Shiv Nadar, chairman and the chief strategy officer of HCL Technology, speaks to Forbes India about entrepreneurship, HCL Technologies, Vineet Nayar and his vision for the company.
Looking back, do you think that HCL missed the bus on Y2K and ADM (application development and maintenance) business?
In hindsight we shouldn’t have missed it, we were the most qualified for it, but we were and have been a technology company and that was the main thing. We expected that ADM would grow but it wasn’t going where we wanted it to go. In the year 2000 I refused a deal worth $175 million for ADM work at $28 per hour. I never felt bad about losing out to my peers. I believed it then and I believe it now, the core of this company is technology. If you see the real buses we missed — we missed the bus of being a Microsoft. Our operating system was working in 1977.
(This story appears in the 06 November, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)