IT Mavens

ONGC program test post

2007-01-31T16:58:00.000+05:30

Hello

HR ASCI post

2006-11-30T12:30:00.000+05:30

post

This is a test

NTPC session

2006-11-14T17:09:00.000+05:30

test

Top IT services vendors earned $262 bln in 2005

2006-05-04T09:31:00.000+05:30

Top IT services vendors earned $262 bln in 2005 by ZDNet's ZDNet Research -- The top IT services vendors had combined revenue in 2005 of $262 bln, a 1.9% increase from 2004, but well below the 8% boost in the overall market, Datamonitor said. The top 50 ranged from IBM Global Services with sales of $47 bln to Patni Computer Systems with $450 mln. The 10 fastest-growing IT services vendors included Cognizant, Satyam, Patni, TCS, Infosys, HCL and Wipro, SRA, CACI and SAIC.

Will they upset Indian outsourcing applecart?

2006-04-26T10:47:00.000+05:30

CIOL has given excerpts from the Sandhill report on outsourcing. Whereas there is an overwhelming trend in favour of India as an IT outsourcing destination, the following are some of the areas of concern
- Rising cost
- Communication problems
- IPR issues
- People issues

Excerpts ;
Sand Hill – Persistent Systems 'Report on Offshoring' hints at many factors that could hit the Indian outsourcing industry

Shashwat Chaturvedi

MUMBAI: In 2003, the world was quite a different place. U.S. forces had landed in Iraq; a supposed Monkeyman (caped crusader) was roaming the streets of London helping old ladies cross the streets.

Meanwhile, India was purportedly 'shining'. There was a virulent campaign against outsourcing underway, yet significant amount of work was being outsourced to India. The clients were a wee bit unsure about the model and how it would work out. The very same year, Sand Hill group conducted a study on offshoring in the U.S., taking into account different clients' view on Indian players and the whole idea of offshoring and outsourcing.

Three years later, the world continues to be a different place. U.S. forces rule the streets of Baghdad, London celebrates Queen Elizabeth's eightieth birthday. Back home, the shine seems to back as the stock markets are on a roll. The latest Sand Hill – Persistent Systems 'Report on Offshoring' gives the industry a 'thumbs up' sign.

But on closer reading, the report also hints at many factors that could upset the Indian outsourcing applecart.

The biggest one is the cost factor. Clients abroad are concerned about the increasing costs; estimates show offshoring vendor costs in India growing 15 per cent to 18 per cent every year.

Says a respondent, “I think the cost advantage is starting to erode as time progresses. The offshore organizations are experiencing tremendous demand, so they have increased pricing strength. As that pricing strength grows, our costs grow, which may lead us to reduce offshoring or bring those activities back in-house.”

But, Anand Deshpande, chairman and managing director, Persistent Systems, isn't perturbed by it. “While there are growing concerns over the increasing costs, it is still not a big issue. Cost is no more the main factor for which the clients are outsourcing or offshoring work to India. The only fallout could be that clients will offshore less strategic work to other destinations. The bulk will still come to India, evident from the fact that close to 84 per cent of respondents affirmed that was India was the first offshoring destination,” he said.

The report suggests that clients should have a price protection clause in the agreement, whereby the spiraling cost could be curtailed.

Communication was another big issue with clients in the U.S. Respondents across the board spoke about communication issues with the team in India. The time difference puts added pressure on the team in U.S. to be able to interact on a daily basis.

“Remote management is a significant challenge to our efforts,” said one respondent. “The wife of one of my engineers complained that he spends from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. on the phone with India almost every night. That's not good. If he's too burned out, he loses creativity,” added another respondent. “Communication will be an issue whenever a company off shores its work. But with time, things ease out. This is not something that is specific to India,” clarifies Deshpande.

Significantly, the number of people who were “very satisfied” with offshoring in 2003, has dropped by 15 percentage points. Whereas the respondents who were “not very satisfied” in 2003, has increased from four-five per cent.

A bad omen? “No. The expectations of the clients have changed over the past few years. The clients do not simply outsource; they look for strategic partnerships. The needs and requirements on the client side have changed. The initial euphoria has given way to more circumspect assessment,” pacifies Deshpande.

Clients in the U.S. are also increasingly worried on intellectual property rights (IPR) related issues. The numerous incidents at Indian companies, where strategic data related to certain clients was comprised does not help India's cause. Deshpande acquiesces, “I agree, a lot more needs to be done to assuage the IPR concerns. It is an important and sensitive issue for the clients.”

Then, there is the most-talked about issue on shortage of talented people. The report mentions that experienced technical staff is tough to find and retain than it was in the Silicon Valley during the Internet heyday. Thus, quality and productivity are suffering.

“It is one of the most talked about issues in India. What more can I add, except that we as a industry need to find an answer for this and fast,” says Deshpande.

The offshoring industry is maturing and India is developing into a powerhouse. The concerns need to be addressed, as the competition is hotting up. And one can't just rest on the laurels. Three years later, when the world will continue to be a different place, hopefully India's place in the offshoring market be the same or stronger.

Link to all management jargon

2006-04-21T16:53:00.000+05:30

Although I have a healthy disrespect for management jargon, they are a necessary evil in the profession I am in. So here is a link to a web-site which gives to links to all the Management buzzwords.

How to read a Business Book

2006-04-17T16:41:00.000+05:30

via Fastcompany

How to Read a Business Book
Three ways to get the most out of business tomes -- without resorting to just the executive summary.

From: Issue 88 | November 2004 | Page 106 | By: Jennifer Reingold

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We here at Fast Company have always been suckers for a good business yarn. And we're not the only ones: Last year, 5,301 books claiming to be about business were published, up 30% from just three years earlier, according to Andrew Grabois, director of publisher relations at publishing-industry specialist R.R. Bowker. Grabois predicts that the business-book market should hit $828.6 million this year, making it the third most-popular category after romance and religion. Basically, we're all drowning in the stuff. So we figured a life raft might be in order. Here's a primer on how to get something out of a business book.

Take a Big Grain of Salt
"Anybody who reads my [work] literally, I have no patience with," says Tom Peters, the consultant and author of 11 management books. "Relative to my conclusions and framework, if you adopt it hook, line, and sinker, then I think you're a fool. It ain't the Bible." Most authors would hardly be so cavalier about their own work, but Peters has a point: Business books are necessarily about generalizations; your company is necessarily all about specifics. No one strategy or approach to marketing, no matter how brilliant, can be an exact fit. So don't just xerox every page and try to perfectly replicate every single example. Just because it worked for Cisco or Microsoft or Procter & Gamble doesn't mean it will work for you.

Distill the Central IdeaEven though a book may have 400 pages chock-full of stories, numbers, and footnotes, chances are most are devoted to just a few ideas. In Built to Last, it's both "preserve the core," or keep what is essential, and "stimulate progress," or have the courage to change and move forward. To be able to get something out of a book, says noted consultant and author Ram Charan, you first need to understand what that key idea is. "Then you toss around that idea in your mind and determine under which conditions it's a good idea and under which conditions it's a bad idea." Finally, he says, you try to push it forward, asking what would be the next logical idea that flows from this one. That's how you get to creative solutions.

Create Your Own Toolbox
Think about your views on parenting, or on politics. Did they all come from your grandmother, or did you develop them by talking to lots of folks and studying different points of view? The same is true for business books: The more you read, the more you learn. "I think of a good manager as being like a good mechanic who has a very good box of tools," says Darrell Rigby, a partner at Bain & Co. "He knows what those tools are good for and when they can be dangerous if applied to the wrong kind of problem." The tools don't all come from the same place, and neither should ideas. "The world is such a complicated place," says Rigby. "Nobody has a monopoly on business truths or effective business principles."

When Will India Kick Its $200 Bln Gold Habit?

2006-04-16T16:14:00.000+05:30

When Will India Kick Its $200 Bln Gold Habit?Related Stocks: GLD

If John Maynard Keynes were alive today, he would be horrified to see gold rallying again, and for a reason very familiar to the British economist: India’s “ruinous” love of the “barbaric relic.” Almost 100 years after Keynes used those words to chide India for its extravagance, the billion-people nation shows no signs of losing its fondness for the metal. India accounts for 18 percent of world demand, more than any other country, writes Andy Mukherjee of Bloomberg.

Three out of four traders, investors and analysts in Bloomberg’s latest weekly survey advised buying gold.

What’s surprising to modern economists is that gold demand in India is on the rise when most of the traditional reasons for hoarding the metal — high inflation, persistent rupee depreciation, rapacious taxation and low penetration of banking services — are fading.

With increasing modernization and urbanization in the nation, the proportion of gold in the bridal trousseau should also have been on the wane. However, India’s gold consumption rose 57 percent from a year earlier in the 12 months ended March 31, on top of a 63 percent jump in the previous year.

Andy cites several reasons this should not be occuring:

Indians are no longer living in the 1970s when they were hard-pressed to protect their savings. Inflation averaged 9 percent a year then, and the income tax rate was as high as 97.75 percent in 1974. Gold jewelry was a handy option to store wealth and hide it from the state. It was also a smart investment: Gold prices rose more than eightfold between September 1976 and January 1981, when they soared to a record $873.
India is now the world’s 10th-biggest economy. The top tax rate is a reasonable 30 percent, while local inflation has averaged 5 percent since early 2000.
The Indian rupee, having weakened from about 7.5 to the dollar in 1966 to 49.06 in May 2002, has risen 11.5 percent against the U.S. currency since then.
India has also liberalized gold imports, reducing smuggling of the metal and rendering anachronistic the plot lines of ’70s era Bollywood movies that featured gold-smuggling heavies.
And then suggests several reasons it may be happening:

Over the past five years, the Indian government has added 16 percentage points of GDP to its public debt and spent 65 percent of the borrowed money on expenditure that doesn’t create new capital such as salaries and pensions. That inefficient allocation of savings by the government may have prompted individuals to become more risk averse and stock up on gold, Morgan Stanley’s Ahya says.
According to India’s latest census, more than 47 million girls in the age group of 15 to 29 have yet to marry. Assuming 80 percent of them do so in the next five years, that’s 38 million weddings. At a very modest 10 grams per wedding, or slightly less than one-third of an ounce, that would translate into 76 metric tons of demand a year, enough to buy a fifth of all gold mined in South Africa last year.
[Bloomberg]

The Top 100 Most Innovative Companies Ranking -BW

2006-04-16T15:41:00.000+05:30

The BusinessWeek has brought out its annual list of top 100 innovative companies.
I can see 2 Indian names there. Infosys at 32 and ITC at 81.

The World's Most Innovative Companies 2006 Rank
1 Apple
2 Google
3 3M
4 Toyota
5 Microsoft
6 General Electric
7 Procter & Gamble
8 Nokia
9 Starbucks
10 IBM

Infosys results - more of the same thing

2006-04-14T16:52:00.000+05:30

Infosys came out with its 4th quarter and annual results. I had a quick look at their fact sheet.

Their results have become so boring that one has got tired of their extreme standardisation. If the presentation of the results has the sameness, the business itself has the sameness, which has become very predictable.

- BFSI remains their main industry
- Application maintenance remains the mainstay and the share is growing.
- Time and Material projects are only increasing
- Share of USA remains at 65 %
- India remains a foot note at about 1.2 %
- More space is being created to house more and more pros to do more and more of the routine work
- The pros seem to be increasingly voting with their feet with rising attrition to 11.2 %
- The release of Mohandas Pai from the CFO chair once again shows that any professional who acquires a bigger image than the promoters is usually cut down to size , perhaps..

How long are they going to bank on scale and operational excellence to drive growth and profitability. No innovation. No guts for large acquisition.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts on Monday. With the boring predictability of Infosys results and the cliched statements from the top management, it will do well for CNBC and NDTV profit to not accord any special status to Infosys results, every quarter. They have their own TRPs to look after.

Searching for the invisible man

2006-04-07T16:04:00.000+05:30

In this Economist article , quoting Baumol it says, most breakthroughs arise this way—the offspring of independent minds not incumbent companies. I agree.

Economics focus

Searching for the invisible man
Mar 9th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Economics rediscovers the entrepreneur

THE French, according to George Bush, have no word for them, economic theory has surprisingly little room for them, and it is a mystery why anyone would choose to be one of them. Entrepreneurs are the leading men of capitalism, the venturesome protagonists who move the plot forward. But economic theory gives them few if any lines to read.

Translated literally, entrepreneur means one who undertakes—one of life's doers. To start a firm you need gumption, and to succeed you need an eye for a gap in the market. That in turn demands alertness, as Israel Kirzner, of New York University (NYU), has pointed out. But it does not always demand much originality or power of invention. The fresh-born firm may be a mere clone of another one in a neighbouring town.

More interesting are the entrepreneurs who innovate, who introduce something new into the world. Unfortunately, such figures have been all but banished from the theory of the firm and the market. Microeconomics instead gives pride of place to prices. Guided by the wages and interest rates they must pay, businessmen choose among different techniques of production (labour-intensive when workers are cheap, capital-intensive when they are scarce) but they do not reinvent or revolutionise them. Guided by the price their wares will fetch, they decide to make more goods or fewer. But they do not conjure up new products that no one had previously thought of.

William Baumol, who holds positions at both Princeton and NYU, has been labouring for years to create more space for entrepreneurship and innovation in economic theory. At this year's annual meeting of the American Economics Association, three special sessions on entrepreneurship were held in his name*. Mr Baumol's work in turn pays homage to the insights of Joseph Schumpeter, for whom the settled equilibria and smooth adjustments of microeconomics held little interest.

Schumpeter wanted to dislodge the price mechanism from its “dominant position” in “the sacred precincts of theory”. In the real world, he said, the competitive weapon that counts is not lower prices, but new commodities and techniques. These weapons are much deadlier, striking “not at the margins of...the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.”

If innovation threatens companies with obsolescence and extinction, they cannot afford to leave it to chance. Rather than waiting for flashes of inspiration, they set up research-and-development (R&D) departments and commit an annual budget to the pursuit of new products and processes. In this way, invention becomes routine.

This domestication of wildcat entrepreneurialism is good news for economists. Once research and innovation are reduced to a regular outlay and a steady stream of results, they become amenable to economists' analytical techniques. “We can far more easily subject such a customary, regular and predictable activity to systematic analysis than the erratic, unpredictable ‘Eureka! I have found it!’ kind of discovery,” Mr Baumol writes. R&D can be modelled much like any other investment decision, different only in degree from building factories or advertising.

Entre-penury
Most innovations are merely incremental improvements on something that already exists: a slightly better mousetrap, as Mr Baumol puts it. A rare few represent discontinuous breakthroughs, such as the incandescent lamp, alternating electric current or the jet engine. All of the above, according to Frederic Scherer, professor emeritus at Harvard, were introduced not by the regimented R&D of established corporations, but by scrappy new firms, twin-born with the invention itself. Mr Baumol ventures that most breakthroughs arise this way—the offspring of independent minds not incumbent companies. He has two explanations for this. First, radical innovation is the only kind lone entrepreneurs can do; and, second, they are the only ones who want to do it.

The first explanation seems paradoxical. Breakthroughs are, by definition, more difficult than routine innovations. Surely, they should be beyond the meagre means of the independent entrepreneur? But as Mr Baumol points out, building the Kitty Hawk was much cheaper, and less complicated, than upgrading the Boeing 737 to the 747. Genuinely new ideas are often breathtakingly simple. They grow more elaborate as improvements and modifications are laid on top of them. If you are the first to discover a tree, you get to pick the lowest-hanging fruit.

The second explanation is more intuitive. Revolution is a risky endeavour. Of 1,091 Canadian inventions surveyed in 2003 by Thomas Astebro†, of the University of Toronto, only 75 reached the market. Six of these earned returns above 1,400%, but 45 lost money. A rational manager will balk at such odds. But the entrepreneur answers to his own dreams and demons. Mr Baumol thinks a “touch of madness” is probably one of the chief qualifications for the job.

Economists have little to say about madness, of course. But they can point out its economic implications. If money isn't everything to the independent inventor, he is likely to be cheap. Indeed, he will be the lowest-cost provider of the kind of risky, painstaking endeavour that lies behind the breakthrough inventions. Big firms could pursue the big ideas, but since they would be employing professionals not amateurs for these quixotic ventures, they would have to pay them in money, not love.

Thanks to Mr Baumol's own painstaking efforts, economists now have a bit more room for entrepreneurs in their theories. But it remains a mystery why anyone would want to be one.

* See the papers collected at www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_papers/2006papers.html

† “The Return to Independent Invention”. Economic Journal, January 2003

Business Model

2006-03-29T12:07:00.000+05:30

My Favorite Business Model
Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

Examples:

Skype – basic in network voice is free, out of network calling is a premium service

Flickr – a handful of pictures a month is free, heavy users convert to Pro

Trillian – the basic service is free, but there is paid version that is full featured

Newsgator – the web reader is free. If you want to synch with outlook and your mobile phone, that’s a paid service

Box.net – you get 1gb of virtual storage for free, but you have to pay for more than that

Webroot – you can get a free spyware scan, but for full protection you need to pay

This business model has been around for a long time. Shareware always used a model like this and there are many successful software companies that have been built with this model.

It works even better with web native services. A customer is only a click away and if you can convert them without forcing them into a price/value decision you can build a customer base fairly rapidly and efficiently. It is important that you require as little as possible in the initial customer acquisition process. Asking for a credit card even though you won’t charge anything to it is not a good idea. Even forced registration is a bad idea. You’ll want to do some of this sort of thing once you’ve acquired the customer but not in the initial interaction.

Don’t require any downloads to start. Don’t require plugins. Support every browser with any material market share. Make sure your service works on various flavors of Windows, OSX, and Linux. In short, eliminate all barriers to the initial customer acquisition.

And make sure that whatever the customer gets day one for free, they are always going to get for free. Nothing is more irritating to a potential customer than a “bait and switch” or a retrade of the value proposition.

The best examples of this business model are when the customer implicitly understands why the paid service has to cost money. More storage costs for photos or virtual storage are good examples. Termination costs on other carriers networks in the Skype model are another. When it is just additional features that don’t carry an incremental cost to offer, it may be harder to convert free users to paid users. But if your free service is loved and you do a good job articulating the value that comes with the paid service, you can convert to paying users with good results.

I would like to have a name for this business model. We’ve got words like subscription, ad supported, license, and ASP, that are well understood. Do we have a word for this business model? If so, I don’t know it.

ERP market to grow at 7.7% a year

2006-03-29T12:02:00.000+05:30

Gartner has forecasted that The enterprise resource planning market will grow 7.7% worldwide and the supply chain management market will grow 6.8% worldwide through 2009, Gartner reports.

The Art of Work

2006-03-09T12:39:00.000+05:30

The Art of Work What would happen if the best moments of your life happened at the office? That would be "flow," and thanks to a guy with an unpronounceable name, more and more businesses want to know about it.

From: Issue 97 | August 2005 | Page 76 By: Ann Marsh Photographs by: Phillip Toledano
"It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair....It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape...."

These words, written by American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mee-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee), describe the state of "flow." It's a condition of heightened focus, productivity, and happiness that we all intuitively understand and hunger for.

Csikszentmihalyi's groundbreaking book on the subject, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1990), has been lauded by such heavyweights as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Jimmy Johnson, who credited it with helping him coach the Dallas Cowboys to a Super Bowl win in 1993. Yet although the quest for flow immediately resonated with the sporting and leisure worlds, the concept never got much traction in business, possibly because ecstasy and the workplace go together about as well as tomatoes and chocolate.

In the past few years, however, many major companies, including Microsoft, Ericsson, Patagonia, and Toyota have realized that being able to control and harness this feeling is the holy grail for any manager -- or even any individual -- seeking a more productive and satisfying work experience.

These companies are now using Csikszentmihalyi's ideas to learn how they can get the best out of their workers or create more compelling connections with their customers. Without flow, there's no creativity, says Csikszentmihalyi, and in today's innovation-centric world, creativity is a requirement, not a frill. "To stay competitive, we have to lead the world in per-person creativity," says Jim Clifton, CEO of the Gallup Organization, which provides management consulting for 300-odd companies. "People with high flow never miss a day. They never get sick. They never wreck their cars. Their lives just work better." Clifton says flow is one ideal outcome of Gallup's consulting work.

No one is more surprised about the corporate world's increasing interest in his research than Csikszentmihalyi, 71, the former head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago. Now director of the Quality of Life Research Center at the Drucker School of Management in Claremont, California, he has been studying flow for more than four decades. Csikszentmihalyi was born in Italy; his father, the Hungarian consul there, was sentenced to death in absentia for not returning to Hungary after the Soviet takeover in 1948. In 1956, at the age of 22, Csikszentmihalyi came to the United States with $1.25 in his pocket.

An avid rock climber, Csikszentmihalyi took note of the special feeling he got while inching his way up a challenging rock face, and began thinking about it in terms of his psychology studies. Why, he wondered, was the entire field of psychology focused exclusively on the study of human pathology and dysfunction? What about the positive states, the moments when human beings are at their absolute best?

Csikszentmihalyi spent hours interviewing and observing exceptionally creative people, including leading chess players, rock climbers, composers, and writers, and normal folks as well, as they did their work. He also developed a unique research tool called Experience Sampling Method, in which his study subjects carried pagers for a week at a time. Beeped randomly eight times throughout the day, they wrote down what they were doing and feeling right at that moment.

Csikszentmihalyi, who with his white hair and beard resembles a tall and reticent Santa Claus, discovered that the times when people were most happy and often most productive were not necessarily when they expected they would be. Passive leisure activities such as TV-watching consistently ranked low on participants' scales of satisfaction -- even though they often sought out these experiences. Instead, people reported the greatest sense of well-being while pursuing challenging activities, sometimes even at work, and often while immersed in a hobby.

In the flow state, Csikszentmihalyi found, people engage so completely in what they are doing that they lose track of time. Hours pass in minutes. All sense of self recedes. At the same time, they are pushing beyond their limits and developing new abilities. Indeed, the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to capacity. People emerge from each flow experience more complex, Csikszentmihalyi found. They become more self-confident, capable, and sensitive. The experience becomes "autotelic," meaning that the activity actually becomes its own reward. "To improve life, one must improve the quality of experience," he says. One of the chief advantages of flow is that it enables people to escape the state of "psychic entropy," the distraction, depression, and dispiritedness that constantly threaten them.

Csikszentmihalyi, a classic academic, has resisted many overt attempts to commercialize flow, particularly in the business world. "I'm not claiming that flow is like a magic pill," he says. "I'm always a little worried that if you ramp it up to a large company without knowing the culture and the context, it might not work." Don't bother looking for "7 Habits of Flow at Work" here: Csikszentmihalyi is the anti-Stephen Covey.

Yet plenty of others see the flow of dollar signs, either in their own company's performance or in bringing the concept to the corporate masses. Back in 2002, Stefan Falk, then the vice president of strategic business innovation at Ericsson, was given the task of integrating the merger of two huge business units worth $16 billion. Layoffs were coming, and Ericsson hoped Falk could find a way to make the remaining workers more productive. A former McKinsey & Co. consultant, Falk and a colleague had stumbled across Flow and another Csikszentmihalyi book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (HarperCollins, 1996), while conducting a multiyear study at McKinsey on human development and motivation. "I was mesmerized when I read it," Falk says. "I had a vital piece of the puzzle. I said to my friend, 'I think we should contact this guy whose name I cannot pronounce.' "

So he did (like many others, Falk calls Csikszentmihalyi "Mike" for the sake of simplicity). The two discussed Mike's belief that flow has several necessary preconditions. These include having clear goals and a reasonable expectation of completing the task at hand. People must also have the ability to concentrate, receive regular feedback on their progress, and actually possess the skills needed for that type of work.

Falk concluded that the best way to get to flow was to have Ericsson managers spend a nearly unheard-of amount of quality time with each one of their employees. Managers were asked to work with employees to draw up separate "performance contracts" that included an assessment of each worker's strengths and weaknesses and set out a very specific action plan to help improve their skills. It all sounds pretty standard, but there was a kicker: To monitor progress, managers would meet with each employee six times a year for intensive one-on-one sessions lasting as long as an hour and a half each.

At first, the managers groused at the extra work. Falk's response: "What are you managing? The only thing you really manage here is your employees. End of story." This fall, Ericsson will export the new management system to all of its offices around the world.

Falk moved on to Green Cargo, one of Scandinavia's largest transport and logistics companies, in mid-2003, and instituted an even more comprehensive flow-based management overhaul. Every single month, he required meetings between employees and managers, 150 of whom were sent Flow to read as part of a six-day training process. Performance-review contracts were drawn up to cover three-month periods, and then renegotiated. Before each meeting, workers were asked to spend at least an hour reflecting on what had transpired since the previous one and determining the content of the upcoming one.

It seems most ironic that more meetings would lead to better flow, but these aren't your normal stultifying interdepartmental snorefests. Instead, they are one-on-one intensives akin to an executive coaching session. So far so good: Last year, government-owned Green Cargo turned a profit for the first time in its 120-year history, and Falk's work gets much of the credit, says Johan Saarm, Green Cargo's deputy CEO.

In a world teeming with authors lusting for the speaking circuit, Csikszentmihalyi is a refreshing oddity. Although business is clamoring for more and more of him, his relationship with the private sector remains ambivalent; he even recently organized a conference called "Alternatives to Materialism." Csikszentmihalyi says he never really thought about business until five years ago, when he was offered the post at Drucker. He accepted it in part because he liked his potential colleagues, and also because it was a quiet place with good weather for his wife's tortured sinuses. "I lived my life in an ivory tower, and business was to be held at an arm's length," he says, Birkenstocks poking out below his slacks and blazer. That may be because none of his research has established any link between happiness and the possession of lucre.

It may also be because there is a dark side to flow, says Csikszentmihalyi. It can come while pursuing destructive activities, such as addictions or crimes. He offers the contrasting examples of Mother Teresa and Napoleon Bonaparte to show how differently the flow state can affect the world. The same is true of business; it's easy to imagine Enron's Andrew Fastow in a rapturous flow state as he plotted his next scheme.

Yet if Csikszentmihalyi feels he can make a difference, he will speak to companies, and currently takes about 10 corporate speaking engagements a year. A few years ago, he gave a talk at Microsoft, which is studying how to use flow to give Windows users a more engaging experience. If the notoriously buggy and user-unfriendly operating system suddenly becomes a pleasure to use, Csikszentmihalyi deserves some thanks. Elsewhere at Microsoft, a researcher is studying how flow might improve the lives and productivity of software engineers.

At Patagonia, CEO Michael Crooke seized upon the ideas in Flow earlier than most. He read the book 10 years ago and credits it with explaining to him exactly why he thrived as a Navy Seal. "When you get a high-powered team together and you really get into a zone, you'll synchronize," he says. Crooke sought Csikszentmihalyi out, and has been meeting with him weekly for the past four years while working toward a PhD in management. Much of his dissertation focuses on creating a workplace environment conducive to flow.

Crooke's research laboratory is his own company. He believes the flow experience can extend from the Patagonia worker to the customer if they both feel good about what the company stands for. Flow, he says, "is at the center of everything I'm doing." In April, Crooke sent out the first iteration of an annual survey intended to gauge how much meaning and job satisfaction employees find in their work. It is chock-full of probing questions like how free employees feel to use their own judgment, whether they feel management is fully open about financial matters, whether Patagonia adequately reports environmental damage it causes, and whether its corporate values and its workers' personal values are aligned.

Crooke is also examining to what extent Patagonia's famed goal of protecting the environment affects his workers' experiences there. This is because Csikszentmihalyi believes that flow is most powerful when achieved in service of a goal that will better society. After learning how much pesticide was required to make a single cotton shirt, Patagonia began using only organic cotton in its clothes. In a few years, Crooke says, Patagonia will make biodegradable clothing that people can compost in the backyard along with their banana peels.

Some people dispute a direct linkage between earth-friendly underwear and an inspirational workplace, but Crooke isn't one of them. "[Flow] manifests itself in focused, on-time, on-spec products," he says, "that win in the marketplace because they were developed in a system in which the customers and the internal people all know what they want and need." In a world of depressed Dilberts, it's certainly worth a try.

Ann Marsh is an author and freelance writer based in Costa Mesa, California

The Secret To Google's Success

2006-03-09T12:15:00.000+05:30

The Secret To Google's Success Its innovative auction system has ad revenues soaring

Everybody knows that Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) innovations in search technology made it the No. 1 search engine. But Google didn't make money until it started auctioning ads that appear alongside the search results. Advertising today accounts for 99% of the revenue of a company whose market capitalization now tops $100 billion. Advertisement

Now, research is showing that Google's auction methodology, invented internally and so important for its success, is far more innovative than auction experts once believed. While superficially similar to earlier types of auctions, it is a "novel mechanism" that "emerged in the wild," write the authors of The High Price of Internet Keyword Auctions, a new study by Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University, Michael Ostrovsky of Stanford University, and Michael Schwarz of the University of California at Berkeley. Google's AdWords became so successful after its debut four years ago that some of its key features were quickly adopted by Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO ), then the search-ad leader.

MATHEMATICAL RIGOR
Close-mouthed Google has opened up about AdWords since the three economists cracked its code last November. It freed Hal R. Varian, a Berkeley economist who consults for Google, to publish some of his findings about the auction methodology. And on Feb. 22, Google gave an interview to BusinessWeek in which for the first time it named the technical leader of the project: Eric Veach, a veteran of Pixar Animation Studios (PIXR ) whose Stanford doctorate was in computer graphics, not economics. "Without his mathematical rigor we wouldn't have been able to do it," said vice-president of product management Salar Kamangar, himself a biology major, who was Employee No. 9 at Google and led the nontechnical side of the project.

Some of Google's innovations are only now being matched. For instance, Yahoo gives the top spot on its search results page to the advertiser who pays the most per click. But Google maximizes the revenue it gets from that precious real estate by giving its best position to the advertiser who is likely to pay Google the most in total, based on the price per click multiplied by Google's estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the ad. Anil Kamath, chief technology officer of Efficient Frontier Inc., a search-engine marketing firm in Mountain View, Calif., estimates that Google earns about 30% more revenue per ad impression than Yahoo does. Kamath says Yahoo is likely to follow Google's lead soon. Asked about that, a Yahoo spokesperson says the company is "currently evaluating" making more use of the "click-through rate" in placing ads. Last fall, Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) MSN embraced Google's approach, tweaking it to increase ads' relevance, when it began auctioning search ad space.

What makes Google's auction so different? Auctions come in two main flavors. In a typical first-price auction, participants put in sealed bids, then the winner pays his or her bid. But the danger is the high-bidder ends up regretting having won, an effect known as the winner's curse. A second-price auction lessens winner's curse because the highest bidder gets the prize but pays only the minimum necessary to win, namely the second-highest bid, plus perhaps a penny.

Kamangar, Veach, and colleagues chose a second-price auction. But not knowing theory, they designed one that differed in a key respect from the one economists had studied. In the economists' version, bidders always have the incentive to tell the truth. In Google's auction they don't, say Edelman, Ostrovsky, and Schwarz, since in some cases, by understating the top price they're willing to pay, advertisers could get a slightly lower position on the search page for a lot less money. They conclude that naive advertisers who told the truth could overbid. Google's system has pluses for advertisers, too, says Varian. It's easier to understand than the academic version. And it's proven to work on a large scale.

AdWords Select, as it was called at its February, 2002, debut, was actually Google's third crack at an ad auction. The first two were flawed, but Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept pushing. Even the current system isn't perfect. Advertisers complain that it's too much of a "black box." Still, if the best measure of innovation is commercial success, Google's AdWords was a grand slam. Says Kamangar: "Third time's a charm."

Is Offshoring Good?

2006-02-27T12:14:00.000+05:30

Via Fastcompany

The head of an Indian consulting firm and a high-tech-union president face off on the effects of offshoring and globalization.

From: Issue 102 | January 2006 | By: Fast Company staff
Ashok Soota
Cofounder and managing director of MindTree Consulting in Bangalore, India

Marcus Courtney
President of WashTech/CWA, a Seattle-based union for high-tech workers

Resolved: Offshoring is good for America.
Soota: My observations: "Offshore" is a term borrowed from the manufacturing economies of the last century. In the knowledge economy, the terms offshore and onshore have no relevance. At MindTree, we have substituted these with the term "OneShore."

There are two forces at work in shaping the OneShore paradigm: Globalization and technology. These enable every nation to sell globally and source globally. This is not without transitional pain. The pain is equal for a small retailer in India edged out by a global giant or a farmer who must buy genetically modified seeds from U.S. sources and an American whose programming job may go to Bangalore.

No nation is as well equipped to take advantage of the emergent phenomena as the U.S., because it is a champion of free markets and has a large immigrant work force with global connections. Finally, American people are by nature, more adaptive. These give the country timeless resilience with which it reconfigures itself and leads the next wave.

Hence, I have no doubt that the new paradigm is good for America.

Courtney: Thanks for your observations. No question that technology and the Internet have enabled anytime, anywhere production that could not have been imagined 100 years ago. The idea that at a flip of the switch that production of high-tech products and services could be moved around the globe is a significant shift in how production gets done.

But there are consequences for this shift. The drivers that are currently moving the global economy are focused on driving down wages and benefits of U.S. employees as the work moves overseas. It is the cost differences combined with technology that makes offshore outsourcing a serious threat to U.S. high-tech workers. Also, tech workers in India are not immune from the forces around driving down costs. More and more Indian companies will be seeking ways to "offshore" their work to gain additional competitive advantage. The U.S. high-tech industry has seen very little job growth more than four years after an economic recession. The slowest job growth after a recovery since the great depression. If outsourcing is so great for the U.S., why are not more jobs getting created in the industry?

The other issue that makes offshore outsourcing unique is the impact it has for the U.S in terms of technology competitiveness. Companies are sending both high and low level work overseas, so it increases the chances of the U.S. losing its competitive advantage. Furthermore, as products and services that were once done in the U.S. are done overseas only to be reimported, it increases our trade deficit and balance of accounts which further jeopardizes our global competitiveness.

Soota: You raise very interesting issues. I have a basic disagreement with your observation that "the drivers that are currently moving the global economy are focused on driving down wages and benefits of U.S. employees."

The drivers moving the global economy are focused on two things: selling and servicing the global customer and driving down the total cost of business. It is not just about wages of U.S. workers. One part of that may be wages--and if so, it is not a one-country issue. As you rightly pointed out, it will affect Indians as well if wages are earned disproportionate to the value they add. It will be subject to pressure, irrespective of the country of origin.

In all this though, what is the fundamental truth? By nature, "value" is migratory. Once, it was India that was known for textiles--a time came when the power loom killed the homespun textile industry. Now the same power loom has to compete with international imports. Germany led the world in steel making at one time. Then it went to the U.S., then to Japan and then to Korea and now it has gone to China. You pick any industry, it will prove to you the migratory nature of value. Software programming, whether U.S. or Indian, is part of this reality.

Now I want to de-link low growth in programming jobs from high-tech leadership. I have no doubt in my mind that the U.S. will remain at the forefront of innovation. The U.S. has unique advantages that will be very difficult to replicate anywhere else, anytime soon.

U.S. competitiveness comes from its inherent diversity, intellectual infrastructure and access to long range capital. Having said that, the future will be such that the process of innovation will be borderless and cooperative. A genomic concept may be developed at Stanford, beta-tested in Bangalore and see first deployment in Beijing.

Apart from being the innovation capital of the world, the U.S. will continue to be the leader in unusual value creation in areas like capital management, health, space, energy, entertainment and defence.

So, the argument that offshoring will take away U.S. competitiveness ignores the nature of competitiveness and creation of sustainable, competitive value.

Courtney: One issue that is very different between India and the U.S. is the questions around market access and export driven policies. India has a national policy around IT that it be export driven. Most of the software services generated in India are exported. It is not consumed in the domestic market. In the U.S., what is happening is that once services that were done in the U.S. domestic market are increasingly getting done overseas only to be imported back into the U.S.

Our national policy should be different. I would argue the U.S. tech industry could go the way of the steel industry, if we do not create national policies, like in India, that promote a more export driven IT industry. The U.S. should follow India's lead in creating national policy around tech that just doesn't let market outcomes dictate everything. This can not only promote more fair competition but also avoid a race to the bottom in core labor standards.

Soota: The success of the Indian software industry is about having the right skills at the right time at the right cost. It has nothing to do with export incentives. Neither are export incentives an answer for what you perceive as the problem for the US.

You have earlier expressed concern on job losses due to offshoring. Let me give you an example where offshoring leads to job increases for the U.S. Most venture capitalists today require that product design be distributed across continents. The result? R&D dollars get stretched. When that happens, more projects can get funded. Projects that would fall "below the line" because of engineering costs become viable. In reality, offshoring (though I prefer the term OneShoring) is not a zero-sum game. It is to the advantage of free enterprise, hence to the advantage of the U.S.

Courtney: WashTech runs an offshore tracker on our techsunite.org website. Since January 2005, we have tracked more than 103,000 jobs have been offshored. These are only numbers that have been reported in the media, so we know the real total is much greater.

This is a significant number of jobs getting exported from the U.S. to other countries by multinational corporations to take advantage of the skilled low cost labor. I know of many tech workers that have lost jobs and when they have found new jobs they pay significantly less. The way offshoring/ OneShoring is currently getting done is a zero sum game, because the jobs getting created in India are mostly serving the U.S. domestic market--the worlds largest market. As more and more R&D gets done offshore, it is going to disadvantage investment in the U.S. market place--why invest in the high-cost center when you can go to the low-cost one. The Indian government invested heavily in creating the workforce with the right skills.

Soota: The issue has to be seen at a micro level and a macro level.

At a micro level, one must empathize with anyone who loses a job whether due to offshoring or obsolescence. Assistance in reskilling such persons must be available at a social and structural level.

At a macro level, jobs lost in one part of the economy are replaced by gains elsewhere. A well-known McKinsey study shows that the U.S. economy gains $1.14 in return for every dollar of offshoring spend in India.

These numbers don't take into account the additional gains from Capital investment. For example, the majority of the funding for MindTree and many other companies is from U.S. sources (institutional and individual) who will benefit when we go public.

The U.S., as the world's largest exporter of services, is the largest beneficiary of open markets. Also, countries with more open approach to offshoring like the U.S. and UK have lower levels of unemployment than relatively conservative economies like Germany and France. All of the above reconfirm that offshoring is good for America.

Courtney: If the current trends continue the U.S. will soon be running a trade deficit in its service category. At one time, the thinking was that U.S. should not be concerned with the loss of manufacturing jobs, or our trade deficit in these areas because the service sector would be the holy grail. How can the U.S. be the world's greatest tech innovator when it is importing more services than it is exporting?

As we can see with the explosive development of offshoring this is not turning out to be the case. We not only have to look at the number of jobs getting created in the macro economy but what kind of jobs. Obviously we make distinctions around jobs. We value computer jobs at a higher-level than fast food jobs. The economy in the U.S. is creating many more fast food jobs than high-end computer jobs. No one can point to what a person should be re-skilled at. If you computer programmers lose their jobs, what should they retrain for? Will employers high them once they are retrained.

I hear the retraining theory all the time but never hear much about the realities of how that is supposed to work.

Soota: To say that "if the current trends continue, the US will soon be running a trade deficit in its service category" is not based on facts. The US is the world's No. 1 exporter of services (per WTO/Dept of Commerce report 2005) at $318 billion with 15% share of the world services market. The next largest is UK with 8% share. Indian share of the overall service market (of which programming is a part) is a paltry 1.9%. That HUGE gap is not going to go away soon as feared by you.

On the re-skill issue, I must share with you what happened to computer manufacturing in India when the market was opened up to global competition. Most manufacturers had to shut shop and were replaced by IBM, Dell, Compaq and HP. What happened to the people in India who used to manufacture computers? Some re-skilled themselves, some changed professions and some I am sure, were left behind. The onus to learn and add new value is a global imperative.

Courtney: As a percentage of our U.S. gross domestic product--which is what I was referring to--we will be moving from a trade surplus to deficit. We could still be importing more services than we are exporting and be the world's largest service exporter.

Globalization requires that we have social imperatives outside of market forces. If the onus is to constantly update and re-skill, then we should have social policies around that imperative. We have to look at other values such as fairness, who is really winning, losing and why.

As you point out opening markets up for competition in India created more opportunity for large multinational corporations and they became the winners and domestic producers became the losers. We cannot have globalization and trade where the only winners are the large multinational corporations and the market. Workers, labor rights, communities and the environment should be on an equal playing field as the market in the discussion around globalization.

M-Commerce for developing countries

2006-02-27T12:01:00.000+05:30

A new report titled "Micro-Payment Systems and their application to mobile networks" (PDF) commissioned by the Information for Development Program (infoDev), in partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the GSM Association, found that mobile-enabled commerce, or m-Commerce, can address a major service gap in developing countries that is critical to their social and economic development.

The proliferation of mobile communications in developing countries has the potential to bring a wide range of financial services to an entirely new customer base. The infoDev report, which focuses on the use of mobiles for micro-payments in the Philippines, found that mobile-enabled commerce, or m-Commerce, can address a major service gap in developing countries that is critical to their social and economic development.
In many developing countries, particularly in rural areas, access to financial services is limited. A large proportion of the population is excluded from formal banking systems and makes payments entirely using cash, which is far less secure and flexible than electronic payment mechanisms. However, in the Philippines, 3.5 million people are using a service that allows them to transfer money over the two major mobile networks operated by SMART Communications and Globe Telecom.

The experience in the Philippines shows that m-Commerce has the capability to bring advantages to all stakeholders:

For users - an opportunity to become engaged in the formal banking sector, to facilitate and reduce the costs of remittances, and to enable financial transactions without the costs and risks associated with the use of cash, including theft and travel to pay in person

For operators - a significant increase in text messaging revenues and a large drop in customer churn

For the banks - an increase in their customer reach and the added cash float available to the bank

For the retailers - added business opportunities through the sale of prepaid account credits

For micro-finance institutions - the ability to advance funds into remote areas and have regular repayments that do not significantly inconvenience the user

For service industries and utilities - the ability to get payments electronically from a significant portion of the overall population

In addition to providing many answers about this new service application, the report raises many interesting questions about the users and how they are benefiting from this service. These questions will be explored during the next phase of infoDev’s work in this area, the scope of which will be decided in consultation with IFC, the GSM Association and its donors and other partners.

Top 10 Innovation Myths

2006-02-13T12:59:00.000+05:30

Top 10 Innovation Myths
Software vendors seeking success need to push past the excuses, find differentiation and swallow this dose of business reality.
By Geoffrey A, Moore, TCG Advisors
Feb. 03, 2006

If you are worrying about innovation, take heart. Only successful companies do. By contrast, unsuccessful companies either aren't around to do any worrying or are consumed with more pressing concerns, like meeting payroll or paying their bills. At the other end of the spectrum, venture-backed start-ups have lots of worries, but innovating isn't one of them - they actually worry more about not innovating, as in let's not waste our scarce resources reinventing wheels that others have already developed.

5. Great innovators are usually egotistical mavericks. Not any more (although there is no shortage of egotistical mavericks that would have you think otherwise). In the current decade there is more competitive differentiation to be gained through collaboration than through busting out on your own. That's because our extended supply chains reward each company for focusing on its core and outsourcing the rest of the offer to someone else in the chain. But actually orchestrating these chains to perform effectively in real time requires enormous innovation. And that is a job for people who listen well, empathize deeply, and make the differentiated performance of the chain as a whole as important as their own local success. In addition, many innovative technology companies are harnessing the hearts, minds, innovative skills of thousands of people through the open source movement. Many great innovators with audacious ambitions have the qualities of Tom Sawyer, getting other people to help them paint the fence - often for free - because they want to be a part of something great.

4. innovation is inherently disruptive. Not necessarily. To be sure, authors like Clay Christensen and myself have spent much of our life's work chronicling the impact of disruptive innovation, but it is only one type among many. And the more established your company, the less likely it is a type for you to specialize in. Alternatives include application innovation, product innovation, platform innovation, line extension innovation, design innovation, marketing innovation, experiential innovation, value engineering innovation, integration innovation, process innovation, value migration innovation, and acquisition innovation. This last one, in particular, is usually an established enterprise's best bet for dealing with disruption.

3. It is good to innovate. No, it is good to differentiate on an attribute that drives customer preference during buying decisions. Innovating elsewhere costs money and entails risk but does not create competitive advantage. It might still be worth doing, either to neutralize another company's competitive advantage or to improve your own productivity, but you would be surprised about the amount of innovation going on in your company right now that serves no economic purpose. Rather it is being undertaken as a form of corporate entertainment, creating the illusion of purpose and meaning while carefully skirting the need to be economically accountable.

2. Innovation is hard. Actually, it is not. What is hard is deploying innovation, especially in an established enterprise. That's because the critical deployment resources are all engaged trying to make the quarter on the back of the existing offer set in the existing market categories. They cannot be bothered with next-generation responsibilities when their current ones are hanging by a thread. The net result: Too often, when a genuinely innovative offer is ready to go to market, there is simply no one there to sponsor it, and it dies on the vine.

1. When innovation dies, it's because the antibodies kill it. Yes, but not how you think. The murder takes place in the customer's world, not in yours. Here's how. As a management team you hope to leverage the current relationships managed by your sales force to introduce the next-generation innovation. But the synergies implied by this tactic are revealed over time to be false - the current team does not have any relationships of merit with the new target customer. Instead it has legacy commitments to the old target customer who in turn is threatened by and resents the intrusion of the new innovation. Thus your own sales force finds itself more or less honor-bound to sabotage your next-generation effort. Whether they actually do or not, they are in no position to lead the kind of charge required, and it is no wonder when some piddly little start-up beats your finely tuned sales machine to the punch.

But you are not a start-up. You have some success, some momentum, and therefore some inertia, and it is the inertia that has you worried. By design inertia resists change. This is a good thing, as long as you are headed in a direction you want to go. But when the market changes, inertia acts against your future interests. Now you are right to be worried.

So you raise the topic of innovation in hopes of getting some insight. Good luck. My recent research leads me to believe that innovation, as a topic, leads the business writing industry in twaddle per page. With that in mind, let me dispel what, in David Letterman tradition, we might call the Top Ten Myths about Business Innovation:

10. We don't innovate around here any more. Baloney. Your people are innovating all the time. The problem is, your innovations are no longer differentiating your company. Your innovations, in other words, parallel your competitors' innovations, with the result that you all look more or less alike. Customers, seeing little to no difference, put more and more emphasis on price. Unable to distinguish your offer, you have no bargaining power, and most capitulate to their pressure. On weekends you complain about commoditization, but during the week you do nothing to address the problem.

9. Product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter. And whose fault is that? If you do not differentiate in hard-to-copy ways, you cannot expect what differentiation you do create to be long-lived. iPod's product life cycles are longer than its competitors, not because it has a way-cool form factor but because iTunes is part of the iPod experience that Apple's rivals are still struggling duplicate. And as cars make their dashboards iPod compatible, the competitors run around catching up to Apple instead of making their offerings distinctive in some other dimension. Sustainable differentiation requires barriers to entry and barriers to exit.

8. We need a Chief Innovation Officer. Like a hole in the head. Think about what your true goal is: you want innovation that creates differentiation that leads to customer preference during buying decisions. That sounds about as close to a core business strategy as you can get. It has to be grounded in the realities of operational capabilities, customer feedback, competitor investments, and capital constraints. So your chief innovation officer by default must be your P&L owner. If that person isn't stepping up to the innovation task, replace them with someone who will.

7. We need to be more like Google. Not on your life. Google is a once-in-a-decade phenomenon, a company riding a wave of adoption so powerful that not only is the first derivative of its growth curve positive, but so is the second derivative. If that describes your market, we doubt you are worrying about innovation. If it does not, and you want outside help, seek it from someone who has had recent experience with markets like yours.

6. R&D investment is a good indicator of innovation commitment. No, it is not. In the first half of this decade, HP invested 15% in R&D and Dell invested 5% and cleaned their clock. How? They out-innovated them in process innovations led primarily by their operations folks. Innovation that leads to sustainable competitive advantage can be initiated and led by any organization in the company. R&D represents the engineering department's lead, and in general pays off well in double-digit growth markets and increasingly poorly in single-digit growth markets. Continuing major investments in R&D in slow-growth markets is a good measure of lack of innovative thinking.

India Internet and Mobile statistics

2006-02-07T11:58:00.000+05:30

From Rajesh's Blog

Let us begin by putting together some numbers. I have put these together from a variety of sources and some extrapolation. (I have also put the financial figures in dollars ? that seems to have become the lingua franca for money-related discussion in India! For easy conversion: $1 = Rs 45; $1 million = Rs 4.5 crore)

India Per Capita Income: $600 [Population: 1 billion]

PCs: 18 million; growing at 5 million/year
Internet users: 35 million; growth 50%/year
Cybercafes: 100,000; accounts for two-thirds of Internet access
Landlines: 45 million (declining slightly)
Broadband users: 1 million (most additions in 2005)
Broadband: $5 per month for 256 Kbps with 100 MB download
eCommerce: $250 million; growing at 100%
Online Advertising: $35 million; growing at 30%; 1.2% of total advertising spend

Mobiles: 75 million; growing at 4.5 million/month; 77% pre-paid; 75% GSM; 25% CDMA
Mobile Voice calls: 3c/min (avg); SMS: 2c/message
In India, calling party pays for calls. There is no charge for receiving SMSes.
GPRS-enabled phone: $80+
GPRS Tariff: $8+/month for 100 MB download (plans vary across operators)
Mobile VAS: $90 million; growing at 40%
Mobile ARPU: $8.50 [Split: Voice: 70%; Rentals: 20%; VAS: 10%]
Mobile VAS Split: Person-to-Person SMS, Caller Line Identification, Roaming: 70%; Content: 30%
Content: Ringtones, Ringback Tones, Games, Wallpapers, Interactive Voice Response, Person-to-App SMS
Content Providers get about 10-30% of revenue for their content

Telecom density 11 percent in India

2006-01-03T15:00:00.000+05:30

Telecom subscribers rise by 3.79 mn subscribers last month
New Delhi | December 09, 2005 7:33:34 PM IST

Continuing the growth trajectory, 3.5 million telephone users were added in November 2005 taking the gross to 120 million while the teledensity touched 11 per cent in the country, TRAI said here today.
In the month of November 2005, 3.79 million subscribers were added as compared to 3.24 million subscribers in October 2005.

During the first 8 months of 2005-06, around 21.50 million subscribers have been added. For mobile segment, 3.51 million subscribers have been added during November 2005 as compared to 2.90 million in October 2005.

The mobile additions consist of 2.33 million GSM subscribers and 1.18 million CDMA subscribers as against 2.11 million GSM and 0.79 million CDMA last month.

During the first eight months of current financial year about 2.33 million mobile subscribers were added, making it a total of 71.46 million mobile subscribers at the end of November 2005.

In the fixed segment, a total of 0.28 million subscribers were added during November 2005, which were predominantly WLL (F). With this the total subscriber base of fixed lines have reached 48.47 million.

The gross subscribers' base consisting of fixed as well as mobile has reached around 120 million.

The gross subscriber base consisting of fixed as well as mobile has become around 120 million at the end of November, 2005. The tele-density at the end of November, 2005 has reached around 11 per cent as compared to 10.66 million at the end of previous month.

The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for mobile services for second quarter of FY 2005-06 mobile segments have come down to 8 dollars from 9 dollars one year back. It is lowest when compared to the average ARPU for mobile services in various regions.

The ARPU for Africa is 20.90 dollars, Asia-Pacific 18.90, Eastern Europe 13.10, Latin America 13.30, Middle East, 22.10, US and Canada 49.60, Western Europe 37.40. The global average stood at 21.30 compared to India's 8 dollars ARPU.

Meanwhile the Broadband (256 Kbps download) connections have continued the similar growth rate since beginning of 2005. At the end of November, 2005, total Broadband connections in the country have crossed 7.50 lakh only as against a target of 3.00 million fixed in Broadband Policy-2004.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

2006-01-03T14:49:00.000+05:30

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint
I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors.

However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.

Before there is an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

Problem
Your solution
Business model
Underlying magic/technology
Marketing and sales
Competition
Team
Projections and milestones
Status and timeline
Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s you’re optimal font size.

So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.

Sales of .org Domain Grows Fast in India

2005-10-04T10:09:00.000+05:30

By RAJESH MAHAPATRA, Associated Press Writer
Mon Oct 3, 8:56 AM ET

NEW DELHI - The sales of the ".org" domain — the Internet address for most nonprofit organizations — are growing faster in India than any other major nation, a top manager for the domain said Monday.

Although India now accounts for less than 1 percent of the users registered with ".org" worldwide, new Indian users of the domain are growing at a pace matched by few countries, said Edward G. Viltz, the president and chief executive of the Public Interest Registry, the Reston, Va.-based nonprofit agency which manages use of the ".org" address.

The number of ".org" domain users in India increased 31 percent in the past nine months from a year ago, compared with 9 percent in China and 5 percent in South Korea, Viltz said. Currently, there are 4 million ".org" users worldwide, 90 percent in the United States and Europe. In India, there are about 34,000.

India is home to one of the world's largest number of nonprofit organizations, which include aid groups, religious trusts, charities and welfare associations; but most have yet to go online, said Viltz, who is touring the country campaigning about the benefits that come with a ".org" domain.

"The dot-org domain is widely perceived as the Internet home for noncommercial organizations. If you have dot-org, your Web site is trusted," he said.

India's information technology infrastructure has rapidly expanded in recent years, making the environment very conducive for growth of the Internet and the sale of domain names.

Viltz said he is looking to India in Asia and Brazil and Argentina in Latin America for robust growth in coming years. In Africa, the prospects were limited because of poor broadband availability, he said.

Term Sheet Series Wrap Up

2005-09-12T10:03:00.000+05:30

Term Sheet Series Wrap UpJason and I hope you enjoyed reading our term sheet series at least as much as we enjoyed writing it. While we won’t be competing with our friend Jack Bauer for any drama awards (I tried to make it 24 posts, but could only get to 20), we’ve tried to take a balanced and pragmatic approach to explaining the mysterious “VC term sheet.” Remember – we’re not lawyers (ok – Jason is) and this isn’t legal advice so you should not rely on it for anything, yada yada standard disclaimers follow. In other words, use at your own risk.

For ease of reference, following are the various sections (linked to their corresponding post) that we covered.

Price
Liquidation Preference
Board of Directors
Protective Provisions
Drag Along
Anti-Dilution
Pay-to-Play
Dividends
Redemption Rights
Conversion
Conditions Precedent to Financing
Vesting
Information Rights
Registration Rights
Right of First Refusal
Voting Rights
Employee Pool
Restriction on Sales
Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement
Co-Sale Agreement
Founders Activities
Initial Public Offering Shares Purchase
No Shop Agreement (also Unilateral or Serial Monogamy)
Indemnification
Assignment
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for things we missed, email me anytime. We have had numerous requests for republishing this content – if you are interested, please contact me. We’re usually happy to oblige – we just want to make sure we know about it. Until next season

Clarify Your Story

2005-09-12T09:45:00.000+05:30

Via SramanaMitra

Product:

o What is your technology?
o What is the application of this technology?
o What is the profile of your ideal Target Customer Company?
o What is your Differentiated, Must Have Value Proposition to this Customer?
o Which Market? Which Segment? Why?
o How big is the Market? Is it big enough? How do you expand, if not?
o Who is the User of your Product? What is the Usage Model?
o How does the User currently solve this problem?
o Who is the Buyer?
o How strong is the pain? Does the Buyer care to solve the User’s pain?
o What is the ROI? How long will take to realize the ROI?
o What Value does the Customer see?
o What Price can you charge based on Perceived Value?
o What is the competition and how do you position against them?
o Whom do you need to partner with to offer a full solution / whole product?
o How do you position win-win deals for Partners?

Sales:

o What is the appropriate Channel Strategy (Direct, OEM, Resellers, SIs)?
o Are there Channel Conflicts? How do you resolve?
o What is your territory plan and prioritization based on market segment targets?
o Who is the Economic Buyer (EB)? What job title does that correspond to?
o Who is the relevant VITO? What job title does that correspond to?
o Who is the Technical Decision Maker (TDM)? What job title?
o Who is the User? How do you drive adoption amongst the Users? What job title(s)?
o Who is a likely Champion for your solution? What job title?
o Who can coach you inside an account? How do you gather information required to qualify the lead? Extract the pain? Position the solution?
o What is your positioning to the VITO? EB? TDM? User? Champion? Coach?
o What do you need to know about a Prospect to efficiently Qualify the Lead?
o What are the key Pain-Extraction questions for a rep to ask during qualification?
o What paid Proof-of-Concept / Pilot Engagement / Evaluation Framework will get you to a deal within a short time?
o What is the appropriate Sales Cycle Steps, Next Steps and Duration breakdown?
o What are the “must have” key target accounts of specific importance? Why? What do you need to accomplish in those engagements to be able to achieve high leverage for Reference Selling, Proof-points, and Metrics?
o Do you have Reference Accounts? Whatâ??s the best strategy to leverage the Reference accounts and proof points?
o How do you build new Reference Accounts? Who is your target? Why? How do you penetrate, sell, and demonstrate ROI?
o Are there “must have” Channel relationships? What do you need to do to appropriately establish and manage them?

Corporate:

o What is the Product Roadmap for the Company?
o What is the unifying theme that positions the company and leverages its strengths (technology, product, channel, current customers, references, etc.)
o Is there a Platform Strategy? A Point Product Strategy? A Solution Strategy? What holds all these pieces together? How do you position to make it into an integrated “BIG” story?
o What products / pieces need to be repositioned / repackaged to align with the Corporate Strategy?
o What is the full story? Is it a powerful, differentiated story that can go beyond a point-product / one-trick pony, to become a Category Leader?
o What is the Category? Do you define a new category or position within an existing one?
o What technology / product / channel / media elements need to be introduced / influenced to make it into a larger story?
o What broad scale industry trends can you impact based on your offering, and how do you position to align with such trends?
o What is your Funding Strategy? How do you position, package, & sell?
o What is your Exit Strategy? How do you position, package, & sell?

Execution Roadmap:

o What is your next major milestone? - Product Launch? -Funding round? -Exit?
o What derivative milestones / related projects do you need to accomplish to be able to stay on track and execute on the strategy?
o What is the “project-resource-timeline” map tracking to the next milestone?
o What is the Messaging Matrix?
o What is the Collateral Map, based on the Sales Process / Sales Cycle Steps?
o What are the Reference Account milestones?
o What is the PR Strategy?
o Do you have the resources to staff all the projects that lead up to the milestones?
o Who will manage Lead Sourcing / Lead Generation / Lead Qualification?
o Who will manage the PR process, pitches, follow-ups, etc.?
o Who will write the collaterals? (Web Site, Sales Pitches, Data Sheets)
o Who will design and produce the web site?
o Who will manage events / tradeshows?
o What are the key additional hires / timeframe?
o Does everything align with your Operating Plan / Budget? What trade-offs do you need to make? What are the prioritization algorithms?

© 2005 Sramana Mitra.

ideas are just a multiplier of execution

2005-08-30T09:38:00.000+05:30

by Derek Sivers via Rajesh Jain
It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.)

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Explanation:

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.
The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas.
I'm not interested until I see their execution.

Derek Sivers is the founder, president, and sole programmer behind CD Baby, independent music distribution, and HostBaby, web hosting for musicians.

Internet grows in depth in India: Study

2005-08-02T14:27:00.000+05:30

Internet grows in depth in India: Study
It should break two barriers to grow exponentially in India

NEW DELHI: Internet usage has evolved more in 'depth' than in 'spread in its decade long presence in India,' a study said.

Internet's impact and growth is being driven through 'increased usage' by existing users rather than assimilation of newer ones, the study conducted by JustConsult said.

The study done among the Internet users in April 2005 sampled over 30,000 users. To estimate the penetration of Internet among urban Indians a telephone survey spread across ten cities with over 3,000 participants was also conducted.

The study finds that around 17.5 million urban Indians are using the Internet with certain consistency. With another 5.2 million using it sparingly, its upper limit is around 23 million urban users at present.

This puts the penetration of Internet among urban Indians at around nine percent. Assuming marginal usage in rural areas, the national penetration level stands at a potential two percent.

In terms of 'depth' of usage, almost a third of urban Internet users are heavy users with log time of more than three hours every day. Interestingly, one out of every three heavy Internet users is connected 'throughout the day' and a third of those are logging in at least five times a day.

The profile of a characteristic net user is exceedingly inconsistent with the projected notion that he/she is a 'white collared professional'. The professional most likely does not represent more than the 'tip' of the iceberg of the urban Indian net users. The typical net user is more the average person. However, he does represent a 'reasonably' decent purchasing power. Every three out of four net users own an automobile of some kind and every second net user has a credit card.

To grow exponentially in urban India, Internet would need to break two major barriers.

One is the 'real' barrier of solving technical issues related to speed and connectivity. This is the biggest reason for users not spending more time online.

The second is the 'perceptual' barrier of creating a more 'persuasive' relevance of Internet in people's overall lives rather than it being restricted to the work domain. This poses a challenge for marketers who need to convert net users into net consumers, the study said.

Mobile phones and development

2005-07-09T11:43:00.000+05:30

Mobile-phone firms have found a profitable way to help the poor help themselves

Get article background

ALL eyes are on what governments can do to end poverty, with aid, debt relief and trade top of the agenda at this week's G8 summit. But what about the role that business can play—and, in particular, technology firms? It is increasingly clear that, when it comes to bridging the “digital divide” between rich and poor, the mobile phone, not the personal computer, has the most potential. “Emerging markets will be wireless-centric, not PC-centric,” says C. K. Prahalad, a management scholar and author of “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, a book that highlights the collective purchasing power of the world's 4 billion poorest people and urges firms to try to profit from it.

Mobile phones have become indispensable in the rich world. But they are even more useful in the developing world, where the availability of other forms of communication—roads, postal systems or fixed-line phones—is often limited. Phones let fishermen and farmers check prices in different markets before selling produce, make it easier for people to find work, allow quick and easy transfers of funds and boost entrepreneurship. Phones can be shared by a village. Pre-paid calling plans reduce the need for a bank account or credit check. A recent study by London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. Mobile phones are, in short, a classic example of technology that helps people help themselves.

Vodafone commissioned a report, which included a study by the London Business School, on the impact of mobile phones on Africa. Charles Kenny wrote a report for the World Bank on communications infrastructure in developing countries. See also Vodacom, Investcom, Philips and the GSM Association.

But despite rapid subscriber growth in much of the developing world, only a small proportion of people—around 5% in both India and sub-Saharan Africa—have their own mobile phones. Why? The price of handsets is the “biggest obstacle” to broader adoption, says Alan Knott-Craig, boss of Vodacom, which runs networks in five African countries. Azmi Mikati of Investcom, which runs networks in Africa and the Middle East, estimates that the number of users would double in those markets if the cheapest handset cost $30 instead of $60.

Ringing the changes

Handset-makers earn most of their profits from fancy phones sold to consumers in rich countries, where on average a handset costs around $200 (before operator subsidies). But as markets have become saturated in the rich world, manufacturers have started to realise that their future growth depends on catering to the needs of developing nations. As a result, they have been working with operators to develop new extremely cheap handsets and to boost adoption in the poor world.

Several operators from developing countries teamed up earlier this year under the auspices of the GSM Association, which promotes the use of GSM, the world's dominant mobile-phone standard. They invited the handset-makers to bid for a contract to supply up to 6m handsets for less than $40 each. The contract was won by Motorola. Delivery of handsets began in April. The low cost is not due to cross-subsidy from high-margin handsets or “corporate social responsibility” funding, insists David Taylor of Motorola. “We do make a margin—a much smaller margin, but it is still a margin,” he says.

This week the procurement process began for more handsets, to be delivered from next January. As well as letting smaller operators pool their bargaining power, this scheme aims to draw manufacturers' attention to the needs of developing countries. “This was the first time that emerging-market operators had come together,” says Ben Soppitt of the GSMA. Each operator is small, but together they represent a big market. “We believe we can increase the market by 100m-150m customers a year for five to ten years if we can get the affordability right,” he predicts. That means encouraging handset-makers to design new extremely cheap phones on which they can still turn a small profit.

Such a phone cannot simply be a cut-down version of an existing handset. It must be very reliable and have lots of battery capacity, as it will be used by people who do not have reliable access to electricity, says Mr Taylor. Motorola's low-cost handset has a standby time of two weeks. And the handset must conform to local languages and customs: Motorola's handset, for example, includes a football game in Africa, but a cricket game in India.

Nor can the makers skimp on design. Kai Oistamo of Nokia, the world's largest handset-maker, notes that people in poor countries have to spend a far larger proportion of their income than those in the rich world to buy even the cheapest handset. “So looks and brand are highly important—it is much more of a status symbol in those societies,” he says. And it is wrong, points out Mr Prahalad, to assume that consumers in poor countries will not be interested in fancy features such as music-playback. Since they cannot afford multiple devices—an iPod, a PC, a PlayStation—they may want more from their mobiles.

As handset-makers respond to this new market, prices will continue to fall. “We will give you the volumes so that you can continue to drive down prices,” promised Sunil Mittal, boss of Bharti, a big Indian operator, at a recent industry conference. On June 29th Philips, a Dutch electronics firm, announced a new range of chips designed to take handset costs below $20.

Lower prices will make a second barrier ever more apparent: high taxes and duties imposed by many governments on handsets and services, often just as growth in the sector starts to take off. “It does seem strange for countries to say that telephone access is a public-policy goal, and then put special or punitive taxes on telecoms operators and users,” says Charles Kenny, an economist at the World Bank. “It's a case of sin taxes on a blessed product.”

In Turkey, new subscribers must pay a special tax of 20 new liras ($15) for a connection. A sales tax of 18%, plus a special communications tax of 25%, is added to all mobile bills. Uganda has just imposed a 10% tax on mobile phones. In Afghanistan, telecoms taxes account for 14% of government revenue, says Mr Kenny. In Bangladesh, the government has just imposed a tax of 900 taka ($14) on all new connections, in addition to an import duty of 300 taka levied on all imported handsets.

In big markets, such as Brazil, handset-makers have set up local factories to avoid import duties. That will not pay in smaller, poorer places. To avoid taxes and duties, many mobile operators in sub-Saharan Africa do not supply handsets, but rely on customers to get them on the black market, says Mark Burk of Informa, a research firm.

Yet there is anecdotal evidence that reducing taxes on handsets can boost government revenues. People would rather pay a small tax on a legal handset than no tax on a smuggled one that cannot be returned if it goes wrong. There are some hopeful signs: India cut its import duty on handsets to 5% last year and plans to scrap it altogether. Mauritius recently cut its taxes on handsets to boost adoption.

The GSMA is now making a 50-country study that will, it hopes, provide conclusive proof of the benefits of cutting taxes on mobile phones. The aim, says Mr Soppitt, is to show that a “win-win-win” scenario is possible, in which customers get cheaper access, manufacturers and operators sell more handsets and airtime and governments raise their tax revenues. (Oh, and the “digital divide” vanishes, too.) With its new focus on low-cost handsets, the industry is doing its part to extend access to communications technology. Now governments must do their part, too.

Top 5 Technology Selection Pitfalls

2005-07-07T10:55:00.000+05:30

Top 5 Technology Selection Pitfalls

by Tony Byrne
01-Jul-2005

Buying major software applications can be stressful. The impact of your choice will reverberate across your company, and switching costs can become prohibitive. Yet, it can seem hard to know in advance whether you're picking the right solution.

CMS Watch technology reports can help you sort out the suitability of different vendors for your needs, but purchasing enterprise software and related services represents a true process. The good news is that many organizations fall victim to a predictable -- and avoidable -- set of pitfalls. Herewith are my top 5 technology selection pitfalls, along with some advice for avoiding them.

Pitfall #1: Creating a 1-dimensional selection team
The traditional divide between IT and Marketing -- or IT and "Business" -- is much discussed and famously joked about.

You probably recognize the phenomenon: Business has the budget and picks a tool without adequately consulting IT, or IT is given sole responsibility for finding the right vendor and doesn't adequately involve Business, or Business simply won't participate.

In my experience, the best software selection teams are multidisciplinary. Depending on the size of your organization, that team should include:

System / Database Administrator
Developer
Enterprise Architect
Content Contributors (ideally more than one)
Editor
MarCom Manager
Sales Exec
Finance Manager
Librarian and/or Information Architect
Plus other functional specialists as appropriate (e.g. HR manager for an Intranet).

Sometimes the Marketing-IT divide is overplayed. Just as frequently the real problem is that a single business unit is tasked with selecting a system for the entire enterprise, and presumes that their choice will flex for all. "If it works for us, it should work for everyone else."

This can stem from a rational desire to apply existing investments in a particular solution more broadly across the enterprise. However, if different business units did not participate in vendor selection in the first place, the chances of the solution natively meeting their needs drops precipitously.

The key word there is natively. With ample time and money you can abuse software to get it to do many things it was never intended to do. But it will be painful for all concerned. Better to involve representative business units from the start if you wish to scale a pilot project enterprise-wide.

Pitfall #2:. Becoming slaves to spreadsheets
Spreadsheets can be useful tools product selections -- as long as you employ them judiciously. Over reliance on long spreadsheets can lead you down the wrong path. This typically happens in two places -- RFPs and vendor scoring.

In RFPs, it is tempting to try to challenge vendors with long lists of desired features and attributes. Here's a secret: vendors have seen all your requirements before, and I assure you that they have very attractive answers.

One of your rows might say, "Supports the Firefox browser." Nearly every vendor will check the box. They dare not: for all they know, Firefox support could be the one key requirement that will nix them before they can even meet you! What they don't tell you is that their user interface in Firefox remains crude and barely-functioning. So keep your Excel checklists to the bare essentials (such as operating system compatibility), and if you want to see how vendors really differ, don't ask, "do you," but rather, "how do you."

The reason to keep checklist items to a bare minimum is that you want to focus on developing real scenarios that vendors can respond to and your cross-enterprise team can test in a hands-on way. James Robertson's CMS Requirements Toolkit contains a very useful discussion of scenarios. The CMS Report also has sample scenarios.

Many selection teams also use spreadsheets to determine finalists by applying weights to criteria, scoring how bidders perform, then adding up the math. Some government procurements require this type of approach. Try to be more flexible. For one thing, selection team members will emerge from the competition with favorites, and they frequently reverse-engineer the equations before entering scores to give their preferred vendor a high total. This seems sneaky, but it also signals a need to uncover and discuss why members possess "gut" instincts about particular vendors.

If you must, just use the numeric scores to arrive at 3 finalists, then talk it through, then test the top solutions again if you need more data (see next point). Give special credence to the opinions of employees who will have to use the system to complete their daily work. If they don't like it, they won't use it.

Pitfall #3: Failing to test the proposed solutions
Buying software without trying it out is frequently compared unfavorably to purchasing automobiles. "Would you buy a car without test-driving it first?"

Indeed, technology selection teams often assume they have to make a decision based on written proposals and inevitably thin, generic demos. The fear of making a bad choice with incomplete information creates tremendous stress. Buyers become suspicious, and it sets up a conflictual process from the beginning. (As Master Yoda counsels, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.") If you are going to make a major investment in technology, then it behooves you to test at least two finalists against important usage scenarios for a limited amount of time, before committing to a solution.

At its best, the test phase becomes a cooperative search for understanding how a particular tool fits your environment. At its worst, it will uncover the difficulty of working with outside suppliers under the press of a deadline. In other words, it will be like a real implementation, after which you can sign a contract with much greater knowledge and confidence.

Pitfall #4: Focusing too much attention on the product -- and not enough on the vendor
Testing products is important, but typically your relationship with the winning vendor will have a greater influence on your long-term success. It is hard to quantify effective relationships, so here again a spreadsheet will fail you. Just remember that your relationship with the software sales team will drift away just as sure as rose petals in autumn, while your relationship with the vendor's services and support staff will endure year-round. Make judgments accordingly.

All companies have personalities. Software companies (and open-source projects) have strong personalities. One vendor might excel at core software engineering while the other focuses on customer-driven feature development. One vendor promotes a large and active consulting arm; another works primarily through local systems integrators. (Recognizing the increasing importance of corporate "fit" over features, we have spent more time on plumbing vendor tendencies in CMS Watch reports.) There is no ideal model -- the best vendor is the one that works best for you.

Pitfall #5: Negotiating a win-lose deal
No buyer wants to be on the losing end of the deal, and you should negotiate for a fair price. But when vendors lose, it can hurt the buyer too. This is especially the case when a buyer tries to negotiate a vendor down an entire pricing tier because they simply can't afford the vendor's entry-level fees. (Or, sometimes a short-sighted vendor sales team will troll for smaller-than-typical customers.) This puts the customer among the vendor's least profitable and hence least desirable customers, and sets up both parties for future conflict. Try to find vendors where you are an ideal customer -- not too big, but more importantly, you're not too small.

Alternatively, an aggressive salesperson can oversell with products you don't really need or aren't prepared to deploy. They win and you lose -- but in this case it is not like buying a car, because you will have an ongoing relationship with the vendor and ultimately you'll come to recognize your raw deal. While a strong vendor will work to make you whole, it can poison the relationship. Ultimately, it's your responsibility to understand what you're buying and how you're going to use it to help your business in the near term.

India's IT services market to grow at 19.8 percent

2005-07-04T16:53:00.000+05:30

Mumbai, July 4 (IANS) India's IT services market is expected to grow at a healthy 19.8 percent through 2009 on increased business activity and robust economic growth, said an industry research report Monday.

According to tech sector research firm Gartner, emerging markets such as India and China will act as the main engines of growth in the IT services market across the Asia Pacific region in the next few years.

The Indian IT services market recorded the strongest growth at 26.7 percent in the fiscal year 2004-05 for the Asia Pacific region, said Gartner.

Although India's total IT services market will still be one-third smaller than China at $5.3 billion by 2009, its development and integration size will be almost the same as China at around $3 billion, said the report.

"As the Indian economy grows, the focus of demand for IT services will shift from large deals to increasing number of mid-size and small enterprises signing deals," said Ravindra Datar, principal analyst (Asia Pacific) of Gartner.

"This is expected to drive the next phase of growth in the Indian IT services market," he added.

According to Gartner, while India has been established as a leading destination for offshore IT and BPO (business process outsourcing) services through the last 10 years, the domestic market demand has started picking growth very recently.

"While India has the strongest growth at 26.7 percent for the fiscal year 2004-05, it is on a smaller base as compared to the more developed markets," said the report.

Some of the key drivers for the increased domestic spending in India are the urgency to meet regulatory requirements in the financial services sector and large scale IT deployment by the central and state governments.

Deployment of IT to improve business efficiency and for better competitive capabilities against global competition and improved infrastructure availability are also important issues to the growth of domestic technology market.

Gartner said banking and financial services, and telecommunications sector are the frontrunners in IT spending in India followed by the manufacturing sector.

Government spending is also growing rapidly due to national and state governments moving ahead with their e-governance plans, said the report, adding this trend will continue during the next four to five years.

"With business confidence continuing to improve across the (Asia Pacific) region cost is still a key consideration in IT investment," said Rolf Jester, vice president (research) of Gartner.

"While companies are more willing to spend, their requirements are also increasingly demanding. They are also more careful in selecting service providers, which results in longer selling cycles," he added.

What is a Podcast ?

2005-07-04T13:50:00.000+05:30

Podcasts: the battle for your eardrums
Who will entertain the mobile crowd? Apple gets in on the

act with new software

RANDAL STROSS
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

NEW YORK—In pre-Web times, marketers counted noses. With the advent of the Web, eyeballs. Mark my words: Eardrums are next.

Who will keep our ears well filled with portable entertainment while we move about?

On the one ear are older media repackaged and sold in digital form, like music and audio versions of books and magazines. On the other are podcasts, the audio programming from the masses that has popped up in the past year, available free.

"Podcast" is an ill-chosen portmanteau word that manages to be a double misnomer. A podcast does not originate from an iPod. And it is not a broadcast sent out at a particular time for all who happen to receive it.

It is nothing other than an audio or video file that can be created by anyone — add a microphone to your computer, and you're well on your way.

The file begins its public life when you place it on a website, available for anyone to download to a computer and, from there, to transfer to a portable player, which may or may not be an iPod.

It's encoded in such a way that the receiving computer can pick it up in successive installments automatically, whenever they are posted to the website. Subscribing is the term used for the automatic downloads, and it's apt.

The delivery mechanism for a podcast subscription is rather slick. There's no need to go to the trouble of browsing the website again for fresh material: The new stuff moves without so much as a beep from the original server to your computer. Then it moves automatically to your attached portable player, keeping the content perpetually refreshed.

Welcome to the post-Web era.

If new programs are added daily, you may begin to regard it as a new form of radio broadcast, ready whenever you happen to be free.

But the seemingly trivial technical fact that you cannot begin to listen to the program before the file transfer is complete turns out to have important legal implications.

A podcast falls in the not-a-broadcast category, which is otherwise known as file-sharing. It cannot include copyrighted music without authorization from the copyright owners. This is why podcasts are not the place for aspiring disc jockeys to realize their fantasies.

Preparing to receive podcasts for the first time used to be cumbersome. You had to install a layer of "podcatching" software on your personal computer, which constantly checked the sites you subscribed to, to see if new installments had been posted. The software also took care of the mechanics of the transfer to your computer.

Last month, however, that problem was removed in one brilliant, dazzling flash, when Apple released a new version of its iTunes software with podcatching capability built in.

Given Apple's sleek online music store, it is no surprise that it has designed an elegantly simple way for visitors to subscribe to podcasts, too. What is unexpected is the variety of initial offerings.

Blogs rendered into audio form are a natural for podcasting, and their likely appeal to strangers can be expected to be about the same as that of the text versions — or even less, given the time-consuming nature of skimming audio.

But audio blogs constitute only one of the 21 subject categories offered at iTunes' podcast directory. A smattering of recognizable brands — news programs from ABC News and ESPN and the British Broadcasting Corp., political commentary from Al Franken and hip tips from the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Fab Five — help to pull the curious in.

Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, said the podcasting phenomenon had simply become too large for Apple to ignore — it had to embrace it or resist it. By opting to embrace, the company regains the revolutionary aura; by introducing many people to podcasts, he added, Apple "will reinvigorate conversation about the iPod.''

Apple's decision to add free podcast subscriptions to its store shelves creates potential problems for another supplier: Audible, Apple's exclusive supplier of more than 17,000 audio book titles for the iPod. At its own website, Audible sells the audio books, either a la carte or as part of a subscription bundle.

It also exclusively sells audio digest versions of well-known periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker (a new offering) and The New York Times. Click to subscribe, pay and your portable player will be automatically updated, just like a podcast subscription.

The only difference is that intermediate step of "pay." Will no-name podcasts dent Audible's famous-names business?

It's impossible to imagine Audible's happy and healthy situation today without noting that it is the direct beneficiary of the wondrous success of the iPod.

The Emerging Global Labor Market

2005-06-19T09:14:00.000+05:30

Via Sadagopan's Blog

MGI's latest research takes a look at the emerging global labor market in services and explores the notion of "global resourcing," the process a company goes through to decide which of its activities could be performed anywhere in the world, where to locate them, and who will do them. It also explores the real demand and supply of offshore talent.

The MGI study offers a well structured and reported presented assessment of the scale and distribution of offshore employment in 28 low wage-rate countries and 8 mid- and high-wage countries in 2003, and thinkthrough assessments of the maximum number of service jobs that could be moved offshore, and projections on offshore employment by 2008. Although 11 percent of the world's 1.46 billion service jobs can be theoretically performed remotely, the number of those jobs offshored by 2008 will remain modest. An estimated 1.1 percent of total demand for labor in services will go offshore due mainly to internal company barriers.A key factor, the report concludes is that the pace of adoption is limited more by company-specific barriers than by regulatory barriers. Company specific barrier are much more difficult to aggregate and quantify than assessing the impact of laws that may prevent certain forms of offshoring. Corporate perceptions and practices can change rapidly as more experience with offshoring accumulates and as pressure for performance mounts MGI projects that by 2008, there will be 4.1 million service jobs offshore - this represents a mere 1.2 percent of service jobs in developed/high wage rate countries.. Some key highlights of the report:
- Only a small fraction of employment that could potentially go offshore will ever do so. Eleven percent (161 million jobs) of the 1.46 billion service jobs worldwide could be performed remotely. As a rule, the more customer facing functions a sector has, the lower its potential to resource those functions remotely. Consequently, this potential varies depending on the industry. The lowest potential is in retail, for example, where 3 percent of employment may be globally resourced. Packaged software, however, could see 49 percent of its services work done remotely.

- The total offshore employment amounted to about 1.7 million jobs in 2003. In 2008, total offshore employment will reach an estimated 1.1 percent of total demand for labor in services from developed countries, equivalent to 4.1 million employees. Some occupations are also more amenable to remote employment than others. Engineering and finance and accounting occupations are the most amenable (52 percent and 31 percent, respectively), while generalist and support staff occupations are the least (9 percent and 3 percent, respectively) because of the close interactions they entail with customers or colleagues. However, because every industry employs many generalists and support staff, these occupations have the highest number of jobs that could be filled by remote talent — a combined total of 26 million positions.

TCS, India's top IT company

2005-06-16T17:07:00.000+05:30

TCS, India's top IT company

June 16, 2005 16:56 IST

The top five software and service players have maintained their positions in the annual list of top 20 software and service exporters for 2004-05 brought out by the National Association of Software and Services Companies.

Tata Consultancy Services is sitting pretty on the top of the heap with revenues of Rs 7,449 crore (Rs 74.49 billion), followed by Infosys at Rs 6,806 crore (Rs 68.06 billion) and Wipro with Rs 5,426 crore (Rs 54.26 billion).

Satyam and HCL Technologies are next in the line with revenues of Rs 3,377 crore (Rs 33.77 billion) and Rs 2,664 crore (Rs 26.64 billion), respectively.

Nasscom does not take into account the revenues of the these companies from business process outsourcing and IT-enabled services business.

The new entrant in the list, IBM Global Services India Pvt Ltd, has made a debut at number six on the list with revenues of Rs 1,867 crore Rs 18.67 billion). IBM reported revenues of its software and services export business in India for the first time and these were included in the rankings.

As BirlaSoft did not report its revenues it does not find mention in the list.

The list does not include companies -- such as Cognizant -- which are US listed firms but have significant offshore operations in India. In 2004-05, Cognizant recorded global revenues of Rs 2,906 crore (Rs 29.06 billion), which would have placed them 5th on this list were they to be ranked.

In addition, Syntel, Covansys, Intelligroup -- all with an India-centric global delivery model -- are also excluded from this list.

"With offshore adoption amongst the Fortune 500 companies increasing rapidly, from 300 in 2003 to 400 companies in 2004, we are optimistic about the long term potential of this industry. This recent momentum complemented by low penetration levels, will continue to drive rapid offshore adoption," Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said on rankings.

He said: "Despite a larger base, the Indian software and services industry has been able to maintain its growth momentum and delivered better-than-expected results. Software exports, the mainstay of the industry, grossed $12 billion in 2004-05, up from $9.2 billion in 2003-04, indicating growth of 30.4 per cent for the year."

Clients of Indian IT companies have continued to ramp up engagement sizes with leading vendors. The top four players alone have over 660 clients -- with billing rates of more than $1 million per annum -- up from 441 in 2003-04.

Indian software and services employee base has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 23.6 per cent, from 242,000 in 2001-02 to 697,000 in 2003-04.

Revenue from product development and research and development services in 2004-05, was around $3 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2003-04.

Indian IT Industry and Innovation

2005-06-14T09:45:00.000+05:30

via Rajesh Jain's blog

Business World has an article by Sanjay Anandaram of JumpStartUp, a VC firm. Entitled "The Choking of Innovation", Sanjay says: "India's much-vaunted IT industry has to change dramatically to maintain its leadership. A fundamental re-think of the business has to occur."

For one, the next 10 years for the industry will not be anything like the first 10 years. Increased globalisation, increased choices for employees and customers, and increased competition will force big changes. The industry has grown admirably over the past decade and a half and has attracted the attention of the world. That means Indian IT services now have to contend with brutal global competition and market demands.

Indian IT services companies are prisoners of their own success. Enjoying unprecedented market capitalisations thanks to terrific earnings growth, they find it hard to make investments with unsure time horizons and pay-offs. Investments will dent their earnings and affect stock prices. Investments to explore new business models, partnerships, undertake M&A transactions of any significance, hire globally, do research, and create organisational change are sure to impact near-term earnings. But what of the serious possibility of an adverse impact on business in a few years if these investments are not made now?

Instead of investing their cash surpluses in long-term investments, Indian companies tend to reward their shareholders with hefty, tax-free dividend payouts (thereby enjoying shareholder loyalty) and perform treasury management functions by investing the money in safe mutual funds. Clearly, these companies are signalling that they have no other productive or imaginative use for this capital (e.g. investing in long-term competence and capability development) than paying dividends. The management's conservativeness is reinforced by the pressure of maintaining quarterly earnings.

It is disheartening from an industry standpoint to see hundreds of millions of dollars simply lying on the balance sheet and not being invested in creating innovative competitive advantages for the future. It is disheartening to see companies lack the confidence to take big, bold steps, even after 20 successful years in the global arena. The ability to dream big on a global level and then take the required steps to realise the dreams is what will distinguish the true global players from the also-rans in the next 10 years.

Mindsets need to change dramatically, especially among leadership levels. From managing status quos to managing risks, from managing people to managing businesses and leveraging opportunities, from managing Indians to managing a diverse global workforce, from a 'span of control' to a 'span of competencies' - all these initiatives are essential for success. Career paths for R&D and industry experts, for example, need to be made as attractive as jobs that are oriented to people management. An entrepreneurial environment and mindset has to be put in place.

Very well put. The author has clearly identified the behaviour of the leading IT Services companies. They are all prisoners of their own success and definitely victims of the QSQT ( as Jairam Ramesh puts it as the Quarter Se Quarter Tak) syndrome to please the analysts every quarter to keep up the high share prices. In the early years, they got away by saying that Indian companies do not have deep pockets to invest in technology products and when they have deep pockets, they do not have any ideas. How sad !

The 10 Great Levelers

2005-06-13T10:22:00.000+05:30

As per Thomas friedman in this Wired article

1. Fall of the Berlin Wall
The events of November 9, 1989, tilted the worldwide balance of power toward democracies and free markets.

2. Netscape IPO
The August 9, 1995, offering sparked massive investment in fiber-optic cables.

3. Work flow software
The rise of apps from PayPal to VPNs enabled faster, closer coordination among far-flung employees.

4. Open-sourcing
Self-organizing communities, à la Linux, launched a collaborative revolution.

5. Outsourcing
Migrating business functions to India saved money and a third world economy.

6. Offshoring
Contract manufacturing elevated China to economic prominence.

7. Supply-chaining
Robust networks of suppliers, retailers, and customers increased business efficiency. See Wal-Mart.

8. Insourcing
Logistics giants took control of customer supply chains, helping mom-and-pop shops go global. See UPS and FedEx.

9. In-forming
Power searching allowed everyone to use the Internet as a "personal supply chain of knowledge." See Google.

10. Wireless
Like "steroids," wireless technologies pumped up collaboration, making it mobile and personal.

The Power of Us

2005-06-13T09:21:00.000+05:30

Businessweek has this interesting article on co-creation (via Sadagopan's blog)

The Power Of Us
Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business

The 35 employees at Meiosys Inc., a software firm in Palo Alto, Calif., didn't know they were joining a gang of telecom-industry marauders. They just wanted to save a few bucks. Last year they began using Skype, a program that lets them make free calls over the Internet, with better sound quality than regular phones, using headsets connected to their PCs. Callers simply click on a name in their Skype contact lists, and if the person is there, they connect and talk just like on a regular phone call. "Better quality at no cost," exults Meiosys Chief Executive Jason Donahue. Poof! Almost 90% of his firm's $2,000 monthly long-distance phone bill has vanished. With 41 million people now using Skype, plus 150,000 more each day, it's no wonder AT&T (T ) and MCI Inc. (MCIP ) are hanging it up.

How can a tiny European upstart like Skype Technologies S.A. do a number on a trillion-dollar industry? By dialing up a vast, hidden resource: its own users. Skype, the newest creation from the same folks whose popular file-sharing software Kazaa freaked out record execs, also lets people share their resources -- legally. When users fire up Skype, they automatically allow their spare computing power and Net connections to be borrowed by the Skype network, which uses that collective resource to route others' calls. The result: a self-sustaining phone system that requires no central capital investment -- just the willingness of its users to share. Says Skype CEO Niklas Zennström: "It's almost like an organism."

A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening," says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) "Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in."

Collective Clamor

Behold the power of us. It's the force behind the collective clamor of Weblogs that felled CBS (VIA ) anchorman Dan Rather and rocked the media establishment. Global crowds of open-source Linux programmers are giving even mighty Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) fits. Virtual supercomputers, stitched together from millions of volunteers' PCs, are helping predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars. One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund.

Although tech companies may be leading the way, their efforts are shaking up other industries, including entertainment, publishing, and advertising. Hollywood is under full-scale assault by 100 million people sharing songs and movies online via programs such as Kazaa and BitTorrent. The situation is the same with ad-supported media: Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) ace search engine essentially polls the collective judgments of millions of Web page creators to determine the most relevant search results. In the process, it has created a multibillion-dollar market for supertargeted ads that's drawing money from magazine display ads and newspaper classifieds.

Most telling, traditional companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Dow Chemical Co., are beginning to flock to the virtual commons, too. The potential benefits are enormous. If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds -- and at far lower cost, with far less risk. LEGO Group uses the Net to identify and rally its most enthusiastic customers to help it design and market more effectively. Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP ), and others are running "prediction markets" that extract collective wisdom from online crowds, which help gauge whether the government will approve a drug or how well a product will sell.

At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters. "It's the democratization of industry," says C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business professor and co-author of the 2004 book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. "We are seeing the emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people."

Peer Production

That suggests even more sweeping changes to come. Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, sees a common thread in such disparate innovations as the Internet, mobile devices, and the feedback system on eBay, where buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. He thinks they're the underpinnings of a new economic order. "These are like the stock companies and liability insurance that made capitalism possible," suggests Rheingold, who's also helping lead the Cooperation Project, a network of academics and businesses trying to map the new landscape. "They may make some new economic system possible."

Perhaps they already are. Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor who studies the economics of networks, thinks such online cooperation is spurring a new mode of production beyond the two classic pillars of economics, the firm and the market. "Peer production," as he calls work such as open-source software, file-sharing, and Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN ) millions of customer product reviews, creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. "The economic role of social behavior is increasing," he says. "Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products."

Indeed, peer production represents a sea change in the economy -- at least when it comes to the information products, services, and content that increasingly drive economic growth. More than two centuries ago, James Watt's steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, centralizing the means of production in huge, powerful corporations that had the capital to achieve economies of scale. Now cheap computers and new social software and services -- along with the Internet's ubiquitous communications that make it easy to pool those capital investments -- are starting to give production power back to the people. Says Benkler: "This departs radically from everything we've seen since the Industrial Revolution."

Sound pretty threatening to anyone invested in the status quo? You bet. Indeed, as the title of Rheingold's book implies, there could be a dark side to this new cooperative force, especially if it results in mob rule. Quite often, the best solution to a problem comes from the sudden flash of insight from a solitary genius such as Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. It would be a tragedy if these folks, sometimes unpopular in their times, got lost in the cooperative crowds. Clearly, peer production has its limits. Almost certainly, it will never build railroads, grow wheat, run nuclear power plants, or write great novels.

Yet this cooperative force may spread beyond such easily shared commodities as information, knowledge, and media. People are starting to use the Net to pool tangible goods as well. In a sense, Skype enables people to share computer hardware. Thanks to the Web's ability to serve as a meeting ground and scheduling coordinator, it's becoming economical to share cars, for example. Services such as Zipcar Inc. and Flexcar let members use the Net to reserve one of a fleet of autos in crowded cities, almost on demand, for an hourly fee.

What's driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services such as MySpace and Meetup Inc., which has helped everyone from Howard Deaniacs to English bulldog owners in New York form local groups. Those technologies are finally teasing out the Net's unique potential in a way that neither e-mail nor traditional Web sites did. The Net can, like no other medium, connect many people with many others at the same time.

What sets these new technologies apart from those of the Internet's first generation is their canny way of turning self-interest into social benefit -- and real economic value. They have what tech-book publisher Tim O'Reilly calls an "architecture of participation," so it's easy for people to do their own thing: create a link on their Web site to another Web site they like; rate a song; or just show off their knowledge with an online product review. Then, those actions can be pooled into something useful to many: the 3 billion song ratings that help people create personalized Net radio stations on Yahoo (YHOO )! Inc. or Amazon's millions of customer-generated product reviews, which help decide hits and duds. Exclaims Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos: "You invite the community in, and you get all this help."

It's surprisingly good help, too. New research indicates that cooperation, often organized from the bottom up, plays a much greater role than we thought in everything from natural phenomena like ant colonies to human institutions such as markets and cities. It's what New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, in his illuminating 2004 book of the same name, calls "the wisdom of crowds." Crowds can go mad, of course, but by and large, it turns out, they're smarter at solving many problems than even the brightest individuals.

The Internet's supreme group-forming capability suggests the rise of an almost spooky group intelligence. Within minutes of Pope John Paul II's death, hundreds of eBay sellers had posted related products for sale. Whether it is responding to world events or new products such as Sony Corp.'s (SNE ) PSP game machine, eBay's hive mind reacts to shifts in demand much faster than traditional companies with layers of management approval. Although eBay recently has seen some mature markets in the U.S. and Germany slow, the group smarts have helped keep growth more than respectable, with gross merchandise sales this year expected to rise 32%, to $45 billion. As eBay CEO Margaret C. Whitman has noted: "It is far better to have an army of a million than a command-and-control system."

More companies are starting to understand the logic. If they can get others to help them design and create products, they end up with ready-made customers -- and that means far less risk in the tricky business of creating new goods and markets. So businesses are accessing the cyberswarm to improve everything from research and development to marketing. Says Alpheus Bingham, vice-president for Eli Lilly's e.Lilly research unit: "If I can tap into a million minds simultaneously, I may run into one that's uniquely prepared."

Procter & Gamble's $1.7 billion-a-year R&D operation, for instance, is taking advantage of collective online brain trusts such as Lilly company InnoCentive Inc. in Andover, Mass. It's a network of 80,000 independent, self-selected "solvers" in 173 countries who gang-tackle research problems for the likes of Boeing Co. (BA ), DuPont (DD ), and 30 other large companies. One solver, Drew Buschhorn, is a 21-year-old chemistry grad student at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. He came up with an art-restoration chemical for an unnamed company -- a compound he identified while helping his mother dye cloth when he was a kid. Says InnoCentive CEO Darren J. Carroll: "We're trying for the democratization of science."

And apparently succeeding. More than a third of the two dozen requests P&G has submitted to InnoCentive's network have yielded solutions, for which the company paid upwards of $5,000 apiece. By using InnoCentive and other ways of reaching independent talent, P&G has boosted the number of new products derived from outside to 35%, from 20% three years ago. As a result, sales per R&D person are ahead some 40%.

The online masses aren't just offering up ideas: Sometimes they all but become the entire production staff. In game designer Linden Lab's Second Life, a virtual online world, participants themselves create just about everything, from characters to buildings to games that are played inside the world. The 45-person company, which grossed less than $5 million last year, makes money by charging players for virtual land on which they build their creations. Second Life's 25,000 players collectively spend 6,000 hours a day actively creating things. Even if you assume only 10% of their work is any good, that's still equal to a 100-person team at a traditional game company. "We've built a market-based, far more efficient system for creating digital content," says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale.

Likewise, groups online are starting to turn marketing from megaphone to conversation. LEGO Group, for instance, brought adult LEGO train-set enthusiasts to its New York office to check out new designs. "We pooh-poohed them all," says Steve Barile, an Intel Corp. (INTC ) engineer and LEGO fan in Portland, Ore., who attended. As a result, says Jake McKee, LEGO's global community-development manager, "we literally produced what they told us to produce." The new locomotive, the "Santa Fe Super Chief" set, was shown to 250 enthusiasts in 2002, and their word-of-mouse helped the first 10,000 units sell out in less than two weeks with no other marketing.

Corporate planners are even starting to use the wisdom of online crowds to predict the future, forecasting profits and sales more precisely. Prediction markets let people essentially buy shares in various forecasts, often with real money. Most famously, they've been employed in the University of Iowa's experimental Iowa Electronic Markets to determine, with remarkable accuracy, the most likely winner of the Presidential election. The ease of organizing groups on the Net has caused an explosion in their use, says Emile Servan-Schreiber, CEO of NewsFutures Inc., a consultant that has run 40,000 prediction markets for companies and publications.

Mob Mentality

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (HPQ ) services division was having trouble a few years ago with forecasts in the first month of a quarter. So Bernardo A. Huberman, director of HP Labs' Information Dynamics Lab, set up a market with 15 finance people not normally involved in such planning. They bought and sold virtual stock that represented a range of forecasts at, above, and below the official company forecast. Their collective bets yielded a 50% improvement in operating-profit predictability over conventional forecasts by individual managers.

For all the benefits, Net-based cooperation holds plenty of peril for the unwary. Obviously, not all crowds are wise. Even The Wisdom of Crowds author Surowiecki wonders if the Net connects like-minded people so well that it can amplify groupthink. "The more we talk to each other, the dumber we can get," he notes. Groups that discourage independent thought potentially could put a damper on out-of-the-box ideas from brilliant individuals. They can also become herds that buy or dump stocks on momentum alone. For that matter, they can devolve into lynch mobs and terrorist groups.

As companies have learned, the online hordes can quickly turn against them. Last September bike-lock manufacturer Kryptonite tried to downplay a blogger video that showed how to open its bike locks with a BIC pen. But the video instantly spread across the Net, forcing the company to spend more than $10 million on lock replacements.

To contend with this rising people power, corporations will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant. They'll be unable to keep secrets for long amid the chorus of online voices, as Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) learned when fan sites spilled the beans on unreleased products. Managers and employees will have to learn how to take orders from customers more than from bosses. "Networks are becoming the locus for innovation," says Stanford University professor Walter W. Powell. "Firms are becoming much more porous and decentralized."

The challenges, though, go to show that we're not talking about merely a new capitalist tool -- at least not one that's dominated by big capitalists. Upstarts, both ad hoc groups and new companies, are seizing the initiative far more than are established businesses. They're transforming industry after industry faster than individual companies can cope with.

Nowhere has that phenomenon happened faster than in software. Collaborative open-source development is rapidly moving beyond basic utility software like Linux to mainstream applications as well. An especially eye-opening example is SugarCRM Inc., which provides an open-source version of customer-relationship management software now dominated by Siebel Systems (SEBL ) and salesforce.com Inc. (CRM ) The 10-person outfit's software, which CEO John Roberts calls "the collective work of bright CRM engineers around the world," has been downloaded more than 235,000 times for free.

The company makes money from services such as technical support and a $40-a-month Web-based service, as well as more fully featured corporate software for which it charges $239 per user per year. Scarcely a year old, SugarCRM won't reveal its finances, but its business model suggests a big change in how the software industry works. "The fact that everyone can participate [in open-source] is creating a new market ecology," says Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource Inc., a startup providing bundles of open-source products. Or, as Roberts adds brightly: "We're turning a $10 billion market space into a $1 billion market space."

The same scary prospect lies ahead for other information-based industries, such as entertainment, media, and publishing, that are rapidly going digital. People are not only sharing songs and movies -- legally or not -- but also creating content themselves and building sizable audiences. The threat comes from more than the 10 million-plus blogs. Overall, 53 million Americans have contributed material to the Net, from product reviews to eBay ratings, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The most breathtaking example: Wikipedia. Some 5 million people a month visit the free online encyclopedia, whose more than 1.5 million entries in 200 languages by volunteer experts around the globe outnumber Encyclopedia Britannica's 120,000, with surprisingly high quality. "Our work shows how quickly a traditional proprietary product can be overtaken by an open alternative," says co-founder Jimmy Wales. Unlike Britannica, Wales is not aiming to generate much, if any, revenue. But "that doesn't mean that we won't destroy their business," he notes. Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas says sheer volume of articles isn't a measure of quality and may be overload for most readers and researchers.

Then again, the cooperative crowds offer a lifeline to beleaguered media such as newspapers. The five-year-old online paper OhmyNews in South Korea has marshaled 36,000 "citizen journalists" to write up to 200 stories a day on everything from political protests to movies. Its popularity with 1 million daily visitors has made it the sixth-most influential media outlet in Korea, according to a national magazine poll -- topping one of the three television networks. "It's participatory journalism," explains founder Oh Yeon Ho, who says OhmyNews turned a profit last year. The idea is starting to catch fire in the U.S., too, via independent citizen-media efforts such as Backfence Inc. and Bayosphere and budding initiatives by E.W. Scripps Co. (SSP ) and others. The New York Times Co. is also testing the waters: In March, it bought About.com, which has 475 citizen experts on consumer electronics, personal finance, and other topics.

Even industries that traffic in physical goods are being turned upside down by Net-driven sharing. In retail, for instance, "consumers" are becoming active participants in the merchants they buy from, transforming the venerable suggestion box into something more influential. At Amazon.com, thousands of volunteers write buyer's guides and lists of favorite products. Amazon also lets thousands of merchants, from Target Stores (TGT ) to individuals, sell on Amazon pages.

What's more, Amazon is opening up the technology behind product databases, payment services, and more to 65,000 software developers. They're creating new services, such as the ability to compare brick-and-mortar store prices with Amazon's by scanning a bar code into a cell phone. Thanks in part to such moves, the company is solidly profitable on $6.9 billion in sales last year. "We're all building this thing together -- Amazon itself, outside developers, associates, and customers," says Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web services evangelist.

That raises a key point: All of us will have to take on more responsibility. And to get the most out of the new cooperative tools and services, we'll have to contribute our time and talent in new ways -- such as rating a seller on eBay or penning a short essay in Wikipedia. But the rewards will be more personalized products and services that we don't merely consume, but help create.
Ultimately, all this could point the way to a fundamental change in the way people work together. In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the notion of the tragedy of the commons. He noted that public resources, from pastures and national parks to air and water, inevitably get overused as people act in their own self-interest. It's a different story in the Information Age, contends Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the pioneering PC software VisiCalc and president of consultant Software Garden Inc. in Newton Highlands, Mass.

Instead, he says, there's a cornucopia of the commons. That rich reward may be worth all the disruption we've seen and all the more still to come.

Six industry trends in Outsourcing

2005-05-30T09:51:00.000+05:30

Outsourcing Center has studied the outsourcing relationships and found the following trends.

The Center discovered six prominent trends in today's outsourcing relationships:

1. Cost is no longer the only key driver; an important emerging driver is
the need for process expertise.

2. Full-service human resources outsourcing is gaining acceptance.

3. Offshoring is here to stay, but still only has a small presence.

4. The deal sizes are getting smaller; there were significantly more
small deals than mega-deals.

5. Few buyers want a mid-term contract of seven or eight years; most
buyers prefer less than five years or more than ten.

6. Companies are moving away from complex service level agreements;
fewer, more effective metrics are becoming more popular.

China catching up in software race

2005-05-16T11:51:00.000+05:30

Telegraph has this interesting article

JEHANGIR S. POCHA

Beijing, May 15: The Chinese government’s statistics have always been the most inscrutable aspect of this country, and last week authorities here bowled another googly.

On May 9, Ding Wenwu, the deputy president in the ministry of information industry (MII), was quoted by the China News Service as saying that the country’s software exports in 2004 had exceeded India’s.

The news caught the headlines everywhere and pundits began gravely proclaiming the end of India’s dominance in the global software industry.

But a little due diligence shows Ding’s claim to be hollow. By MII’s own numbers, China’s software exports for 2004 were $2.8 billion. In contrast, India’s software exports for 2003-2004 were $3.8 billion, according to the Software Technology Parks of India.

Although China’s $2.8-billion figure represents a six-fold increase since 2000 when China’s software exports were $400 million, the comparison with India looks even more negative when one factors in income from IT-related services. China’s figure for 2004 then grows to $4 billion, but India’s jumps to $12.5 billion.

Still, there is no denying that China is catching up with India in the software industry. In 2002, Sunil Mehta, vice-president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), had predicted during a visit to China that in 2005, the country’s software exports would be $1.5 billion and India’s would be $23 billion.

That he underestimated China’s potential by 100 per cent while overestimating India’s is indicative of how the software competition between China and India is panning out.

Ding said China’s growth was the result of smart policies the state council, China’s cabinet, put in place five years ago. These, he said, led to the establishment of 11 national software industry bases, six national software export bases and 172 national key software enterprises. The government and the private sector have also invested billions of dollars in hi-tech financing, technology, professional training and purchase and protection of intellectual property rights.

While India’s strength is in enterprise or corporate software, most of the growth in the Chinese software industry has come from the computer games segment. This has sparked the runaway success of numerous domestic gaming firms, such as the Nasdaq-listed Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd. Its chairman and chief executive officer, Chen Tianqiao, is now China’s richest person with an estimated fortune of $1.11 billion.

Significantly, China’s largest enterprise software company, the privately-owned Kingsoft Corporation, is also gearing up to enter the big league with a $100-million to $300-million initial public offering later this year.

However, China’s software industry continues to suffer from manpower problems, according to a recent survey by a committee of the China Youth Software Promotion Project. The country lacks special institutions to train managerial and technical staff for software development and as a result, companies have difficulty in recruiting qualified programmers, the survey said.

Still, the sheer size of the Chinese software and gaming market continues to attract foreign investment and ironically many Indian companies are leading the way.

Indian software giants like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro and Satyam are being wooed by high-profile projects, such as Beijing’s Zhongguancun Software Park, dubbed “China’s Silicon Valley”.

For Some Techies, an Interminable Workday

2005-05-13T16:52:00.000+05:30

For Some Techies, an Interminable Workday
By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer 51 minutes ago

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - The traffic jam ended hours ago, the parking lot is nearly empty and fluorescent lights are dimmed at PortalPlayer Inc., where the nightly brainstorming session is about to begin.

Instead of gathering the few remaining souls from their cubicles, three managers move into a conference room to dial India, where engineers 12 1/2 time zones ahead are just arriving in Hyderabad.

As colleagues on opposite sides of the globe discuss circuit board configurations and debugging strategies for a project code-named "Doppelganger," it's just the start of another endless day for the company. Within twelve hours, Indian workers will end their day with calls and e-mails to California, where managers in the Santa Clara headquarters will just be waking up.

"We keep passing the baton between California and India, and that way we can cram a lot more work into a 24-hour period," said Jeff Hawkey, vice president of hardware engineering, who conducts evening meetings from the office or on his laptop at home. "A lot of nights, I go home, tuck the kids into bed and then get on the conference call."

Executives at PortalPlayer, which makes chips and software for portable music devices such as the iPod, say having 90 employees in Hyderabad nearly doubles the amount of engineering work that gets done in 24 hours. That shrinks production cycles and lets the 6-year-old company stay ahead of bigger semiconductor rivals.

Thousands of other tech companies have similar baton-passing rituals. "Offshoring" — the migration of jobs to lower-cost countries such as India, China and Russia — remains politically sensitive because of the tepid U.S. job market. But executives insist that cheaper labor and faster work flow have made offshoring a fact of life for everyone in the industry.

Even the most unapologetic globalization proponents nevertheless acknowledge that offshoring has resulted in longer, stranger hours for white-collar workers in the United States. Some business experts worry that the trend could result in massive burnout if offshoring isn't properly managed.

Silicon Valley workers grumble that communicating with colleagues overseas requires midnight teleconferences, 6 a.m. video meetings and the annoying "pling" of instant messages and twittering cell phones all night long. Although many techies swapped social lives for 80-hour weeks during the ephemeral dot-com boom, the 24-hour business cycle seems even more stressful than the caffeinated '90s: Today's long hours are less likely to result in windfall bonuses or stock options, and there's no end in sight.

"It's definitely a case of work creep — everyone in this industry is working harder right now because of e-mail, wireless access and globalization," said Christopher Lockhead, chief marketing officer of Mercury Interactive Inc., a Mountain View-based consulting firm in 35 countries, including Israel, where Sunday is a normal working day.

"You can't even get a rest on the weekend," Lockhead said from his cell phone in the Dallas airport after sales meetings in Mexico. "The reality is that when you do business globally, somebody working for you is always on the clock."

Some executives who ask workers to burn the midnight oil offer flexibility — longer lunch breaks, telecommuting privileges and complimentary dinner if you work past 6 p.m. Others dismiss complainers as spoiled or provincial — after all, customer service representatives in Asia have worked on U.S. schedules for more than a decade, so why shouldn't Americans deal with time-zone challenges as the industry globalizes?

The staunchest advocates say whiners should find new professions. Richard Spitz, who leads the technology division of the recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International, says corporate clients want employees who embrace a 24-hour business cycle.

"If you want to play in the A league, you have to take on some additional challenges," Spitz said. "It might not mean that you have to work around the clock for your entire career — at some point, you can step off the treadmill. But if you want to be in the business, then you have to commit to this schedule for some period of time."

At what cost, however?

Some worry that the extra hours and unrelenting pace could have dire consequences — namely, widespread fatigue and brain drain in the technology and financial services industries, the most aggressive exporters of white-collar jobs. Steep turnover among sleep-deprived managers could eventually lead senior executives to re-evaluate the benefits of offshoring, said Peter Morici, an international business professor at Robert H. Smith School of Business at University of Maryland.

"You simply can't keep working a full day, put the kids to bed, take a call from Malaysia, then go back fresh the next morning — it's one thing to do it for a couple weeks, but it's another to put up with this pain in the neck permanently," Morici said. "When executives talk about the efficiencies of offshoring, they're often not factoring in the long-term human toll on management."

Staffing challenges may already be taking a toll. According to a study released in April by Deloitte Consulting LLP, 62 percent of senior executives interviewed at 25 large corporations said offshoring required more management effort than they had originally thought. More than half said they couldn't free up enough managers to supervise projects.

Worker advocates compare the trend to the automobile industry phenomenon of "speedup" in the 1920s, when Henry Ford increased assembly line speed without paying workers more. Turnover mushroomed to 400 percent per year in some Detroit-area plants, and the frenzied pace helped the 1930s union movement.

Marcus Courtney, president and organizer of WashTech, the Seattle-based branch of the Communication Workers of America, said few employers pay overtime for midnight meetings or red-eyes to Shanghai. And while many techies are proud workaholics, dawn teleconferences and 9 p.m. hand-off meetings have stretched shifts to absurd lengths.

"In today's global economy, employees are seeing longer working hours, greater job insecurity due to job exporting and fewer rewards and opportunity," Courtney said. "I'm worried that the stress levels of employees continues to rise and we are seeing a further eroding of the 50-hour work week."

Hours are particularly long at startups and when companies launch overseas operations. But offshoring needn't result in burnout, seasoned executives say.

Peter Hazlehurst, senior vice president of engineering at financial services software company Yodlee Inc., supervises 170 engineers, including 30 in Redwood City and 140 in Bangalore, India.

Managers recently began alternating weekly meetings between 8 a.m. Wednesdays and 9 p.m. Thursdays, so neither Americans nor Indians get the late shift every time.

"People are more receptive when they realize that this relatively challenging burden of working between time zones is a shared burden," Hazlehurst said.

It's unclear whether Silicon Valley's new work schedule will become the national norm as jobs migrate abroad — or whether foreigners will continue to staff the most brutal shifts. Roughly 830,000 U.S. service-sector jobs — ranging from telemarketers and accountants to software engineers and chief technology officers — will move abroad by the end of 2005, and 3.4 million more jobs will leave over the next decade, forecasts Forrester Research Inc.

Bombay-based consulting powerhouse Tata Consultancy Services employs 42,000 employees worldwide, including 14,000 people in India who handle U.S. projects. Their shifts are 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., or 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. local time, not including frequent early or late meetings with overseas clients, said Arup Gupta, president of Tata Consultancy Services America.

"We can be the ones who put in the overlap time," Gupta said. "These types of schedules are baked into India's DNA. We have to earn our money somehow."

Answers to the Weekly IT Quiz # 13

2005-04-14T09:35:00.000+05:30

1. What is the codename of Intel's successor to its Pentium 4 ?

Ans. Prescott

2. What `oxymoronic' term, used in the context of computer environment,

was coined by Jaron Lanier?

Ans. Virtual Reality

3. If Sun Microsystems developed Java, who developed Javascript?

Ans. Netscape Communications.

4. Which law in `mathematical language' would be: "where N is the

number of nodes, the power of a network is N squared."

Ans. Metcalfe's Law

5. AsiaInfo: China :: _______ : India . Fill in the blank.

Ans. Infosys technologies. AsiaInfo was the first Chinese company to get listed on NASDAQ. Infosys has the honour among Indian companies.

Gartner: IBM maintains integration lead

2005-04-14T09:31:00.000+05:30

Infoworld reports that IBM with 37 % is the market leader in the Application Integration and Middleware products market.

By Ed Scannell
April 12, 2005

IBM (Profile, Products, Articles) continued to extend its lead in the overall AIM (application integration and middleware) market over archrivals BEA Systems (Profile, Products, Articles) and Oracle (Profile, Products, Articles), capturing a little more than 37 percent of the worldwide market in 2004, according to a report released by market researcher Gartner on Tuesday.

Finishing second was BEA Systems with 7.2 percent; Oracle was third with 4.4 percent, and Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) fourth with 4.3 percent. Gartner pegged the overall application integration and middleware market to be worth $6.7 billion last year, which is up 5.8 percent over 2003, predicting it will continue to grow at a "slow but positive pace for most segments."

What will continue to propel this market growth, according to the report, will be the widespread need to bundle this kind of software into other products including mobile and wireless applications, integration suites, and other applications where message-oriented technologies are well-suited.

IBM continued to lead in the application server market over BEA by 38.4 percent to 21.7 percent, respectively.

Big Blue's WebSphere integration software ranked first with 21.9 percent share followed by offerings from Tibco with 9.6, Microsoft with 7.7 and webMethods (Profile, Products, Articles) at 5.4.

"IBM has started to build products that Global Services can then build vertical solutions out of. They have 18 vertical solutions and are building more. It gives them the ability to leverage some 20,000 consultants over there in Global Services," said Joanne Correia, a vice president at Gartner and author of the report.

She added that a second factor contributing to IBM's continued growth is the company's WebSphere Express line of software server products, which has given them better access to the 14,000 ISVs who specialize in selling to midsize companies with solutions based around midrange systems, notably the iSeries.

The report states that for the first time, Microsoft has moved into the top five for licensed revenue. The top five vendors in the worldwide AIM market in 2004 for new license revenues include IBM, BEA, Fujitsu (Profile, Products, Articles), Oracle, and Microsoft. In year over year growth, Microsoft grew some 63 percent whereas BEA had negative license growth over the past 12 months, the report said.

"Microsoft has moved into the top five based on the combined revenues of its BizTalk and SharePoint servers. It is another indication that the market is maturing when midtier companies can start absorbing technology like this and you see volumes climb higher and prices go lower," Correia said.

The AIM and portal market grew at 5.8 percent from 2003 to 2004 with further growth in these markets as the range of AIM technologies continued to increase business process efficiencies, improve integration, and provide better development tools and data access, according to the report.

The most intense battle for market share is in the "composite market," according to the report, which is made up of application servers, integration suites, a number of portal products and application platform suites. Product license revenue for the composite application platform suite was $3.43 billion in 2004. The top five vendors in this arena took almost 57 percent of the total market last year, the report stated.

Gartner plans to reveal the full results of the report next week at its Application Integration and Web Services Summit in Los Angeles.

Ed Scannell is an editor at large at InfoWorld.

The Weekly IT Quiz # 13

2005-04-12T11:53:00.000+05:30

1. What is the codename of Intel's successor to its Pentium 4 ?

2. What `oxymoronic' term, used in the context of computer environment,

was coined by Jaron Lanier?

3. If Sun Microsystems developed Java, who developed Javascript?

4. Which law in `mathematical language' would be: "where N is the

number of nodes, the power of a network is N squared."

5. AsiaInfo: China :: _______ : India . Fill in the blank.

The answers will be posted after 2 days.

These questions have been provided by G.Sreekanth.

IBM: Beyond Blue

2005-04-11T10:53:00.000+05:30

Sadagopan's blog points to an interesting Business Week cover story on IBM's new strategy
Beyond Blue
Never mind computers and tech services. IBM's radical new focus is on revamping customers' operations -- and even running them

Over the past two years, Palmisano has built these concepts into a strategy that would be laughable -- if it weren't so serious. His goal is to free IBM from the confines of the $1.2 trillion computer industry, which is growing at just 6% a year. Instead of merely selling and servicing technology, IBM is putting to use the immense resources it has in-house, from its software programmers to its 3,300 research scientists, to help companies like P&G rethink, remake, and even run their businesses -- everything from accounting and customer service to human resources and procurement. "We're giving our clients a transformational lift," says Palmisano.

While Palmisano looks out at the world through thick glasses, he's not short on vision. He expects that within 10 years IBM could build an annual revenue stream of as much as $50 billion in business consulting and outsourcing services. If so, Palmisano will have created a second services miracle and hitched IBM to a crucial growth market. And in the process, his company will be fixing -- or running -- big chunks of the world's business.

Answers to the Weekly IT Quiz # 12

2005-04-08T17:58:00.000+05:30

1. Why is AirSnort a worry to the leading providers of wireless networks ?

Ans. It is a tool that can surreptitiously grab and analyze data moving across any major wireless network.

2.Which famous MNC is known for its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which has been behind many technology inventions in the world, including laser printing, ethernet and GUI?

Ans. XEROX

3.The IT services division of which Indian IT training company has been renamed as Scandent ?

Ans. SSI Ltd

4.The ENIAC, the first large digital computer was unveiled in 1946. What was its first use ?

Ans. Hydrogen Bomb

5. "Software for the most advanced microprocessor on earth" was an ad line used by ?

Ans. "The Economic Times"

The Weekly IT Quiz # 12

2005-04-07T09:21:00.000+05:30

Here are the 5 questions for the week.

1. Why is AirSnort a worry to the leading providers of wireless networks ?

2.Which famous MNC is known for its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which has been behind many technology inventions in the world, including laser printing, ethernet and GUI?

3.The IT services division of which Indian IT training company has been renamed as Scandent ?

4.The ENIAC, the first large digital computer was unveiled in 1946. What was its first use ?

5. "Software for the most advanced microprocessor on earth" was an ad line used by ?

As usual the results will be published in 2 days.

Charting a New Course at Siebel

2005-04-04T09:41:00.000+05:30

Charting a New Course at Siebel: "
Close Window

MARCH 30, 2005

Back from sailing the globe, OnDemand Computing honcho Bruce Cleveland talks about his plans to compete with Oracle, SAP, and some pesky upstarts
The last three years haven't been kind to Siebel Systems (SEBL ). Revenues fell from $2 billion in 2001 to $1.3 billion last year. The Silicon Valley software outfit's share price has declined even more precipitously -- from $119 in November, 2000, to $8.56 on Mar. 29, 2005. Even a new leader hasn't helped. Siebel shares have traded down 19% since IBM (IBM ) veteran Mike Lawrie became CEO in May, 2004.

Siebel, which virtually invented the market for customer-management software, has suffered a host of problems, among them a sluggish information-technology market and increased competition from the big guys like Oracle (ORCL ) and SAP (SAP ). Siebel also faces pressure from upstarts Salesforce.com (CRM ), RightNow Technologies (RNOW ), and privately held NetSuite -- the evangelists for delivering software as a service over the Internet rather than as a physical package installed at the customer's office.

CALL-CENTER STRATEGY. Siebel gave up on its own software-as-a-service business nearly five years ago, only to revive its offering three years later when it was clear the smaller competitors were gaining traction. Since then, Siebel has been working overtime to catch up. It has made several acquisitions and released seven new versions of its service.

On Mar. 29, Siebel announced its latest: a software service that can get call centers up and running within days, not months, and for a fraction of the $1 million-plus price tag companies usually pay, says Bruce Cleveland, Siebel's senior vice-president and general manager of OnDemand Computing.

BusinessWeek Online reporter Sarah Lacy talked with Cleveland about how Siebel has changed over the years and how so-called on-demand software is guiding future changes at the company. The following are edited excerpts of that conversation:

Q: What's your background?
A: I was one of the original founding executives [at Siebel] and was here up until a couple of years ago as the head of marketing. I took a two-year hiatus to go sail around many parts of the world and just rejoined in July of last year to take on solving two new growth markets: on-demand products and small- and medium-sized businesses. Originally, when the company thought about this product line, they thought small- and medium-sized businesses would be the primary consumers. When I joined, I took a look at customers and market data, and threw that plan out the window. Now large enterprises want it as well.

Q: How is Siebel different on your second tour of duty?
A: For the first eight years, the company largely had no strong competitors. Over the years, we saw tremendous growth rate. That growth rate was tied to the health of a growing economy. Once companies retrench and cut costs, they don't invest in sales and marketing. So, two big things jumped in front of our growth. The global economy took a nosedive, and this became an interesting market segment to Oracle and SAP. That really impacted our growth after 2001.

Internally, [Lawrie] has come in and realized that, to get us farther, we need to organize [differently]. That different structure enables division heads to make their own decisions. [Former CEO and current Chairman Thomas Siebel] ran without any outside [venture capital] investors, and [with] his name on the company. He wanted to know everything that was going on. Now we can make decisions more quickly. I make 9 of the 10 decisions affecting my division. Under Tom, it was the reverse.

Q: Why was Siebel so late to the on-demand market?
A: It depends on what you mean by late. For the enterprise space, it's quite early. We tried to do it early in 1998 through partnerships, but there just wasn't any appetite in the market for that kind of offering, and it's easy to see why. At the time, IT had infinite resources and wasn't really worried about containing costs. It was the go-go expansion days.

We launched a competitive offering now because we decided, in order to grow, we had to move outside of enterprise to the small- and medium-business market. It was clear they wanted it delivered in that form factor. And we felt that Salesforce was using their success in small and medium businesses to attack our customers.

Q: How do you think you're competing on technology?
A: Today is our seventh release in a little over a year. That's taken us from a product lukewarmly competitive...to a product offering that closes the gap in a lot of ways. I think we're making the right steps. There's a lot of history in the software world of companies that were first -- Netscape was the first browser. I don't think being first portends what the future will hold.

Q: How is your product different?
A: I think there are some philosophical differences in the way we are delivering, and the differences have nothing to do with Salesforce and everything to do with our history and customer base.

Eight or nine years ago, customers came back to us and said, "We're having to invest a significant amount of money in customizing our products, and we don't think we should." So we created 23 industry-specific versions of the product. In the hosted space, we've created four industry-specific versions that will build on that.

That's a dramatically different approach from Salesforce's. Their approach is to create a platform and a software development kit. For big companies, giving them a tool kit will be poorly received. We come from the enterprise and are moving down. They come from small business and are moving up.

Another major difference is what we are announcing [Mar. 29]: The first fully hosted contact center integrated with customer relationship software. What does that mean? It means when companies want to provide call centers, they have to invest millions up front and six months to put it together. We've effectively bought all that equipment, integrated it with our applications, and are offering it on a subscriptions basis.

Large companies can use it to add capacity. Retailers, during the holiday season, don't want to take on the permanent cost for additional volume. Polling offices during government elections can turn it on and turn it off.

Q: How does it play into the strategy to take on Salesforce?
A: Companies may know how they want to use voice- and e-mail, but haven't figured out if they want consistent forecasting processes that are more on the [customer-resource-management software] side. These are relatively newer concepts that not all companies have figured out. They have figured out they have to answer phones and e-mail, and need a more effective way of doing it. We start there, then link them in with customer-resource management.

Q: How important is the OnDemand line for the company?
A: We're investing a significant amount in this. Our competitors would claim this is an afterthought. But it's our intent to take our entire Siebel product line so it can be delivered in a hosted form. The OnDemand interface will become the interface for all of our products. That's a tremendous switch from where we started. We will go through a transformation over the next couple of years.

"

Answers to Weekly IT Quiz # 11

2005-04-03T18:17:00.000+05:30

1. Which company's logo consists of 8 U's ?

Ans. SUN Microsystems

2. Who pioneered the concept of Venture Capitalism ?

Ans. Eugene Kleiner

3. "Intelligence everywhere " is the punchline of which technology company ?

Ans. Motorola

4. Which celebrity from the IT World owns yachts " USA76" and "Katana" ?

Ans. Larry Ellison of Oracle

5. Which international consultancy firm popularised the term "Learning Curve" ?

Ans. Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Answers to Weekly IT Quiz # 11

2005-04-03T18:11:00.000+05:30

1. Which company's logo consists of 8 U's ?
Ans. SUN

2. Who pioneered the concept of Venture Capitalism ?
Ans. Eugene Kleiner

3. "Intelligence everywhere " is the punchline of which technology company ?
Ans. Motorola

4. Which celebrity from the IT World owns yachts " USA76" and "Katana" ?
Ans. Larry Ellison of Oracle

5. Which international consultancy firm popularised the term "Learning Curve" ?
Ans. Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

The Weekly IT Quiz # 11

2005-04-01T16:08:00.000+05:30

Apologies for the delay. Here are the 5 questions for the week.

1. Which company's logo consists of 8 U's ?

2. Who pioneered the concept of Venture Capitalism ?

3. "Intelligence everywhere " is the punchline of which technology company ?

4. Which celebrity from the IT World owns yachts " USA76" and "Katana" ?

5. Which international consultancy firm popularised the term "Learning Curve" ?

As usual the results will be posted after 2 days.

The Many Uses of Mobile Phones

2005-03-23T11:11:00.000+05:30

Via Rajesh Jain's blog

The innovation and growth on the mobile phones front is astonishing. The top-end phones available now have the processing power and storage available in desktop computers from just 4-5 years ago. Little wonder then that 2004 saw 674 million phones being bought, and estimates for 2005 stand at 730 million.

The mobile phone is rapidly becoming the uber-device – the one device that seems to have it all and becomes even more indispensable than it is now. Mobile phones have already started functioning as more than just communications devices. Mobiles serve as watches and alarm clocks. Even with the limited free games that come with basic phones, they are already good for “time-pass.” They can also function as calculators.

In unfamiliar neighbourhoods, they tell us where we are. The address book and contacts list on phones is our social interface. Without the phone, many of us would be quite lost in connecting with other people! The calendar function on the mobile phones can help us track our lives. Phones can also function as radios. For some, the mobile phone also becomes a notepad – send an SMS to oneself and make it a reminder service. Owners also have tended to customise phones – with their own ringtones, themes and wallpapers.

This is just for starters. Consider what some of the more advanced mobile phones are also doing:

Digital Camera: Point-and-click! Phones capture pictures and let us save them for posterity or transfer them to others and computers.

Audio Recorder: Mobile phones can be used to record conversations, or even brief notes to oneself.

Video Recorder: Phones are becoming video cameras also – some of the newest cellphones can record an hour or more of video.

Multimedia Messaging: Everything recorded can be shared with others by using MMS.

Email Client: The phone can be used to connect to any POP or IMAP server and allow receiving and sending email. While most phones may not have the ease-of-use that a Blackberry has with email, contacts and calendar, the fact that it is on the phone itself and there is no need for a separate device can be a big help (along with the lower total cost of ownership).

Web Client: Phones can also browse websites – via a WAP and/or HTML browser. Most websites may not look great on the small screen, but it is still possible to connect to any website.

Gaming Platform: Mobile games have become big business in the past couple years, as people seek entertainment in the free time that they have on the device that they always carry with them.

Documents Viewer: It is increasingly possible to view documents on the cellphone – in the popular MS-Office file formats.

Computer Adjunct: For many, the cellphone has replaced the PDA as the complement to the computer. With a remote desktop application, it also becomes possible to make the mobile phone a window to one’s computer.

Music Player: The next big thing in 2005 is reckoned to be the combining of music capabilities on the mobile phone. While phones can play MP3s, it will soon also be possible to have music streamed from the Internet. Motorola is expected to introduce a phone this year that marries the mobile with Apple’s iPod.

TV: In India, some operators have been promoting many TV channels on the cellphone over next-generation networks like EDGE.

Wallet: The phone can also be used to pay for purchases like a credit or debit card. There is already a billing relationship that exists between the subscriber and the operator, and that can be used to make payments to merchants.

Bar-code readers: Phones will also be able to read barcodes and that can have very interesting applications in commerce.

Ramesh Jain, professor at University of California, Irivine, wrote on his weblog: “Mobile phones are becoming very powerful and are likely to become a dominant device for CCC (communication, computing and content).”

So, the phones of tomorrow will be remote controls for our life. They will come with bigger, better keyboards and displays – even though there are practical limitations on how big a device we will carry. Networks are becoming faster, too. And the device that was once a replacement for the fixed-line phone will occupy an even greater role in our lives. Countries like Japan and South Korea already lead the way in having multi-purpose mobile phones. China is following and India is not far behind.

Consider some of the recent announcements at Cebit.

A Slashdot reader wrote: “Samsung [is] showing off a new cell phone which runs on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system which features a built-in hard drive. The SGH-I300 will offer 3GB of storage which allows you to store up to 1,000 songs on it for playback through the music player. The 3GB hard drive is similar to the type of hard drive that is found in Apple's Mini iPod. These 1-inch drives with very low power requirements, are ideal for cell phones and other mobile devices.”

News.com wrote about two of the announcements at Cebit: “Motorola is demonstrating its 3G Motorola V1150 phone in Hannover. The sleek phone will come with an integrated 2-megapixel camera, two-way video calling and a new Motorola ticker technology called Screen3 that streams news and entertainment from Motorola...Sony Ericsson is showing off the W800 phone, the first Walkman- branded cell phone. The handset comes with a digital-audio player, FM radio tuner and 2-megapixel camera. The W800 will have 38MB of free memory for music and images.”

Mobile phones are morphing – to the point where voice is just incidental. They are becoming, what George Gilder has called, teleputers.

Answers to the Weekly IT Quiz # 10

2005-03-22T11:03:00.000+05:30

1. What is considered to be the source of the term " Bug" which means a fault in a computer program ?

Ans. The term is often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book.However, use of the word "bug" to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks.

2. " Cookie" is a packet of information that travels between a browser and the web server. Who used it first and what is the source of this term ?

Ans. The term was coined by web browser programmer Lou Montulli after the term "magic cookies" used by Unix programmers.

3. "Nerd" is a colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one. What is the source of this term ?

Ans. Earlier spelling of the term is "Nurd" and the original spelling is "Knurd", but the pronunciation has remained the same. The term originated at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1940s. Students who partied, and rarely studied were called "Drunks", while the opposite - students who never partied and always studied were "Knurd" ("Drunk" spelled backwards). The term was also (independently) used in a Dr. Seuss book, and on the TV show Happy Days, giving it national popularity.

4. "Ping" is a computer network tool used to detect hosts. How did this term come about ?

Ans. The author of ping, Mike Muuss, named it after the pulses of sound made by a sonar called a "ping". Later Dave Mills provided the backronym "Packet Internet Groper".

5. " Wiki" is a hypertext document collection or the collaborative software used to create it. Who and how did this term come about ?

Ans. Coined by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki concept, who named them for the "wiki wiki" or "quick" shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport. Wiki wiki was the first Hawai'ian term he learned on his first visit to the islands. The airport counter agent directed him to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.

Source :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_term_etymologies

The Weekly IT Quiz # 10

2005-03-22T10:10:00.000+05:30

Here are the Five Questions for the week. This is once again an etymology special, this time on computer terms and products.

1. What is considered to be the source of the term "Bug" which means a fault in a computer program ?

2. "Cookie" is a packet of information that travels between a browser and the web server. Who used it first and what is the source of this term ?

3. "Nerd" is a colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one. What is the source of this term ?

4. "Ping" is a computer network tool used to detect hosts. How did this term come about ?

5. "Wiki" is a a hypertext document collection or the collaborative software used to create it. Who and how did this term come about ?

As usual the answers will be published in 2 days.

The Google-Yahoo competition

2005-03-22T09:26:00.000+05:30

With the acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo, the competition between Yahoo and Google is becoming intense.

Via Sadagopan's blog the emerging landscape

- Google,Yahoo and for academic completion include MSN for comparison of what they are doing:
- All the three have mail capabilities, web, toolbar, desktop search, paid search(includes plans)
- All three have RSS readers available in some form
- All three have picture imaging services
- Retail and Small Biz Services
- Blogging: Google has blogger – Yahoo has announced beta(Flickr shall be integrated into Yahoo 360), MSN spaces already exists.
- Yahoo has music service, MSN is getting in there. Google may be there
- Google and Yahoo already have catalogue services
- Google may have browser plans
- Yahoo may get into music and blogging more aggressively
- IM services of Yahoo and MSN may become more enriched, Google may need to get in there - we can expect something innovative to happen here.

My loyalties are divided between Google and Yahoo. Whereas, I am a huge fan of Google as an orgn, I use Google's search, Blogger and Picasa. But, I still love Yahoo for its mail and My Yahoo service. There is nothing quite like My Yahoo with Google. Yahoo's IM is also great, but have not been using it that often.

Software industry is expanding, not contracting

2005-03-21T10:10:00.000+05:30

Via Sadagopan's blog this Business Week article says the growth in software industry continues..

MARCH 17, 2005

VIEWPOINT: MILLS
By Steve Mills

In the Shadow of Software's Titans
The big players' recent mergers obscure a more enduring trend: As always, legions of startups and VCs are shaping the industry's future.

Despite some recent high-profile mergers and the inevitable speculation that they are signs of broad industry consolidation, the $190 billion software industry is expanding, not contracting (see BW Online, 3/15/05, "When Big Blue Goes Shopping" and BW Online, 3/11/05, "Big Software's Blood Sport" ).

It's true that some large software companies are getting bigger. SAP (SAP ) and Oracle (ORCL ) have launched rival bids for retail software maker Retek (RETK ), just months after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. Symantec (SYMC ) and Veritas Software (VRTS ) are trying to merge in a stock transaction originally valued at $13.5 billion -- the largest software acquisition ever proposed.

PULLING TOGETHER. But a look beyond the headlines indicates that the software industry is doing what it has always done -- expanding at the same time it contracts, and definitely not reaching maturity or commodity status. Hundreds of new software companies quietly enter the market every year, boosting the industry's overall size.

Here's what happened in 2004: Private-equity firms invested $1.1 billion in first-time funding for more than 200 software companies, according to the National Venture Capital Assn. (NVCA).

And here's what didn't happen: Software did not stop being essential to streamlining and integrating strategic business operations. The typical enterprise has deployed thousands of software applications. Making them all work together is a profound challenge.

"INFLECTION POINT." Why? Because companies know that they must have top-notch performance across their entire computer networks, not within particular, so-called vertical functions. That requires the horizontal integration of varied systems, combined with sophisticated software tools and business intelligence analysis programs to allow the real-time use of all the information software generates.

This desire to integrate is creating pressure -- and strong incentives -- for software providers to expand beyond their traditional areas of expertise. Some have responded with new products, others have acquired expertise they want from smaller firms. So rather than reaching maturity, the industry has come to an "inflection point." We're not going to see clients buy software just to boost productivity. Instead, they'll invest in software (and services) to redesign business models and the way work gets done.

That shift is creating opportunities across an industry as a complex "ecosystem" of newer, small companies align with more established players. Software companies -- thousands of them around the world -- may compete with one another when selling products, but partner together in establishing standards that allow systems to work together.

GLOBAL REACH. According to the NVCA, software was the leading venture-capital investment in 2004, with $5.1 billion invested, or 24% of all venture-capital dollars. That's not the investment profile of a contracting market. Expansion is fueled by programming standards and open-source software, which lower the barriers to entry.

Governments around the world are encouraging software startups as engines of economic development. Partnerships between government, academia, and business are fostering the creation of new software companies that are targeting local software needs in markets such as China, India, Eastern Europe, and Brazil.

Although company names and products will continue to change over time, the software industry will evolve to meet ever-growing customer demands. And that means an ongoing influx of innovative new players, private and corporate investment, and a healthy expansion of the industry.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mills is senior vice-president of IBM's $15 billion software business

Answers to the Weekly IT Quiz # 9

2005-03-17T09:29:00.000+05:30

1. In HBR, this author wrote a controversial article called " IT doesn't matter" . After a lot of debate, he expanded this article and toned it down to a more prosaic " Does IT matter ?" and published this book in 2004. Who is the author ?

Ans. Nicholas J. Carr

2. This Chairman of a well-known technology company wrote atleast 3 books on IT and management. His autobiography is called "Swimming Across : A Memoir" . His bestselling book which brought the term 'stratgic inflexion point" in common usage was called " Only the paranoid survive" Who are we talking about ?

Ans. Andrew S. Grove ( Intel)

3. He is considered the Guru of technology marketing. He has written bestselling books like " Crossing the Chasm" and " Inside the Tornado: Marketing strategies from silicon valley's cutting edge ". Name this author.

Ans. Geoffrey Moore

4. This outsider from RJR Nabisco and McKinsey turned around IBM in the nineties. He has chronicled this change journey in a bestselling book. " Who says elephants cant dance" ? Who is he ?

Ans. Lou Gerstner

5. In the revolutionary bestseller, " Innovator's Dilemma" this Harvard professor says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership, or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate. Who is he ?

Ans. Clayton M. Christensen

The Weekly IT Quiz # 9

2005-03-15T12:55:00.000+05:30

Here is a IT Books and authors special. 5 questions

1. In HBR, this author wrote a controversial article called " IT doesn't matter" . After a lot of debate, he expanded this article and toned it down to a more prosaic " Does IT matter ?" and published this book in 2004. Who is the author ?

2. This Chairman of a well-known technology company wrote atleast 3 books on IT and management. His autobiography is called "Swimming Across : A Memoir" . His bestselling book which brought the term 'strategic inflexion point" in common usage was called " Only the paranoid survive" Who are we talking about ?

3. He is considered the Guru of technology marketing. He has written bestselling books like " Crossing the Chasm" and " Inside the Tornado: Marketing strategies from silicon valley's cutting edge ". Name this author.

4. This outsider from RJR Nabisco and McKinsey turned around IBM in the nineties. He has chronicled this change journey in a bestselling book. " Who says elephants cant dance" ? Who is he ?

5. In the revolutionary bestseller, " Innovator's Dilemma" this Harvard professor says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership, or worse, disappear completely. This is because of 'disruptive technologies" . Who is he ?

The answers will be posted in 2 days.

Answers to weekly IT Quiz # 8

2005-03-10T17:31:00.000+05:30

Answers to the Weekly IT Quiz # 8
1. Dan Quayle remarked that "If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented Spell Check" - referring to his much publicized mis-spelling of the word Potato(e) on camera. While Al Gore certainly did not invent the Internet, he did coin a phrase synonymous with it. What?
Ans. Information superhighway

2.What path-breaking device was founded by Vijay Chandru, Prof Ramesh Hariharan, Prof. Swami Manohar and Prof.Vinay L.Deshpande?
Ans. Simputer

3.What is the alternative developed by Hewlett Packard to the Java technology?

Ans. Chai
4. The Princeton University Statistician John W.Tukey coined the term 'Bit', an abbreviation of Binary Digit and another very famous word, which has become part of everyday usage. Identify the word.

Software
5. Trivia. What does "3-finger exercise" or "3-finger salute" mean in computing technology?

Ctrl-Alt-Del

The Weekly IT Quiz # 8

2005-03-08T11:26:00.000+05:30

1. Dan Quayle remarked that "If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented Spell Check" - referring to his much publicized mis-spelling of the word Potato(e) on camera. While Al Gore certainly did not invent the Internet, he did coin a phrase synonymous with it. What?

2.What path-breaking device was founded by Vijay Chandru, Prof Ramesh Hariharan, Prof. Swami Manohar and Prof.Vinay L.Deshpande?

3.What is the alternative developed by Hewlett Packard to the Java technology?

4. The Princeton University Statistician John W.Tukey coined the term 'Bit', an abbreviation of Binary Digit and another very famous word, which has become part of everyday usage. Identify the word.

5. Trivia. What does "3-finger exercise" or "3-finger salute" mean in computing technology?

As usual the results will be published after 2 days.

Answers to Weekly IT Quiz # 7

2005-03-01T09:18:00.000+05:30

Here are the answers to the Weekly IT Quiz # 7. Sorry for the delay.

1. How did the animation company Pixar get its name ?
Ans. Action (verb) of making pixels in Spanish. According to "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" book by Alan Deutschman, Ed Catmull and John Lassetter were looking for a sticky name and came up with "Pixer", but they thought it sounded better in Spanish: Pixar. The company was founded after Steve Jobs bought the computer graphics division from Lucasfilm for $10 million.

2. How did the popular web-server Apache get its name ?
Ans. The name was chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. Secondarily, and more popularly (though incorrectly) accepted, it's a considered cute name which stuck: Its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'a patchy' server—thus, the name Apache.

3. What, perhaps, prompted the founder of IBM to name it International Business Machines ?
Ans.IBM was started by an ex-employee of National Cash Register. To one-up them in all respects he called his company International Business Machines.

4. What was the inspiration for Mitch Kapor to name his company Lotus?
Ans. Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

5. Why did the founder of the company Red Hat name it so ?
Ans. Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. People would turn to him to solve their problems, and he was referred to as 'that guy in the red hat'. He lost the cap and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone.

2005 Innovation award winners : AMR Research

2005-02-24T10:16:00.000+05:30

Sadagopan has pointed to this news about Innovation award winners

The 2005 Innovation Award Winners
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
AMR Research Staff

And the winners are…saleforce.com, TrenStar, T3Ci, and IBM. No, it’s not the Oscars. It’s AMR Research’s 2005 Innovation Awards that were handed out last week at our annual Strategy 21 Conference. The awards are designed to honor breakthrough ideas by small, midsize, and large companies.

AMR Research received more than 150 nominations and chose the winners based on the following criteria:

Has a sustainable competitive advantage
Is unique
Addresses a key business issue
Spurred new business for the company
Has referenceable accounts
The Winners:

Salesforce.com—large company (more than $100M): The company’s Customforce product has made it easier for companies to integrate other applications and customize the software. The ease of use and short implementation time is changing the game in the hosted CRM market.
TrenStar—midsize company ($10M to $100M): With a unique business model that combines asset acquisition; tracking technology, including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID); and a variety of management services TrenStar came out on top. TrenStar is the first company to offer this combination of technology and services to support pooling of common, nonstrategic containers and other mobile assets.
T3Ci—small company (under $10M): The first vendor to provide RFID analytics, T3Ci’s applications monitor movement and status of inventory and have helped clients reduce out-of-stocks and excess/obsolete inventories.
AMR Research also awarded IBM the Continuous Innovation Award. Last year, IBM received 3,248 patents by the U.S. Patent Office and has topped the list for the most patents 12 years in a row. IBM recently pledged 500 patents to the open source community.

The Innovation Awards were created to give business technology the recognition it deserves that often pales next to consumer technology—start thinking of who might make the list next year.

The Weekly IT Quiz #7

2005-02-24T10:04:00.000+05:30

Here are the 5 questions for the week. This is a Company Name etymology special.

1. How did the animation company Pixar get its name ?
2. How did the popular web-server Apache get its name ?
3. What, perhaps, prompted the founder of IBM to name it International Business Machines ?
4. What was the inspiration for Mitch Kapor to name his company Lotus?
5. Why did the founder of the company Red Hat name it so ?

As usual the results will be published after 2 days.

The future direction of IT Services company in Banking

2005-02-22T13:40:00.000+05:30

In the recent issue of Business World dated 28th February, 2005. Mr A.K. Purwar, the Chairman of SBI has been quoted. The quote goes like this " Banking is nothing but value-added IT. If IT can be global. why not banking ?". Whereas, this quote can itself set off a debate, in this mail I don't intend to do that.

If banking is value-added IT, then the IT companies which have been serving the banking sector for such a long time, can they diversify into banking ?

If you look at the 2 leading companies in IT services namely TCS and Infosys, we see that TCS derives 37 % and 35 % of its revenue from the BFSI sector. Banking and Financial services sector alone accounts for over 25 % in the case of Infosys. Both TCS and Infosys have a strong process knowledge in the Banking sector derived by developing Banking products. By providing ADM services to leading banks of the world, TCS and Infosys have built up a huge pool of personnel conversant and having functional knowledge of Banking and Financial Services. These companies have very good knowledge about the back office operations of most areas of banking worldwide.

Is back-office process knowledge good enough to diversify into a bank ? Banking is also about accepting deposits, giving loans, managing investments and providing top-class service to millions of customers, retail and institutional. Banking is a highly competitive and a very regulated industry in most parts of the world. It is easy for an ICICI Bank to start an IT subsidiary ( 3i Infotech ) but it will be very difficult for an IT company to get a banking licence in India, at least.

If an IT company does acquire the licence and the front-office capabilities by hiring the experienced people, will there be a conflict of interest and will there core business be affected. Banking being a highly fragmented business, India alone having over 50 odd national banks, the impact should be minimal.

But why should IT companies diversify into Banking ? The foremost reason I can think of is that IT services generate huge amount of cash in their highly profitable businesses. IT services business is inherently manpower intensive and not capital intensive. Currently, TCS and Infosys are spending huge sums of money to build infrastructure for offshore development. For instance,Infosys, will be generating over Rs 1900 cr in net profit in 2004-05. It has spent about Rs 600 cr in fixed assets in whole of 2004 with a result Rs 1300 cr additional cash is generated. Infosys distributed Rs 860 crore by way of dividend, including a special dividend of Rs 100 per share for crossing the 1 Bn $ mark. Infosys already has a huge cash and cash equivalents of over Rs 3000 crore, This cash does not generate the same returns as the regular business, so the return on capital employed keeps falling. TCS story is not very different except that it has started with zero reserves after the division was carved out of Tata Sons. Banking is a capital intensive business with stable revenues but low profitability. Banking is a good cushion for IT services.

The choice before these companies is to invest these cash reserves in software products, acquire companies or something else. The software products business is inherently very risky and has a long gestation period. Till now, the investments made by TCS and Infosys in products is quite insignificant in relation to their cash generation.

If TCS and Infosys, see themselves primarily as a services company then Banking is also another service. These companies have long standing relationship with many non-banking companies all over the world. They could leverage that relationships to start with wholesale banking in global markets. They could use their process knowledge, manpower and their healthy balance sheets to kick off the business. After the banking business gains speed, then some of the new institutional customers of the bank could become future customers for the IT services and BPO businesses.

Will any Indian IT company take this fork on the road ? I doubt it. But, I am sure it is worth considering. If I have to stick my neck out, which company is likely to do so, I think it will be Infosys. Firstly, they have huge cash reserves and they come from a state which has a great banking history and capability.Also, like TCS they do not belong to a group which has other capital intensive businesses. This move when it happens it will be a very interesting one to watch, because there are no half-moves in banking.

Malcolm Gladwell : The Accidental Guru

2005-02-18T15:52:00.000+05:30

Here is an interesting article in Fast Company about Malcolm Gladwell, from whose first book "The Tipping Point" the name for this blog has been borrowed.

Malcolm Gladwell, says one fan, is "just a thinker." But what a thinker. His provocative ideas are taking the business world by storm. So who is this guy, and what can he teach you about business?

Innovate or Abdicate

2005-02-16T12:09:00.000+05:30

Came across this post by Joyce Wycoff
It amazes me that there are still business leaders who don’t appreciate the importance of innovation … and even more who think that it will somehow happen automatically. If customer service or quality or financial savvy doesn’t happen automatically, why would innovation?

Perhaps we’ve taken a small step forward now that the InnovateAmerica final report from the Council on Competitiveness is out. It deserves to be read by anyone interested in innovation.

Here is the opening statement:

“Innovation will be the single most important factor in determining America’s success through the 21st century.” It continues by stating, “innovation-driven growth (is) a more urgent imperative than ever before.”

The report recognizes that we have focused on efficiency and quality for the past 25 years and now it is time to place the same level of focus and energy on innovation. In a rather interesting twist on the “Innovate or Die” theme, the report states, “Innovate or Abdicate.” In other words if you’re not leading innovation, you shouldn’t be leading.

The definition crafted by the group is:

"The intersection of invention and insight, leading to the creation of social and economic value."

While there are hundreds of definitions floating around, this is one of the best. It incorporated the concept of new understanding (insight) coming together with the urge to create something new (invention), all in the service of creating new value, in this case social and economic.

Innovation is not only a good business strategy ... and it's not only our patriotic duty (as emphasized in this report) ... but it is also our only hope for solving the immense challenges facing our world today.

My 2 cents on the above :
Please see this post in connection with the previous post on the India outsourcing story. Innovation is as much relevant for India as much as it does for America. The Indian outsourcing companies have just done one innovation, the Global Delivery Model, which hinges on wage arbitrage. After this gap reduces they would have to innovate to just survive. If they have to achieve the targets suggested by Indian President of 260 bn $ by 2009, they would have to innovate. They better start innovating now when they have huge cash reserves. These companies really need leaders who go beyond paying lip service to innovation and continue with their manpower multiplication game.

Two sides of outsourcing

2005-02-16T11:46:00.000+05:30

Two Sides of Outsourcing
By Corie Lok Febuary 2005

With so many startup founders, CTOs, high-level engineers, and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley tracing their roots to India, why doesn’t India itself boast a booming high-tech innovation sector? One reason, of course, is that many of the best-trained Indian engineers still find it more exciting to work in the United States and other Western nations. But another, more controversial reason could be the type of business that is booming in India: information technology outsourcing. Some analysts worry that information technology professionals in India are too busy serving their well-paying foreign clients to risk time or capital on developing their own products for the Indian or U.S. markets*.

But the impact of outsourcing on indigenous innovation may not be so clear cut, as is shown by the experiences of two very different Indian companies, Infosys Technologies and Ittiam Systems. Big outsourcing providers like Infosys may not be fountains of innovation, but their presence will have—in fact, is already having—trickle-down effects. Outsourcing, many Indians argue, is training India’s next generation of tech entrepreneurs.

Infosys Technologies, India’s third-largest IT services company, was founded in 1981 to design, develop, and maintain software for U.S. corporate clients in banking, manufacturing, and telecommunications. In the late 1980s, when business was slow, Infosys turned to creating proprietary banking software that is still used today by about 70 percent of Indian banks. But after the Indian government loosened economic controls in 1991, the software services industry took off, and in the mid-1990s Infosys decided to drop further product development. “We did not want to conflict with our clients,” says Kris Gopalakrishnan, Infosys’s cofounder and chief operating officer. Infosys’s services strategy has been enormously successful; the company’s revenues have climbed by 30 to 40 percent since 2001. But now, most of the intellectual property it generates goes back to its clients.

But outsourcing can have indirect benefits. Take Ittiam Systems. A crew of former Texas Instruments (TI) employees—led by Srini Rajam, the former managing director of TI India and now Ittiam’s CEO—founded the startup in 2001 to make better and cheaper digital signal-processing systems. The company secured $11.5 million in venture capital financing and by 2004 was earning profits of $1 million annually. Rajam, who worked for the giant Indian outsourcing firm Wipro Technologies before joining TI’s India division, sees himself and his company as a child of the outsourcing phenomenon. “Outsourcing will help innovation,” says Rajam. “It gives people confidence and experience”—not to mention the high salaries that free them to take risks on new ventures.

Indeed, Ittiam isn’t the only example. Alumni of outsourcing companies like Wipro have launched dozens of startups in India, a few of them funded by JumpStartUp, a small venture capital firm based in Bangalore and Santa Clara, CA. One explanation for this trend, says JumpStartUp cofounder Sanjay Anandaram—himself a former Wipro employee—is that skilled and experienced Indians are returning home from abroad to provide leadership. Another is that people who’ve worked for Indian outsourcing firms serving multinational clients gain critical experience managing global operations.

But perhaps most important is a gradual change in attitudes in a culture where entrepreneurs were once seen as loners who couldn’t hold down regular jobs, and business failure was traditionally equated with personal failure. Today “a startup is no longer viewed as a no-no,” says Rajam. “It is in fact viewed very positively.” At least some of this change can be credited to outsourcing, says Ashish Arora, a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “If India has any kind of successful product development, it will be because of the success of the software services sector.”

My own take on this is Wipro and HCL Technologies are or were the cradles of innovation, i.e, before they also got on to the volume game of Application Development and Maintenance outsourcing. Infosys and TCS were always in the volume game, so they never encouraged innovation. I don't expect entrepreneurship to come from the outsourcing boom.

Answers to Weekly IT Quiz # 6

2005-02-16T11:32:00.000+05:30

Here are the answers to the quiz published 2 days ago.

1. Who developed the Plug n Play technology (PnP) ?
Ans. Intel and Microsoft

2. Doug Engelbert in 1968 invented it and called it the “X-Y position indicator”.This is better known by the name his co-workers in the research lab gave it.What?
Ans. Computer Mouse

3. Which software product had this slogan-“Write once, Run Anywhere” ?
Ans. Java

4. In possibly the only event of its kind in history, the entire telephone system of the US and Canada was switched off for a minute on August 4, 1922. What was the occasion?
Ans. Death of Graham Bell

5. `Make Laloo look good. Give him a mud-pack.' Identify the brand.
Ans. Indiagames.com

Sorry for the last one, it was too much of a trivia. Just wanted a Laloo question when he was so much in the news.

Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More

2005-02-15T12:47:00.000+05:30

Sumankumar has a pointer to this link to an interesting presentation on using Blogs and Wikis for Knowledge Management

What is a Wiki?

A Wiki is a unified system for publishing:
· Many users at once can freely create and edit the content, “edit anything at any time”
· A matrix-based, horizontal navigation created and controlled by users
· Users “gesture” by creating a “linked” page, without necessarily creating content on the gestured page
o Creates cross-links on the fly
o Invites participants to help build the information structurally and within pages
· Edit both content as well as organization of the content without fear of losing old information, “ruining” the page or overwriting good information

How can a Wiki help me internally?
· Help manage departmental, project, and company wide knowledge that previously resided in silo'd systems or on individual desktops
o Increase the ratio of acquired knowledge collectively
o Enable your team to work more collaboratively
o Migrates static and otherwise outdated documents to being live and dynamic documents
o Localize information and increase find-ability
o Provides ample version control
o Refine the organization of information
· Formalize and informalize the information sharing process
· Encourage people to share knowledge in writing who were previously reluctant to share due to loss of context

For more info on Wiki check out this link in Wikipedia.

Barry Talks! : The Decade of Process

2005-02-14T17:36:00.000+05:30

Barry Talks! : The Decade of Process: "The Decade of Process
[An edited transcript of a speech I gave on January 13, 2005].

Today I'm going to talk about People-Driven Processes as a component of collaboration. In many ways business process is by far the most important and valuable form of collaboration since while e-mail, instant messaging, and shared workspaces facilitate communication, business process achieves business goals. When a customer buys something on the web site, a process is set in motion which at its conclusion results in the customer receiving goods and the enterprise, money.

I believe that where the eighties were known as the decade of productivity applications -- spreadsheets, word processors, and so on, the nineties as the decade of email and the Internet, this decade, starting now (isn't it interesting that software waves start around the middle of the chronological decade), will be the Decade of Process.

Process, simply, is defined as that set of steps which must happen, with greater or lesser rigor, in some sequence in order to achieve a business goal. Mortgage approvals, funds transfers, performance reviews and so on are all examples of processes, and it's clear that nearly everything we do in business corresponds to some sort of process. Customers call and we have to react; we run out of inventory and we have to order more; and so forth. I'll have more to say about this later.

First, though, I want to talk about the nature of information in business and in particular how documents relate to process.

We are creatures of commerce; it is innate to the very notion of humanity.

In the technology of documents we've made lots of progress in the past millenia: paper replaced clay, moveable type supplanted the legions of clerics copying illuminated manuscripts; fax, copy machines, and so on.

In our own lifetimes we've seen tremendous change. In my youth, I had a summer job where I tabulated sales reports from gas stations using an adding machine, a pencil, and a big green piece of paper with rows and columns -- a spreadsheet, ironically enough. And oh, in those days how I prayed that the sums of the columns and the sums of the rows added up to the same number! Little did I then realize that I would not only enjoy the benefits of but in fact participate in the creation of the digital versions of these tools: electronic spreadsheets and other members of modern office applications. What a privilege!

And, fascinatingly enough, in the business world we use these applications to create the same sorts of documents the Greeks did thousands of years ago: invoices, bills of lading, inventories, and so on.

But in the last generation there have been two other revolutions in the way we think about and manage information.

The first is the relational database. With the clean, rigorously structured tables of information in the modern RDBMS we can query, track, analyze, and report upon enormous volumes of data in ways unimaginable in our parents' time. The value of the relational database is underscored by the fact that relational technology is at the heart of every major business application shipped today.

But for all their power, the DBMS does not represent data in a way intuitively consumed by humans. Only the worst client-server applications (and regrettably, there are lots of these) would show table upon table. We humans think in document terms: we like text, we like annotations, we like personalization: we rely on the DBMS for structure and integrity, but for human renditions of the data, we prefer the age-old notion of documents.

And that leaves us with a gap: how do we move information from databases to humans and back again, how do we render data in useful ways, through multiple steps in a process and to multiple channels? We need a malleable, infinitely transformable intermediate form for data; and that, of course, is XML.

I believe we have only begun to truly appreciate the power and value of XML. It allows applications to easily read relational data and render it in ways appropriate to the human, be it on browser, electronic form, PDA or cell phone. From the neutral XML we can generate any number of types of documents, as appropriate: the order becomes a shipping form becomes an invoice, all from the same neutral data, depending upon the state of the process. XML makes information fluid.

Now, let's talk about process for a few minutes. It's trite, but true to say that business runs on business process. Order processing, supply replenishment, human-resources management, and so on and so on: the way we accomplish these goals in a manageable, trackable, and measurable way is through the institution of business process.

As we examine business processes, it's obvious that there are many different kinds. Highly deterministic, automated processes control real-time scenarios like electronic funds transfer: through the SWIFT financial network some seven trillion dollars of funds move -- every day. Security, reliability, and the elimination of latency are essential to the success of nodes on the SWIFT network.

People-driven processes by contrast enables the interoperation, the collaboration, of a company's most valuable asset, its employees. Employee performances reviews present an illustrative example: an employee creates a self-appraisal, which is forwarded to the manager, who comments and forwards it further, perhaps to the next-level manager. The review has salary and (perhaps) legal implications, and individuals in those departments are also therefore involved.

And there are other types of process: there are document-centric processes, where people, sometimes very large numbers of people, collaborate on a document such as a New Drug Application or merger and acquisition disclosures. There are business-to-business processes; and so on. You can slice the categories of process in many ways.

But here's the thing. To do a truly good job with performance reviews, you need to refer to other information assets in the computing ecosystem: perhaps an ERP or HR system for historical salary information by individual, grade, organization, division and/or company; you may wish to consult diversity information for the organization; you may need to look at the employee's historical performance and comparables for other employees in that grade, and so on.

Conversely in an electronic funds transfer application, what happens when something goes wrong? An exception is created, and human intervention is required; and the human receiving the exception may wish to do all sorts of human things with it: forward it, delegate it, escalate it, collaborate on it.

Here is the point. In the old days (five, not five thousand) years ago we in the software industry thought of enterprise application integration (EAI), human workflow, business-to-business communications, and business process management as separate product categories. Today, we do not. Today we think of them as aspects or facets of the same problem, of business process. Any reasonable business process today will have elements of human workflows and backend application integration.

How have these notions of process now affected our view of documents? Yes: and in a very, very profound way. In business, documents rarely stand alone; they are manifestations of a greater process; in fact, I claim that business documents are projections of the state of business processes.

As the performance review moves through its various stages, the nature and content of its human-readable rendition changes. Different parts are readable and/or editable depending on where the review is, and who has it.

We are reaching a stage in which the document as a thing-in-itself no longer exists; but different viewers and editors can be instantiated to manipulate process context. Indeed, I have seen examples of business processes in which at appropriate points documents are created from scratch, from nothing, by creating an instance of an XML schema, populated from information in the process -- and then show up as Microsoft Word attachments in end users' email inboxes.

This is why I think the Decade of Process will again revolutionize business, as productivity applications and the Internet did in past decades. Building on such crucial advances in technology as relational databases and that marvelously fluid intermediate format XML, we can drive business process to new heights of efficiency and productivity -- and this will be essential as the world's business continues to globalize, as even the smallest enterprises run 24 by 7. It's an incredibly exciting time, and I'm thrilled to be in this space.

Thank you very much.

"

Weekly IT Quiz # 6

2005-02-14T17:07:00.000+05:30

Here are the 5 questions.

1. Who developed the Plug n Play technology (PnP) ?
2. Doug Engelbert in 1968 invented it and called it the “X-Y position indicator”.This is better known by the name his co-workers in the research lab gave it.What?
3. Which software product had this slogan-“Write once, Run Anywhere”
4. In possibly the only event of its kind in history, the entire telephone system of the US and Canada was switched off for a minute on August 4, 1922. What was the occasion?
5. `Make Laloo look good. Give him a mud-pack.' Identify the brand.

As usual the answers will be published after 2 days.

Answers to Weekly IT Quiz # 5

2005-02-11T13:47:00.000+05:30

Here are the answers to the Weekly IT Quiz # 5

1. What is mail droppings?

Mails which are CCed to famous personalities.

2. Which product has the baseline ‘The business internet starts here’?

Windows 2000.

3. It was called electronic printer 101 at the time of its inception. However, in due course of time subsequent models were developed. These were aptly called son of electronic printer, son 2 of electronic printer, so on and so forth. What do we call it today?

Ans. EPSON

4. What are programs that claim to do something but do something else ?

Ans. Trojans

5. M M Hasham’s family business of rice exports was lost when the government nationalised it in 1941. Undeterred he plunged into the oil business. In 1947, during the partition he was offered a ministerial post by Jinnah if he went to Pakistan. But, he chose to stay on in India. At the time of his death in 1967 his company had done reasonably well and had two popular oil brands Sunflower and Camel. His son took over and entered a new field. How do we know them today?

Ans. WIPRO

The Weekly IT Quiz # 5

2005-02-09T09:33:00.000+05:30

Here are 5 dry questions for the week. You can the answers as comments. Thanks-Saby for pointing out that this blog did not accept comments from unregd users. I have changed the settings.

1. What is mail droppings?

2. Which product has the baseline ‘The business internet starts here’?

3. It was called electronic printer 101 at the time of its inception. However, in due course of time subsequent models were developed. These were aptly called son of electronic printer, son 2 of electronic printer, so on and so forth. What do we call it today?

4. What are programs that claim to do something but do something else ?

5. M M Hasham’s family business of rice exports was lost when the government nationalised it in 1941. Undeterred he plunged into the oil business. In 1947, during the partition he was offered a ministerial post by Jinnah if he went to Pakistan. But, he chose to stay on in India. At the time of his death in 1967 his company had done reasonably well and had two popular oil brands Sunflower and Camel. His son took over and entered a new field. How do we know them today?

Thanks Shamala for the questions.

As usual the answers will be posted after 2 days.

Revenge of the Right Brain

2005-02-08T20:16:00.000+05:30

Via Emergic.org this Wired article

Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion.

By Daniel H. Pink

The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today - amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going on. And it's right inside our heads.

Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times.

Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.

Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a slow but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.

The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.

Asia

Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And it's not just tech work. Visit India's office parks and you'll see chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US hospitals.

The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to Asia is overhyped in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all going to lose our jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the US labor force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go.

But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also why plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less routine work - programmers who can design entire systems, accountants who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the intricacies of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work better.

Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. "In the old days," legendary computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, "anybody with even routine skills could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true anymore. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over to machines." The result: As the scut work gets offloaded, engineers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than competence.

Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a $500-a-month accountant in India doesn't swipe your accounting job, TurboTax will. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere skills, we'll have to rely ever more on our right hemispheres

Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents' youth. Their lives were defined by scarcity. Ours are shaped by abundance. Want evidence? Spend five minutes at Best Buy. Or look in your garage. Owning a car used to be a grand American aspiration. Today, there are more automobiles in the US than there are licensed drivers - which means that, on average, everybody who can drive has a car of their own. And if your garage is also piled with excess consumer goods, you're not alone. Self-storage - a business devoted to housing our extra crap - is now a $17 billion annual industry in the US, nearly double Hollywood's yearly box office take.

But abundance has produced an ironic result. The Information Age has unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less rational sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and entrepreneurs, it's no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more.

Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of everyday life. And that will only intensify as the first children of abundance, the baby boomers, realize that they have more of their lives behind them than ahead. In both business and personal life, now that our left-brain needs have largely been sated, our right-brain yearnings will demand to be fed.

As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.

But let me be clear: The future is not some Manichaean landscape in which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic - a land in which millionaire yoga instructors drive BMWs and programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. Logical, linear, analytic thinking remains indispensable. But it's no longer enough.

To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy for everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or at least fear less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our caveperson ancestors weren't plugging numbers into spreadsheets or debugging code. But they were telling stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human. It's just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high concept, high touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.

Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right.

Adapted from A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, copyright © by Daniel H. Pink, to be published in March by Riverhead Books. Printed with permission of the publisher.

A Guide to Developing an Enterprise Open Source Strategy

2005-02-05T11:27:00.000+05:30

The Rise of Open Source and the LAMP Stack

Not only is open source ready for the enterprise, it's also proven there. Many of the world's largest organizations, including Sabre Holdings, Cox Communications, The Associated Press, Google, and NASA, are realizing significant cost savings by using open source products to power web sites, business-critical enterprise applications and packaged software. But, it's not just the largest enterprise companies that are implementing open source.

In this white paper, you'll learn:

- How both large and small organizations have successfully implemented open source strategies
-Why open source is important to the enterprise
-Why enterprise companies are using the open source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Python / Perl) as a way to further improve operational efficiency

In addition, to help you develop an open source strategy, this white paper provides:

- An overview of open source products
- An Open Source Scorecard to help you evaluate if your organization is ready for open source
- Tips on getting started with open source

You can download this whitepaper from this link.

7 Reasons Google will rule the world

2005-02-04T13:52:00.000+05:30

Sadagopan has pointed to Paul Allen's blog. As it comes from him ,who is one of the founders of Microsoft, there is a great deal of credibility to what he has to say.

Once again Google surprised the street with much higher than expected earnings. The stock price has jumped $20 today to more than $210 per share and the market cap is almost $58 billion.

I will not be surprised to see consistent positive earnings surprises coming from Google for many years.

I believe that Google is on track to being the most valuable company on the planet. I blogged last year my prediction that within 10-15 years Google will surpass Microsoft in market cap. Here are 7 reasons why it won't even take 10 years for this to happen:

Google Philosophy. Google has the right philosophy for our time--they want to change the world by helping everyone in the world have access to the information they need at any time. By giving us all access to extremely valuable data and tools, they are amassing the largest customer base in the world. After providing a service and attracting an audience, they figure out smart ways to monetize it. But that is not their first priority--changing the world is.
Efficiency of Advertising Model. Once they have eyeballs, the Google self-service model allows hundreds of thousands of businesses to manage their own accounts. New advertisers can set up an account and have traffic coming to a site in just a few minutes. Overture's staff of humans often takes days to approve a new campaign. Google pays almost nothing to get new customers and almost nothing to generate this revenue--the customers themselves do all the work. The profit margins here are breathtaking.
Good Partner. Google is unbelievably generous with partners--content sites who accept Google ads in exchange for a percentage of the revenue. Because Google is not evil, and they want all sites to accept their ads, they share most of the revenue with their content partners.
Employee Pet Projects. Long term, this is the #1 reason why Google will become the most valuable company in the world. I have read that every employee at Google is allowed (or maybe even required) to spend 20% of their time each week working on a pet project. Most companies operate from the top-down. Managers tell employees what to do. Executives make all the resource allocation decisions. But Google has embraced a philosophy which I think can revolutionize the business world--if other companies are smart enough to adopt it. While the most talented, creative, and entrepreneurial people leave companies like Microsoft in frustration in order to start their own enterprises, Google has created an environment where the most talented, creative, and entrepreneurial employees can play in their own sandbox, attract attention and support from top management, and have their pet projected funded within the company. I understand that Larry and Sergei keep a list of the top 100 pet projects in the company. Many of the existing services which Google offers (including Orkut and Google News) were developed by employees. I expect to see hundreds more innovating and exciting free services coming from Google in the coming years. I see more innovation here than from almost all the other top internet companies combined.
Speed of Decision Making at the Top. Once a pet project or an outside company catches the imagination of Google's founders, its maybe only a matter of days before they make a decision to invest in something or make an acquisition. Consider Google's acquisition of Blogger and Picasa. I don't think a dozen MBAs took weeks or months to build extensive financial models to justify the decision to get into blogging or free photo sharing. Google's founders' instincts are so good and they have the ability to make decisions so quickly--that the rest of the world--slow and bureaucratized as most of it is--better watch out as Google makes big moves and does business at the speed of thought.
Cash Flow Funds Pet Projects and Acquisitions. Google's cash flow is so amazing that anything the founders want to do in terms of funding employee pet projects or making acquisition, they will be able to do. While Microsoft is distributing tens of billions of dollars to its shareholders through dividends (signalling the end of their ability to generate high returns from investing the cash internally), Google will be investing more and more in its world changing strategies--like scanning millions of books from the major research libraries in the world and offering free voice over IP (free telecommunications) to people around the world. No doubt they will become a leader in instant messaging; they will launch a browser to steal market share away from Internet Explorer; they will be prominent in blogging, online photo sharing, and in online communities. Eventually they may even offer an operating system or network computer with application functionality that will compete head on with Microsoft Windows and Office.
Open Source and Declining Hardware Costs. All the services Google rolls out are being launched on cheap hardware using open source software. The costs of providing services to the world are declining at an astonishing rate. And Google is there at the right time, investing like crazy. I heard a Berkeley professor in 1999 talk about how CPU, storage and bandwidth costs were approaching zero over time. I don't think most companies understand what this means. Google is on track to having a million or more cheap computers configured into one great network computer system that will store our personal data, host the knowledge of the world, and provide us with tools for communicating with each other. And the cost of deploying such a world-wide network is decreasing all the time. Which means profit margins at Google will be breath-taking for years to come and the street will continue to be surprised.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I've sold my Google stock and invested the profits in Infobase Ventures' own startup companies. Even if Google increases in value over the next few years and passes Microsoft in market, the return on equity for a good startup company should be much higher than the 5-6 fold returns that Google might provide, the way I see things.

The main risk I see in investing in our own startup companies is that the thousands of smart Google employees might beat us to the punch in executing on most of our good ideas. They seem to be everywhere these days; and I see their pace of innovation only accelerating.

Answers to weekly IT Quiz #4

2005-02-03T10:01:00.000+05:30

1. What communications company was the first to offer a Wireless Web Mini-Browser built directly into the phones ?

Ans. Sprint PCS
2. How do we popularly know the IEEE standard 802.11b?

Ans. Wi-Fi
3. In December 1999, which media giant created history by firing 23 employees for misuse of e-mail?

Ans. New York Times
4.Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Alfred P.Sloan are 3 of the 4 nominated to be Fortune's businessmen of the century. Who is the fourth?

Ans. Thomas Watson Jr.
5. The software exports division was earlier part of Apple Industies, later Aptech Computers, now what is it known as?

Ans. Hexaware technologies

Many thanks to Shamala Padmanabhan for the questions.

Why Software-as-a-Service?

2005-02-03T09:57:00.000+05:30

Why Software-as-a-Service?

This is a list of what makes a good SaaS application and some of the benefits of SaaS more generally:

*The app provides functionality many businesses need, but isn’t terribly different from one company to the next.
*The service allows customization, but the SaaS model prevents clients from doing too much reinvention. This saves money and grief. It also encourages best practices.
The service brings together information from several sources and presents it to the user in a friendly, web-based interface.
*Hosted services are easier to get running, partially because of the limited customization potential but also because there’s no hardware to buy and no software to install.
*There’s also no software to manage, fix, upgrade, etc. All that is the responsibility of the vendor. Customers get a semi-custom application without having to hire developers and people to keep it running.
*SaaS costs are predictable and typically usage-based.
*If the vendor doesn’t meet your needs, there usually is no long-term commitment and it’s easy to switch. This keeps SaaS vendors responsive.

Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 1

2005-02-02T15:29:00.000+05:30

Enterprise Systems | Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 1: "Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 1
via Sadagopan's blog
How the thinking of a Jesuit priest can make a difference in IT/management communication.
by Jim McGee

1/18/2005
Have you ever wondered what�s behind the conflict between geeks and suits? Sure, they think differently, but what, exactly, does that mean? A Jesuit priest who passed away in 2003 at the age of 90 may hold one interesting clue.
Walter Ong published a slim volume in 1982 titled �Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word� that explored what the differences between oral and literate cultures mean about how we think.
Remember Homer, the blind epic poet credited with 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey'? If we remember anything, it�s something along the lines of someone who managed to memorize and then flawlessly recite book-length poems for his supper.
The real story, which Ong details, is more interesting and more relevant to our organizational world than you might suspect. Homer sits at the boundary between oral culture and the first literate cultures.
In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell�without visual aids. Ong�s work shows that oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop: literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It�s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.
While this may be interesting for a college bull session, it's particularly relevant to organizations. For all their dependence on the industrial revolution, organizations are human institutions first. Management is fundamentally an oral culture and is most comfortable with thought organized that way. Historically, leadership in organizations went to those most facile with the spoken word.

At the opposite extreme, information technology is a quintessentially literate activity with a literate mode of thought. In fact, IT cannot exist without the objective, rational, analytical thinking that literate culture enables.

How does the nature of this divide complicate conversations between IT and management? Can understanding the differing natures of oral and literate thought help us bridge that divide?

IT professionals have long struggled with getting a complex message across to management. In our honest and unguarded moments, we talk of “dumbing it down for the suits.” But the challenge is more subtle than that. We need to repackage the argument to work within the frame of oral thought. The easy part of that is about oratorical and rhetorical technique. The more important challenge is to deal with the deeper elements of oral culture; of being situational, engaged, and conservative. The right abstract answer can’t be understood until it is placed carefully within its context.

What management recognizes in its fundamentally oral mind is that organizations and their inhabitants spend most of their time in oral modes of thought. The oral mind is focused on tradition and stability because of how long it takes to embed a new idea. The techniques of change management that seem so obtuse to the literate, engineering mind are not irrational; they are oral. They are the necessary steps to embed new ideas and practices in oral minds.

Repeating a calculation or an analysis is nonsense in a literate culture. Management objections to an analytical proposal rarely turn on objections to the analysis. Walking through the analysis again at a deeper level of detail will not help. What needs to be done is to craft the oral culture story that will carry the analytical tale. It’s not about dumbing down an argument, it’s about repackaging it to match the fundamental thought processes of the target audience.

That might mean finding the telling anecdote or designating an appropriate hero or champion. Suppose, for example, that your analysis concludes it’s time to move toward document management to manage the files littering a shared drive somewhere or buried as attachments to three-year old e-mails. Analytical statistics on improved productivity won’t do it. A scenario of the “day in the life” of a field sales rep would be better. Best would be a story of the sales manager who can’t find the marked up copy of the last version of the contract.

These human stories are much more than the tricks of the trade of consultants and sales reps. They are recognition that what gets dressed up as the techniques of change management are really a bridge to the oral thinking needed to provoke action.

Seen in this light, what is typically labeled resistance to change is better understood as the necessary time and repetition to embed ideas in an oral mind. In next week's discussion, I’ll examine how an orally centered management team might take better advantage of analytic and literate thought.

"

Microsoft introduces Elixir

2005-02-02T11:12:00.000+05:30

Microsoft is planning to upgrade its Outlook to become a CRM.

From ZDNet
In an attempt to increase the uptake of future versions of its Office suite, and perhaps increase its market share in the CRM field, Microsoft is planning to roll out a new feature for Outlook called Elixir

Convincing businesses to upgrade to new versions of Office is a perennial challenge for Microsoft, but the company hopes a new Elixir might speed things up.

An effort, code-named Project Elixir, will take shape later this year as a way to promote Microsoft's Outlook email and contact program, with some additional fields, as a tool for viewing customer relationship data. Eventually, the plan could help the software giant elbow its way further into the customer relationship management market, where Siebel, Oracle and SAP dominate.

Microsoft started doing this internally last year, using Outlook as a means for its sales force to access a data warehouse linked to the company's Siebel CRM software.

Microsoft is currently in the process of trying to take that internal effort and transform it into a set of software tools that other companies can use. Although the company used Outlook internally with Siebel products, it could be linked to a variety of other CRM programs. Interest from outside customers has been high, Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategies, told ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com.

While Microsoft doesn't expect to generate revenue from offering Elixir, it does stand to benefit when companies tie Office deeper into their business processes. Since the Elixir code Microsoft has developed works only with Office 2003, the company sees the tool as a way to get customers to upgrade. Longer term, such tools may also spur sales of Windows Server and other software.

"It works with Outlook 2003, so it drives both revenue and deployment there," Fitzgerald said, noting that a demo of Elixir recently helped convince one reluctant chief information officer to upgrade to Office 2003.

Whereas ERPs like SAP and Oracle are trying hard to come into SMB segment. Oracle with its Navision and upgrading its Office is trying to move into the same space. Interesting battle ahead. Not to mention, the ASPs like Salesforce.com.

Weekly IT Quiz # 4

2005-02-01T09:12:00.000+05:30

The gaps between the weekly quizzes is turning out to be longer than a week. Anyway, here are the five questions for this week.

1. What communications company was the first to offer a Wireless Web Mini-Browser built directly into the phones ?
2. How do we popularly know the IEEE standard 802.11b?
3. In December 1999, which media giant created history by firing 23 employees for misuse of e-mail?
4.Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Alfred P.Sloan are 3 of the 4 nominated to be Fortune's businessmen of the century. Who is the fourth?
5. The software exports division was earlier part of Apple Industies, later Aptech Computers, now what is it known as?

As usual the results will posted after 2 days.

The New Discipline of Services Science

2005-01-29T11:01:00.000+05:30

Via Sadagopan's blog a Businessweek articleVIEWPOINT
By Paul Horn

The New Discipline of Services Science
It's a melding of technology with an understanding of business processes and organization -- and it's crucial to the economy's next wave
If the film The Graduate were remade today, the word of career advice whispered in Dustin Hoffman's ear might well be "services" instead of "plastics."

Services have come to represent more than 75% of the U.S. economy, and the field is growing rapidly. In the information-technology business, services have become even more important. Without a doubt, the information-services sector is a great place for high-paying jobs.

But there's a shortage of skills where they're needed most -- at the intersection of business and IT. As companies build more efficient IT systems, streamline operations, and embrace the Internet through wholesales changes in business processes, a huge opportunity exists. Nonetheless, little or no focused efforts are preparing people for this new environment or to even to thoroughly understand it.

SPOTTING WEAK POINTS. The IT-services sector is in dire need of people who are talented in the application of technologies to help businesses, governments, and other organizations improve what they do now -- plus tap into totally new areas. The complex issues surrounding the transformation of businesses at such a fundamental level require the simultaneous development of both business methods and the technology that supports those methods. This is the seedbed for a new discipline that industry and academia are coming to call "services science."

Services science would merge technology with an understanding of business processes and organization, a combination of recognizing a company's pain points and the tools that can be applied to correct them. To thrive in this environment, an IT-services expert will need to understand how that capability can be delivered in an efficient and profitable way, how the services should be designed, and how to measure their effectiveness.
This new academic discipline would bring together ongoing work in the more established fields of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, management sciences, and social and legal sciences, in order to develop the skills required in a services-led economy.

NO GOING SOLO. There's more to this than meets the eye. Not only are new curriculums required in our universities but more research and development focus has to be applied to ensure that the necessary processes, technologies, and techniques are developed. Evidence will have to be gathered to demonstrate effectiveness, as is done in any science.

The task is large and the implications far-reaching, so this kind of R&D will have to be based on a closer collaboration among industry, academia, and government. Joint research projects are already under way at University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, to name just a few.

It will be a major change. Today, IT-services training is mostly accomplished through individual companies' on-the-job programs. This may have been adequate before, but it's not any longer, especially with increasing globalization and competition from cheaper labor markets made possible through technologies like the Internet. Like everything else, labor is governed by the rules of supply and demand. In the job market, this translates to higher salaries for those who have in-demand skills.

EMBRACING INNOVATION. America has moved from an agrarian-based to a manufacturing-based to an information-based economy. We're now entering a new phase where value will be found in what we do with information to improve business, government, and people's lives. Call it an innovation-based economy, where profits and jobs will go to those who have the skills to capitalize on the explosion of new opportunities at the intersection of business and technology.

The world rewards those who stay ahead of the curve. The creation of an academic discipline and the commitment of R&D investment to support this kind of services environment are important means of doing just that. By collaborating with universities and encouraging a cross-disciplinary approach to services science, corporations and research organizations can play a large part in developing the skills of the 21st century workforce.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paul Horn is senior vice-president of IBM Research

Answers to Weekly It Quiz#3

2005-01-29T10:55:00.000+05:30

The logos of the famous brands were

Ans 1. Adobe
2.Tux-the logo for Linux
3.Cisco- Golden Gate bridge in their logo is a give away
4. Apple is not enough - iMac is the answer
5. Our own desi BSNL

Hope you enjoyed it.

2005-01-26T18:40:00.000+05:30

Q5. Sitter !!

2005-01-26T18:38:00.000+05:30

Q4. Logo of a landmark computer

2005-01-26T18:34:00.000+05:30

Q3.Logo of a well-known IT company

2005-01-26T18:33:00.000+05:30

Q2. The cute penguin, logo for a pathbreaking product

2005-01-26T18:29:00.000+05:30

Q1. A famous software company.

Weekly IT Quiz #3

2005-01-26T18:08:00.000+05:30

Here is my first attempt ot upload some image files on to this blog. Here are logos of some IT companies or products. They have come as 5 different posts. I have to learn to how to do it in one post.Identify them. As usual the answers will be posted 2 days later. Hello is just fabulous. Google Maharaj jiyo!!!

The Revolt of the Corporate Consumer

2005-01-26T17:51:00.000+05:30

Via Emergic.org the WSJ writes :

For more than two decades, software vendors have been in control, selling tech-hungry companies a steady stream of new products and services largely on the vendors' terms.

No longer. In the four years since the collapse in corporate technology spending, the tables gradually have turned -- to the point that now, it's the buyers who are clearly calling the shots. They are wrangling for better prices, demanding software that's more reliable and secure, and resisting software companies' push for constant -- and expensive -- upgrades.

All this represents a seismic shift in power to tech buyers from sellers. Limited tech budgets have given chief information officers more negotiating clout with vendors, who know that many buyers already feel burned by disappointments with previous purchases. Meanwhile, open-source and subscription Web-based software services have emerged as more-serious competitors to the established software giants, putting downward pressure on prices. Combined, these trends mean that customers are demanding -- and getting -- more and better software for their money.

Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala - a profile

2005-01-22T11:00:00.000+05:30

Among the Indian scientists, technologists working in the IT space, I have a very high regard for Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala, of IIT Madras. One of his stated objectives is to double the per-capita income of rural India using IT. His economic orientation is remarkable for a scientist.

Dreaming up disruptive technologiesDr Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT Madras is a quintessential dreamer. Venkatachari Jagannathan takes us through his dreams

Venkatachari Jagannathan
20 January 2004

His daydreams are not about wealth and power,the kind which most of us have but about innovating disruptive technologies that would strike against multinational corporations. Greatly influenced by the philosophy of Jayprakash Narayan and by the Naxalite movement in his younger days his ultimate wish even now is "to see to see a rupee equal $50"

Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, the head of department of electrical engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, is the man behind the cost effective indigenous telecom technology, corDECT wireless in the local loop (WLL), which brought into being a clutch of companies collectively called the Telecommunications and Computer Networks (TeNet) group. Some of these companies have attracted high profile venture capital funding. (See A global winner).

Dr Jhunjhunwala's other dreams are about development of telecom technologies to impact the rural masses; about 200 million telephone lines in India, cheaper personal computers, automatic teller machine (ATM) among others.

In a revelation that should start ATM manufacturers worrying, he says, "At IIT we are in the process of developing an ATM that will cost Rs 40, 000."

Awarded the prestigious Padma Shri title by the Government of India, Dr Jhunjhunwala is perhaps the only serving academician in the country to have a place on the boards of large corporations like Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), Polaris Software, HTL, Shyam Telecom, Tejas Networks and Sasken Communications, apart from the directorships in the TeNet group companies.

Dr Jhunjhunwala's technology has now begun to reach the villages and the villagers of Ulagapitchampatti near Madurai will vouch for the fact that a birth/death certificates in their village can be had on the payment of the government stipulated rates of Rs 25, without greasing greedy palms of clerks and other officials. Earlier, getting a birth/death certificate meant a payment of Rs 100 in the least.

For accessing the presentations made by Prof. Jhunjhunwala in various seminars, please access the following link.

IBM Company profile

2005-01-21T09:02:00.000+05:30

Hoovers is one of the best sources of company information. I hope to post the company profile of all major IT companies. ( Gorillas and a few chimps)

International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE: IBM)
New Orchard Rd.
Armonk, NY 10504 (Map)
Phone: 914-499-1900
Fax: 914-765-7382
Toll Free: 800-426-4968

http://www.ibm.com

Big Blue? Try Huge Blue. International Business Machines (IBM) is the world's top provider of computer hardware. Among the leaders in almost every market in which it competes, the company makes desktop and notebook PCs, mainframes and servers, storage systems, and peripherals. The company's service arm is the largest in the world. IBM is also one of the largest providers of both software (ranking #2, behind Microsoft) and semiconductors. The company continues to use acquisitions to augment its software and service businesses, while streamlining its hardware operations with divestitures and organizational shifts. Late in 2004 IBM agreed to sell its PC operations to Lenovo for approximately $1.75 billion.

Key Numbers
Company Type Public (NYSE: IBM)
Fiscal Year-End December
2003 Sales (mil.) $89,131.0
1-Year Sales Growth 9.8%
2003 Net Income (mil.) $7,583.0
1-Year Net Income Growth 111.9%
2003 Employees 255,157
1-Year Employee Growth (28.2%)

Key People
Chairman, President, and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano
SVP; Group Executive, Sales and Distribution Douglas T. (Doug) Elix
SVP and CFO Mark Loughridge

Business
Computer Services
Information Technology Services (primary)
Computer Hardware
Computer Peripherals
Specialized Computer Systems
Point-Of-Sale & Electronic Retail Systems

Top Competitors
Dell
Hewlett-Packard
Microsoft

Fact sheet for IBM Global Services from Hoovers IBM Global Services
New Orchard Rd.
Armonk, NY 10504 (Map)
Phone: 914-499-1900
Fax: 914-765-7382

http://www-1.ibm.com/services

Big, bigger, biggest. Such is the path for IBM Global Services. In 2002, parent International Business Machines (IBM) acquired PwC Consulting, expanding its Global Services group. The unit is divided into three business lines -- Strategic Outsourcing, Business Consulting, and Integrated Technology. Customers such as AXA and Charles Schwab tap the information technology services provider for its expertise in evaluating and building networks for e-commerce, customer relationship and supply chain management, and enterprise resource planning tasks. The business consults its clients, combines IBM hardware and software with third-party products, and offers outsourced management services to maintain the systems.

Key Numbers
Company Type Business Segment of IBM
Fiscal Year-End December
2003 Sales (mil.) $42,635.0
1-Year Sales Growth 17.3%
2003 Employees 180,000

Computer Services
Information Technology Services (primary)

Top Competitors
Accenture
EDS
HP Technology Solutions Group
17 Competitors Listed For IBM Global Services

Answers to Weekly IT Quiz #2

2005-01-20T09:13:00.000+05:30

1. If Nike's ad-line was `Just Do It', who recently created a controversy with the `Just Don't Do It' tag-line?

SEGA

2. What is abandonware ?

A software that is at least five years old and is no longer sold or supported by its publisher or developer

3. In the OS SCO Unix, expand SCO.

Santa Cruz operations

4. What is the name given to a free online tracking system of Department of Posts to track Speed Post consigments ?

Speednet

5. Who is the only distributor and reseller of Blackberry in India?

Airtel- Bharti Cellular

New Google Tool Allows Online Photo Sharing

2005-01-20T09:10:00.000+05:30

Google has released version two of its free photo management tool to allow people to share digital pictures online.
Picasa 2 includes basic image manipulation, customized printing sizes, captioning tools and code to allow pictures to be shared via email or over peer-to-peer networks.

The software also offers a module that communicates with companies that will print the photos professionally, such as Ofoto and Walmart.

Picasa 2 can be used to burn photos onto CDs and DVDs and prepare photo slideshows that can be sent as gifts.

"With Picasa 2, we've made it easier for people to find, organize, improve and enhance their photographs, as well as create photo CDs, personalized slideshows, desktop collages and much more," said Lars Perkins, general manager at Picasa.

The software is available for users of Windows 98 and above, but is only available in English

The essence of business

2005-01-19T13:17:00.000+05:30

From 800Ceoread Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in their new book Return on Customer write

“Businesses succeed by getting, keeping, and growing customers. Customers are the only reason you build factories, hire employees, schedule meetings, lay fiber optic lines, dispatch service trucks, stock inventory, file for patents, operate call centers, negotiate contracts, write software, or engage in any other kind of business activity whatsoever…

Without customers, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby.”

IT services market became more fragmented in 2004

2005-01-19T10:43:00.000+05:30

IT services market became more fragmented in 2004The shoots of recovery in the IT services market in 2004 were reflected in solid growth in the value and number of contracts tracked by ComputerWire.

18 Jan 2005, 15:15 GMT -
ComputerWire's IT Services Contract Database tracks every new outsourcing, systems integration and consulting deal with a value greater than $1m signed by major IT services vendors, and contains information on more than 6,500 contracts signed since 1998.

ComputerWire tracked 1,814 deals in 2004, which represented a 4.4% increase over the 1,738 logged in the previous year. The combined value of the deals rose 37% to $163bn from $118.9bn in the previous year.
Interestingly, there were fewer mega-billion-dollar deals in 2004 than in 2003 (25 versus 29). This seems to tally with the belief of many in the services sector that clients are adopting selective sourcing models, where they outsource specific IT and back-office functions to specialist outsourcing vendors rather than hand over their entire IT department to a single supplier.

However, the days of the mega-deal are not yet numbered. The value of the 20 largest contracts announced during the year rose from $38.3bn in 2003 to $53.6bn in 2004, although the picture differs greatly between the public and private sectors.

The 20 largest contracts announced by government and defense agencies during 2004 were worth a combined $45bn, which represented a huge 61% increase over the $27.9bn figure for 2003. Further major government sector contracts are expected in 2005, with the UK Ministry of Defence poised to award a $7.6bn IT infrastructure overhaul project to one of two consortia headed by EDS and CSC respectively.

But in the private sector, the value of the 20 largest deals actually declined between 2003 and 2004 from $28.1bn to $27bn, which suggests that clients are shying away from far-reaching contracts with single suppliers. The best example of this is financial services giant JP Morgan, which in September 2004 reversed its decision to outsource to IBM Global Services in a previously agreed $5bn deal.

One striking feature of the services market in 2004 was that the deals were shared out between a larger number of vendors than in previous years.

The 10 vendors with the largest single market shares of the contracts tracked in 2004 by value, accounted for 57% of the total. This compares to 68.1% in 2003 and 70.4% in 2002. Moreover, the 100 largest contracts announced in 2004 were shared out between a total of 37 different lead suppliers.

Michel Janssen, president, supplier solutions, at outsourcing advisory firm Everest Group, commented: "We are seeing increasing competition from a variety of firms like ACS, Hewitt, and Perot that are beginning to win deals that were traditionally won by those in the top 10 vendors. Looking further down the road, we are also seeing the top-tier offshore vendors such as TCS, Infosys, and Wipro compete, and win, in head-to-head deals against top-tier Western vendors, and the wins are increasingly larger in size."
IBM Global Services had the largest single share of the contract awards for the fourth year running, although its slice of the market has consistently fallen during this period. ComputerWire tracked $17.4bn of IBM contracts in 2004, which gave it a 10.7% share of the $163bn total. However, its share almost halved from 21% in 2003 and 25% in 2002.

The Datamonitor report also found a 39.8% decrease in the average contract value for pure BPO deals. This drop in average value was driven by a 51% increase in the total number of these deals in the $20m-$200m range. There were almost six times of deals in the $20m-$200m compared the $200m+ range.

Janssen also noted that for the first time, mid-large versus the large-very-large businesses dominated human resources outsourcing. "2005 will be the year that BPO goes mainstream, and it will be driven by mid-size client organizations," he said. He also said companies with between 5,000 and 25,000 workers signed more of these broad-scoped HRO deals. In the past, companies with more than 25,000 employees were the ones inking HR outsourcing deals.

The growth of 40 %+ reported by TCS and Infy is thus largely because of the growth in the value of deals by 37 % and also taking away some share from the likes of IBM, EDS and CSC. But megadeals from the Govt of the kind mentioned above are still not coming the Indian companies' way. With the market in the US alone being as big as $163 Bn, the Indian industry still can chip away at the shares of the Big companies.

Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker

2005-01-18T17:25:00.000+05:30

Excerpts from Drucker Foundation Leadership and Management Conference
November 9, 1999 Closing Plenary Session

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long term perspective, I think it is very probable that the most important event these historians will see is not technology, it is not the Internet, it is not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time -- and I mean that literally -- for the first time, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And let me say, we are totally unprepared for it.

Throughout history, practically nobody had any choice. Up until maybe 1900, even in the most highly developed countries, the overwhelming majority followed their father -- if they were lucky. There was only downward mobility; there was no upward mobility. If your father was a peasant farmer any place, you were a peasant farmer. If he was a craftsman, you were a craftsman, and so on.

Opportunities of Choice
And now suddenly a very large -- still a minority, but it's growing -- [number] of people have choices. And what is more, they will have more than one career. The working life span of people is now close to sixty years. You got twenty years in 1900.

In a very short time, we will no longer believe that retirement means the end of working life. Retirement may be even earlier than it has been, but working life will continue if only out of economic necessity. It is predictable that within the next twenty-five years most people will still keep on working, perhaps not full-time, not as employees of a company -- as temps, as part-timers, but still working till they are in their seventies -- in part, maybe for economic reasons. I hope that my grandchildren will not be foolish enough to be willing to give thirty-five percent of their income to support older people who are perfectly capable of working. Very few people will be able, no matter how much they put into their retirement accounts, to live without some additional income.

But also, knowledge gives choice. And when I talk to the people in my executive management program, (who are forty-five years-old on average, and successful people, sixty percent business, forty percent non-business), every one says, "I do not expect to end my career where I am working now."

If your father was a lawyer, you were a lawyer, or maybe a doctor, but a professional, and so on. And you were born into maybe not the profession, maybe not the work, but certainly the class in which you spent your life. And that is no longer true of knowledge.

This also explains why we suddenly have women in the same jobs as men. Historically, men and women have always had an equal participation in the labor force. The idea of the idle housewife is a 19th-century delusion, but men and women did different jobs. There's no civilization in which the two genders did the same work. And knowledge work knows no gender. This is one of the great changes -- that in knowledge work, men and women do the same work. This is also unprecedented, and also a major change in the human condition.

Responsibilities of Choice
So, we will have to learn, first, who we are. We don't know. When I ask the students of mine -- and these are successful people, "Do you know what you're good at?" almost not one of them knows. "Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths?" Not one of them has even asked that question.

On the contrary, most of them are very proud of their ignorance. You have those human relations people who are exceedingly proud of the fact that they can't read a balance sheet. Yet if you want to be effective today, you have to be able to read one. But on the other hand, there are the accountants who are equally proud of the fact that they can't get along with human beings!

Well that is nothing to be proud of -- it is something to be ashamed of, because you can learn that. And both are very easy things - it's not very hard to learn "please" and "thank you," not hard to learn manners -- and manners is what makes you get along with people.

Using Feedback

Very few people know where they belong, what kind of temperament and person they are. "Do I work with people, or am I a loner?" And "What are my values? What am I committed to?" And "Where do I belong? What is my contribution?"

And this is, as I said, unprecedented. Those questions never -- well, yes, the super-achievers asked them. Leonardo DaVinci had one whole notebook in which he asked these questions of himself. And Mozart knew it and knew it very well. He's the only man in the history of music who was equally good on two totally different instruments. He wasn't only a great piano virtuoso; he was an incredible violin virtuoso. And yet, he decided you can only be good in one instrument, because to be good, you have to practice three hours a day. There are not enough hours a day, and so he gave up the violin. He knew it, and he wrote it down. And we have his notebooks.

The superachievers always knew when to say "No." And they always knew what to reach for. And they always knew where to place themselves. That makes them super achievers. And now all of us will have to learn that. It's not very difficult. The key to it is -- what Leonardo did and what Mozart did -- is to write it down and then to check it.

The key is that every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen. "What are the results of this decision?" The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only very recently, have begun to ask the question, "If you put this man in to help this base, what do we expect this general to accomplish?" And then they look at it three years later. And they have now reached a point where forty percent of their decisions work out.

Building on Strengths
It's very easy to learn "what my strengths are" by putting down the results. And let me say most of us underweigh our strengths. We take them for granted. What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be any good. So we don't know our strengths, and we don't know what we need to improve them.

And we don't know what the good Lord has not endowed us with. Yes, in extreme cases -- I didn't need any feedback to know that I am not a painter. The first time I took a crayon in my hands at age two, I think I knew it. Extreme cases, but in between? You don't really know that "this is not for me." And so we are at an unprecedented place, and most educated people in the next thirty years, will have to learn to place themselves.

We will have to learn where we belong, what our strengths are, what we have to learn so that we get the full benefit from it, where our defects are, what we are not good at, where we belong, what our values are. For the first time in human history, we will have to learn to take responsibility for managing ourselves. And as I said, this is probably a much bigger change than any technology -- a change in the human condition. Nobody teaches it -- no school, no college -- and [it] probably will be another hundred years before they teach it.

In the meantime, the achievers, and I don't mean millionaires, but rather the ones who want to make a contribution, who want to lead a fulfilling life, and want to feel that there is some purpose in their being on this earth. They will have to learn something which, only a few years ago, a very few super achievers ever knew. They will have to learn to manage themselves, to build on their strengths, to build on their values.

And for the first time, the world is full of options. When I listen to my grandchildren and the options they have, it's pretty frightening -- almost too much. When I was born, there were none. And you will have to learn that it is your job to decide "which option is for me?" And "why, and which, and what fits me, and where do I belong?" As I said, in retrospect, historically, this may be the greatest change, the most important event of the time in which we're living -- more important than technology.

The Role of the Social Sector
nd one important implication for the social sector. There is no better way to find out where you belong than to be a volunteer in a nonprofit. And my friends in business always come to me with enormous development programs for their people, and I take a very dim view of them. Because the real development I've seen of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in an organization. You have responsibility, you see results, and you very soon find out what your values are. And so let me say, this is probably the great opportunity for the nonprofits -- and especially for their relationship to business.

We have long been talking of the social responsibilities of business. I hope we will soon begin to talk about the nonprofit as the great social opportunity for business. It is the opportunity for business to have manager development -- far more than any company, university -- to be a volunteer with this church, or with the Girl Scouts, or with any of the organizations in this room.

And this is one of the important opportunities we have in the social sector, one of the unique things we can offer -- that we are the place where the knowledge worker in an organization can actually discover who he is and can actually learn to manage himself or herself.

Weekly IT Quiz# 2

2005-01-18T11:03:00.000+05:30

1. If Nike's ad-line was `Just Do It', who recently created a controversy with the `Just Don't Do It' tag-line?

2. What is abandonware ?

3. In the OS SCO Unix, expand SCO.

4. What is the name given to a free online tracking system of Department of Posts to track Speed Post consigments ?

5. Who is the only distributor and reseller of Blackberry in India?

You may post your answers as comments. Answers will be posted in 2 days.

CNN's Top 25 Innovations

2005-01-18T10:39:00.000+05:30

TOP INNOVATIONS

The world was different before the Internet.

Without the Internet, you would not be reading this. There would be no way to instantly find the name of the movie your favorite actor was in five years ago or how much it costs to fly to Aruba. Shopping required braving the elements and the crowds. Paying bills relied on the postal service.

Today, with a couple of clicks, you can go anywhere in the world without leaving your computer.

So it should come as little surprise that the Internet (as we know it) headlined the top 25 innovations of the past quarter century, according to a panel of technology leaders assembled by the Lemelson-MIT Program, which promotes inventiveness in teens.

In creating the list, the group hoped to single out "25 non-medically related technological innovations that have become widely used since 1980, are readily recognizable by most Americans, have had a direct and perceptible impact on our everyday lives, and/or could dramatically affect our lives in the future."

The creator of the Web as we know it is British software consultant Tim Berners-Lee. Frustrated by the multitude of information systems requiring complicated access, Berners-Lee fashioned a universal one that made information readily available.

He created HTML (hypertext markup language) and its rules of usage (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol) and in 1991 unveiled the World Wide Web, making no money from any of them.

Like the Internet, other items on the top 25 list have changed the way people go about their lives and are so commonplace that they are almost taken for granted.

1. The Internet
2. Cell phone
3. Personal computers
4. Fiber optics
5. E-mail
6. Commercialized GPS
7. Portable computers
8. Memory storage discs
9. Consumer level digital camera
10. Radio frequency ID tags
11. MEMS
12. DNA fingerprinting
13. Air bags
14. ATM
15. Advanced batteries
16. Hybrid car
17. OLEDs
18. Display panels
19. HDTV
20. Space shuttle
21. Nanotechnology
22. Flash memory
23. Voice mail
24. Modern hearing aids
25. Short Range, High Frequency Radio

Open source vs. free software

2005-01-15T17:34:00.000+05:30

Open SourceOpenSource is a style of software licensing and distribution, related to FreeSoftware.
The consumer of an open source program has the rights to do the following things to the source code:
* read it
* use it
* modify it
* distribute it
* charge money for services related to it, such as copying or support, so long as they do not infringe on the freedoms of others

FreeSoftware is software which users can freely:
* Run, for any purpose
* Study and modify for their own needs
* Redistribute copies (charging for them if they wish)
* Improve and release the changes to the public

CopyLeft software is FreeSoftware with these additional conditions:
* The source code must be made available to users
* Copies cannot be redistributed under a non-FreeSoftware license

The FreeSoftwareMovement was started by RichardStallman of the FreeSoftwareFoundation and the GnuProject (http://www.gnu.org). The GNU Project philosophy area (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html) has a number of texts about why RichardStallman and others support FreeSoftware.

Note that 'free' here refers to a philosophical notion of freedom, not to price, and that this page is about RichardStallman and the FreeSoftwareFoundation's definition of FreeSoftware.

FreeSoftware is related to, but not the same as, OpenSource software. In the words of RichardStallman:

FreeSoftwareMovement [...] is concerned not only with practical benefits but with a social and ethical issue: whether to encourage people to cooperate with their neighbors, or prohibit cooperation. The FreeSoftwareMovement raises issues of freedom, community, principle, and ethics, which the OpenSource Movement studiously avoids.

Notable FreeSoftware projects include
* The GnuLinux OperatingSystem
* PerlLanguage, PythonLanguage, and RubyLanguage
* TexTheProgram and LaTex
* Most of the WikiWikiClones

Link to Free Software Foundation of India

Link to a very interesting article by Tim O'Reilly on Open Source Paradigm shift

Turning Big Ideas into innovations

2005-01-13T09:56:00.000+05:30

Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld: "

Strategy+business and Knowledge@Wharton have come out with a nice framework for enabling companies to improve product innovation.

The most effective product development and commercialization processes encourage dynamic communication and idea sharing among engineers, marketers, and customers.

From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the conventional view of product development has always portrayed the inventor as the hero. In fact, the inventor is only part of the process. The truth is, most successful product innovation requires imaginative insights and incisive action from heroes in the lab and in marketing. The most effective product development and commercialization processes have always been based on a dynamic and complex exchange of ideas and interests among engineers, marketing experts, and, most importantly, the end-consumer. Few companies are good at managing this exchange, particularly when it comes to capturing and incorporating customer insights into product design . While it's difficult to measure the cost of such missed opportunities, experts say that this failure to incorporate the customer's perspective often seriously limits the potential financial and competitive value of corporate innovation.

Institutional barriers are perhaps the biggest reason. Often, engineers are tucked away so far within a company that they don't see firsthand what customers really need .Overconcentration on technology is one of the most common sources of trouble. The biggest problems occur when you get strongly engineering-driven companies that don't really appreciate the emotional attachment people have to products or their emotional reactions to them, and think it's all about very specific product attributes. Genuinely valuable innovation is generated through a different dynamic: "understanding, engagement, and participation of direct customers coming together with some kind of a technology improvement."

Levers for Innovation - Discovering customer insights about products, and then incorporating those insights into product development, requires a number of initiatives at a variety of levels — personal, interdepartmental, and strategic. Although no two companies innovate in exactly the same way, successful companies often share a number of characteristics, according to Booz Allen and Wharton School Of Business experts:

1. Employees use the product before launch : eg - Harley Davidson

2. Successful innovators conduct vigorous market research of customer needs : Computerized design and improvements in supply-chain dynamics have shortened product development cycle times to levels that were unheard of just a generation ago, tempting many companies to try to take shortcuts with their market research to stay ahead of the competition. "When you have such pressures, very often companies skip the marketing research," warns Wharton marketing professor Yoram “Jerry” Wind. But that can be a huge mistake.Good examples of companies investing research : Procter & Gamble, CLAAS KGaA, Germany great sources for useful information for both modest and major product innovations.

3. The engineers stay close to the market : Contrast the successes of Bose, the sound system company, with that of Apple Computer of Cupertino, California. Both companies are technology-driven. Apple,with its exceptional focus on customer insight, has been able to invent great products with great technology, which Bose does too. Apple, however, also creates vast new markets. Witness the way it has transformed the music industry with its hugely popular iPod. Interestingly, Bose has a new sound system specifically made for use with the iPod, and it has dramatically raised its marketing and brand identity push in the last few years. At Hewlett-Packard, for instance, the company requires “everybody on the team to go together to a prospective customer and hear the customer themselves,” says Wharton’s George Day.

4. Companies perform R&D around the world: Any launch of a major product is global these days and therefore a global research base is a must.

5. Innovative companies seek understanding of customer behavior and motivations : Starbucks has a superb record for anticipating customers unarticulated desires to create new and better experiences. "Coffee was a commodity and consumption was declining until Starbucks came up with a different concept, meeting a previously unrealized need. The company has almost single-handedly invented specialty coffees as a major category in the U.S. market, encouraged consumers to trade up to a more upscale (and therefore more expensive) product, and made the coffeehouse not just a fixture on college campuses or in urban neighborhoods, but a vital new public gathering place that’s evident throughout mainstream American life".

From modifying the structure of the development teams, to refining lines of communication within the company, to increasing the volume and thoughtfulness of the market research, tactics for improving closeness with customers are available in plenty. The key need is commitment and more innovative approaches to the process of innovation.

One of the objectives of this blog is to bring Engineers close to the market, so that they don't create in splendid isolation.

Infosys Q3 results

2005-01-12T13:23:00.000+05:30

Infosys Q3 results

Infy has come out with its results today. Here are a few observations, which caught my eye at the first glance.

- When market is growing at 32 % they have grown at 49 %. That's great.

- Inspite of an appreciating rupee, they have bettered their profit w.r.t guidance. Good Forex management, I guess.

- They will end the year over Rs 7000 crore. One thing is clear, Infy is fast catching up with TCS. Tomorrow,TCS results will show, if they really are.

- Infy is a large BFSI AdM shop, (The share of development is falling and maintenance is increasing), even though it claims to be full-service one, ranging from Progeon to Infosys Consulting. But, yes, package implementation share is rising. On-site offshore mix is 50:50, no major change.

- Their attrition rate is still high at 10.3 % but falling. With 35,000 + employees, they are really huge.

- Rise in receivables is a problem area.

The stock market has reacted well to the news.

Answers to Weekly IT Quiz #1

2005-01-12T09:29:00.000+05:30

1.What was founded in 1972 by the former IBM employees Claus Wellenreuther, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira, Dietmar Hopp and Hasso Plattner?

Ans. SAP
2.Which IT product is sold under the tagline “ Brand of Bengal “?

Ans. AAMAR PC

3.What unit is used to measure the movement of a computer mouse ?

Ans. Mickeys ( are you kicking yourself for not guessing this one)

4.Who currently holds the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT?

Ans. Tim Berners Lee (The father of WWW)
5.The concept of Friday dressing that allows employees to dress informally at least one day a week thus fostering an open and informal organization originated in which company?

Ans. Apple