Jobs gave the short shrift to India

BANGALORE: Whenever we have walked into N R Narayana Murthy’s or S D Shibulal’s offices in Infosys Technologies in the past year, they have been on their iPads.
Indeed, much of corporate India today is in love with Apple, thanks largely to the iPad.
It wasn’t always like this. Steve Jobs gave the short shrift to India through much of his time at Apple. If you wanted a Mac or the early iPhones, you had to buy it overseas.When it launched the iPhone in India, it was seen to be over-priced. The products were not marketed aggressively.
In 2006, Jobs even withdrew a 3,000 people strong support centre that Apple had planned to establish in Bangalore. It had leased the property.
But ardent Apple fans around the world, convinced that India would not be able to meet the high support standards they expected from the brand, protested vigorously online. That persuaded Jobs to cancel the centre. May be he still thought of India as the country that he had visited in the 1970s as a backpacker. Jobs remains to this day one of the only major global technology CEOs to have never visited India while holding that position.
But in the past one year, there are signs of change. Apple has begun marketing itself more aggressively here. It has exclusive stores. The response to the iPad in particular has been phenomenal. "I can’t think of life without my iPad,” says Manish Dugar, global head for BPO in Wipro Technologies. He uses it for just about everything, including at work – checking customer details, taking notes, reading and sending mails, reading newspapers/magazines/books, for video talks, checking the weather and maps when traveling.
He’s given his first iPad to his children, bought a second for his wife, and has got the latest 3G WiFi version for himself. He has two iPhone 4s, one for India and one for use when he is in the US and UK. His senior colleagues at Wipro, N S Bala, who is global head of manufacturing and high-tech industry, and Ayan Mukerji, global head for media and telecom, are also big iPad users.
A L Jagannath, director-marketing at VMware India, is another ardent iPad fan. "It’s a fantastic travel gadget. The battery is good, there’s no boot up required as in alaptop, the WiFi connects easily. And we have a technology that replicates my desktop/laptop on my iPad, so I can access all my work requirements on the iPad wherever I am,” he says.