in developing products that meet the user requirements.

Operating environment factors include: Places (home, office, traveling etc); User conditions such as: Dusty environment, Hot weather, cold weather, high humidity etc; User knowledge or cultural bias etc.For example take the case of the personal video player. The operating conditions include:

1. Usage at home (bedrooms mostly), office & mostly while traveling – in cars, trains & flight
2. Should operate in extreme weather conditions from 40oC to -5 oC, should be able to operate in dusty, humid environment
3. Users may not be computer savvy
4. Users may not be very comfortable with English language
5. Power supply conditions may vary greatly – ability to work with dirty power.
6. Users are usually teenagers.

1.3 Customer Use cases

How does a customer use the product? What are the different uses for the product?

It is very important to document all the possible customer use cases, so that developers can understand how the product is being used. When a new product is being developed, it may not be possible to capture all the possible use cases – extra effort must be taken to document as many use cases as possible.

Users often times use the product in ways that was not originally intended by the manufacturer. But such use cases cannot be documented before the product is developed. This implies that use cases must be documented continuously even after the product has been released in the market.

2. Promoter’s requirement

When a new product is being developed, promoters play a major role in driving the product requirements. Promoters – aka investors or managers are the real brains behind the new product. Promoters provide the direction, vision and the business rationale for the new product. The common requirements which are typically driven by promoters are:

1. Technology Platform
2. Business models
3. Business use cases

2.1 Technology Platform

Promoters often decide on the technology platform – often times without consultation with the potential customers. This is often done on gut instincts. Many a times promoters have deep understanding of the market and that gives them the requisite knowledge to choose appropriate technology platform for the product.

What is technology platform?

The meaning of Technology platform varies widely with the industry – but it all refers to the foundation technology on which the product will be built on. For example: In case of software, it could imply the operating system (Windows, Unix, Linux etc.); In case of automobiles it could imply the engine technology (Diesel or gasoline or Natural Gas or electric or hybrid); In case of cell phones it could mean the operating standard (GSM or CDMA or 3G) etc.

Promoters are the best persons to decide on the broad framework of underlying technologies that will be used to develop the product.

2.2 Business Models

Every product or a service in the market has a business model in which the business sells the product/service. It is the promoter’s job to define the business model for the new product. The business model decisions include: manufacturing location/partners, distribution systems, pricing, margins, licensing etc.

Business models play an important role in defining the final product. The business model for a new product has to be determined before the product development starts – and refined over time. As the business models change, the product features/specifications also change. During this process, it is the role of the product manager to closely orchestrate the business model needs to the developers and the vice-versa.

Business models must then be translated into product requirements and these requirements should be orchestrated to the developers. Developers in turn can provide feed back to the promoters and help them fine tune the business models.

To understand this, take the case of iPod & iTunes. Apple built a business model around personal audio/video players, where users can manage music/video in their iPods by using iTunes store to download music via a local copy of iTunes on the computer. This complete business model was the key factor that ensured the success of iPod, while other MP3 players failed to build a sustaining business mode to support the product.

2.3 Business Use cases

Business use case is an extension of business models. In case of commercial/industrial products, the product will have a buyer, which is the firm, who is different from the user. The Business use cases include factors such as operating costs, total cost of economy, ease of maintenance, serviceability, customer support, release management etc

For example, Microsoft bundles its Office suite in many different ways – based on licensing. A basic license will consist only of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, & Outlook. While enterprise license will have lot more: Visio, MS FrontPage, MS project, MS Notes etc. This differential product bundling is an example of business use case. Similarly, GM & Ford offer their cars with different pricing and services bundle for car rental companies.

3. Developers Product

Developers are the engineers & technicians who actually develop the product. Developers can give valuable inputs to product requirements – mainly in terms of what is technically feasible and with inputs on how to make a particular feature better. The role of developers in requirement gathering can be broadly classified as:

1. Project constraints
2. Product improvements

3.1 Project Constraints

Every product development project has its set of constraints. These constraints in turn limit what is feasible – which in turn defines the final product. Developer’s inputs are very valuable in developing new products – mainly because new product ideas are often very lofty, which is very high in promise but not based on reality. The developers can then give the project a healthy dose of reality.

Promoters and customers often start out with a very high ambition and often demand a product so advanced that the current engineering technology would be able to deliver it. Therefore the product requirement must be toned down to match with the reality of today’s technologies.
The typical constraints that bound any product development projects are:

1. Resource constraints
2. Technology constraints
3. Time-cost-quality constraints

The project constraints limit what is feasible with the given set of resources. On one hand constraints act as a limiting function, but on the other hand constraints also act as impetuous for innovation. Developers are smart to figure out ways to go around the constraints and innovate. Product managers must encourage such innovative thinking to prompt developers to innovate while giving the constraints.

3.2 Product Improvements

Product Developers are typically engineers & technicians who have several years of experience in developing similar products. With experience, they would have learnt ways and means to improve on any product. So given a set of product requirements, they will certainly have ideas to improve the product in ways that was never thought before. These improvements will be small incremental ideas – which makes the product better or cheaper to manufacture or easier to use. It is therefore mandatory for the product manager to gather these ideas from the developers. (Also see: Ideas to Concept – Small Ideas are better)

Product improvement ideas/suggestions will be coming all through the development phase. It may be tempting to have all these ideas to be incorporated into the product design; however such a move will have an adverse impact on the project schedule. The best solution is to capture these product improvement ideas in the product requirement document before the start of the project, and ideas generated during product development must be viewed on its merit and project impact to decide if that idea can be incorporated into the current development version, or should it be deferred to the next version. To accomplish this, product management must start with a plan for the follow-on product to the first version – even when the first generation product is in development.

4. Form a feedback loop

New-to-the-world products do not always meet the customer requirements in the first release. The new product may meet some of the customer needs – but the solution will often have its fair share of short comings. It is therefore very prudent to plan for multiple revision of the product. A general rule of thumb is that a new product will take at least three versions before it becomes stable and widely accepted in the market. New Product development projects will have negative NPV during the initial few releases of the product and this must be factored into the product development financial planning.

So the best way to improve the product is to release the product into the market – for the target set of customers, take their feed back and then develop the next generation/version of the product. During this cycle, experience from the customers, promoters and developers must be captured as feed back to the product and convert it into product requirements and then incorporated into the next version of the product.

Once customers start using the product, it is very essential that customer experiences are observed and documented by promoters, developers & product management. Documenting the customer experience is a form of customer feedback – but it defers in the basic fact that the customer does not give the inputs, instead the customer is observed while he/she is using the product and that observations is documented. This practice is called Customer Anthropology.

Customer feedback, customer studies, promoter feedback, and developer feedback should all be channeled into a new product requirement document. This closed loop orchestration must be repeated several times to achieve mass customer acceptance.

Closing Thoughts

Developing new product requirements can be summarized in the following state diagram.

Product requirements initially start out as a vague set of ideas which needs to be filtered down in to a set of instructions that can be implemented by developers/technicians – to realize a product. New product development is an iterative process – where at the end of each iteration, a working product is produced. The product released at end of each iteration will not be perfect and will need further refinement & improvements which has to be done in the subsequent development cycles.

Promoters and developers must be aware that new product development will take at least three iterations to get to the targeted set of customers. Product managers and project managers must plan accordingly for multiple iterations – and see to it that the product is enhanced progressively through the iterations.

Internet Bandwidth Cap will limit Innovation

Today in New York Times there is an article “Comcast to Place a Cap on Internet Downloads”. This is first sign of trouble in Internet economy. The idea of putting cap on Internet download is akin to putting up speed barriers in the information freeway - A move which will surely kill innovation.

Internet has been one of the prime drivers of Innovation in the last decade. Internet changed how people communicate, how people access information, how people buy things and most importantly how people live their lives.

I live in India, where Internet is relatively expensive and usually comes with a bandwidth cap. As a result, I know how stifling it can get if Telco’s are allowed to impose such caps and restrict Internet usage.

To understand the impact of download cap, one must come to India. In India, YouTube is a non-starter, IPTV is still in its infancy, Police impose strict monitoring rules on cybercafé, i.e.: Internet usage is limited.

With all these restrictions, it is not surprising to see that there is not even one Indian company that became successful in the Internet space. Here is pop quiz: Name top-10 Internet companies from India?

Do you find that tough? Then try the Top-5. To sum up the popularity of the top-5 Indian Internet companies is less than that of a small Internet startup like Ciao.com or cuil.com. E-Commerce is virtually non-existent in India. Even the biggest Indian retailers do not have E-commerce presence.

Closing Thoughts

Open and unlimited Internet is the key for innovation. Restricting Internet usage will kill innovation and competitiveness of US firms. In the long run, it will affect the overall development of various technologies: Internet, Software, Hardware, semiconductors, entertainment, and telecommunications.