Even before Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to join Paul Allen’s efforts to build a BASIC interpreter, firms like IBM, ICL, DEC, Data General, Cray and yet some more existed. However, Microsoft (MS) did not come out of their cradle. It was born in an unlikely place called Seattle, from the efforts of two very unlikely people who would not have been candidates for beatification in the first four decades after ENIAC.

There is a critical lesson in this analogy. Just because we have produced software services companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro, it does not mean these firms can build the next great software product. There is a certain sense of agony and frustration among many intellectuals because they see Indian IT services firms falling short of their aspiration to see both a brand, and non-linear revenue Indian firms. That feeling is a misplaced sentiment. Going by that logic, IBM should not have had to buy an operating system from MS – without this one historical event, MS might have been a very different story. IBM had Nobel laureates on its payroll; why did it have to go buy an operating system from a totally unknown entity like Microsoft? It is quite another story that MS did not in the first place have what it was selling to IBM. So, expecting TCS, Infosys and Wipro to build a product brand is as much of an impossibility as to ask a hen to deliver a duckling.

That said, the bigger question still remains; if not from the stable of the known companies, but from somewhere else, is there hope that India would produce a software product company like a Microsoft, an Oracle or SAP? The pointers are saying yes.

But before we explore that, we need to ask ourselves a very fundamental question. Is there a reason why the three companies have come out of developed nations like the US and Germany? Is there is a linkage between building product companies and a certain level of overall socio-economic progress? I would argue that there is. There is a distinct possibility that India would emerge as a developed economy in my own lifetime and if that happens, there is no reason why we should not expect a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs or a Larry Ellison to happen right here. Though, as I argued before, they would be born outside the confines of the existing companies just like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.

A few days ago, I was told that MS revenues from India this year would be in the range of $1 billion. I have grown up in an India where nothing was a $1 billion industry. India becoming a $1 billion market for a single software firm is mind-boggling. It tells me that if the deliverer arrives, there is indeed hope that he would survive.

Before MS, Oracle or SAP became global firms, they were domestically well known, they cut their milk teeth in the home-market before venturing out.

Finally, software products do not get created because someone knows how to write the code. Software products – for that matter any product – get created because the creator feels the need for a certain something in a deeply personal manner. People who envision and create products have a certain affinity, a calling, sometimes and a feeling akin to a craving for something. A dress designer must love dressing up; a composer must love the idea of music itself and not learn it primarily because it is the highest paying industry that makes job offers in the third year of someone’s engineering course. Software product creators must experience the same emotions, have the same craving like a dress designer and a music composer for that something that does not exist and then go make it or sometimes, get it made.

Interestingly, it is not enough to just have a domestic market and a bunch of people with a special craving for creating something or an uncanny ability to anticipate a need and the ability to build a solution for it ahead of others. What makes great companies, products and brands happen in a country at a certain time is difficult to explain in any linear, logical way. It is part science, part economics, part politics (only free and true democracies have produced great software companies), part social structure, and part passion and part witchcraft. So far, we were agonising with just the part science piece right. But only now do I see the beginning of the other pieces nicely falling in place and I would take a bet that by 2020, India would have produced a global software brand and a couple more in the subsequent five years.