I know an Indian independent contractor who worked on contract for a large electric utility. He managed six warm bodies provided by some Indian company. His contract came from some company that had a contract with another company and the grand parent company was the vendor to the electric utility. Each was padding up his hourly rate. It was rumoured one of the shell companies that did no work other than to shuffle paperwork and skim 10$ an hour from each contractor was owned by a relative of the top IT manager of the electric utility.

There are perverse incentives in the system to roil an smoothly working system, promise heaven and earth using some powerpoint magic, and deliberately trigger a crisis. Crisis means no bid contracts, crazy decisions and highly inflated costs.

Or depression, anxiety about future, or a combination.

It is very much possible the utility companies may be able to stymie and delay the solar adoption in USA, but rest of the world will pay premium prices, and pay off the installation costs of these factories. So when the dam breaks and they start flooding the market, there is nothing that will save the utilities.

My father grew up in Akron, OH, and in the 1930s it had the world's largest building - a no-longer-used airship hangar. My dad and his friends used the hangar to fly microfilm models - http://www.indoorduration.com/... - and I think this is the hanger -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

So indoor model-flying seems to be an Ohio tradition. I know my dad enjoyed doing it as a teenager.

Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them. They are used to hardball by retailer and any naive implementation of US level customer service will be gamed to death within two quarters.

Google will do well to

1 open its own stores,

2 use its strength in access to capital,

3 introduce products with differentiation so that you would not be using the same phone your driver is using,

4 deliver superior customer service to those who play fair

5 undertake price war for the in market above "servant maids and drivers and cooks" sector and below the "MNC executive, people rolling in black money" sector