Dome Sweet Dome Former Microsoft Employees Teaming Up Again To Build City Of The Future In India
On an arid landscape baked by temperatures soaring to 107 degrees, a town of more than 4,000 white domes will rise on the horizon.
Engineered to withstand extreme temperatures, each dome is wired with a high-speed connection to the Internet and houses a single family.
This isn’t the United States in 1,000 years, though. This is India in three.
Residents of this company town will be able to telecommute or walk along well-planned streets to offices just down the block. Their community will have clean water, sewage treatment and a consistent power supply — luxuries that Americans take for granted.
The town will include shops, parks and a temple, a mosque and a church, all under giant white domes.
If all goes according to plan, New Oroville will house 20,000 to 30,000 people by 2004, thanks to the efforts and creativity of three Kirkland entrepreneurs and their willingness to scrap rules and make up new ones.
Eric Engstrom, Christopher Phillips and Swain Porter, co-founders of Catalytic Software Inc., are building New Oroville in the badlands of India to house their company staff. All three previously worked for Microsoft Corp.
Engstrom, during his eight years in Redmond, managed MSN’s Internet access business and several Windows Multimedia teams. Phillips spent 5-1/2 years with the software giant as a director of business development. Porter was an independent consultant for Microsoft and formerly a research scientist with Seattle-based Immunex Corp.
Engstrom earned a reputation as a maverick within Microsoft, primarily for developing DirectX graphics technology without the permission of any senior management.
It took a maverick to envision New Oroville. One big problem with starting up a new company is finding enough talent. Where do you find programmers? The competitive nature of the high-tech industry has led to a shortage of talented software developers who can be lured away by companies offering better stock option deals, higher salaries, four-week paid vacations and even the chance to win a new car.
Engstrom, Phillips and Porter took a cue from other Northwest companies, such as vCustomer, Talisma Corp., and Imandi.com Inc. and decamped to India. But instead of just outsourcing a certain amount of work, they took the whole company there and set up Catalytic Software Ltd. in Hyderabad, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
Porter, the company’s CEO, now resides in Hyderabad, and the company has a total of eight employees between Hyderabad and Kirkland. Engstrom and Phillips, chairman and vice chairman, respectively, work out of the company’s Kirkland office.
India offers the technology industry an educated, talented, English-speaking work force that has the added advantage of being 12 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time, allowing round-the-clock work cycles for multinational corporations.
And in a country with an average annual salary of less than $400, highly educated Indian software developers are much cheaper than in the U.S.
Andhra Pradesh, India’s fifth-largest state, contributes 23 percent of India’s software professionals, and yet it lags behind other regions of India in economic development, with only a 44 percent literacy rate.
Thanks to the leadership of Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, however, the state has drawn a lot of foreign investment, especially in software engineering.
And while Western technology companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, GE Capital and Toshiba, have set up offices in Hyderabad and a new international airport is planned near New Oroville, those jobs are rare in a poor state.
While recruiting workers isn’t a problem, retaining them is harder.
“There’s no retention, because if you wave 10, 20 percent more salary at a guy, he just leaves,” Phillips said. If not to other local firms, than to Bangalore, India’s other high-tech center, or abroad to the U.S.
Catalytic’s plan is to offer U.S.-style benefits to its workers: stock options, salaries of roughly $8,000 per year and - best of all - a home.
“The infrastructure is rough, the living conditions are not U.S. standard,” Engstrom said. “It takes 45 minutes for an employee to get to work from where they live with their parents because roads are so bad.”
All these things affect employees’ productivity, he added.
“Catalytic is designed to go to India, fix that problem, and hire a bunch of developers there,” he said.
New Oroville will cover one square kilometer and house 4,320 employees and their families. Named after Engstrom’s and Porter’s hometown of Oroville in Eastern Washington, it also will have four large entertainment complexes, including an ice arena, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a gymnasium with a climbing rock, aerobics, yoga and squash facilities, tennis courts and a fitness center.
Everything will be housed in domes - more than 4,000 of them. Arranged along meandering sidewalks, each house will be a concrete shell 26 feet in diameter and 32 feet tall, providing 804 square feet on the ground floor.
Each is divided into a living area, master bedroom, bathroom and a kitchen outfitted with washers, dryers, dishwashers, refrigerators and modern plumbing. Each will have cable TV, telephones and fiber-optic wiring connecting to the Internet.
As a bonus, employees of Catalytic will vest in their homes in five years, receiving 20 percent ownership in the home per year. While employees would have to give up the houses if they left the company, Catalytic would pay former employees the value of the percentage of the home they own as part of a severance package, Engstrom said.
Phase one of the New Oroville project breaks ground in three months. It will involve building one large office dome and 30 residential units. It will require 18 months to finish one quadrant of the town grid and two to three years to finish the entire town.
But work for Catalytic’s employees will start as soon as the first developers are hired, brought to the U.S., trained in the “Microsoft process” of developing software, and then sent back to work.