Recently, the Indian government decided to end the partnership with MIT's Media Lab in MLA. Business Week writes: "At first glance, losing MIT's Asian Media Lab looks like a heavy blow. Chances are, however, that now India will make its own advances." This is a refreshingly different viewpoint from most of what I have read in some of the Western press.
In India, the incident has refocused the country's attention on R&D, and some Indians are hoping that it could encourage the establishment of a domestic version of Bell Labs. It has also brought public attention to the technological innovations done in small corners of India, like Wi-Fi and geographic-information mapping systems that could greatly ease the hard lives of rural Indians and help make administration of these areas easier.What's clear is that with little or no support from multinationals, poor countries such as India will have to develop suitable new technologies and innovatively adapt existing ones to solve their own problems. That will put other nations on the path to progress, too. Same mission as Media Labs, but with a more home-grown flavor.
India and its organisations (academic and commercial) have an opportunity to lead the world in creating solutions for the next markets. Media Lab Asia started to get Indians to think in a focused manner about that, and perhaps that will be its legacy.
Gartner provides a cautionary assessment on Linux desktops. The bottomline:
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• Enterprises should take a realistic look at desktop Linux to separate the myths from the reality.
• Enterprises should evaluate all software in their stacks and consider how running alternatives on Windows and Linux may change their costs.
• Although extending hardware life and moving to a Linux operating system may result in some savings, such action will probably not eliminate all of the costs that the enterprise expects.
• When considering labor costs, Gartner believes that locking down and managing the desktop will result in bigger savings than simply switching operating systems.
• Enterprises must consider the technical, political and cultural issues to understand how they will be successful with those disciplines under Linux if they failed under Windows.
"Organisation Will" plays a role too
Here is an interesting, but related observation from the field. Barring a few professionally managed IT setups, the vast majority of Linux initiatives by SMBs in the country are generally half-hearted attempts to try out GNU/Linux (Linux) in their office environments. Some of these attempts are unilaterally carried out by technical staff, and management is unaware about this fact.
The problem lies not in the fact that these initiatives are taking place, but because they are taking place without a determination in the organisational hierarchy to see them through to the end. This generally results in disappointment with the results obtained, and the fall in productivity often gets blamed on the shift to Linux. 
Julia Lerman has a nice collection of tips for those among us who make presentations.
