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S Somasegar, corporate vice president, developer division, Microsoft Corporation and the man behind the Microsoft India Development Centre in Hyderabad, is a very happy man now.
Happy not only because Windows Vista is out in the market, but the 300 engineers at IDC, Hyderabad were behind developing the new operating system from Windows.
In an interview with Contributing Editor Shobha Warrier, Somasegar speaks about how his team developed Vista and a lot more.
You must be a very proud and satisfied man now that the Microsoft India Development Centre which you have set up played a crucial role in developing Vista. . .
Absolutely. About 300 engineers at the IDC, Hyderabad worked on a variety of technologies for Windows Vista. It has made us feel quite happy about the contributions made by the team in making Vista successful.
What exactly was the role of IDC, Hyderabad in the development of Vista?
If you look at Windows Vista, there are hundreds of new features . . . and some of the important functionalities and technologies are developed here. I will give you a couple of examples. The IDC team has delivered the UNIX interoperability and migration technologies. This is the first time that these technologies are shipping as part of the client operating system.
The fax and scan applications and infrastructure in the operating system have also been built at the IDC.
The networking group in the IDC has contributed the VPN (Virtual Private Network), RRAS (Routing and Remote Access Service) and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) technologies that enable mobile workers to connect to their corporate network and manage the network addresses for enterprises. These are integral components of the Network Access Protection (NAP) initiative -- a key security feature in Windows Vista.
Development of the 'Complete PC Backup and Restore' feature in Vista happened at IDC. This feature creates an image of your entire Vista computer which can be used to recover when your computer is not booting due to any hardware or software failure.
In addition, IDC, Hyderabad delivered several other important features for Windows Vista like the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (allowing enterprises to customize the deployment of IE), User State Migration Tool (lets enterprises migrate their line of business applications to new machines running Vista), Internet Connection Sharing (ICS -- allows broadband connections to be shared between home computers) and several other infrastructure technologies like Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Terminal Services Gateway, and File System utilities.
On what criterion did you allot the work to be done in the US and also at IDC, Hyderabad?
It is a combination of two things. First, we look at what kind of expertise we have here, what kind of expertise we have in the US and what kind of expertise we have in the rest of the world. Then we look at what kind of features and technologies we want to develop. Depending on that, we allot work to various centres.
For example, we know there is interoperability expertise here. So, we allot that work here.
I have read that after your US development centre, IDC is the most important development centre for Microsoft.
It is true. IDC, Hyderabad has also emerged as the largest development centre.
Do you have only Indians working here?
Primarily, we have Indian origin people working here. We also have some non-Indian origin people. It is an open place. And if somebody from any other development centre wants to come and work here, they are welcome to do that.
A few days ago, Bill Gates slammed the new US visa restrictions saying it would prevent real talent going to the US. Have you been facing a talent crunch at Microsoft in the US?
Absolutely. For the last 31 years, we as a company have aspirations to hire so many people every year but we fall short of our aspirations because there is a gap in the demand and supply.
Are you talking about the situation in the US, or do you feel the same in other places too?
I am talking about the US. More recently, in the last four, five or six years, there is a decrease in the enrolment in computer science courses and curriculum in colleges in the US. This, we think, will create a big gap between demand for and supply of talented people.
So we always talk about how we can increase the enrolment and how we can attract talented people from around the world if they choose to come to the US and work for companies like Microsoft.
Does that mean you have been recruiting people from other parts of the world in the last few years because there is a talent crunch in the US?
Not just the last four-five years. I remember as early as 1995-96, we were recruiting people from outside the United States. Whenever they are interested in coming to the United States and working there, we go and hire them.
What kind of impact will it have on your major development centre in the US?
As a company, we have lot more aspirations about the kind of products we want to develop and deliver to the market. When we think about growth, we think about increasing our work force. Say, if we want to increase our work force by 100 people, and let us say we get only 73 people in the US, we need to look for the rest of the 27 people somewhere else.
So, as we increase our growth, we think a big chunk of growth is going to happen not only in the US but in the rest of the world also.
We think of ourselves as a global company, building global products for the global customer base. So, if we can get the brightest people from all around the world, we can build better products. So, a part of our growth is going to take place in the United States and a part of our growth is going to take place outside the United States.
In this scenario, do you see the IDC, Hyderabad playing a major role in future?
Absolutely. We see this centre growing both in terms of number of people and in terms of the R&D work we do at Microsoft.
Let me ask you about Microsoft Vista now. You need huge disk space to run the Vista. Who is your target customer?
Anybody and everybody who has a personal computer.
You mean an ordinary person who has a PC and has already been using a Microsoft operating system?
Vista is targetted at anybody who uses a personal computer. He could be a home user, he could be a small business customer, he could be a medium business customer, he could be an enterprise customer, and he could be a student.
What do you say about Apple's Mac ad asking, "you probably need a new PC to run Vista. So go beyond Vista and get a Mac"?
(Laughs) The Apple guys have an operating system just like we have an operating system. It so happened that we have more customers than Mac has today. We strongly believe that if you look at the history of Microsoft, we have always been a platform company at heart.
We see to it that we have the best operating system and we provide the best value for both our customers and those who want to build applications on our OS. That is why we invest in a huge way in the operating system.
What are the compliments and brickbats you got for Vista?
Let me start from the negative and go to the positive. In hindsight, we feel it took a long time to get Vista done. The main criticism was why it took us so long. We do not want to have such a long gap again. You can call this brickbat or constructive criticism or feedback.
The positive is that we are super excited about the kind of things we have done on Vista and our customers are also super excited about it. We have a highly secure operating system and we have also simplified it. It has made it easier for customers to operate the system.
The best compliment was when people told us, 'we wish we had this two or three years ago.'
You said you took five years to come out with Vista. Have you already started thinking about the next product?
As the team finished on Vista, we have started thinking about what we should offer next. We are in the planning process, and probably in the next 3-4 months, we will be able to talk more on this.
One thing we know, we don't want five more years to come out with another operating system.
Do you feel customers are becoming more and more demanding?
Yes. The day they become less demanding, I will be a worried person because that shows we have become irrelevant. I like when customers ask for more and more.
Majority of the world uses Microsoft operating systems, still do you get the jitters when a new operating system is being launched?
Any time we ship a new product, we have a lot of euphoria and also the same amount of anxiety too. The good news is, we don't do our products in isolation. We are big believers in self-hosting; Community Technology Preview. In the last 2-3 years, we have been constantly in touch with the customers and had been getting regular feedback from them. Hundreds of our customers participate in the beta program, so we have a good understanding of the customers' mind.
By self-hosting, I am talking about us deploying our products internally at Microsoft, using our products day to day and in some sense betting the farm on our products even before we ship them to our customers. For example, we have many tens of thousands of people running Windows Vista on their systems for many, many months and long before we shipped Windows Vista to our customers.
So, in addition to getting feedback from our customers we also have a good handle on how the product performs because a lot of us use the product every day even before we deliver it to our customers.
Can you tell us something more about Community Technology Preview?
We at the Developer division -- the division I am responsible -- for invented this concept. Sometimes when we release the beta version, customers may not like certain features. But they may not have enough time to react. So, we will have to wait for the next release to do the modifications. Then, I said we should involve customers from the design stage itself.
We let customers test the beta version and give us their feedback. So, we have the opportunity to work with them on an ongoing basis and create a better product. We have community feedback on our products wherever they are being developed. This is what we call the Community Technology Preview (CTP)
So, if you look at Visual Studio today, we are working on the net version of Visual Studio, codenamed Orcas. We most probably will ship a beta version later this year. A week ago we have released a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Orcas.
Orcas would provide the developer toolsets needed for some of the technologies, along with Office 2007 support and key innovations like data access strategy.
How do you select the community?
We don't select. When we release a product on CTP, anybody can go and pick it up. We pioneered it at the Developer division and now most of Microsoft is using the CTP.
What is IDC doing now?
About 300 engineers were working on Vista, and the strength here is 1,200 or 1,300 people. We are working on a variety of products now. While people at Redmond are working on planning, here our people are working on the development of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System.
In fact, Visual Studio has been developed entirely by the team in Hyderabad IDC.
It has already shipped three versions of Visual J# as part of Visual Studio .NET, Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005.
(Above) S Somasager, corporate vice president, developer division, Microsoft Corporation.
Photo: Sreeram Selvaraj