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When
it comes to Pakistan, the "image" belies
the reality and seeing is believing. From the shadows
of a misplaced image has thus emerged an innovative
strategy that seems to do the trick for Pakistan's
IT entrepreneurs. This might just be the right kind
of "break" the country's software industry
needs from its rather lackluster past. Pakistan is
fast becoming a happening place for IT.
Nadeem Malik, the CTO of Pakistan's oldest software company narrates
an interesting story about his company, Systems Pvt. Ltd--a software
development and system integration company formed in 1976. The tale has
it that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's current President and CEO, was once
visiting Lahore, Pakistan in late 1970s to attend a wedding of one of
his room-mates, a Pakistani fellow, at Stanford University. The gentleman
happened to know Nadeem and his associates who had just opened shop in
Lahore by the name of Systems Ltd and asked Ballmer to visit them while
he was in Lahore. Ballmer--who, along with Bill Gates, had just opened
a small software company in the United States--visited Systems' offices
in the Chambers of Commerce building in Lahore and was pleasantly surprised.
He also suggested some possibilities of "doing something together".
Microsoft Corporation was, back then, a promising yet small venture hoping
to make it big someday, and Ballmer, in all fairness, probably thought
that they could use the help of these cool guys in Lahore to get there. " Of
course, we thought otherwise", reflects Malik, "we were Pakistan's
first and largest software company at that time. We thought it a little
strange to partner with a small relatively unknown entity (back then)
called Microsoft. It turned out to be the single largest mistake that
we ever made in our entire careers". Not that one can fault Nadeem
or Systems Ltd. for not foreseeing Microsoft's enviable rise as a software
behemoth and hence foresee the value of the partnership at that time,
the anecdote illustrates the fact that Pakistan's IT entrepreneurs were
way ahead of those from other countries in thinking about the opportunity
in IT and setting up companies to capitalize on it as back as in 1976
but also that they missed the boat on a number of occasions very early
on in the process.
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