RESUMING AFTER A LONG BREAK

The previous year had been a pretty descent year. Looking forward for an intellectually challenging year. Hope to publish at least one post a week.

Category: Personal

OUTSOURCING IN THE FUTURE

Continuing on talks of the past, present and the future "Outsourcing". The future would think beyond India and China. What would this mean? East and West had awakened and would probably be dusting their strategies and decision's on outsourcing. India and China had been enjoying the advantage of the intellectual pool and best practices. Will this feed India and China at long term? My probable answer would be both yes and no.

Bill Gates quotes "The three dynamic economies in the world today are India with its best practices, China with its best practices and United States with its best". The economic engine once revolved around three countries. Now some more countries which are slowly, silently and vigorously raising heads above. What would it mean to India and China?. Will it be a set back for India and China ?. Again my response is mixed. Yes and No.

I could foresee a day where there would be multiple levels in executing an assignment. High end design and architectural work would get executed from India. Rest of the work would get executed from growing countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, Argentina, Romania, Mexico, Moscow. The list goes on.

Indian Challenges

1) High attrition
2) Rising salaries
3) Poor Infrastructure
4) Red Tapes at various levels
5) Raising real estate costs

Will India recover and regain the cost advantage? Let's wait and see.

Category : India, Outsourcing, China

TEN WAYS TO THINK ABOUT INNOVATION

The “2006 Young Innovators under 35” is out. Quite Happy to see Indian’s making a mark in the list. Also came across the article on “10 ways to think about Innovation"

The ideas stem from top innovators of the century, so definitely worth a read.

1) Successful innovators are famously untroubled by the prospect of failure.
2) Many innovators appreciate failure (Was surprised to see this initially). When doesn’t go on technologies that fail, you're not pushing the boundaries enough. (Thinking out of the box)
3) Problems and Questions are the limiting resource in innovation
4) Innovators find inspiration in disparate disciplines. The brain is "the ultimate computer,"
5) Innovation flourishes when organizations allow third-party experimentation with their products. Astonishingly, the fruitfulness of an open society is still unappreciated by some commercial technologists. (Very much true)
6) Fra­gility is the enemy of innovation: systems should boast broad applications and be unbreakable. (Absolutely against the software terminology)
7) Real innovators delight in giving us what we want: solutions to our difficulties and expansive alternatives to our established ways.
8) Sometimes, we are perplexed by our ignorance of our own needs. "You have to solve a problem that people actually have” (Piece of advice to make money out of your most innovative product)
9) Successful innovators do not depend on what economists call "network externalities"
10) Many innovators become technologists because they want to better the world. Shiladitya Sengupta says “You can do top-notch research, but at the end of the day, it should actually benefit mankind.” (Quite contradicting with all previous points)

My Take: Innovation spring from the problems we come across every day. Necessity is the mother of invention, day to day problems and solutions are road to innovation. India, is always a better place to find, many problems free of cost. Problems are large, but solutions in the form of innovations?

Category: Innovation

BLOGCAMP - BLOG UNCONFERENCE BLOGGER'S MEET

Preparations are ramping up for the "BlogCamp" to be held on 2006, Sep 9-10, at Tidel Park, Chennai. Looking forward to meet the blogging community. Kudos to the team.



Category: BlogCamp, Chennai

GOOGLE, THE HYPE ENGINE

Google, has been undoubtfully the best among the search engines. Google in the recent times had introduced array of products like "GMail,Google Talk, Google Online Spreadsheet". Every time when google releases some of its so called innovative products, I get a doubt what kind of company is Google?. What can Google be classified as? An Internet company delivering solutions across the Web. Do they really stand out and compete with their rivals Microsoft, IBM and Yahoo!. My answer would be a definite "No".

Most of its rivals are well ahead of the race. For that matter, Microsoft had made a head start in desktop operating systems, where they stand as an unshakeable leader. Oracle, business leader in database, where Microsoft fights hard to take their pie of database market. Similarly, Google would find it hard to penetrate their products to users, for most users are very much comfortable with the existing products.

Business Week runs an article "So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits". The crux of the article is Google has initially send shiver down its competitor’s spine. But at the end it’s the competitor's who win the battle. To draw some statistics on Google's products

1) Google Talk, an instant-messaging service launched last August, now ranks No. 10, garnering just 2% of the number of users for market leader MSN Messenger

2)Google Finance, heralded as a competitor to market leader Yahoo! Finance, has settled in as the 40th-most-visited finance site

3) Gmail, the e-mail service that was lauded at its 2004 launch for offering 500 times as much storage space as some rivals (they quickly closed the gap), today is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail.

One of the analysts very prompt view is "After sparking substantial buzz, most of Google's nonsearch offerings quickly fade from view. People give Google the victory in the beginning and don't show up later to notice that things didn't go anywhere"

Google has been muddling with its products, simply to show it does innovate. But I would rather say Google always does things "out of the box", which keep people murmuring it for some time. It’s a tricky and challenging thing to motivate and keep the user stick and user their products.

Category: Google

INDIA, MARCHING TOWARDS BRIGHTER FUTURE

As India gets mature, so does the people, economy, industry. Business reaping higher profits, increased standards of people, good and quality education is the key implication behind this wonderful nation's march towards excellence.

Though India and Indian HQ companies have been flourishing, there are areas where India needs to improve, to maintain its sustainable advantage.

1) Better Infrastructure
Infrastructure including Roads, Rails, Telecom definitely need to improve where its competitor China is well ahead in the race.

2) Primary Education
Growth of every nation depends on its literacy. India is no exception. It needs to mould people as intellectual thinkers, motivating leaders and innovators than mere followers.

3) Industries
To borrow some lines from my inspirer, "Enough of services. Let’s make more products". Let’s reduce our dependency on the west for growth. Let's toss the coin and produce innovative products and ambitious people driving its growth.

Category: India

CHINA, THE BUZZ WORD

Last two weeks, it's been China, everywhere I listen to. Right from my chat with peers, industry veterans to TV Channels its the China buzz everywhere. Today, I was lucky to catch up with week special program "Emerging Giants" in BBC.

The program had an interview with Rahul Bajaj, CEO, Bajaj Auto Ltd., A very valuable point from his side, is the "lack of infrastructure" in India. The BBC is supporting the same backed by its survey, which points to some of the difficulties in India, which makes it a laggard in growth rate on comparison to China are

1) Lack of Infrastructure
2) Economic instability
3) Scarcity of resources.

While people have mixed views , I strongly agree with the poor Indian infrastructure, right from Telecom, Roads and accessibility. If the problems were not addressed seriously, fueled with couple of issues on reservation, would be serious treat for the generations to follow and economy as a whole. The most funny thing is most India HQ Television Channels, never care or cover programs on similar lines

Category: China & India

OPEN SOUCE ON COMMERCIAL STAND

Source: Slashdot

Came across this interesting discussion thread on "How Has Open Source Helped You Commercially?". The crux of the thread is "Have you, personally, ever benefited from having the source code to your project freely available and downloadable, instead of being kept under lock-and-key? Have you ever fixed a bug in your spare time? Have you ever sought outside help (providing source code snippets) on a particularly nasty problem?"

My Take:As always, I have an inclination towards Open Source and its value to the community. From my perspective and little experience, more than helping me with ways for finding solutions at work, it has definitely helped me develop ability to understand the work of code hackers, a sense of motivation to write code on similar lines and finally the desire to contribute my own work to the open source community.

Category: Open Source

OUTSOURCING HASN'T HIT ITS PEAK

Source: Businessweek

An excerpt of an interview with Mr. Lakshmi Narayanan, CEO Cognizant Technology Solutions. To be brief Lakshmi, had been part of the founding team of Cognizant, he has been with the company in its mega growth phase. When recently awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year” award by The Economic Times, a leading business daily, the jury had this to say: “… On parameters like profitability, brand equity outside India, turnover, number of jobs created and governance, Cognizant and its founders are clearly the best of the lot.”

Being simple and down to earth by his form and nature, this 53 year old, not out young man talks about outsourcing and its current form, adds “Outsourcing is still in its amateur stages”.
Outsourcing started as a way for companies to realize the benefits of lower costs. Later, they realized they could improve the quality of much of their work by taking advantage of excellent workforces. It can take six months to assemble a team in the U.S. We can have a problem solved in six months. He adds the pie of the outsourced value is just $20 billion a year, where the real potential is $200 billion.

“When it comes to areas such as innovation and development, the U.S. still is unchallenged. As other countries develop, the demand for higher-end U.S. services will grow. The U.S. needs to make sure its workforce is trained to meet that demand.”

My Take: Valuable point to think. I always dream of a day for India, where Technology, Innovation takes precedence over the mundane Process and Quality followed in the Industry. (I might not carry with me wealth of experience with the industry, excuse me if I am against any your views or facts.) When there’s innovation embedded in our products and offerings, why should we after all care for the western guys shouting against outsourcing? Our products and technology would talk for itself as in every industry. On the lighter, it took me an hour to publish this post. Hats off to the terrific service provided by my ISP.

Category:Outsourcing

TOP 10 INDIAN BLOGS

Source: BusinessWeek

Came across this article in this week’s Business World Edition. Quite Amazed by the active and major presence of Chennaites in Blogosphere space too. I tried searching for the article in BusinessWorld’s portal, but the end was failure to trace it from my side. Here is the listing of the Top 10 Indian Blogs

www.kiruba.com
www.lazynet.net
www.gauravsabnis.blogspot.com
www.mdeii.blogspot.com
www.selectiveamnesia.org
www.emergic.org
www.yazadjal.com
www.indiauncut.blogspot.com
www.vinodg.blogspot.com

I am very regular reader of Rajesh Jain and Kiruba’s Blogs. But still promise you, other blogs too are worth a try.

Category:Indian Bloggers