Will only cheap products succeed in Indian markets?

In most of our interactions involving marketing products for India, one hears the generalized view that "In India, unless the product is cheap it will not succeed".

From my experience in marketing technology devices, the price of any tech device depends on the cost incurred by the customer due to the problem the device is trying to solve, and also the other alternatives available in the market. That the tech device is able to solve the problem is of utmost importance, and not the price.

The best example is the Akash tablet. At 2500-3500 rupees you have a really clumsy device which does not solve anyone's problems. Instead, at 6500- 9000 rupees you have various tablets, including the micromax funbook, which address the customer's need to have a handy device with which to browse the internet. One would rather pay a little more and have something which works, rather than save a little and end up with something which is useless.

Innovation need not be focused on making 'cheap' products, rather the innovation could be in a business model where a moderately priced product is made affordable in a pay per use or some other revenue model. My belief is that in the same way rural India warmed up to the sachet SKUs for urbane products like shampoos, Indian customers may pay premium on smaller affordable units that work.

Why be scared of hardware?

Recently I had a software requirement which needed an app to read some values received through Bluebooth. I sent out the requirement to a few people I knew and also some freelance website, but all of them backed out on reading the words related to hardware.

Many of them either backed out completely or grossly over estimated by order of magnitudes the time required to get this done.

As someone who had not touched software development in the last four years I didn't want to do it, but I went through Android documentation to roughly estimate it to be less than three days of effort. Whatever was needed was already encapsulated and abstracted to comfortable levels that one just needed to assemble a few pieces together.

Finally someone known to me got it done in under two days time. I fail to understand why we are so scared of hardware that we don't do basic analysis of simple problems.

Indian Tablet Market looking up

Till recently there were only very limited options if one wanted a tablet computer in India - with the exception of OlivePad, the only other options were the highly expensive Apple iPad and the moderately expensive Samsung Galaxy Tab.

August has been a month of many launches- all of them in the android space. I'm sure all technologists would've by now concluded that the mobile/tablet platforms are now entirely between android and iOS platforms. And looks like the Indian market is behaving differently from the world market - Apple is far from being the market leader here. Reliance 3G tab, Beetel Magiq, Mercury mTab are new options available at sub 13k prices, with the latter two being sub 10k. This certainly would hot up the tablet market like never before.

There is also talk of amazon too coming out with a forked version of android based tablet akin to kindle- I'm yet to know the price. I'm also hearing of spice coming out with a tablet. None of these new tablets are available yet in stores for checking out. among the tech specs of OlivePad, mTab and Magiq, I liked mTab most, at par with GalaxyTab spec at a much lower price. I wish there was a chance to try out these devices for a real feel - the tech specs may not always live up to a good user experience.

Will update the blog once I get to lay my hands on these devices at a store. Do drop in a comment if anyone of you are aware of stores having the newer devices.