AOL will enter the Indian market when the time is appropriate and when his company finds a suitable joint venture partner in India, said Case. "It's only a matter of time in terms of being able to find the right partner and launch the right services," Case told IANS.

Case, who was here to attend the 11th Annual CNN World Report Conference and CNN's 20th anniversary celebration, said AOL's strategy had initially been purely domestic and that's why unlike a lot of other leading American computer companies, AOL had not rushed into India or any other countries. "We launched our company in 1985 and spent the first decade really just building the service in the United States."

Case said it was only five years ago that "we started expanding globally. So we thought it very important that we not export AOL to other countries. We did not think that people wanted AOL. What they wanted was an AOL experience, which was easy to use service, but with very localised software, localised content, localised communications partner, localised media partners, with a local management team put in place to make local decisions and a local joint venture partner."

"So as a result, we took it slow," he said, "but hopefully a get in right approach and we initially launched in Europe and then in Asia and we are continuing to look at new markets."

In this regard, Case acknowledged that "we certainly recognise that India has a significant market." Case however declined to comment on rumours that AOL is negotiating with Satyam Online for a strategic alliance to develop the Indian Internet market and to launch a powerful all-encompassing portal.

On AOL's unstinted support for an expansion of the H-1B visa programme, Case said, "We do support that legislation. We do think it is important to have a global economy. We do think it is important to allow people to move from place to place to help build companies and we are encouraged by the fact that we are starting to see more, and certainly in India and Israel and many other places, more growth of entrepreneurial start-ups." Case said he strongly supports bills circulating in Congress to increase the number of H-1B visas to import highly skilled information technology workers, nearly 50 per cent of whom have been from India in the past few years.

Case declared that the Internet is "really stimulating the global development of business and its actually less important than used to be that you move to a financial centre or a particular city where all that activity is."

India Abroad News Service