India's situation is similar to China's, which has large population
with low personal incomes. However, a significant number of people
will be moving into middle class before turning into year 2000.
I am not surprised that India will become another key market like
Japan, or Europe. Apple sure could take advantage of its own superior
graphics capability to provide India's languages, such as Hindi,
Gujarati, Punjabi, and Sanskrit. It usually used bit map technology
to form the characters, and takes special entry methods to enter the
characters. In Japan people use Japanese to communicate, In China or
Taiwan they use Chinese to talk and write. The same will be applied
to other countries, such as France, German, Russia etc. Although
India people probably uses English as an offical language (Forgive me
if this is not correct), they probably prefer use their native
languages to express their own cultures and customs. This is what
Apple calls, "to localize", is a smart move.
I believe your description in the second point - India has the world's
most prolific film industry. Apple could provide the better
technology to this mutlimedia industry.
About your third point, I think US companies have been moving
some of software projects to India to take advantage of cheap labors
and superior labor quality. For Apple, the same approach could be
applied in India. However, Dept. of Labor still has to balance out
jobs lost due to this move. |
