Internet will be driven by India, China

"Five years ago, if you had to set up a data centre, it had to be in Manhattan, or may be in the Bay Area. But in the coming years, given the talent, resources and needs, most data centres will be in Apac (Asia-Pacific)"

The argument comes from no less a person than Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. He is of the opinion that the internet momentum is shifting from the wealthy countries to the more heavily populated ones like China, India and Indonesia. He attributes several reasons to this like

• The explosion of social networking sites and the youth heavy demographics of these countries
• Creative use of Internet to bring its power to the poorer masses by various institutions
• The evolution of the Internet from mere communication tool to a powerful social utility

Schwartz sees a massive growth in developer community in the Apac region. India's developer numbers are expected to rival that of US in a couple of years. Worldwide, 50% of users of Sun Microsystem products for software development come from India and China.

However this could also mean a threat to the competing software development tools framework by Microsoft like the .Net platform. However Sun could also be overlooking the threat from free open source frameworks like the hugely popular ones currently being used for web development like Ruby on Rails and AJAX.