I like the directness and total honesty of yours Sridhar. That is remarkable. Hats off to that - I am sick and tired of listening to the political, diplomatic and ignorant comments of CEOs in Indian IT (well mostly IT services!), like: Krish G of Infy says - in Dec 2007 - Downturn will not have any impact. Now after 1 year it will be 15% growth! S. Ramadorai of TCS says - We are not bothered about our some financial clients being lost. Now says we are living in unpredictable times! NASSCOM Chief now - S. Mittal - Shall I say something?? The list is distinguished and endless. What hurts me most is that they are playing with many young professionals who come to IT for the lure of money. What is wrong in saying - I do not know actually. How hard is to say that??? Personally I am not surprised as I know the many PM/GM/TM/DM etc in their companies have not written a single piece of code in their entire career. But why these guys keep on ducking the truth??? On the other hand I do not agree with your data and application rebel theory. Application will always be there to control data. If you talking of data neutrality, I am really sorry. This is a long haul. We all know how they are collaborating in language front (IDL came and went, ...then XML is new fashion now) or in market front say OSS/BSS interoperability. Loooooooong battle, no victory or loss in sight yet. Btw, (not important at all) but I guess the number of IITians is perhaps more. You, Tony, Shailesh and Sekar are from IIT (=4). But it is totally meaningless as I have seen in software. IIT/IIM etc do not matter and I respect your candor on that. May be high time GOOG, MSFT, YHOO learn something from here. So also IIT/IIM guys - recently I was talking to one and I was suffocated with the arrongance within minutes.