Witness the Academia - Industry divide!

The latest on the OpenXML ISP Standardisation debate is India’s choice to vote “NO” for the Open XML to become an ISO Standard by the BIS committee. the voting pattern was - 13 Against, 1 Abstain and 5 For. So who were the 5 voting for the OpenXML – Microsoft, NASSCOM, TCS, Wipro and Infosys... all of them are BIG IT giants (leaving out MS from this as it is expected to be pro OpenXML) employing thousands of people.

A lot of credit for India’s resurgence in the global landscape can be attributed to these IT industries.. Since their businesses come from a variety of technologies (including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP etc.) these are truly vendor neutral organisations!

Now, in Sept 2007 BIS had raised 82 Comments for Open XML. On completion of BRM, all 82 comments from India were resolved by the committee. One would expect the committee to then vote “YES” for the standard.. So the question is then why would BIS still choose to vote “NO”?

Maybe the answer lies in understanding the psyche of the remaining participants. from the documents listed on the BIS website (thanks for the transparency BIS), the “rest” seemed to be obvious anti OpenXML lobby (e.g. FSF, IBM) and then the professors from institutes like IIT Delhi, IIT Mumbai.. now i don’t have any less respect for these institutions but from the voting patterns it is clear that these institutes seem to be totally out of sync with the industry stalwarts..

this "out of sync” behaviour only goes on to reflect the reality in Indian education system where large no. of graduates from engg. institutes are largely unemployable. i feel that these institutes should stay in sync with the industry.. only then can our country, industry and the students remain at the forefront of the world!

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Comments

Anonymous said…
My Comments:
http://dotnetjini.jigneshdesai.com/blogs/
March 22, 2008 at 8:25:00 AM GMT+5:30
Anonymous said…
Your observations are indeed correct.Go to the CS lab of any IIT and you will find only GNU/Linux machines ... the students graduating from these institutes are completely "out of sync" with the "industry" represented by Infy/TCS etc mostly doing hi-tech `copy-paste' - most of these students go for MS/PhD and then work on very low tech stuff like compilers, operating system internals etc. But the students coming from local engineering colleges, fed on a hi-tech diet of cutting edge stuff like VB/.NET etc are completely "in-sync" with the copy paste industry.
March 26, 2008 at 6:25:00 AM GMT+5:30
Abhishek Kant said…
both innovation and run of the mill are important.. the innovation being done by IITians are mostly in foreign labs and of no value to India. however, the passouts from local engg. colleges are contributing to Indian economy and the growth story that everyone is so proud of is because of these gradudates..

yes IIT is out of sync with industry and what more out of sync with India (most of ur passouts can be found "innovating" in foreign universities)..
March 31, 2008 at 9:59:00 AM GMT+5:30
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