THE CHALLENGES TAKEN BY THE MINISTRY OG COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING HOMEGROWN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CAMPANIES.

Ever since IT generated various software and hardware products, it becomes one of states‟ effective political and economic vehicles – or soft power, for that matter. Leading IT companies in the world today are located in Silicon Valley, or commonly known as the home for startups. Apple, HP, Intel, Google, and many more are headquartered here, and over many years, have expanded globally, making the US much stronger in technology.
Asia is one of Silicon Valley‟s prospective areas. Especially Indonesia, with 74.57 million internet users, is publicly known as one of the world‟s consumerist states of Silicon Valley‟s products. This condition brought society to create a motto, Internet for Everybody, to indicate whether or not they are young, they are internet users – and most likely to be netizen of Silicon Valley‟s software products.
The advantages have shown that the product expansion has helped increase Indonesia‟s education level, reduce government and non-government expenditures, improve social networking, and so forth. However, Silicon Valley‟s products have also pressured homegrown IT companies to be more successful. In order to solve this, Kemkominfo applied several approaches to 1) educate society about “digitalpreneurship” and 2) strengthen regulations for developing homegrown IT companies.
Unfortunately, supports were not always there. There is no strong ecosystem and IT companies in Indonesia become weaker – some may have even rot. On the other hand, Silicon Valley‟s products keep on adding consumers every now and then. As a result, IT entrepreneurs from Indonesia – as they have been interviewed – argued that Kemkominfo‟s intervention to encourage them was rather an obstacle that led Indonesia‟s IT sector to remain weak.