Who has adapted best to the vagaries of e-commerce? The bubble's certainly burst a bit but the reason even Yahoo didn't turn a profit is that it is trying to "buy clients" and increase its customer base. There's no doubt it could change to make a profit in the short-term but it would mean losing market share in the long-term. In the same way that AOL probably isn't making much money from its £15 a month unlimited internet offer, but it is going to get people for life. In my field of online learning there are companies trying to sell to individuals, expecting them to spend hundreds of pounds on online courses. That's not going to happen because we expect to get it for nothing. The winning model is companies that are selling online learning to other companies or to universities and schools. The money transaction is B2B which then happens to be passed on to the end user for "nothing".
Does the UK lag behind the rest of the world in IT terms? We have some of the best IT people in the world. That's why companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Psion have their research facilities here. Where we do lag behind is in the number of people with IT skills. There ought to be some qualification in the UK for people without degrees but who are good IT programmers. In India we run the GNIIT programme which is recognised as the No1 IT qualification and we get more than 400,000 students a year. Of course theirs is a very process-driven culture but maybe here we could be more flexible in our approach to finding people with IT skills.
Was the failure of Wap to capture the public imagination a surprise? I'm sure there are some people for whom it works very well but, at the moment, it's more of a gimmick. Prior to NIIT I worked for an organisation that was rolling out the earliest examples of Wap content and it was a railway timetable! The emerging Bluetooth and 3G technologies look set to deliver more of the "look and feel" to which Wap aspired.
How did you become involved with computers? I had a Sinclair ZX81 so early that when I phoned Sinclair to ask for a 16k RAM pack they wanted to know how I'd got my hands on one. I was using Husky handheld computers in the mid-80s then progressed to a Sun Spark Station 2. I'm currently using a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300, which is a lovely bit of kit. I also use a Pentium III Packard Bell system at home with the whole electronic office and ISDN link.
Any favourite websites? I like the e-learning guru Eliot Masie's site. There's also www.people performancemagazine.com and I like to check on Mr Coulthard's progress at www.itv-f1.com.
Visit: www.niit.com
