As part of the Big Bad Recruiting Blog Swap, today's post is brought to you by Gautam Ghosh. Enjoy...

I apologise to Tod and you dear reader for this late blogswap posting. My dilemma was on which topic to write this blogswap post.

I am a Organizational consultant based in India and have as an employee for Indian IT services and MNC IT consulting firms in addition to hardware firms like HP and Dell also. I blog here.

One of the frequent questions that the media keeps asking India's IT services firms like TCS, Infosys and Wipro is "Why can't you go the product route, like say...Microsoft?" The assumption being software companies are about higher per person productivity and profitability and that the services business is too much about arithmetical growth.

Earlier they would get all flustered up. These days they answer it with elan focussing on a message that basically says - "Services is our core competence. That is what we do well, and that is what is causing the big boys like Accenture, IBM etc to play catch up with us."

But that is not to say that they haven't tried. Infosys has had a modest success with a Banking tool called Finacle. iFlex solutions is India's most successful software product company - it too is in the banking domain - a product called flexcube.

But Indian companies do not have any success story in the prodcut for mass market area. The reasons given usually are that we lack the financial muscle to market software products to the mass market.

I however think that what Indian software companies lack is imagination. The focus should not be the mass market in the West but the mass market of the Latin American, Asian and African continents. A tool like the accounting software "Tally" has been a moderate success within India in the small retail segment. Marketed well, these can be quite successful in the markets that are similar to India at a retail level.

So Tod and dear readers, what do you think? Should Indian IT firms concentrate and services or also do products? Is it possible to do both together, or does the DNA of the company need to be different?

ps: Gautam was a little bit late submitting his post, but followed through which is what really counts. So Gautam...no apology is necessary. Thanks for the perspective.