Hindi computing coming in big way
India and Internet
People laughed and shrugged when Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google stated five years before about the influence of India on internet in next ten years that created all round flutter among the English dominant internet world. This statement came five years before, now enough water has flown down in Ganges since Eric said it and the influence has begun to show. India is heading toward becoming the biggest internet market in the world. Wait, the statement further said that America where the information technology took off would not be able to survive without help of India. A big statement, probably he saw the influence of Hindi on internet and increasing number of people using Hindi as well as English. That probably encouraged Eric to stat that Mandarin, English and Hindi would be the future languages of internet, in that order.
Now, we can put it this way that probably internet is assisting Hindi to get more popularity and proving the myth wrong that computer and English are made for each other. The facts are machine serves the purpose of consumer and not vise versa, this is quite visible as Hindi is growing in stature and taking over its proper place in computing world. India with its Hindi speaking/understanding majority have taken to computing with growing interest since the software available that helps them adapt to internet with ease and without making them afraid of use of English language. Although most user are doing it out of eagerness for the time being but this also is a fact tat these people are encouraging people who are not comfortable with use of English, to use computer in Hindi.
We are in the process of converting software in regional languages and with our manpower and support for different languages especially Hindi, Eric’s statement may come true sooner than his expectations. After all how long can we keep computer away from rural masses of India and more so while the prices of computers are going down every day. We shall have to develop software according to need of people and the way things are moving the day seems to approaching fast. Computer is here to stay in local languages as the demand for the same is growing at a rapid rate.
Consumer and market demand
Information technology is spreading is wings in new horizons, they are searching for new markets because the market in English speaking areas has almost reached to a saturation point and if they do not search for new consumers there is no scope for computer industry in coming years. Mobile and internet technologies are coming up fast in India to support the growing demands of local consumer in big way. Communication sector is at its peak and India is attracting multinationals to try their luck and to be precise they have already developed Hindi applications for use of Hindi text service in Indian markets for their gadgets as optional facility. Multinationals are in no position to overlook giant size Indian markets with so much scope that is available in different languages headed by Hindi.
Multinationals looking at Indian Markets
Yahoo, google and MSN are some of the big names marching toward Hindi market in India because even the local Hindi portals are becoming independent as millions are reaching to them so not depending much on dotcom craze. As the stats suggest that, no international IT company was showing any interest just before five years is ready to jump into the fray to grab the opportunity of growing Hindi market. Today every big name right from Google to yahoo has come to India as the prospects of Hindi software look brighter today. Microsoft has brought its Desktop related products in Hindi, IBM, and Sun Microsystems Oracle all are following the trend with Linux and Macintosh not far behind. Browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape and opera are supporting Hindi. Hindi is becoming popular in blogging and articles. In a nutshell, Hindi being the language of masses is attracting every one from consumer as well as manufacturers of software and hardware fields.
Unicode encoding system
This is a pleasant coincident for Hindi users that Unicode encoding/converter has made it possible to use Hindi as efficiently as English language at international standard. The combination of Hindi market and interest of multinationals has cashed on this boom like any thing and more than any thing the Unicode has provided the standardization of Hindi language use in computers. The only problem faced by Hindi user is the use of keyboard, which is still in Roman letters. The techniques like transliteration are bringing Hindi users to closer to the computers but the use of keyboard is only half as efficient for people interested in Hindi use, as the use of keyboard without Hindi font is not as easy. The present system demands people to learn computing in English and learn to use it in regional languages by trial and error technology. I think if the facility of both fonts is made available can solve the purpose up to an extent.
One thing is sure that if we want to popularize use of Hindi in computer sector we shall have to provide Hindi software at reasonable price at a rapid speed and the use of the same would need to extend to e-commerce, technology, science, e-education, e-administration and help lines. They shall need a proper integration of these applications and facilities with English language sites to make them fully functional and take full advantage.
Books on technology available in Hindi
The books in Hindi related to computer training, education and designing, which were available until a few years before in English only are available easily for the benefit of Hindi consumer. Even complicated topics like web designing are covered as the Hindi user is interested to know about every field including IT. No one thought only a few years before that people might demand books related to computer languages of Basic, Java, C++, multimedia etc in Hindi but this is happening today. Hindi is as much in demand and English is no more a language of elite class. Writers in Hindi are as much of demand as in English and this all have become possible because computer has accepted to Hindi in a big way.
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