One Foot in the Mudd

in todays world: what is the single point that provides the competitive edge? Technology: there has been a steady move from man, to machine to microchips.
from the industrial revolution, there has been the constant urge to find ways of doing things, better, faster and cheaper, thats what makes the company do better, and thats what sells. The horse drawn carriage was replaced by a motorised carriage (even though in some states in india, there are still ox drawn carriages, thats a generation behind the horse drawn ones), the hand made motor carriage was replaced by the assembly line, the assembly line was perfected to JIT, and that has provided for cheaper faster cars. now a company that first had gotten itself lovely sales persons who could talk the hind legs off a donkey, and also sell sand to the arabs at the same time. later, there was the inkling that the things were not going as planned, so they turned towards technology to get and track the customers needs, wants & desires. that worked really well, then everyone got into doing just that. Jaguar did that rather successfully, wherein, they used technology to track their customer service requirements, and this has become an industry standard. Jaguar worked hand in hand with Peppers & Rogers group to come out with a customer relationship mgt suite that helps track the usage, and based on the customers driving patterns informs the customer about service frequencies etc. this worked well, because it provide for a “personalised” attention to each customer. From what i heard, lexus goes one level further with technology. Each car owner’s specifications are taken into account, and once the internal adjustments for the car are made, they are embedded intot eh key that is handed over, that includes seat height, airconditioning, music system volume etc etc, so when the car is opened with a particular key, the adjustments are made for the driver to get in. That is clearly a competitive edge using technology.

However, technology can be replicated, so what is it that the company needs to stay in front? Using technology to enable business, not using technology for business. Using technology to enable business is to be able to leaverage on cutting edge technology to offer better services to its customers. The market is moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. World over, it is the services that play an impact. Even in a manufcaturing company, the services angle plays an important role in deciding the buying decisions of the customer. Hence, any company, wishing to stay ahead of competition, should use technology to enable its employees to work better.

Unified communications platforms,VoIPs, MPLS, MoIP etc are all new age technologies that are coming into the market. ompanies that are able to implement them will definitly be able to push ahead of competition.

On example of leveraging on technology, a food service company was able to reduce response times from 24hrs to 15 mins due to implementation of CISCO’s Unified communcations platform. Another IT service company was able to shave 20% off its data communcation costs due to its migration to an MPLS network.

So, now that we know that technology is here to stay, we should allow ourselves to leverage on it to enable businesses.

That is the latest competitive edge!

Well, there is this group of cycling enthusiasts, whom i had gotten to know of, yesterday, they were planning on taking a trip to the north of the city. i thought, hmmm. maybe i will take a ride, meet up with them and head back, so i went to meet them, and the idea of actually peddling a bout 65 Kms did sound fun, it was that inbetween place, neither too far, nor too close! so we took off. It turned out to be a very interesting ride. the sights, the sounds. The pain of cycling really got to me by the end of the trip, i was a pile of aches. That did feel rather bad, cause the others seem to have been in good health! 🙁 so now i have something to work towads, i think i must get a better seat on my cycle, i think that will help! 🙂
anyways, i decided that if i comeback and give into my aching joints, i might not be able to get up, so i bravely put up a front and head out to finish errands! i finally go to sleep rather early, and then wake up in the mornig with a phenomenal back ache! something that does not hurt, is hurting now! 🙁 aarrggh! got to get back in shape!

off late, there has been a lot of “hue and cry” about HP’s independent probe into the alleged leak of information of its board meetings to the media. The HP board inducted a vendor to look into these, and also to look for the source of the leaks. The HP director assigned to oversee these, Patricia Dunn, appeared to have been unaware of the use and methodology of pretexting. Gathered from various news reports, I figured that Dunn, would not have ordered the use of such means, considering the high profile of this case as well as the unethical nature of the method. However, why is there such a hue and cry?

I want to find out what is happening in my house, I ask someone to check, they give me the results. I don’t want to know how they did it. I find out what’s wrong, I fix it. I am happy, no one knows.

how different is this from what governments of countries do to ensure “security”? Except this is a government organization. In all fairness, people are jumping onto this “lets get at HP and prove a point” bandwagon. However, the bigger picture is not being seen.

this is quite unfair for people to be pouncing. If my security and my trade secrets are at stake, I will use any means in order to resolve these issues.

in today’s information world, where the technologies and needs are changing so fast that they can be clocked with an egg timer, guarding secrets is the greatest necessity of the corporation.

so what is the difference between a company and a country? One is guarding the people, and one is guarding the economy. Which is more important? Well, neither. They both require each other to survive. The economy requires the company to survive, and the company requires people to survive, and the people require the economy to survive. So the government, should allow the company to survive, as putting a spoke in the wheel might lead to greater consequences that might spiral out of control.

Bonobos:

Apparently, a very rare species of the ape family, this was thought to be a common chimpanzees untill 1982, when scientists found a difference in the genetic sequence. now there is a swing that these Bonobos are closer to humans than to Chimps.
I actually came across this on bbc’s website that said there exist less than 10K of these. I was thinking, that an entire species exists, who’s total strenght is less than the number of people working in one city in my office. like the dodo, if things are not done fast, the bonobo will become extinct.

so why is this ofprime importance to me? quite simple, i did chcek some pictures of these things, and i saw that these are so close to humans that they might be the missing link between chimps and humans. This is a matriarchial society, like the egyptians and some of the more advnaced societies in the world, the female bonobo makes decisions.
They breed once every 3 to 4 years, thereby giving the female time to recover and nurse the bonobo till its old enough. That is another line similar to humans ( well, i guess i am leaving out certain areas that have an annoying habit of getting “knocked” up “unknowingly” and not in terms of planning for families) that is why the number of bonobos are reducing as the frequency of births and number of offsprings are a far cry from some other species such as dogs and turtles.

Now come some more interesting facts, the bonobo infant, needs the love of a mother, else it just dies. thats very scary considering, the fact that we assumed the mammals to be of a “lesser” species. there does exist a sanctuary in DR Congo that has ‘surrogate” mothers to take care of these infants.

The links that I thought i must talk about,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/africa_bonobos_under_threat/html/1.stm

and the sanctuary that take care of Bonobos:

http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/

NOTE: The above images are not mine. They have been taken from the website http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/

Information overload:

As and when i type out, the keys that i press are transformed to ones and zero’s and then its pushed to the computer, that displays the keys are they are “supposed” to appear. now, the word document that saves the words that are typed by me is again saved as ones and zeros. the now the whole world, has been converted to ones and zero’s. this means that these one’s and zero;s are growing faster than the fusion on the sun, and this information explosion is going to hit us so hard, we wont know what hit us?

to us what is a file that is being saved? 45KB that is saved on my 40Giga Byte harddrive. gone are the days that a 128Kbyte harddisk is top of the line, now a days, disk players are coming with more memory than that.

So where is this going?with one document after another being churned out every minuute, the frantic typing of keyboards shows that there is information going into the system to be stored. now this systems then gets put onto the internet, and displayed for the world to see. However, there is a physical aspect to the whole thing.

Where there is a physical dimension, there will be a limit, where there is a limit, there will be a cost.

So where is the information overload heading? Currently, there are the Terra bytes, and so on, and Apple’s XSAN claims to be able to handle PetaBytes, thas the size of the GigaByte, raised to the power of five! So where does all this lead to? The cost of storage is skyroketing! with cost per GB gradually declining due to the technology cost time curve, the volume of the storage is increasing at rates of close to 100%. Now with social sites coming and people “connecting” there is a spurt of storage requirement. Take for example “you tube” or “flickr”, a site that allows people to upload and share photos. There is a poitn where it costs the user nothing to share, but the company to provide the storage space, and as and when this stoage grows, the costs allocated to the company’s storage also grows?

there needs to be a more streamlined thought process on Data & storage dynamics.People should be more concious on where what when how. there are always, multiple copies of files stored in multiple locations. Companies taking
backups are taking the backup of the same data.

There was a report that said 60% of the information on certain systems were accessed last about twelve months ago.

That leaves us with the picture that more than a couple of TB of data is lying blocked. It is not an asset now but a liability, and hence a white elephant.

People need to be taking an active role in making sure that the data that is stored is of use and not something that will not be seen after a while. if there are internet links that have interesting documents, the best thing to do is either save the links on files, or other bookmarking sites like www.del.icio.us can be made use of to save on stoage space by bookmarking the sites.

Marketing is war! Be it within the organization or within the market segment or within the market on a generic level. There is a battle of the brands to get mindspace, shelf space, top of the mind recall, impulse purchase points and anything possible to make the consumer lift the product off the shelf and place it at a point of consumption in their personal lives. There are many ways that marketers achieve their desired results, be it in a legitimate way or sometimes borderline cases where the truth is bent so much that it makes any meandering river appear smooth as a well polished piece of wood.

Advertising has been the primary method for product promotion. Over the top advertising, online, offline be in a straight line, or not so straight line, products are advertised throughout the city, street or country. The popularity of the product and the places where all the products are advertised meets the eye at every nook and corner. Things right from pin to pianos are advertised in all media possible: electronic, print, radio television etc. This is the form that has the marketer standing and shouting from the roof tops about discounts and more discounts. Look at the strategy of any of the airlines. They shout and advertise about low airfares, and how these airfares are cheaper than the train fares, but what they don’t add is the fact that “other charges are extra”- namely a surcharge, tax and others. So what is so great about advertising, very specifically, it gives just the highlights of the product. However miniscule the “benefit”, that is built upon. Obviously, that is the logical explanation; you do not stand on rooftops and shout about the defects of the product.

It has been a trend of late, instead of moving from a product appeal to emotional appeal, thereby taking the consumers through the “advertising life cycle”, marketers are attempting to bypass the whole process by releasing emotionally appealing advertising first. This attempt, I feel, seems to be back firing big time, simply because, in advertising, like in kindergarten, consumers need to be hand held till they can stand on their own two feet and decide. There is a popular belief that the advent of the internet has made the process of purchase and the entire purchase cycle shorter, however, in a country like India, where the PC penetration is still a mere 14 per 1000 and the internet penetration being about 5 per 1000 [1] , so how does this contribute to the “increased” awareness? We still have 995 people out of every 1000 still basing their decisions on the advertisements they see on the various media, so I believe there needs to be a serious re-look at the advertising methods being adopted. When a brand connects with the customer on the emotional level, leaving out the first phase of “product enlightenment”, the customers are left vulnerable. Much like Abhimanyu’s attempt to breach the Chakravyuha. He was successful in breaking in, but unable to escape, breathed his last, in a vain attempt to free himself. Similarly, moving advertising onto the emotional level, by by-passing the first few levels, will leave the consumer highly susceptible to counterfeits and “pass-offs”, as the knowledge levels of the product are still in the infancy and the consumer has “bonded” with the product already, the window of opportunity to strike and dupe unsuspecting victims is evident at this stage.

Marketing is more than advertising, according to the marketing text-books, the product, price, promotion and place or the new mantra of creating value, communicating value and delivering value. So the value is created by the product team, this value is then communicated via the marketing team and finally the sales and distribution team delivers the value. However, sometimes value needs to be “destroyed” in order to build value. This means reducing the market share on one product in order to increase the market share of another product. Else, the introduction of flanker brands does just that. The market is captured by the fact that the main brand exists and the flanker brands, basically watered down versions of the main brand, work towards driving out competition. When car companies launch cars to compete in certain segments there is inevitably a spill over to another segment wherein there is competition with pre-existing models. Perfect examples will be high end models in one segment and low end models of the next higher segment.

There is another interesting phenomenon that seems to be getting noticed these days: Product sabotage [2] . Essentially, this means, pushing higher margin products, and keeping the lower margins off the “menu card” so to speak. Sabotaging the product, is also done in order to make the consumer upgrade to the next higher one. One example cited was the IBM printer example, in which IBM inserted chips into the printers in order to slow them down. Starbuck’s example of not featuring the cheaper ones on the menu, because the profitability on those are lower.

So what does all this translate to?

Consumers are becoming more aware that these things happen, more so, the ability of the consumer not to be taken for a ride is definitely reducing because of the internet. Developed nations such as Japan, the US, Europe and others where the PC penetration is high and the internet penetration is even higher, the ability to deliver information directly to the target audience is a growing challenge. This will be a constant battle in order to provide direct campaigns that ultimately resort to a higher convertibility in terms of sales.

[1] http://mungee.org/archives/2005/05/19/india-targets-pc-penetration-of-65-by-2008/
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5274352.stm

Well, I am really pissed. the past few days, my life seems to be getting tormented by morons who dont seem to have the balls to go speak to women, or they just dont seem to have balls, full stop. I really dislike it when people use my name to get to knw others, without my consent. I dont mind it if i personally introduce them, however, when people take liberties such as this, it really ticks me off. today i got a call:
Caller: hey man, how you doing?
ME: good, wassup?

Caller: hey, this friend of ours was saying you know this girl.
Me: yeah, So.

Caller: Well, there is this friend of mine who wants to know which school she studied in.
me: What? (complete disbelief, considering im doing some really important work on news. bbc. co.uk)

Caller: Well, this friend of ours said that you know this girl, and I wanted to know if you can give me that information.
Me: Can i speak to this friend of ours?
Friend: these guys are mad.

Me: duh! huh! they work for SW cos, what DO you expect?

Caller: maan, can you help.
Me: No.
Friend: NO, good!
Me: Tell them if they wnat to know, let them Talk.
Caller: *click*

I mean, gwad! whats up wth the world today! Do I look like a pimp or something? i mean, AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
two days in a row: something tells me, tomorrow IS NOT going to be different!

One of the most famous landmarks of Southern India, The brahadeshwara temple is a quentisential display of Cholan Art form. Its sanctum sanctorium (the inner shrine) is built out of a single stone, thereby making it the largest monolithic structure in the world. It is also one of the first sites in southern india to come under the UNESCO banner as a heritage site. The unique structure of the sanctum sanctorium is such that the shadow of the top never falls on the ground. It is also the ONLY temple in the world where the Sanctum Sanctorium is taller than the entrrance. In traditional temple architecture, the entry gopuram is taller than the main gopuram, however, in this temple (and unique only to this temple) it is the other way. Also, this is one of the few temples dedicated to Shiva.

Lovely place. You should visit it if you have the time.