Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Saturday said his company has decided to move its entire workload out of Microsoft Azure to its own cloud platform Krutrim within the next week. The move is a reaction to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removing Aggarwal’s post on ‘pronoun illness’, in which he called out the platform for imposing a ‘forced ideology’ over gender pronouns.
Reportedly, this move will lead to a loss of over Rs 100 crore for Microsoft in India, as Ola is a big customer. “It (shifting operations from Azure to Krutrim) is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this,” Aggarwal posted on social media platform X. He also threw an invitation to other developers, saying if they wanted to move out of Azure, “we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don’t go back to Azure after that!”
In 2017, Ola had partnered with Microsoft Azure to build a new connected vehicle platform for car manufacturers worldwide. Azure came on board as a cloud services provider for Ola. In FY23, Microsoft’s revenue from India operations rose 39% year-on-year to Rs 19,230 crore.
Krutrim is a made in India generative AI platform that was launched by Aggarwal last year. Recently, Krutrim launched AI cloud services called Krutrim Cloud to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity.
“The pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India… Clearly Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out,” Aggarwal said.
The issue has also sparked a debate around monopolies of Big Tech firms in owning social media platforms, along with the ongoing issue of their monopolies in the Play Store market. On similar lines, Aggarwal said he will work with Indian developers to build a DPI (digital public infrastructure) social media framework.
“DPIs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar, etc, are a uniquely Indian idea and is even more needed in the world of social media,” Aggarwal said. “As an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies and we will be culturally subsumed as the above experience shows,” he added.
The idea floated by Aggarwal to have a DPI-like social media platform will be governed by community guidelines based on the country’s Indian law. “No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned. Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by the corporates who make money using our data and then lecture us on community guidelines,” Aggarwal said.
