FREE HISTORY OF COMPUTING COMPANIES LESSON
1968 — Sell coordination, not a product
TCS, Infosys, and the global delivery model
Sell coordination, not a product
India’s computing industry demonstrated that an important computing company need not own a hardware platform or packaged product. TCS built downstream computer services; Infosys later industrialized distributed delivery. The scarce resource became reliable coordination of expertise across customers, machines, organizations, time zones, and changing requirements. Labour cost alone cannot explain success because the hardest work is preserving context, trust, and accountability across distance.
A services institution creates value when it turns dispersed expertise and ambiguous customer knowledge into a reliable, accountable delivery system.
Institutional reconstruction
Split a legacy modernization across customer and remote teams. Mark work that can cross a low-bandwidth contract and decisions that require shared context. Redesign any handoff that creates a queue without ownership.
Trace the scarce resource, coordination mechanism, power boundary, and newly possible failure.