digital-post

The Last Samurai

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:03:35 PDT

What is common between Microsoft & Oracle? The fact they make tens of billions of dollars in software revenue, sure! And that their predominant source of revenue is from software products. They were founded in late 70’s. I am sure you know all this. What is new is that in the times to follow great software product companies like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP will either disappear or switch to services model. This makes Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison, The Two Last Samurai of the software products.

It is extremely important for upcoming software ventures to understand this trend for the successful implementation of their selling Strategy. Basis of my analysis is the revenue data from Top 100 Software companies. 70% of the top Software Companies attribute their revenue from the Products. However what is more interesting note is the fact that product revenue is only 24% ($200 Billion) and the rest from services. Based on these findings and other supporting data we can conclude that selling of software products or RTU is on its way out. It is also clear that large numbers of products only companies are dependent on large system integrator partners to be successful. Many of the software companies are now dependent on Internet for selling Software as a Service (SAAS). The latest trend of “Cloud Computing” and selling software as a utility or infrastructure or transactions or bundled with content; are all indicative that software as RTU is disappearing.

These changes will bring fundamental changes in the way Software Development Centers are organized. I have listed some of these changes -

1. Product Management and Program Management roles will get merged under one person. No more hot potato meetings.

2. Product Management will move up the value chain. The new age product manager will be responsible for Sales and Business Development. No more hypothetical discussion in the beginning of the year what we must build to sell.

3. Feature priority are now decided by the end-user metrics. Let user enjoy the value but not the burden of platform.

4. No more professional services or SI certification issues.

This model will unleash highest level of optimization in knowledge workforce. The trouble is that most of the organizations are not able to come to terms with their own established processes and structures.

The Curious Case of Data Dumping

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:05:43 PDT

I have all the material ready for my next provocative blog. Yes the one that will make me controversial and unpopular!

A Sensational Title: Anti-data-dumping law to bridge the digital divide

Some background patronizing information: Most countries introduce anti-dumping duties to protect the local industry. Without getting into the history, open market arguments etc., the fact-of-the-matter is that anti-dumping duty is a reality. Commodity and manufacturing sector comes to ones mind when international trade pundits discuss anti-dumping. Developing countries bear the brunt of taxation trying to sell their low-cost produce in developed nation. Interestingly in the knowledge industry the dumping of knowledge products and services are in reverse direction.

The Case Opening Statement: Internet, the new media is controlled by developed economies and a handful of global players have cornered most of the new medium across the globe. This kills the chances of developing local industry and hence the underdeveloped markets will lose out most of the advertisement revenue and marketshare to the developed markets. I would like to argue that to protect small and local internet web services there is a need to introduce anti-dumping duty on global players.

Circumstantial Evidence: I collected some evidence to build my argument.

The above tables show that there is direct correlation between the internet advertisement revenue and explosion of content on the web pages. The global internet traffic and proliferation has grown as well adding to the demand side.

Hard Evidence: The next piece of evidence needed was to nail down the perpetrators. This came from an unusual sourceTeleGeography’s Global Internet Map.

Agreed, this is not an easy to read map, hence for analysis purpose I have used some spreadsheet tricks.

In mature market like Europe 75% of the bandwidth is consumed within the region. However the less matured markets like Asia and South America are largely dependent on the fat pipes from North America and Europe. Interestingly but not surprising USA exports 85% of internet traffic outside of North America.

The Usual Suspects: In any anti dumping situation there are beneficiary interest groups. I had the list of usual suspects in mind, however to establish the facts rested my case based on the latest Analytics Reports -

Cold Feet: I must admit that in spite of such strong case and so close to being self-appointed for the next round of Doha negotiations, I have developed a cold feet to continue pressing charges!! Why? Well, first of all USA is a net importing nation and secondly USA is net importer of "Advanced Technology Products" including Information Technology and Communications. This will perhaps come as a shock to most of the technology producers who look upon US funded venture ~~capital~~socialists and track closely NASDAQ technology companies.

Let Go: I will conclude with a note of sympathy to world's largest producer of technology to reconsider its views on Software. It is up to US Knowledge Workers to decide if an eyeball attention is worth more than technology and knowledge!

The Great American Internet Brain Drain (loss of knowledge in return of eye-ball)!!

Enanomics

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:03:33 PDT

Choice of Free Products (or Services) is of utmost consumer interest regardless of our ideological beliefs. There are several blokes on the Internet who strive to give quality product or service completely free. The analysis of “Free” is essential to our understanding of Enanomics (web economics). When it comes to web technologies the cost of each transaction cannot be measured accurately, there is some kind of uncertainity principle. Nano-economics or Enanomics has not been understood properly and is not even defined in Wikipedia, let me make a humble beginning.

The Institutional Free:

As a class VI student I recollect an essay on Mother Teresa. She would accept broken biscuits from local bakery to feed the growing needs of her institution Missionaries of Charity. Charity missions have two important elements (a) champion visionary and (b) public private partnership to channelize spare/unused resources for the goodness of society.

In any given technology the hard part is to develop the tools and knowledge. It requires champion visionaries to build and enrich tools or knowledge. One can look up to institutions like universities to sustain this effort (BCD UNIX Project). GNU and Wikipedia are two examples which have been built on charity model. The principles used by GNU and Wikipedia developers are to keep software tools and knowledge above business greed. This philanthropy drive helped in getting the best people to contribute for noble cause. The time-management inefficiency in knowledge industry is being channelized for contribution towards building GNU and Wikipedia.

It is not that GNU and Wikipedia are allergic to Money. Every Wikipedia page carries the slogan “Wikipedia is sustained by people like you. Please donate today”. Likewise one can support Free Software Foundation through donations as well. Wikipedia has Alexa Ranking 7 and can easily switch to self-sustained Advertisement Model, but then I could lose my OpenId for spreading such blasphemy! The time saved by millions of people searching for right tools or information is good enough reason for well meaning people to contribute and make it available for “Free”. Though unlikely but if for some reason Wikipedia was to file for bankruptcy, UN will declare it as “World Heritage Site”! The power of “Free” cannot be undermined in a democratic society.

Disclaimer: there is a conspiracy theory that GNU and Wikipedia were created to check the monopoly of Microsoft, though I do not subscribe to it. These are just good examples of how to institutionalize “free” for a good social cause.

The Free Institutions:

All other free stuff on Internet has sound business plan. The business plan could be around “renting virtual shelf to distributers – Amazon”, “target advertising social networking platform - Facebook”, “viral or pyramid marketing tool - Twitter”, “Online publishing – Wordpress”, “Direct mailers – Hotmail” etc. There are times when web developers go awfully wrong with their business plan and they turn to selling their software for "Free" or as "Donationware". This usually doesn't work, they must join SAAS Therapy group to get out of their self-inflicted misery. We are in the early days of Enanomics, so let me start with supply and demand equations.

Uncontrolled Inelastic Supply: Web services are structured around creating seemingly infinite supply, e.g. “Unlimited Storage with email account”, “Unlimited connections in a social network”, “Unlimited Blogs”, “Long tail @ Online App Store, Music Store, Books Store, etc…” In reality the supply is never unlimited. There are sufficient checks to ensure that unlimited supply has limited shelf-space or shelf-life.

Example 1: Only 2% users of MSN Live visit skydrive (25GB free storage on MSN Live). MSN is fairly safe to take the bet that the doomsday of reaching the storage capacity of thousands of petabytes for its hundred million users, will never happen.

Example 2: Amazon has millions of items to sell. The way Amazon builds its inventory is by creating virtual shelf space on its website. The real world seller’s chances of making millions by selling “12mm washers” using Amazon platform is less than winning Australian Lotto. Amazon can charge a small fee for virtual space; Amazon gets rich by charging few cents for lending virtual shelves. It is the ability to create a platform which seemingly provides unlimited supply that differentiates web from real world. However when the rubber meets the road, FedEx wins! Think about it, typical IT cost for any enterprise is ~4% of its revenue, what is a better option, create your own online store or rent space on Amazon, you decide! Blockbuster realized this and was quick to respond with its own online store to fight back the Netflix onslaught. So it isn’t the perceived long-tail of inventory which gives Netflix the competitive advantage.

Controlled Elastic Demand: Theoretically, free-service generates infinite demand. However web service providers are protected/limited by total users with internet access, bandwidth price, network throttling of traffic and deadweight loss (marginal gain from “reading my free blog” vs. “completing your project on time”.) Dead weight loss is caused by “people who would have more marginal cost than marginal benefit are buying the product”.

A Simple Supply-Demand curve of an Ad-Based Web Service

First Law of Enanomics: If everything in the micro-economic or macro-economic world remained constant, the web service provider revenue is a function of internet traffic.

The question that still remains to be answered is that why at zero prices there is no deadweight loss? Web service providers understand the value of “Time”. Any end-user who is not able to find an item on-line in two clicks (assuming average bounce rate of 45% for any given website) will lose the customer resulting in deadweight loss. The web tools like search engines, recommendation engines, folksonomy etc help in building a commercial model which can be tapped by industry. These web tools drive ecommerce and fall under the “Free Institution”, free to user billed to supplier.

Second Law of Enanomics: When the price of a service falls to zero, the demand is proportional to marginal benefit.

There are more laws to come!!

Beware of an Anti Salesman

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:02:46 PDT

Why Sales?

Driving in Delhi, I once came across beggar woman selling tissue papers boxes on a busy traffic signal. Tissue paper is a symbol of vanity and hygiene. Why would anyone in their right senses buy these items from a roadside beggar? Ability to create need for a product and to be able to serve it to customer's delight is what Sales People do. Only a Reformist will come up with an idea of selling tissue papers at traffic lights. Reformists are concerned about uplifting bottom-of-the-pyramid and sustainable-growth models. Though reformists have good intentions they are perfect examples of anti-salesmanship.

If you ever come to Gurgaon watch out for Sales folks lurking around every corner. You are more likely to encounter a Sales Person taking you for a ride than a Rickshaw Puller. I can say it with complete certainty that there are more Sales People packed in 1 kilometer wide strip distributed equally on both sides of Gurgaon's lifeline NH8 starting from Ambience Mall to Hero Honda Chowk than there are in Manhattan, NY. Apparently during the global meltdown every company has been advised by their investors to focus on global economies, Hints: India and China.

Pre-Qualification?

There are two simple questions one need to ask (a) did you cry watching cupid SRK and Kajol in the movie DDLJ and (b) did you feel remorse killing-the-lady-with-money in GTA: San Andreas on Playstation3? If the answer to both these questions is “No” you can apply for Sales job. Having cleared the simple test you need to give yourself a suitable title. The best thing about Sales is that there are no hierarchies; you are either Head of Sales or an Account Director. If you do not like air-travel and prefer to use your own driver you are better off as an Account Director. Head of Sales is more dependent on company provided transportation. If your company has a policy to give a title like “Sales Executive”, please change your job or consider moving to Noida. Even Eureka Forbes has stopped sending door-to-door sales executives in Gurgaon. Having said that remember that your growth is determined by “target” and not by “title”.

There are usually few pre-sales folks in the team. You need to remember that pre-sales has nothing to do with “Sales”. Primarily due to in-depth technical bend of mind these folks are around to satisfy the deep sense of knowledge gathering in the customer organization. In fact you can take the pre-sales person from competition by signing a simple NDA, without any difference to the eventual outcome. Some pre-sales folks prematurely lose technical enquiring attitude and move to Sales, in case the company’s flawed HR policy supports such moves. You need to be extremely careful of crossover Sales people; they are not the pure breed. They cry watching TV serials and they buy stock of paper napkins at traffic signals!

Need Target Practice?

It is likely that one may not achieve targets due to certain unfortunate events usually attributed to everyone but oneself in a given Sales Cycle. This is not a tragedy. A good Salesperson keeps a log of all the opportunities created in the market and has an anti-thesis for why his company should not spend resources chasing point-deals which is efficiently done by channels. I must quickly add that managing channel is a procurement function which is most likely running from company’s Noida office. With this explanation you do run the risk of promoting yourself to higher Sales target. Let me introduce the first mantra of Sales here – “all future targets are achievable, the problem always lies with the current target.”

No one ever moves out of Sales, not even a speeding BPO van ever hits a Salesman crossing the chaotic DLF Cyber City roads. I always wondered why the richest real-estate tycoon could not afford to build a sub-way for pedestrians across the most expensive landscaped buildings in DLF Phase III, Gurgaon. No sir, this is not a design overlook. It is based on deliberate HR request for live battlefield training for Sales People. The customers and vendors are separated by these busy roads. The first test of a Sales Person is to find a parking lot, then cross these streets without getting killed. This is followed by 2 levels of frisking if you enter any DLF premises. Remember I told you about starched shirt at the very beginning. I am told that the metal detector does not beep for a successful Salesman. Sales People usually achieve zero gravity when entering into the overloaded lift. On arrival at customer premises a security questionnaire, laptop serial numbers and a fake encounter with front desk person who feigns complete ignorance to the fact that their company has a procurement department. Only after solving these three hurdles one gets past the Pearly Gates. Sales is not for the faint hearted.

Competition, what competition?

Speaking about competition there is none amongst the Salespeople who have long been with the “industry”. The competition, if at all, is superficial. This is hard lesson to learn for a new bee, however after going through a few job changes, acquisitions and mergers the loyalty to brand, product and country fades. Everyone talks to everyone else about the opportunity. Two drags of Wills Light and out comes the Sales Strategy. This may appear to be a bad move to novice, but this is the ultimate test of Sales Networking Skills. It works two ways if decoyed properly, you get to know the competition strategy and when the customer finds holes in your offering, you know exactly who is feeding the customer. Hopefully you have back-pocket full of alternatives. Time for the second Mantra: “every mistake is deliberate and no one can surprise more than your own misadventures”. I could have said “believe in yourself”; but would you switch to Sales with that slogan?

Cycle of Sales

In my business the Sales Cycle is 12-18 months. There are usually 4-5 companies shortlisted from 500 odd potentials for any given opportunity. This makes anywhere between 250 to 2500 people actively working on the opportunity and equal number of people in the headquarters updating status. It is almost certain that 90% of people will be disappointed at the end of this exercise. Sales people are born with skills to create and combat Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A good Sales Person uses this skill for creating mindshare. An Anti Sales Person can get the RFP cancelled or worse create Fear, Uncertainty and Jobloss (FUJ) in his own organization.

In either case the chances of disappointment exceeds the chances of success by a factor of magnitude. One out of 5 is a good chance when compared with an insurance telemarketer or Sales Exec at Merc showroom. However this is not good enough to be successful Sales Person stationed at Gurgaon. This inherently faulty structure is unsustainable and soon the business fraternity reorganizes itself to correct the situation by going into a process of consolidation. There are a few outsourcing deals announced. The Market sees value in companies who outsource core services to product vendors and the product companies who outsource core product development to service vendors. Of course the customer care is carved out as separate business and outsourced to far out land, safe distance from customers. This creates tight coupling between technology producers, provider and consumers. A Sales Person understands this cycle best. They know winner “never” takes it all. You never lose a deal; you always get some part of the deal, just by hanging-in there!

Plumbing the Torrent!!

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:22:54 PDT

Recently Sweden passed the local IPRED law. The law allows copyright holders to force ISPs to reveal details of users sharing files. It is understood that the Internet traffic dropped by more than 30% immediately after the law came into effect. Sweden is also the home of most popular File Sharing website “The Pirate Bay” having 22 million users. A court in Sweden has jailed the owners of The Pirate Bay in a landmark case, found guilty of breaking copyright law. Most administrators believe that tougher laws can prevent file sharing, but I do not agree. Internet piracy is cross border as most of the Content is hosted in the countries where IPR violations go unnoticed.

Infringement of copyright is not the only problem posed by peer networks. Peer networks have longer session time, massive redundancy of data and inefficient use of bandwidth. Falling storage prices and browser assisted web accelerators are adding fuel to the fire. What can the ISP’s do? Not all the countries are equipped with Cyber laws and enforcement capabilities. ISP can fix the leaking taps but not a hole in a dam!

It is not easy to filter peer networks. QoS based filtering and Deep Packet Inspection devices provide first level of defense against abnormal traffic patterns. However with improvements in HTML based peer networking methods the blending of p-2-p traffic makes it very difficult to be blocked at traffic shaping.

Consider a situation where every end user’s upstream demand starts growing. This demand is stochastic (random) process and the networks are not designed to uplift heavy data from multiple sources. From a network design perspective, the caching & retransmitting data at end-user client/browser will cause reverse flooding of the network core. In that respect Torrents or any kind of web-client based accelerator have worst bandwidth efficiency performance. The impact of IP Networks is lot more significant for upload traffic than download traffic. The ISP's resort to selective blocking of sites, traffic patterns, etc leading to significant public ire for "censorship" of content.

Can ISP's not exploit the opportunity in this challenge? Here are a few suggestions for ISP to consider for plumbing the Torrents:

A) Fix the leaking tap: Adopt asymmetric charging model. Typically user gets more downstream bandwidth than upstream. ISP put lot of focus on downstream charging plans based on download speed, speed-on-demand, gigabytes to unlimited downloads per month, rate plans based on the time-of-the-day or day-of-the-week etc. We need to devise tools to measure and publish “Upstream Leverage Factor”. This factor will determine sustainable upstream traffic per user in the network. The operators can use this factor to devise data charging plan for upstream data usage. There will be a limit set on the upstream data usage the operator can charge fee for this limit. If ISPs make uploading to be paid service the dynamics of file-sharing and peer networks will change in more than one ways.

B) Building Dams: Since most of the ISP’s are in pure bandwidth selling, they do not consider investing in content distribution as a viable business option. If the users are paying for upstream bandwidth, there is a clear business case for creating storage networks. Content storage capacity can be built on access aggregation points. Flash memory price, foot print and storage capacity are at the sweet-spot to build Terabytes of distributed storage networks, without having to invest in centralized data centers. The ISP’s can sell storage space to web service providers as well. E.g. Personal Picture Library can purchase network storage hosted by ISP and offer free uploading service to their users.

C) Make channels: The uploading of user data can be divided into "syndicated" and "user generated". The syndicated data uploading is done by authorized agents of content distributor’s networks of web service providers. Authorized agents will invest in setting up high speed connection and storage capacity. The ISP can offer hosted content management services to syndicate partners. It will force bandwidth intensive websites like YouTube, Flikr to either make end users pay for bandwidth or develop distributor network of partners who will pay the ISP for uploading User Generated content.

I believe that these methods can effectively curb the peer to peer file sharing menace without having to send anyone to jail!

Innovation lacks Ideas backed by Research

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:19:12 PDT

My job often takes me to DAKC, Navi Mumbai. Entering from Gate No 4 towards the left is the lonely Corporate Head Quarters Building. A deserted road marked prominently by the following words of wisdom, signed by Anil Dhirubhai Ambani -

Innovate or perish. That is the only imperishable truth in this new era of knowledge driven economy.

Indian Corporate Sector has adopted “Innovation” as a mantra to leapfrog the mundane methods of routine jobs. The top-down communication is highly efficient and almost every manager worth its salt is quick to jump on the “innovation” bandwagon. A call center manager lecturing his newly acquired team on the merits of innovation ends up with 50% attrition in the next six months. The team is not able to clearly figure out how to innovate, surely get the threat “or perish” and looks for a safe heaven. The head of HR in such organizations receive the annual award for innovation for outsourcing all critical functions, leaving the company vulnerable in the times of uncertainty.

Based on my little understanding of this subject. I have started keeping note of what Innovation is not. Here is my list of exclusivity for Innovation:

Innovation is not “outsourcing”
Innovation is not consolidation or unbundling of assets
Innovation is not “Mobile VAS”
Innovation is not India Times "reality show"
Innovation is not “invention” (I learned this recently in a corp. seminar, to my horror!)

Paul Jackson of Forrester Research explains the Innovation Hierarchy as below:

Growth based on short-term impact has taken a beating due to economic slowdown. The new age Indian Corporate Giants like The Infosys, The Wipro, The Reliance Communication, The Airtel, The Future Group, etc. had spotted impeccable market timing to create successful businesses in Telecom, Retail and ITES. In my view these companies have successfully adopted all the “evolutionary” methods of Innovation.

Indian Industry has deliberately stayed away from the “revolutionary” innovation due to high risk and low return. Developing new products and fundamental research leads into a path of unknown results and unviable businesses. Only the rich countries can afford that. The table below on the number of patents filed by country is a good measure of research and creation of intellectual wealth.

Industry sponsored research spending is quite low and everyone looks up to government for providing subsidies and tax holidays on research spending. In absence of incentives most of the institutions take up research topics which have little commercial value. Venture Capitals have some apetite for risk. Barring some effort in the VC circle our dependence on developed nation for product ideas is overbearing. We cannot blame the industry as well, we are a poor country, and hence raising capital for commerce has to be backed by known & repeatable success stories. India Research spending has been a consistent 0.6% of GDP, however China has tripled its R&D spending since 1996 from 0.5% to almost 1.5% of its GDP.

It is not lack of talent which leads to poor spending on research. It is the lack of incentive to individuals and lack of management of talent which has lead to this situation. It is important to get quality ideas which are backed by research. Our future and next spate of growth will come from innovation in products (not services). This requires deep pockets, long gestation and lot of market competition.

What is innovation? Product Innovation for a developing nation like India is ability to meet the requirements of every customer at an affordable price. An example of innovation will be AMUL. Its business model is long term sustainable and ensures that quality product at affordable prices. There are several areas which are still begging for innovation in our country:

Potable Water
Sanitation for everyone
Low Cost Housing
Primary Education
Primary Healthcare
Public Transport

The list goes on. We cannot be dependent on West to solve these problem. Corporate India will perhaps not see a business case to invest.

How do we propose to address these?

DESTINY - by an anonymous poet

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:18:05 PDT

Realize that destiny is not lying in wait

it's with you here and now. Its not the road you walk it is the walking.

Wether friend or enemy, it always answers to your name for you are destiny.

Control the self and destiny acts within you,

wills within your will, uncoils the universe within.

But even destiny needs a nudge -

leave the fatalists to blame their fate on fate.

My daddy greatest!!

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:33:02 PDT

1977 was just another year. Emergency had ended and so had my VIII standard exams at St. Paul's in Udaipur. My school had switched to CBSE advocated 10+2 pattern and the idea of spending an extra year in school was like a joy of getting better than expected golf handicap. Our school always announced the annual results on 6th May. We will pack our bags to go to Jodhpur to spend the rest of the summer vacation with our bickering cousins the very next day. Trembling hands unfolded the mark sheet searching for "Promoted to class IX" and the joy of finding it right in the middle of page 3, promptly signed by Reverend Father Coutinho, was an answer to the long prayers the night before. I quickly rushed to class V to check how did it go for Girish my younger brother. We were all set for our annual voyage to the Thar Desert.

Jodhpur was a difficult town for us and was filled with many regrets. Our bicycles were back in Udaipur and we were at the mercy our cousins. Many of them now knew how to fly kites and ride scooter. They were allowed to go to the cinema halls by themselves, they could wear long bottomed jeans and keep long hairs. Copying Amitabh style was considered normal. Day one was filled with comparing notes. Standing next to my six month elder cousin who had apparently grown much taller than I, had left my mother quite anxious. Our marks were well hidden behind good-second division which is still a well kept family secret. It was too bad that we could not answer in English to the questions posed by cousin sisters who were in St Mary's, which I must admit was better disciplined all-girls school.

The day ended with complete loss of self-esteem and biting mediocrity. Pretending to sleep, I could still overhear papa and mausaji (uncle) discussing the post-emergency politics. Changing subjects my father said that he has great expectations from me. I was doing extremely good in school and was preparing for IAS examinations. He had already subscribed to the magazine "competition success review" studded with IAS toppers photos and interviews. This was too much aspirational burden to take on in a single day. I dozed off and many years have passed since I recollect the "good-old-days".

I couldn't fulfill all my dad's wishes and get my photo published in CSR, but let me tell you that here is no reward greater than fulfilling even half of our parent’s dreams. Parents live their dreams through their children. Mother's love is unconditional it provides the strength but it is daddy who provides with all the challenges and raises the bar.

Today many social scientists ape western principles and advise parents to hold back. Things are definitely going to change in the western world as well. President Obama never met my dad but he is clearly aware of problem of aspiring Asians and their higher success rate of churning talent.

Interpretations of the Ballad with an Apology to Satyam Employees

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:10:15 PDT

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Cannon to right of them,
Canon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the ten thousand.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death

Rode the ten thousand.

The poet refers to "cannon" to right to the right wing politicians who have decided to keep mum on the subject of impending layoff at Satyam. The poet also refers to "canon" to the left (please note the missing 'n' in cannon) are the media persons who have already declared an"end" of the light brigade on their headlines. The cannons in the front are the customers who are calling the shots by cancelling contracts, with each shot killing chances of revival of hopes.

The poet has carefully captured the "mounting" tension of the "benches" by depicting them as the riding horsemen whose voices seem to be gagged in their attire and drowned in the noise of shareholders who have taken forward calls on the falling soldiers marked by 3 straight upper-circuits on the national stock exchanges. You see every dead soldier is now worth more to the company than alive. "Into the mouth of hell" is the asset value of an employee. It is a sarcastic remark on the state of IT companies who once swore by the bench strength to win more business and hired like crazy in their pursuits to please the same shareholders.

The command "Forward the light Brigade" asking the question was there a man dismayed? The question begging to be answered to unveil any doubts in the minds of decision makers. Probably no one, the erstwhile board and the new board are unanimous that the only solution in these tough times to send their men to the gallows. Lord Tennyson leaves the question unanswered on the "Someone had blundered" since the case is still under SFIO investigation and it will be premature for him to pass the judgment.

The rest of the poem is offering no help to employee as they go past the cheering crowds into the wilderness of unemployment statistics. More than 300 thousand such soldiers have their jobs in the hands of top 5 IT top decision makers; one can only hope that they make right choices.

The poet seem apologetic on the state of affairs and rather sad about the foregone outcome of battle in the times of innovation and employment being its incidental outcome.

Three Reasons why not to make lists

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:25:25 PDT

I am not sure how it all started but making lists while writing articles seem to be a cute trick to lure the readers. No one at the end of the article remembers the list but people never seem to get enough of it.

Ever noticed that most of the experts when asked to answer a question always have a three-points answer. It is only Mr Narayan Murthy who can come up with an extempore 7 points (or more) response. Jack Welch books have so many lists of things to remember that I wonder if he made them all up for the young management wannabe CEO's! Self-help Guru Dr Stephen Covey got so obsessed with his seven habits that he had to dedicate a new book "The 8th habit" to get out of it.

In my view the origin of list lies in our education system. We were asked to write down important notes in tabular form and index bullet points for memorization. Making lists was learning tool during school days. In work-life Lists are mostly used for time management. Not to mention the list of lifestyle desirable; seven wonders, top 10 movies of the year, top twenties songs, Times 100 celebs, Forbes 500, etc.

I have seen my son grow up and for whatever reason his lists are follow the binary system i.e. zero or one. It is good to see him cheerful and carefree. Cheerful when he has "one" thing to do and carefree when he has "nothing" in his mind. That may not be good enough reason for you to kick the habit. Let us go through my list of three reasons:
1. Don't make lists make objects of the things to remember. Action buttons with colorful designs is taking over as new user interface, you might end up as a creative art director in web2.0 firm.
2. Connect the objects in story or a flow diagram. It will help develop lateral thinking (e.g. VIBGYOR or My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas).
3. Work usually has life cycle or in a flow chart steps. I am not suggesting learning UML state machine design, just follow simple work flow rules.

101 Reasons to visit Rajasthan on your next vacation.

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:02:16 PDT

Pictures courtesy Mr Atul Jhala of Rajasthan Tourism. A rare glimpse of Rajasthan's majestic palaces, wild life, people and their craft. Locations in this album are Udaipur, Chittor, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Jaipur, Jhalawar and Ranthambore Wild Life Sanctuary. Enjoy!

Pictures worth thousand words

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:06:48 PDT

I am not a great fan of my Nokia E61i considering all the new and fancy models available, but I do like some of its features -

1. Built-in blackberry client.

2. Good voice quality and great speaker phone

I tried my hand on taking some pictures on the way to work and some travel the results are not bad. Hope you enjoy the pictures.

The Pied Piper of India

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:59:16 PDT

If I get a chance to meet AR Rahman, will ask him if the Indian National Congress Media agency “Mindshare” take permission to use the music "Jai Ho" for "commercial purpose" or for "non-profit"? Also did BJP ask for compensation for doing the take off version of the same song? No I don’t want to know the answer, just asking for sounding intelligent !!

I have tried to break a few laws myself. I am using pictures of the three public figures without their permission. Perhaps will get away with that. Also have used a cartoon (Credit: Conservative Punk) and repurposed for a different outcome. Anyways my blog is not a very popular place and is not generating any revenue. A few copyright glitches will go unnoticed. If it does not, I will take shelter under "artistic freedom" to repurpose art. Inspirational art for academic purpose to explain the law using examples following the footsteps of reformists to bring out changes in the society.

I would like to see following changes in the copyright act

1. Reduce the number of years of copyright to maximum 4-5 years. Artist or publisher or media companies are mostly able to monetize their work within this period after which it becomes public property.

2. Make adaptation, translation, and other forms of repurposing of art free from copyrights and allow limited commerical value (Cost Plus Model).

3. Inspirational form of art should have limited commercial value. Cost plus model.

In my view Internet based creative commons and open source effort will change the way art will be viewed in future. Immersive web (web 3.0) will be able to dynamically chain and repurpose huge amount of information. My best example is that of 10,000 people in a stadium with their mobile phones up-linking video to a central server. Theoretically, it is possible to get an accurate, hig-definition, three-dimensional view of the live match. In this case copyright does not belong to any one of the individual and can be broadcasted only if all of them agree on "creative common". Microsoft Photosynth project is also an effort in similar direction.

What are your views on repurposed art and copyright act?

Wrapped Time in a Flat World

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:36:51 PDT

Most of the telecom operators are concerned that 3G and LTE data services will introduce Internet based voice services and their traditional voice business will be lost. What can the operators do?

Telecom bridges three gaps (a) Distance, (b) Information and (c) Time. Telecom Operator's focus is "Distance" and Web-services focus is "Information" with some overlapping intentions. No one is focusing on Time? Let us consider a few examples to understand the issues (Please note I have restricted the discussion to voice calls only) -

(a) Instant Access - reduced waiting time, saved travel time, improved response to customer. This has resulted in setting up call-centers service to reach out to customers. The value add charged by call-center over normal communication service is anywhere between 20-200 times (depending on the country and type of services). If the underlying voice call is FREE the value addition is infinite! The flaw in this model is that call center does not factor in the cost of time of the called party (it is assumed to be zero). Most of the dissatisfaction with call centers is emerging from 2 issues - long waiting for service calls and the unsolicited calls. Obviously the call centers do not care about your time, however call-centers get paid for "on call" time. What you don't want comes unannounced and what you need is on-hold for the next free attendant. This is an unsustainable model which finds it roots in the Toll Free Service. If the service was not “toll free” it could have been better?

(b) Pervasive Access - The personal or private time of individuals has been taken over by telephonic interrupts. People travel long distances to meet someone and find that their face to face meetings are interrupted by telephone calls. Taking appointments, booking calendars, scheduling conference calls, watching movies, why lunch even loo brakes are interrupted with phone calls. If time is money whose is paying for your time? People talk to family during office hours and take work related conference-calls from home.

It is my estimate that productivity of individuals due to unplanned calls has come down by at least 20%. In any given meeting at least 2 people go out of the meeting to take phone calls. Everyone in meeting is interrupted by emails, text messages and everyone is multi-tasking.

Let me kick in my theory here "talk time is free but the time to talk is not". If we were to build a complex talk-time trading system:- One that allows calling party to decide the price they are willing to pay to talk to someone and it also allows the called party's willingness to accept the call at certain price, the transaction would be more rewarding. The operator can decide a floor price for the calling party talk time and the rest of the pricing will be on discovery and market forces. Telecom operator keeps a small percent of revenue. The factors determining talk-time trading is time-of-the-day, presence status and relationship between the calling parties. Now consider a few use-cases of this trading system.

1. Consider that the calling party has signed up for the minimum floor price. If the called party has marked status as available the call goes through. This is plain vanilla stuff.

2. Consider the called party has applied restrictions with check-my-price flag. Now the calling party will need to up the stake depending on the number of suitors and a fee charged by receiver. It better be important. Assuming that calling party has real emergency situation agrees to pay for higher call rate the call matures.

3. Appointment situation. Consider a patient to book an appointment with Doctor. Patient is presented with a fee for available slot much like a flight booking system. Once a reservation is made online during the appointed hour, Incoming calls to doctor will be presented to an online call administrator who can take messages or interrupt the doctor during emergency situation. If the doctor is interrupted network refunds the patient. During the appointment situation the patient also has call restrictions or optional call administrator. The appointment situation can be extended to consultations, education, coaching, etc.

4. Circle of influence. The users can create their inner and peripheral circles. The inner circle belongs to direct work and family relations. Presence information is shared within the circles. Calls are treated differently when being presented outside of the circle. The calling party can present a call with message (e.g. "Your stock broker is calling"). The presence status decides the billing rate. If you are in office and decide to take personal calls or call outside your circle, your office may charge you. If you accept a call in a meeting your phone bill goes up. Likewise if you get office circle calls during personal time, you make extra money.

5. Certain areas like cinema halls, theatres, hospitals, etc will have restrictions and different bleeding oops billing plans!

6. Different subject matter experts can make themselves available on-call for charge. The bidding system decides who is most sought after and the stake goes up.

7. Celebrities can put up themselves available for fan-call for a fee determined by talk-time auction system.

This requires standardizations efforts, inter-operator agreements and massive integration with location, presence and payment platforms. If the operators are willing to open these systems, independent application developers will be interested. Long distance education using video conferencing is a great example of “value of time” for technology provider, content provider, service provider and end-user. The trading system devised for talk-time price discovery would be the best way to grow the voice revenue.

Gen-X Rejects Mandalization of Indian Politics

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sun, 17 May 2009 15:10:00 PDT

The next generation voters and emerging congress leadership has put brakes to growing Mandalization of Indian Politics. It has taken one generation of Gandhi Family to reverse the trend which was set in force by VP Singh by accepting Mandal Commission Recommendation back in 1989. Rise of local parties based on vote banks emerged in the Hindu Heartland.

The Indian Voters clearly understood the better bargain power and influence of smaller parties in the formation of Government. Consider the impact of electing SP or RJD leader who gets to be not only a Cabinet Minister but also in the "inner circle". No issue is decided in isolation. The vote bank is supreme. If a large party comes to power, the voter has no say in their candidate yielding as much bargain power in deciding the fate of the Government as was possible with multi-party alliances.

What went wrong for the smaller parties in Election 2009? I think there are multiple reasons -

1. Ban on traditional media (posters and banners) has had significant impact on smaller parties. The Smaller Parties are not well prepared for electronics media.

2. The smaller parties lacked unity. There wasn't sufficient time to regroup.

3. As a result, smaller parties kept poker face. The seasoned voters couldn't care less but it was perhaps the first time voter, clearly deciding in favour of black-and-white, they were confused by the shades of grey displayed by their leaders.

4. The parties which did not play constructive role during the coalition were punished.

It will be interesting to see if we move to 3 party system in the coming elections. Sitting in opposition for five years teaches several lessons. For now it is "Jai Ho" to the Indian Voter for deciding against indecision.

What is your take?

Blogging is a lonely word

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:08:03 PDT

I created my blog some time back and have since tried every trick in the trade to make it popular. I finally decided to take some professional help and discussed this matter with our corporate communications head to get some useful tips. I have bad news for bloggers. I was told that there are millions of bloggers who are creating content everyday. As per study done by digital publisher large majority of the blogs are being read-or-visited by the authors alone. This is very depressing. It is almost like writing a private diary. I can assure you that more people will read my blog if I circulated the printed version of it on my way to work. So much for the "ubiquity" of the web, promise of the “collaboration” tools and the power of rating engines (bookmarking/share etc.) The depression gets deeper when one learns that there are more bloggers joining the party and slice of advertisement revenue is getting thinner.

There are three important steps towards publishing. The digital media has fixed only step one of the process.

(A) Content Creation: The creation of content, the editing tools, collaborative tools make it easy for bloggers to use their creative genious and make it readily available for online consumption. Why is it then people are not consuming the online content. It cannot be true that millions of bloggers are boring, self-gratifying, egotists, writing to satisfy the creative urge and not for the publicity. At least 5% of them deserve a better response. If digital publishing and open platforms are to make any dent to closed media baron controlled industry there is a clear need for rags to riches story for a weblogger.

(B) Moderator: An author in the paper world has to get past the editors. The editors decide what the people should be reading. Web with its democratic efficiency was a savior to millions of would be writers. Electronic marketing is simple, post your blog on your social networking site, signature of email or put it on your visiting card if you like. I wish it was that simple, not everyone is lucky enough to get the attention of the discerning readers.

In my view there is no electronic equivalent of an editor. "Most Viewed", "Most Rated" and "Most Discussed" are not editors, these analytical tools. If you do not get past "viewed" statistics it is a sad end of your blogging career. We are looking for semantic tools "Most Proficient", "Most Prolific", "Most Elegant", "Most Humorous", "Most Relevant" etc... Machine cannot replace the human touch of an editor. Does the online version of print media have an edge over millions of free-lance bloggers?

What we need is a publishing tool, let it be paid tool? Let there be paid editors who will rate blogs based on different criterions. The rating when fed into a recommendation engine will generate “publish worthy” content. Will web 3.0 have this capability?

(C) Publisher: The role of the publisher can never be undermined. Publisher is someone who understands the economics of the art. Publisher creates the cultural orientation, the prophesized value system and on-boarding of trusted advertisement partners. There is no equivalent of Vogue Magazine besides its online version. Can an online publisher create a Vision, a Mission and a Business Logic system where input come from “freelance bloggers” and output will be a finished online magazine? Can semantic web take care of this?

The solution lies in creating freelance editors. We need the snooty readers to judge our literary skills, we want them to pay visit to our sites, we need humans not machines crawl the blogoshere. I will give up my digital-post spot to a worthy author in return for an editorial position. Think about it there is an unexploted business potential.

Ideas are transcendental, implementation is Karma

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:55:11 PDT

The date is important 12th March 2007, Shantanu and I are heading to Gurgaon in pre-paid taxi taken from Delhi Airport. The driver makes an innocuous request of stopping at gas station for CNG. We nod our heads and before we know it we are standing at the fag end of a long queue of taxi's waiting for our turn. We did protest but failed to convince our man to fill in the gas on his return trip. I made a profound suggestion to Shantanu that one day people will drive Electrical Vehicles where they will rent batteries at "battery charging" stations. Every roadside pawn shop will be a battery charging station. A great energy trading model. This will reduce the cost of ownership of car and the mode of energy distribution will be cheaper than selling "gas". Shantanu perhaps was in no mood to discuss debate this, he agreed and both of us went quite.

In April 2007, Shai Aggasi quit SAP to pursue interests in alternative energy and climate change. In October 2007 he founded a company named Project Better Place, focusing on a green transportation infrastructure based on electric cars as an alternative to the current fossil fuel technology. (source Wikipedia).

Moral of the story is that ideas are transcendental. Given a problem statement multiple people can arrive at the same conclusion. Not everyone has conviction or courage to put ideas to implementation stage. I still believe that this will be a great idea for 2 wheelers where a number of companies have entered with products aimed at cities. Any VC listening?

Software Services in a flatter world

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:52:04 PDT

Discussing with my friends I predicted that Indian Service Sector will slow down hiring in India and will increase their US Headcount. They would like to be seen as "Job creators" where there are significant chances of backlash against outsourcing as a result of global meltdown. It is not important that my prediction has come right what is important is how the "service delivery" model of outsourcing companies will change in the coming years and is this move good for the industry.

In my own experience this is a great move. On site delivery model is great and it improves efficiency of the services. It gives the service industry to move up the value chain. The key advantages of this model are -

1. Close to the end customer

2. Teams can be benchmarked for efficiency and satisfaction across the locations and each one gets benefit from the other as a result of healthy competition. On-site team is sensitive to higher "expenses" and off-site team is sensitive to "high-efficiency". This brings the best of both worlds.

3. Win local services business and participate in the revival of economy, instead of fighting at WTO for more H1 visas.

Most of the global corporations had moved to "captive" development centers to take advantage of best of both worlds and drive common practices. The service companies can now go after the captive centers.

The focus will eventually shift from arbitrage opportunities to creating assets in the countries which offers fewerbarriers and provides better business environment. The service delivery model will face its test for operating efficiently and growing business. It is ironic that in yesteryears bench-strength was critical to win business and attrition was a problem. Now the bench-strength bites and healthy attrition is welcome!!

Network Neutrality : Who Benefits?

lchowdhary@hotmail.com (Lalit S Chowdhary) — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:44:18 PDT

Dataquest Magazine published my first article. Ideas for ISP's to consider opportunity in growing its online business by participating in it.

You can read the online version here: http://dqindia.ciol.com/content/industrymarket/focus/2009/109040703.asp

Provide your feedback.