Microsoft and universities
Scoble talks about Microsoft and university relations in India. Since I'm involved with Microsoft's academic initiatives in India, I know quite a bit about how this works.
...Yesterday, for instance, I interviewed Mythreyee Ganapathy. She's one of a few people working on University Relations in India. That's a tough job. India has something like 25,000 colleges. Is she helping make Microsoft a more friendly face? You betcha...
Now, this sounds good in theory - but the fact that it isn't exactly true. The real work in India is being done by the 3 academic evangelists - Kevin, Ashwani and Janakiram. These guys have reached something like 20,000 students in the last year alone and got people like me into the problem and changed my life to a great extent. Janakiram has almost single-handedly changed Microsoft's perception in academia. People actually like Microsoft now - something that was very rare to find 1-2 years back when it was cool to hate Microsoft.
On the other hand, there is a part of Microsoft which needs improving in academia - and about which the academic evangelists can't do anything about. As far is Microsoft is concerned, the Indian IITs seem to be the only colleges which are worth their attention when it comes to links with Microsoft Research -or worse - when it comes to campus placement.
Now, this makes for an interesting scenario. You have less than 10 IITs in India and the last time I checked, there was not a *single student* from the IITs who's involved with the academic initiatives of Microsoft. So what this means is that you have around 160-odd student champs and ambassadors from across the country who live,breathe Microsoft(including travelling across the country, organizing events with their own money). These student champs have also been good enough to win stuff in the Imagine Cup regional rounds. But when it comes to working with Microsoft Research or worse , when it comes to on-campus recruitment - they're locked out solely because they're not studying in one of the few IITs.
Now, this sucks big time. But right now, the people who do the recruitment and who work with Research are so inaccessible that a lot of the student evangelists have given up their dreams of working in Microsoft - the sole reason being that Microsoft doesn't care whether you win the Imagine Cup or whether you've written ultra-cool apps in .NET. As far as they're concerned, if you're not part of the few IITs , you might as well not exist.