Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized the technology departments of global corporations with a doomsday story many times more puffed up than the luxuriant crop of hair he sported.
The latter was a wig, and the former was just bad science fiction packaged by consultants as a $600 billion hair-raiser. But Dewang Mehta, the chief lobbyist for India’s fledgling software services industry, carried off both with aplomb, convincing businesses that at the stroke of midnight of the new millennium, their computer systems would crash because old programs measured years in two digits instead of four. The solution, he persuaded them, was to let a horde of techies from Bangalore and Hyderabad go through each line of code and fix the Y2K bug.
That was the birth of India’s massively successful software services industry, which died Friday after a short battle with newer digital technologies. At the time of its demise, the business was worth $110 billion in annual export revenue.
The first hint that the end was near came on Thursday when Tata Consultancy Services, the biggest Indian software vendor by market value, announced a virtual stalling of its business in the September quarter from the previous three months. After Infosys followed up by slashing its full-year revenue guidance for the second time in three months, it was time to turn off the ventilator.
