Kaleidoscope

Authentic Goan cuisine in Goa

2014-12-31T15:34:00.000+05:30

It's new year's eve and party time again. Party and Goa has become almost synonymous for last few decades. So it is hardly any surprise that Goa attracts biggest footfall in December-January. People who love Goa also know that it is not only the beaches alone, Goan cuisine is indispensable part of Goan holiday culture. And here is one problem people mostly stumble. Which restaurants are to go if you are looking for authentic Goan cuisine? This post is particularly for those who faced this problem earlier.
For the starter, Goa is not a single place. People know that south Goa offers very different lifestyle compared to North Goa. If North Goa is busy, crowded, noisy and more lively, south Goa provides more laid-back, slow and calm holiday options. However, Goan cuisine is fabulous and equally delectable both in south and North Goa. If you are travelling from outside, it is always advisable that you hire a car and drive yourself. It also turns out to be less expensive option if you are staying for 2-3 days.

Now come the restaurants.

1. Top of the chart of course is held by Martin's Corner, Betalbatim, south Goa. You simply cannot find any better place to match the taste and authenticity of Goan cuisine. By far this is the most popular spot for all the connoisseurs of Goan food. If you heard of Xacuti, Vindalho, sorpotel, Pomfret Recheado but have never tried before, this is the place you got to come. And most likely you will never forget the taste, not to mention the place! Typically they always are booked, so it is a good idea to book before you visit to avoid long waiting. Here is their number: +91 832 2880413 and their site
2. Ritz Classic near Miramar Beach
It is said that if you enjoy Goan seafood cuisine, you cannot miss Ritz Classic's crab curry! People often cover great distance to have meal in this place. whenever you go, you may have to wait for half-an-hour at least to get a table. Check Google+ profile for more details or call them at +91 832 242 6417
3. Kentuckee Seafood restaurant on Colva Beach.

If you love Goan Steak preparation, you must not miss this place. Beside standard Goan platter, you can try lobster masala fry, or sizzlers. In fact their sizzlers are very popular. Plenty of space still you may have to wait for 30 minutes if you land up there during peak hours. Call +91 96375 98121 for booking.

If you are first timer in Goa, you most likely are staying close to Calangute beach or near Baga beach. If you cannot venture out and want some options nearby here you have couple of restaurants to try:

4. Souza Lobo on Calangute beach. You can see the big white building from the beach itself. Their sea food menu people enjoy the most. Number to book table: 0832-2281234. If you like to browse online, here is their site.
There are of course many joints on Calangute-Baga road that offer sumptuous Goan cuisine.
You also can look for Britto's on Baga beach. Of late they got some rave reviews on their seafood menu.
5. Let me end this post with the Verandah Restaurant in Panjim Inn. They insist that they provide the old Goan ambiance with authentic Goan taste. so if you are stuck in North Goa, try them. Their number 0832-2226523/2435628

Could this gamble be game changer in 2015?

2014-12-29T23:09:00.003+05:30

IDC released 2014Q3 report on smartphone OS market. It shows Microsoft Windows firmly in the 3rd place in 2014.

People may have forgotten how and from where it rose to this position, but future business historians will remember this as another successful strategy maneuver from Microsoft.

Techcrunch in a recent article observed that Microsoft went public in March, 1986, barely 5 months after it released Windows OS [Nov, 1985].

In the S-1, Mircosoft's IPO document, Microsoft's future valuation of Windows software is fascinating!

"In November 1985, Microsoft began shipping Microsoft Windows, a graphical operating environment which runs on the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. As an extension of MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows manages such hardware as the keyboard, screen, and printer. This product allows new applications programs to present themselves in a standard and graphical manner that is independent of video or other output devices. Microsoft is encouraging independent software developers to create applications programs which will take advantage of Microsoft Windows graphical user interface features. Lotus Development recently announced its intent to pursue the development of applications products that will run on Windows. Microsoft’s own new applications software will be based on Microsoft Windows. It is too early in the life of Microsoft Windows to determine what level of acceptance it will attain in the marketplace."

Well one hardly needs anything to be said further to that statement today. Windows not only redefined PC market, Microsoft ensured that Windows' success is leveraged across all emerging computing platform markets, Server, Gaming Console and so on. Before Apple's second wave of growth, people never saw any serious threat to Windows for any foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, Windows never was a serious choice in embedded OS market. Microsoft also appeared to be hesitant, if not reluctant, player in smaller platform segment. Partly to that, all ventures [windows CE for example] from Microsoft in mobile segment were seen as weak, if not tentative. Mobile Phone market was largely proprietary and with Nokia leading the pack, no one saw any incentive to break the status quo. That hesitation turned into a strategy blind-spot soon when Apple turned the table with iPhone. Microsoft needed something very badly to cover the lost space. For quite some time, beside Apple, there was no serious dominating player in the smartphone market.

Then Google brought Android and Samsung brought Android-based Galaxy series of phones. Android started changing the smartphone market in the same way Linux did to the PC market earlier. Microsoft did not appear to have any play. Some people even started writing eulogy for Microsoft.

Obvious reasons were

Linux is eating into Microsoft's PC OS market share.
VMware started almost monopolizing the server virtualization market
Cloud was fast becoming credible alternative to private data centre for the enterprises.
iPhone and iPad redefined smartphone and tablet market and Microsoft's mobile OS had no play at all.

With slow PC/Laptop growth and exponential smartphone growth, Microsoft needed a serious game changer in the smartphone segment. When no one thought of any future for Microsoft, Microsoft almost created coup-d'etat with Nokia. Fast devaluation of Nokia's valuation and Elop's crucial decision of adopting windows for Nokia phone gave Windows the life-saving chance that it needed so badly.

IDC's recent report seem to indicate that the strategy maneuver has worked for Microsoft. Gartner's press release also indicate the same trend. Microsoft is back to OS game. Below charts from Gartner speak for themselves:

Table1
Worldwide Device Shipments by Operating System in Mature Markets (Thousands of Units)

Operating System	2013	2014	2015
Android	266,701	313,529	337,791
IOS/Mac OS	157,273	167,787	182,564
Windows	138,312	141,977	149,128
Others	100,633	48,130	29,352
Total	662,920	671,424	698,835

Shipments include mobile phones, ultramobiles (including tablets) and PCs

Source: Gartner (October 2014)

Table 2
Worldwide Device Shipments by Operating System in Emerging Markets (Thousands of Units)

Operating System	2013	2014	2015
Android	632,517	928,135	1,117,860
Windows	187,474	194,091	221,804
IOS/Mac OS	78,928	95,304	112,647
Others	772,562	520,605	383,914
Total	1,671,480	1,738,135	1,836,225

Shipments include mobile phones, ultramobiles (including tablets) and PCs

Source: Gartner (October 2014)

Cost for the gamble

Leaving the development cost of windows 8, let's just look at the cost Microsoft incurred in acquiring Nokia phones:

Microsoft paid to Nokia: $7.2 billion

Adoption cost: $1 billion out of the Nokia operation

Microsoft posted an operating loss of $692 million this July. It claims to stop losses by June, 2016.

How do the Microsoft shareholders look at this? This Business Today report says, Microsoft shares hit new 14-year highs just after quarterly result announcement, and were up by 1.1 per cent at $45.33.

Microsoft is charting new territory

Microsoft recently launched Lumia 535. They dropped Nokia logo in the new phone. Not sure how many are observant that Microsoft is charting a new path here. More than 91% of Windows mobile phone sales bring revenue directly to Microsoft. In a recent report, IDC projects that Windows Phone will account for $7.8 billion (about 2%) of the $382.9 billion in revenue expected to be generated by the smartphone market in 2014. Although windows share in smartphone market is not high, the fact that almost all windows phone sales happen from Microsoft now, this gamble has already created success for Microsoft. Here Microsoft is charting Apple path [hardware + software] unlike what they did in 1985. Although Microsoft has treaded complete hardware and software path before with Xbox, smartphone market is likely to pose a lot harder challenge since there are too many dominant players and market is too nuanced already. But if there is anything to cheer about, it is that Windows has moved from PC-only market to PC plus Tablet plus smartphone market.

Riskless Capitalism and India

2014-11-26T11:36:00.000+05:30

Raghuram Rajan, the RBI governor, said some large borrowers in India are enjoying 'riskless capitalism' and are responsible for making banks’ credit profile unhealthy. These big clients were in effect becoming ‘freeloaders’ in the banking system and the taxpayers and honest borrowers end up paying the price for losses suffered by state-run banks due to bad loans taken by these big borrowers.
Mr. Rajan is not the first to use the term Riskless Capitalism. Kennedy in a different context, used the term 'Riskless Capitalism to explain how a new financial policy framework is going to create universal "Security for Capitalists and consumers, workers and employers, corporates and farmers" and in that process, "it did not seek to abandon capitalism but transform it into a relatively 'riskless capitalism'". He was facing a different problem then and he felt the policies would smoothen the rough edge of capitalism. But as it appeared, the 'riskless capitalism' helps the businesses more than common tax payers. In his book, Great wars and great leaders, Ralph Raico observes,"Businesses welcomed the government intrusions which brought them guaranteed profits, a 'riskless capitalism'" in the context of government policies in the aftermath of WW-I.

Capital by nature is asymmetric and in any closed or semi-open system, capitalists tend to take greater advantage of government policies because larger the capital, the bigger is the promise of returns and greater is the influence on the flow of capital, which is controlled by banking system of the nation. In any case, the goal of the manager of capital is to reduce risks on the capital growth and by design he will prefer the risk-free growth opportunities. Or he will find avenues to pass the risk downstream, if he cannot nullify the entire risk. In our system, that creates the huge NPA, for public banking systems, which banks de-risk by increasing capital borrowing cost for small borrowers or penalizing the small borrowers. [read Business Today report SBI chasing smaller borrowers to control rising bad loans]
Mr. Rajan seem to be resonating that in his speech yesterday in Anand, Gujarat, "A large borrower, whose loan has turned bad, should not be “lionised as a captain of industry, but justly chastised as a freeloader on the hardworking people of this country,” Dr. Rajan said in cases of any stress, the promoter threatened to run an enterprise to the ground, asking the government, banks and regulators to make necessary concessions to keep it afloat. We have seen perpetually sickening of Jute industries in Bengal and how the promoters de-risked their capital at the cost of BIFR and workers there.
“We have to ask if our system of credit is healthy. Unfortunately, the answer is that it is not. The sanctity of the debt contract has been continuously eroded in recent years, not by the small borrower, but by the large borrower,” Dr. Rajan said. In scathing remarks on the misuse of the system by the large borrowers, Dr. Rajan said taxpayers and honest borrowers end up paying the price due to the excesses committed by large borrowers by way of losses to state-run banks and high pricing of loans.

“If the enterprise regains health, the promoter retains all the upside, forgetting the help he got from the government or the banks — after all, banks should be happy they got some of their money back!

“What I am warning against is the uneven sharing of risks and returns in enterprise, against all contractual norms established the world over — where promoters have a class of ‘super’ equity which retains all the upside in good times and very little of the downside in bad times,” Dr. Rajan said.

NPA of Indian Banks

[source Reserve Bank of India]
In average India's public banks are running with more than 3% NPA [the figure for SBI is 4.42%]. Just for a comparison same ratio for Bank of America and HSBC are 0.21% and 1.77% respectively.
This article provides a nice infographics on top Borrowers in Indian banking system.

Wharton report predicts doom of IT sector by 2033

2013-12-12T17:00:00.000+05:30

A yet to be published Wharton study by Colin Ward predicts that by 2033 IT sector will transition to decline phase by 2033. He applied asset pricing to find future valuation of IT sector. His model indicates that growth of IT sector is already in the transition phase and transition to end roughly by 2033. He cliams to "develop a new method that puts structure on financial market data to forecast economic outcomes."

"I apply it to study the IT sector's transition to its long-run share in the US economy, along with its implications for future growth. Future average annual productivity growth is predicted to fall to 52bps from the 87bps recorded over 1974-2012, due to intensifying IT sector competition and decreasing returns to employing IT. My median estimate indicates the transition ends in 2033. I estimate these numbers by building an asset pricing model that endogenously links economy-wide growth to IT sector innovation governed by the sector's market valuation.", He elaborates.
The paper is accessible at

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11770278/JMP_Ward_ITrevolution.pdf
If you find the paper little too technical and finance-oriented for your interest, there is another way of testing the hypothesis. We could try to extrapolate the future based on the patterns that we see now. The way we see the IT industry today was unimaginable in 1974, though people consider 1974-80 to be the beginning of the growth of the industry. The industry experienced the growth
in massive scale during 1995-1999 and most of that rode on banking industry's fear of Y2K glitch. Once that crest passed, the industry saw first massive slump in 2001. Very few imagined that trough will come so soon after crest, because it was never seen before. Industrial revolution lasted for a long time before people saw the economy decline.
People accepted dot-com bust to be credible explanation although banking industry's IT budget also showed fast contraction right after year 2000. Traditionally IT consumption always showed sharp increase or decline as an effect of overall economy's growth/collapse.
One must not miss the fact IT needs are not fueled by direct consumption from the consumers [which has direct impact on real-estate, manufacturing, luxury and cosmetics items, electronic equipment etc] but by those industries that serve
the consumers and those industries increased IT budget as a response to threats such as probable banking software malfunction due to Y2000 round up or pressure from business consolidation.Business consolidation happens organically in any industry when growth slows down and large players invest in IT to leverage information availability. Thus a bank upgrades its back-end software and IT hardware as a need to remain competitive [it improves scale of operation, information flow and customer response] when it faces slow growth. Retail
industry upgrades its CRM and analytics software in order to capitalize faster the retained data of its consumer base. Now once they upgrade (spend in IT) their IT setup, next upgrade would happen only if they outgrow their present capacity.
There is another dimension to it. Given that the IT providers themselves are coming up with innovations faster that brings down the overall cost of IT in order to remain competitive, the value of IT erodes faster. For example setting up a CRM for a retail chain is lot cheaper today when compared to that a decade back. The solution today is lot more open, agile and powerful compared to what they used to get a decade back.
Compare this with any other Industry e.g. automobile or nuclear reactor. The price of automobile such as Toyota Corolla has consistently gone up over the years and so has the cost of a nuclear reactor. Unfortunately same cannot be said about IT produces.
Also over the last few years, industries witnessed fast transition from in-house IT setup to outsourced IT setup. Salesforce has consolidated CRM of many of its clients who earlier had their own CRM solutions. Salesforce thus brought down the consolidated IT expenditure of its clients to a fraction of what they used to spend together. And it is clear that this transition is going to be faster in next 10 years as SAAS become mature and more secure. IT budget will shrink sharply once the transition reaches 70-80% of total market. Mainstream industries will not buy IT product, they will simply consume IT as service, just like they consume electricity or water. Net effect? Growth disappears!
Colin's model gives us another tool to reach the same conclusion, albeit with far more analytical rigour.

Male/Female %Male / %Female

2013-10-10T21:15:00.000+05:30

More often we are oblivious of the misconception and dogmas we carry around. Alan Turing, the famous computer scientist who formalized the concept of algorithm and broke WWII German code Enigma was incarcerated and cursed to ignominious humiliation for his homosexual affinity by the authority, would have died happy had he not killed himself prematurely. The society that he belonged to, took few more decades to learn and accept that homosexuality is not a social crime. Since that time, science has advanced a lot. Big data analytics with massive computational power enabled the scientist to analyze extremely large demographic and biological data with spectacular ease. Human Genome along with many other species are decoded entirely. Many of the irregularities which used to be considered as nature's whims earlier, are understood to be simply a statistical norm. How real, for example, is the male/female difference? Do they have completely different design?
When does a foetus become male or female? Medical science tells us that a human embryo starts showing first sign of transformation to boy/girl at around 9th week in the womb. In other words an embryo assumes its sexual orientation quite early in its journey. So, one could safely assume that male/female boundary is quite distinct, right?
Actually no.
We already know that there is a sizable human population who do not abide by this clear boundaries, for whom the boundary is less physical and more social. The data shows that 1 out of every 1600 newborns are intersexuals and 1 out of every 100 new born is ambiguous w.r.t sex. Calculate the number for present world population and you will appreciate that data better.
Biological evidences aside, how about human mind? Does it have innate male/female traits?
There are popular [and pseudo-scientific] beliefs that male and female differences are irreconcilable. How often have you heard "all men are alike" or "Even God can't read women's mind!"? There are no reasons that millions of copies of 'Men from Mars, Women from Venus' are sold worldwide, right?
Well latest researches indicate otherwise. Neuroscience tells us that male/female is a continuum rather than well-separated set of traits. In this paper [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176412/] the author tells us that "For most documented sex differences in the brain, however, and in particular in regions involved in behavior, emotion, and cognition, there is a considerable overlap between the distributions of the two sexes."
It asserts further that, "Current data on the effects of environmental events on brain structure strongly suggest that heterogeneity in the “male/female” type of an individual’s brain characteristics is the rule, rather than the exception. Specifically, prenatal and postnatal manipulations (e.g., exposing dams to stress, maternal separation, rearing conditions, early handling, acute and chronic postnatal stress, prenatal exposure to psychoactive drugs, anesthesia) have been shown in rats to reverse, abolish, create, or exaggerate sex differences in brain characteristics.." The paper concludes therefore that for us, 'different individuals will have different combinations of “male” and “female” brain characteristics'.

Top graph shows distinct
non-overlap in physical strength
while the bottom graph
shows striking overlap in
psychological trait of
assertiveness[source: Huffington Post]

Another recent research published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology also tells us that when it comes to psychological traits, there is a whole lot more overlap than there is difference [see the bottom graph in picture]. [source: Huffington Post].
Brains, therefore, appear to be neither “male” nor “female,” they are “intersex”.
So next time, you try to blame the other sex, think twice!
And in case you are curious to know what percentage your brain is male/female, try this BBC quiz:

Sleeponomics

2013-09-27T17:11:00.002+05:30

A century ago, Thomas Edison commented, "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Considering in average 1/3 rd of the day one spends in sleep, you would sleep away around 25 years by the time you reach 75. So it does look like that sleep is serious waste of time especially in the present globalized world where business runs 24 hours a day. Many of the techies and IT managers are likely to agree to Mr. Edison at least some time, if not all the time. Especially when the deadline is in the near-horizon, many would wish all the sleep away.
There are also those who boasts of managing life with only a few hours of sleep. I recently met a person, in his forties, recuperating in the neurological ward of Fortis hospital after suffering a mid stroke. He said there are some people whose strength is working for long hours, 14-18 hours to be precise and he considers himself in that category. Question is if sleep is really wasteful for your well-being or it is necessary for your well-being. If you are intrigued by the question you may as well read till the end.

One article in Nature tells us that "20% of American adults reported being so sleepy during the day that it interferes with their daily activities at least a few days per week, and a frightening 17% reported falling asleep while driving within the last year. The risk of sleep-related accidents is compounded by the fact that people are unable to judge the likelihood that they will fall asleep, and by the related misconception that falling asleep is a slow process. In fact, sleep-deprived people commonly enter so-called 'microsleep' states, where they fall asleep for brief episodes lasting several seconds, during which time they are perceptually 'blind', often unaware that they have fallen asleep.
Accidents aside, one likely consequence of sleep deprivation is memory impairment. It was shown several years ago that a particular type of memory consolidation—improvement after practicing a visual discrimination task—does not occur until many hours after practice has ended. Using cleverly designed sleep deprivation experiments, researchers extend this result by demonstrating an absolute requirement for sleep within 30 hours of training. Importantly, it was the occurrence of sleep and not the simple passage of time that was critical."

There are other researches that tell us that 'within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways'. Russel Foster, a neurologists and sleep researcher, explains in a recent TED talk that it is not just the laying down of memory and recalling it, our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. "In fact, it has been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important."

In a just published article in Nature, researchers found that "fear extinction may be selectively enhanced during sleep, even without re-exposure to the feared stimulus itself." So sleep is crucial to help you beat your everyday paranoia and other neuroses.
Orfeu Marcello Buxton, another neurologist told in NYTimes that in his research he found that sleep restriction or disruption increases obesity and diabetes risk, by decreasing insulin secretion, increasing blood glucose levels slowing metabolism (the study is here).

So it is kind of clear that lack of adequate sleep is bad economics for you, not only in long term but also in short term. So much so that there is more than $20 billion business[CNN Money report, 2006] came up to capitalize on the derivative of lack of sleep of high-earning people. In other words you increase your liability manifold compared to what you gain by curtailing your sleep.

But how much sleep is adequate for you?
Dr. Russel Foster tells you that you must listen to your body. If you are feeling irritated, tired or dull in the morning for no reasons, you probably are sleep-deprived and more you continue in that state, more you reduce your mental productivity as well as your overall well-being.

Read more
Dr. Russel Foster's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/russell_foster_why_do_we_sleep.html
Articles in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v3/n12/full/nn1200_1225.html
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3527.html

US loves GM crops!

2013-09-20T18:00:00.000+05:30

If you are living in US, you are most likely consuming GM [Genetically Modified] product, either with your full knowledge or not. As per the US Department of Agriculture, about 90% of all Corns, Soybeans produced in US are GM crops.[ latest report from USDA].
Should you be concerned? Well, there is a good number of those who believe you should be. Here is one article that warns that viral genes in GM crops are likely to promote diseases. There are many other reports that warn you about serious pitfalls of consuming GM crops. Fact is we still do not have enough data to know for sure how genetically modified strains interact with our genes. With less convincing studies that prove otherwise, you are more likely taking a path that is going to impact all your future generations, genetically. At present GM production address two different problems that farmers face: 1. insect resistance and 2. large scale crop epidemic resistance more famously known as Herbicide-tolerance. But there is a large-population who are extremely wary of the long-term effects of these genetic modifications. After all, human have many genes in common with the plants that are being genetically modified and we do not know how the modified genes will impact continuous genetic variations happening in human cells.
Perhaps you want to know how other countries are dealing with GM crops. Unlike in US, Monsanto, the largest GM crops producer has taken decision to not pursue with producing GM crops in Europe [reports Telegraph, UK]. Fact is European Regulatory Authorities have been slow in providing approval to GM products. Perhaps they have taken cognizance to rising public opinion against GM crops in Europe. Public resistance to GM crops are also quite visible in India [GM brinjal was banned in India]. But somehow US appears to be unaffected by all these commotions. Surely the decision makers think GM crops are good for US. Some would argue that US traditionally favours new technological advancement and GM after all is new technology. But skeptics are not so sure if it is love for technology or love for dollars! Lot of dollars are already spent in US. Huge corporate investments are made in US. Many argue that corporate lobbyists are actively promoting GM everywhere to ensure that investment is protected.
This article provides an account of the money being spent in lobbying in US for GM crops.There are many other reports that claim that GM crops are aggressively being promoted in African and other countries. For instance, this Reuters report claims that U.S. tax dollars promote Monsanto's GMO crops overseas. Ghana apparently accuses US for pushing GM crops to their land, as per the recent report from The Guardian.
There is little doubt that however vocal the opposition/activism against GM be, GM is going to stay here and that is all the more reason for you to be aware of the state of the affair so that you can choose what is right for you.
This article below provides detailed account of GM crops in the context of India for those who like to explore more.

GM crops-Part 1: The truth about genetically modified foods
GM crops-Part2: The myth about food security
GM crops-Part3: The economics of genetically modified food

Finally, Nokia and Elop story reached logical end

2013-09-04T18:00:00.000+05:30

Two and half years ago, when Stephen Elop was brought in to lead Nokia, many asked the question openly if Elop was the trojan horse for Microsoft. Though Elop publicly denied that charge at that time, Nokia's journey for last two and half years with him at the helm, has however reached the conclusion that many feared with announcement that Microsoft is buying Nokia mobile business at $7.2 billion and Stephen Elop returning to Microsoft. With Steve Ballmer's announcement of retirement, people are making simple arithmetic with Stephen Elop. We, humans, are good in drawing sweeping conclusion based on only 2-3 data points and this is also no exception to that rule. Truth, as often is found to lie somewhere in between.
The legacy of Elop in Nokia is hardly anything to be jealous about. Since he came on board, Nokia's valuation came down by 85%, the market space where Nokia was world leader, saw Nokia receding ground to Samsung and other OEMs. The smartphone space which was the key element driving Nokia to cannibalize Symbiosis and embrace Windows OS, decidedly went with Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Now did anyone know for sure that these were going to happen when Elop came on board?
Social psychologists use the term Fundamental Attribution Error to our natural bias to attribute personal disposition instead of situational artifacts as a cause of certain eventuality. We feel higher satisfaction if we can find someone to hold responsible for an event that we do not like. So we feel doubly eager to attribute Nokia's ill-fate to Elop. Psychologists also tell us that that bias changes when one is involved and is answerable for the course of event. In the scenario where the person is involved, it is often observed that he/she attributes the cause of events to the situational changes instead of his/her own decisions. That means, Stephen Elop will attribute the cause of the present state of Nokia to the changing situations!
Rational minds would ask, "Was the decision taken only by Elop? Would Nokia board agree to allow Elop to take the decision if they knew they had better alternatives [other than going windows way] two and half years back?"
Given that the board members had access to all the information that Elop had, it is reasonable to assume that each member individually vetted all the different options in their personal capacity before agreeing to Elop's solution. What Elop most likely have done at that time is that he influenced these members in evaluating the potentials and risks that each option provided. He might have been successful in creating fear for future failure in sticking to existing course. He might have projected the value of Windows and Microsoft alliance much higher than it actually was. But ownership of the course steering lies with all the executive members of Nokia board.
Once the decision was taken, it was clear which path Nokia is heading. Mounting accumulated losses, market pressure, competition from Apple, Samsung and other Android-based smartphone OEMs took Nokia further away from its root and towards further grip of Microsoft.
But did Elop think that bringing Nokia mobile to Microsoft could make him a strong candidate for Ballmer's successor? Even if he did, how much could he bet that course of events will take the shape the way it happened when he took the plunge 2.5 years back? Nobody realistically could be sure. At most, he could do is play his cards the way he played and hope things will eventually take him to the coveted post that he might have been eying for.
Now how does this change for Microsoft? Would this bring the hardware success that eluded Microsoft and Ballmer all along? Well, fact is Nokia Lumia series with windows 8 has become a success. It is capturing market quite fast, providing a credible alternative to Android based smartphones, even at lower cost point. Merger in fact positions Lumia at stronger ground with control on both smartphone hardware and OS. It will give Lumia leverage to bring price of smartphone further down and present a credible competition to Android-based low cost phones in all emerging markets where the real smartphone battle has to be fought and won.
It will also help Microsoft to boost its advertising business where the battle with Google is being fought, by making advertisement more personalized for the users by integrating smartphone's on-device data with skydrive [Microsoft Cloud] and Outlook [Microsoft email]. But for this to work, Microsoft's existing strong culture of internal competition [and therefore wastage of creative bandwidth in political rivalry] must change and find a way to work like collaborative set of engineering/business functions. Lumia hardware engineering must be allowed to function independently of Windows software division for them to build on each other's strength. But if this strategy succeeds, Microsoft will have evolved itself for the new generation of users and move to a new position of strength.
So, good luck to Mr. Elop and RIP Nokia mobile [that's a bit hurtful for someone who always used Nokia handsets]!
The next news to watch is who is going to buy Blackberry/RIM!

You may also like to read these posts:
New frontier of marketing manipulation
Nokia in Mobile world Congress
Microsoft Online advertising business after Aquantive

India in a self-engineered financial crisis?

2013-08-22T23:30:00.000+05:30

Larry Elliott of The Guardian writes in his post, "India's financial woes are rapidly approaching the critical stage. The rupee has depreciated by 44% in the past two years and hit a record low against the US dollar on Monday. The stock market is plunging, bond yields are nudging 10% and capital is flooding out of the country."

At the time of writing Rupee breached 64.5/$

Yesterday, Ruchir Sharma along-with Dr. Pranay Roy and Arun Shouri dissected Indian economy in a talk show in NDTV's news channel. Ruchir and his team at Morgan stanley put together few charts to show where India stands today. I have extracted the data from video and

FDI flow shrunk to half in 5 years. Official data
can be found here

While Forex Reserve stagnated, CAD ballooned.
FM said that CAD will be contained to $70bn

ballooning short-term debt a disturbing aspect

put them in charts here. Since, May, 2013, FII are pulling money from both equity and bond market. Ruchir's chart showed that FII drew out around $12 billion since May, $2 billion from equity and $10 billion from debt. The tipping point as everyone seem to be pointing to is Ben Bernanke's announcement about "tapering" Quantitative Easing which in plain word means, from September, US will slowly reduce pumping money in the market in response to US financial recovery. As soon as the announcement came, foreign money [not locked in capital investment] started moving back to US putting huge pressure on Indian currency. But the fact is Indian currency is losing ground since last year, may not be as fast as it is losing between May and August. Indian Government did not appear to figure out the right move for the whole of the last year barring usual discourse of "Fundamentals are Strong". As GDP slowed, Current Account Deficit and fiscal deficit both ballooned while foreign exchange reserve started coming down slowly.

India did really bad compared to other EE

Contrast this with China which is still an export-surplus economy and still growing faster than India. While India's financial policies are tentative at best, China maintains firm grip on the value of Yuan. Ruchir showed that top 10 Indian companies have expanded their debt 6 times. The direct effect from that is, as he pointed out, some of the companies do not have enough cash flow to take care of interest payment. It is interesting to note that these corporate debtors have taken loans mostly from Indian banks and as an effect, banks' Non-Performing Assets have expanded a lot. CBI director made a statement yesterday that they are investigating NPA with various banks and asked

Indian Companies are adding their share of debt

respective CVOs [Chief Vigilance Officers] to assist them with the data. So why are these relevant? Well that is the point Ruchir is making. He is saying India is actually in financial crisis and a large part of that has to be attributed to ill-decisions or confusing financial policies that Government owns. In other words, this crisis rather than an effect of global slow-down, is largely self-engineered.
You can watch the video here

What Ruchir explained in the hour-long session is summarized by Larry quite well. He wrote, "In a sense, this is a classic case of deja vu, a revisiting of the Asian crisis of 1997-98 that acted as an unheeded warning sign of what was in store for the global economy a decade later. An emerging economy exhibiting strong growth attracts the attention of foreign investors. Inward investment comes in together with hot money flows that circumvent capital controls. Capital inflows push up the exchange rate, making imports cheaper and exports dearer.

Widening FD and CAD signal the crisis

The trade deficit balloons, growth slows, deep-seated structural flaws become more prominent and the hot money leaves."
How does India get out of this mess? Well, here things become less convincing. Investor's confidence has to be reinstated and that Bloomberg suggests, can only happen after the election! CAD has to be brought down to manageable 2% of GDP but that requires cutting down subsidies to corporates and energy prices and probably in food subsidies too. That is not going to happen before next election. Forex reserve may not be enough if the rupee continues its downward journey and India may have to go back to IMF again.
Now one thing we must remember is that Economics as an applied body of knowledge is not an exact science, neither the economists can claim to accurately predict future given a circumstance. Things are messy because there are many competing interests and themes that are involved when one talks about country's economy. Dynamics between these competing chain of events are never clearly understood. So it become news when a prediction actually turns out to be true. Success of prediction is an exception rather than a rule, here. So, India's economy can collapse and go back by 5 years or circumstances may change and that could propel India to adopt right path. Indian FM spoke this afternoon and told that structural changes are being undertaken by the Govt. He assured that CAD and FD will be contained and growth will start by next quarter. While the market believes in his intent, it is not sure how those will be done and till people see any tangible results from Govt. policy changes, market sentiments are likely to remain the same and rupee will continue with its down-slide.
Either way, we have little options other than preparing ourselves for another gloomy decade of Indian economy. Journey will not be easy, weak economy opens political fissures, slows down country's growth, expands the rich-poor divide more, which in turn can lead to more social violence. But the silverline is that India has gone through worse phases in past. As one retired DRDO scientist told me once, fact that India still continues to exist as a country and a nation even after all the misadventures of its political masters and bureaucratic misdirections from its executives, proves beyond doubt [to him] that India is a holy land!
So let's hope that holiness of India will help us to sail through this time.

New Frontier of Marketing: Leveraging your emotional vulnerability

2013-08-21T23:03:00.002+05:30

For last two years, I have been writing about this in this blog in different posts. The web has changed the world permanently and irrevocably. A large chunk of world population literally live inside the web. New generations will never know what it used to mean to live in analogue not-always-connected world. Thanks to myriad digital contraptions that you carry all the time, your location trail is available to anyone who is interested. New tools are continuously being developed that enhance the depth and breadth of the information trail that you leave behind in the web. But you already know that! You buy more powerful, more sophisticated smartphones, tablets which provide you faster apps to post your photos and videos, chat with your friends, 'like' posts and comment on the posts in real time while on move. They make your web-presence lot more richer, more lively. You want people to know and feel the length and breadth of your persona. At both conscious and unconscious level, web is your new sense organ, it breaks the local limits of your sense experiences and makes you expressions available across the web for others to notice.. Noticed, they definitely are but probably not the way you thought. We all like to believe that each of us has his/her own unique persona with his/her own evolved way that arms him/her to deal with reality in a manner that is different from other. So, even though we know that advertisers and product marketeers are targeting us to sell their stuff, we think that we know how to manage them, how not to let them intrude into our emotional space, how not to let them influence our decision making..But do we?
There are experiments made and being made that try to find out how far your emotional irrationality is unpredictable. And do not be alarmed. Most of the researches overwhelmingly conclude that your emotions are predictable, however irrational they are! You panic when situations are presented that unsettle you, like everyone does; You feel vulnerable when you face unfavourable situations, like others do irrespective of where you live or which language you speak. You react, when you feel violated, belittled, like others do. You believe however ludicrous the content appears to be, when the same content is fed continuously to you through all your trusted information channels.
Now to be able to reliably guess your emotional state, one needs histories of situations and your reactions to them. I am sure you would agree that those who you consider closest to you, are closest because you think they understand you i.e. they know your emotional topography; what you like, what your soft spots are, how you react in a given scenario. And they sure do, otherwise, why would you confide them in? Why would you reach out to them when you are disturbed, when you feel emotionally vulnerable? And they know you because you have let them know the trail of emotions and situation that you have gone through. In the new scheme of things, more you lose physical human touch, more you lay bare your emotions in the social portals, in your chats. And with the power, sophistication and reach of the analytics engines that present marketing world has at its disposal, those emotional signatures of yours are computable and usable in real time. After a heated argument with your spouse, when you are feeling particularly low and probably are looking for bear to cool you off, you are likely to welcome a pop-up ad that tells you about a new waterhole at just 1 km distance. Or if a sudden change of events at the stock market has made you feel particularly shaken financially, and you have a payment date nearby, how would you react to a call from bank offering some mortgage offer specifically customized for you? These, you probably would think benign. But how would you react when you learn that your kids are also being subjected to this type of massive, focused advertising manipulations? And they will not be limited only to product marketing, these tools can and will be used for mass opinion engineering. The Extreme the views are, the more pitched and intense would be the manipulation. Who draws the ethical boundary? Who monitors whether that boundary is being respected?
Welcome to the world of new age marketing manipulation! You just cannot run away from this new reality of personalized advertizing and campaigning. Typically, a country would have legal framework to protect its citizen from this type of manipulative assaults but in this case, technology developed faster than the laws governing the advertising Industry. Which means you have no laws to protect yourself or your kids from advertisers to use your online /on-device data in order to present you their product/solution when you cannot refuse. There is no law to stop the advertisers/online campaigners use your personal data to get the result that they want. I saw a recent study report, by M. Ryan Calo from Washington University, that highlights the incompleteness/inadequacies of existing consumer protection laws.
He observes, "Today’s firms fastidiously study consumers and, increasingly, personalize every aspect of their experience. They can also reach consumers anytime and anywhere, rather than waiting for the consumer to approach the marketplace. These and related trends mean that firms can not only take advantage of a general understanding of cognitive limitations, but can uncover and even trigger consumer frailty at an individual level.
A new theory of digital market manipulation reveals the limits of consumer protection law and exposes concrete economic and privacy harms that regulators will be hard-pressed to ignore."
I definitely would urge everyone to read his report which is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2309703. But more importantly, we should actively participate in public discussions so that fast erosion of private space be arrested now with strengthened legal definition of digital market/campaign manipulation.

Smartphone beyond 2013

2013-04-30T21:00:00.000+05:30

If you are checking this blog for some time, I would guess that you are aware of tremendous growth of smartphone as a market segment and probably are curious like me about what the future holds for this nice little device that have become indispensable part of our daily existence. I would bet that there are many among us who almost wear the device 24x7, well may be I should exclude the time when we sleep. The point is remaining connected all the time has become a necessary aspect of our life so much so, many would feel extreme mental trauma at the mere thought of losing the device. For handset vendors this is a place that anyone would dream to be in.

Monthly smartphone OS market-share chart: source comScore research

Billions of customers, Trillions of opportunities to know the users and create avenues to make money. Apple showed the way to others about how to create revenue opportunities by not only selling device but from everyday use of the phone. Google and Microsoft are in the race now. At present device selling earns most revenue for Apple but eventually as the evolution of device reaches mature stage, it will be the apps and other cloud services that Apple provide that become larger revenue avenue for Apple. Google and Microsoft are preparing themselves for those days and chances are high that Google and Microsoft's revenue share will be higher than Apple's, since there will be more smartphones that will use Android [and Windows likely] than iOS. For a quick reference on relative market growth so far for smartphone OS like Android, iOS, Windows, see the latest chart from comScore.

Does this mean that future innovations in smartphones are going to to be driven by OS vendors?

To answer the question, let us look at Nokia's published mobile strategy after their OS strategy shifted to Windows OS. It says clearly that while Nokia will depend on Microsoft for OS, Nokia's R&D will focus more on Services (Cloud-aware Apps development) and Mobile Phone hardware platform to deliver an enriching experience to the users. The strategy is somewhat similar to what Samsung is following of late, though Samsung is focusing more on phone platform at present. In fact Nokia ans Samsung are telling us that the hardware platform is going to dominate the innovation space for smartphone in the near future. We will see, faster and more powerful processor [Qualcomm's 1 GHz snapdragon processor already found popularity], powerful graphics processors, sleek form factor, brighter and sharper display, flexible touch screen, sharper camera, faster data with LTE and next-generation Wi-Fi, more sensors to gather data about user's surrounding and emotional presence. Though there will not be perpetual energy source, battery life between two recharges will increase 10 times in next couple of years given that two large market segments viz automobile and smartphone/tablets are pushing the battery technology for faster innovation.

Google Glas

But real winners will be those who will combine all these components into an encompassing whole delivering an experience so rich that users will identify herself/himself with the phone. Wearable phones may be more available with the advent of Google Glass but some believe that differentiating smartphone innovations are going to be more service-oriented after the initial phase. Quoting CNET, Mark Rolston, the creative director for Frog Design, thinks that smartphones are just about out of evolutionary advances. Sure, form factors and materials might alter as manufacturers grasp for differentiating design, but in terms of innovative leaps, Rolston says, "we're at the end of gross innovation for smartphones." CNET observes, Rolston and other future thinkers who study the mobile space conclude, smartphones will become increasingly impactful in interacting with our surrounding world, but more as one smaller piece of a much large, interconnected puzzle abuzz with data transfer and information.Your activity will be captured and analyzed from second to second. Relevant information will be distilled by powerful analytics engine running on compute cloud and feed it back to your phone which will guide you in dealing with your surroundings in real-time basis. Gaming for example, definitely will be lot more richer and many of your usual chores of the day will be gamified. Gamification deals about changing a certain experience in a way that is more fun, more entertaining for the users. If you are marathon enthusiast, a typical gaming app will track your progress, provide real-time feedback, feed you about marathon events in your locality, help you to define targets and guide you progress towards them, help you to identify your competitions and show you in real-time how well or badly you are faring against them. The idea is to help you live in your personalized world as much as possible and future smartphone/tablets would be the gadgets to deliver that experience.

Further Clicks:

Stuff Article: http://www.stuff.tv/news/phone/imho/this-is-the-smartphone-of-the-future
Concept phone: http://itechfuture.com/concept-of-a-smartphone-morephone/
CNET news article: http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-57578982-85/smartphone-innovation-where-were-going-next-smartphones-unlocked/
Google glass page at Google+: https://plus.google.com/+projectglass/posts

Accelerating 4G

2013-04-19T22:30:00.000+05:30

Months ago, I conjectured that given the growth 4G technology and slow customer adoption of 3G, India may jump to 4G sooner. While Indian operators are slowly ramping up their 4G network deployment, 4G is not likely to see strong growth before 2014. But showing all signs that 4G is gaining strength faster, Verizon reported that they are banking on 4G data growth to fuel their revenue growth in a saturated subscriber-base of US.
In its recently published report, Verizon said that almost 50% of its all present data traffic is on its 4G LTE services, covering more than 260 million Americans. Verizon also said that it now had a total of 21.6 million LTE-enabled devices on its network, a rise of 23.3% on last year.
That shows clear sign of 4G acceleration. However it does not tell us whether that growth is happening at the cost of Wi-Fi or CDMA/3G. In US, Wi-Fi is more ubiquitous compared to other developed countries. So data growth could be at the expense of CDMA/3G or it could be simply complementing Wi-Fi hotspots. However from its report, it appears that Verizon is converting its CDMA data connections to LTE. Verizon may start supporting voLTE this year. That would initiate complete switchover to 4G for its subscribers. AT&T and Sprint are not too far behind. Both have already started 4G data service and fast expanding 4G coverage in more US cities [ source: techradar].
Europe's scenario is little complex with each country at different phase of 3G/4G adoption. Telecoms.com lists plan from various networks in Europe for launching 4G service. Europe's recessive economic condiiton has slowed down 4G adoption a little. The question whether it is more profitable to continue with 3G or it makes better economic sense to transition to 4G, is going to linger with European operators this year. A recent study from Arthur D. Little and BNP Paribas seems to warn that European operators with present inclination to keep 3G and LTE data tariff same, may not see growth in next 3 years. Now if the operators increase LTE tariff, it is bound to have a slow-down on overall adoption rate of LTE in Europe. Since Economics always has the upper hand, European operators may focus on near-term profitability and instead of committing a full-scale overhaul from 3G to 4G, they most likely will take a staggered approach.
Japan on the other hand has traditionally been first-adopter in wireless telecom space. DoCoMo launched its 3G network in Japan when 3GPP were still debating about the 3G standard. In fact 3G proliferated lot faster in Japan compared to any other developed country. So to understand whether 4G is really being considered as replacement for 3G, we need to look at Japan.
In a clear signal that Japan may transition to 4G sooner than anticipated, CN reports that
• Japan’s total mobile infrastructure (2G, 3G, 4G) market surged 78% in 2012, to $3.9 billion, owing to a strong LTE push fueled by NTT DOCOMO, KDDI, and SoftBank Mobile and
• 3G declined 11% in Japan in 2012

"LTE revenue in Japan soared 188% and will keep its momentum this year, driven by accelerated rollouts and the increasing willingness of service providers to shut down 3G,” notes Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research.

ABIresearch, another reputed research firm, projected LTE data traffic to grow by 200% this year. "4G LTE traffic is accelerating, with a growth rate of 207% in 2013 compared to 99% for 3G traffic.", it said. In India. Reliance announced yesterday that it received Govt''s permission to start testing of its LTE network including voLTE service. And if one has to go by the local buzz, Airtel and Vodaphone are planning full voLTE launch by early next year.

So it looks like that US and Japan are going to see strong wireless data growth over LTE this year. Europe will see slow transition from 3G to 4G. China and India will most likely see comprehensive data and voice growth over LTE by early 2014.

How India influences mobile handset innovation

2013-04-15T00:54:00.000+05:30

Innovation in any Industry needs three crucial elements, buyers' support, Industry growth and competition. If buyers do not show interest in new products, innovation loses its spirit. Market growth is the necessary incentive for Industry to bring new products. Competition is the guiding force that shapes up the Innovation for the new products.

From another perspective, Innovation takes the industry to future and future must be enticing enough so that players from present try their best to adopt innovation to move to future. Apple saw the future of it when it took up the job to innovate for a smartphone. The future where people crave to have an Apple smartphone was very enticing for Apple to invest in smartphone development back in 2003.

Indian market at present brings certain crucial elements which are truly enticing for the handset innovators, looking at future growth.

First, Indian market brings world's second largest mobile user base. As per the recently published data, India has around 700 million active customers, more than double the US mobile user-base with a population penetration of around 6%. The chart below from Mobithinking provides a good comparativee view of the top 5 mobile markets.

Table 1: The 100 million club: the top 10 mobile markets by number of subscriptions
Country	Mobile subscriptions in millions	Population in millions (source: World bank)	% of population	3G/4G subscriptn in millions	% of popu- lation	Sources (subs; 3G subs)	Last update
World	5,981	6,973.7	85.8%	1,593.9	23%	ITU Informa WCIS	End 2011 Dec 2012
China	1,091.9	1,344.1	81.2%	212	15.8%	China Mobile; China Unicom; China Telecom	Nov 2012
India	Active: 699; total: 906.6	1241	73.1%	70.6	6%	TRAI Informa WCIS	September 2012 Dec 2012
United States	321.7	311.6	103.3%	256.0	81%	CTIA Informa WCIS	June 2012 Dec 2012
Indonesia	260	242.3	107.3%	47.6	19%	BuddeComm Informa WCIS	May 2012 Dec 2012
Brazil	259.3	196.7	131.8%	65.5	33.3%	Anatel/Teleco Anatel/Teleco	Oct 2012

Mobithinking also tells us that globally smartphone and tablet shipment are expected to grow between 2012 and 2016 while sells for other types of mobile devices will decrease. Broad categories (of phones) that are being used here are are smartphones, tablets [top tier] and feature phones [tier 2]. As per their collated data, there were 1.7 billion mobile phones sold in 2012, which was similar to the number sold in 2011. Most of the analysts pegged Year over-year growth at around 1.2-1.9%, which is construed to be flat-growth. However, segment-wise growth may vary considerably.

As per Mobithinking, around 59 percent of handsets sold in 2012 were feature-phones. In other words feature-phones took the top-spot in terms of number of units sold.

Let us now look at data for Indian market, Cyber Media Research reports in CY 2012, March 2013 release that India registered 221.6 million mobile handset shipments for CY (January-December) 2012 which is around 20.8% Y-oY growth. Their chart below shows that feature-phones sold most. So Indian market is no exception to global trend.
Smartphones sold lot less compared to feature phones but the important part is that it is the fastest growing segment, with a whopping 36% Y-o-Y growth. Smartphone sells are projected to grow at the cost of featurephone segment in next few years.

Table 2. India Mobile Handsets Market: CY 2012 versus CY 2011 (in terms of unit shipments)

Form Factor	Shipments (CY 2011)	Shipments (CY 2012)	Year-on-Year Growth, CY 2012 over CY 2011 (%)	Half Year-on-Half Year Growth, 2H 2012 over 1H 2012 (%)
Mobile Handsets	183.4	221.6	20.8%	16.4%
Featurephones	172.2	206.4	19.9%	11.3%
Smartphones	11.2	15.2	35.7%	75.2%

Source: CMR’s India Mobile Handsets Market Review, CY 2012, March 2013 release

Top 3 Mobile Handset vendors

Top 3-5 players in most Industry define the trend. However in handset market the top -5 list is not a very stable list. Table -3 is a chart from Gartner and it illustrates some interesting points. It shows that except Apple and Samsung all vendors in fact lost their market share last year. It also shows that Blackberry/RIM and Sony did not figure in top-5 list. Another interesting point to note is that three out of top-5 spots are taken by Asian vendors [Samsung and LG are Korean vendors while ZTE is Chinese].

Table 3: Top Five Mobile Phone Vendors Globally, Shipments, and Market Share Calendar Year 2012 (Units in Millions)

Vendor	2012 Unit Shipments	2012 Market Share	2011 Unit Shipments	2011 Market Share	Year-over-Year Change
1. Samsung	406.0	23.4%	330.9	19.3%	22.7%
2. Nokia	335.6	19.3%	416.9	24.3%	-19.5%
3. Apple	135.9	7.8%	93.1	5.4%	46.0%
4. ZTE	65.0	3.7%	69.5	4.1%	-6.5%
5. LG	55.9	3.2%	88.1	5.1%	-36.5%
Others	737.5	42.6%	716.8	41.8%	2.9%
Total	1735.9	100.0%	1715.3	100.0%	1.2%

Source: IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, January 24, 2013

Now let's look at the Indian market. As per the Cyber Media Research, the top 3 vendors are:

Table 4. India Mobile Handsets Market: Leading Players, CY 2012 (% of unit shipments)

Player	Rank – Overall	Share – Overall (% of unit shipments)	Rank – Featurephones segment	Share – Featurephones segment (% of unit shipments of featurephones)
Nokia	#1	21.8%	#1	22.5%
Samsung	#2	13.7%	#2	11.5%
Micromax	#3	6.6%	#3	6.5%

Source: CMR’s India Mobile Handsets Market Review, CY 2012, March 2013 release

A curious addition to the above list is Micromax, an Indian vendor. I don't know why but they did not publish top-5 list but if they did, I suspect Karbonn, another Indian player would figure in the list. It is important to note that all the internationally well-known vendors like Apple, Sony, LG, HTC, Blackberry/RIM also operate in Indian market beside Nokia and Samsung but except Nokia, Samsung, Sony and LG, most have their participation limited in Smartphone category. As far as featurephones are concerned, Nokia traditionally had huge presence with almost 70-80% market share in India. They lost shares of the market to Samsung largely but also to Micromax, Karbonn and other small players in India. This page provides a quite comprehensive list of Indian brands in the handset market.

Influence on handset innovations

Commenting on the results, Faisal Kawoosa, Lead Analyst, CMR Telecoms Practice said, “Although we see a huge market ‘hype’ around smartphones, the fact remains that the India Mobile

source: Business Today

Handsets market is still dominated by shipments of feature-phones. On the other hand smartphone shipments are growing fast. This indicates India is still a ‘new phone’ market, where feature-phones contribute to the bulk of shipments compared to replacements or upgrades.”

“This propensity on the part of Indian subscribers of mobile telephony services to purchase large numbers of feature-phones has paved the way for the establishment of Indian brands, which are largely focused on this segment.” Some interesting features that these phones provide but generally are not available in established brands are, support for multiple SIMs in single handset, powerful speakers and strong LED that can double up as torch in night.

One should not forget that none of the Indian vendors have manufacturing base in India. Here innovation to a large extent is about identifying the market segment, finding the right source of unbranded phones, packaging and creating a light-weight distribution network. One of the important USP of these handset vendors is cost-advantage. They provide similar set of features available in top-branded phones at almost 5 times cheaper price. Their margins are lower but they compensate that with high volume of sales. The fact that most of the Indian vendors source their phones from China, Taiwan or in Indonesia, is an indicator how thread-bare is their operational cost.

Buyer pressure, thus, has created a large innovation opportunity for low-cost feature phones and smartphones. Top vendors like Samsung and Nokia recognized the opportunity quite correctly and brought many low-cost feature-phones in the market in last two years. In other words they have decided to compete with small brands and unbranded mobile sets in India.

This is a very important change in business strategy from what they follow in developed countries. They took this path because they very well know that these low-cost vendors once successful in feature-phones will eventually attack them in the higher-price smartphone segments. Unless they learn to compete at the low-cost segment, they stand to lose the entire segments.

The question is how does it influence global handset innovation. Innovation has primarily two enduring impacts: 1. it helps industry find technology alternatives that are more viable to the Industry and 2. it also pushes the overall cost of development for a product on a downward slope.

Once the likes of Nokia and Samsung figure a way to bring down cost to remain competitive in Indian market, they will apply the learning to bring down their cost of development for higher-end products e.g. Smartphones too. First effect will be higher profit margin for higher-end products but in the long run it will bring down average cost of smartphones due to competition between themselves.
At present highest end smartphones like Blackberry Z10, Sony experia's latest model Z, Apple iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy Note II, Nokia's most powerful Lumia model cost between Rs 34,000 - 44,000 [Blackberry Z10 costs Rs 43,000], in India. These price in absolute terms are way too high compared to US or European market. Undoubtedly this has created a space and an opportunity for innovation, for cheaper smartphones here.
Chinese manufacturers, recognizing the opportunity have formally created a consortium which will operate in the Indian market directly and help the Chinese manufacturers establish their brand-names in India. The Hindu on April 9, 2013 reports, "A consortium of Chinese mobile makers are planning a quiet entry into India with the help of a start-up, which would set up over 200 sales and service centres for nearly 50 different manufacturers. The start-up, a company called AndroidGuruz, plans to set up sales and experience zones, giving the Chinese companies a foothold into the Indian market."
After the Chinese consortium finds a foothold here, they will force all these players into a price-war. But I would argue that intense competition will eventually make Nokia and Samsung the winners globally since the feature-phone experience would have taught them the tricks of cost-leadership and with their larger scale of operation, they would make the last call, unless of course, Mr. Elop decides to be adventurous again!

Report Sources for further digging

Cyber media research report [http://cmrindia.com/more-than-221-million-mobile-handsets-shipped-in-india-during-cy-2012-a-y-o-y-growth-of-20-8-nokia-retains-overall-leadership/]

IDC report [http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23916413#.UWqx_6ODmSp]

Mobithinking Report [http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a]

Indian brands in handset market: [http://www.knowyourmobile.in/products/2315/top-10-desi-mobile-phones]

Business Today article: Top Indian handset makers changing tack to take on MNCs [http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/top-indian-handset-makers-changing-tack-to-take-on-mncs/1/193224.html]

4G phones in India

2013-03-06T17:00:00.000+05:30

As Indian operators are slowly but surely laying out 4G network, they face one specific challenge which we identified earlier. There are few 4G [LTE-TDD] based phones in the market. Most of the western phone vendors have started supporting LTE-FDD looking at European and US market. Indian operators like Reliance and Airtel realized that unlike GSM and 3G phones, they cannot depend on the market for the supply of 4G phones. They have to provide their consumers 4G phone that will work with their 4G network and that too at affordable cost. So, each operator is tying up with specific phone vendors to provide 4G phone for their consumers and predictably all the phone vendors that are being tied up, so far, are Asian. While Airtel tied up with ZTE and Huawei earlier, Reliance is tying up with Samsung to provide the 4G phones for its consumers. Mukesh Ambani's RIL announced today that it tied up with Samsung to bring branded 4G phones at Rs 5500. Albeit none of these phones support VoLTE [please check my previous post for more details on VoLTE] as yet.

ZTE's android based 4G phone. specs here

It is interesting that while western phone makers are lethargic to bring out LTE-TDD phones, all Asian phone makers are scampering to launch more 4G phones this year.
Last week in Mobile World Congress, China Mobile showcased 4 LTE-TDD phones, from brands such as HTC, LG, Huawei and ZTE[news report]
We should expect more announcement on 4G phones and deployment in the upcoming 4G World conference in India, scheduled on April at Gurgaon. You can check their website for more updates at http://www.4gworldindia.com/
Incidentally Videocon took a different path for 4G. While big operators in India picked up Chinese vendors for Equipment, Videocon tied up with Nokia Siemens for 4G-based broadband. "We intend to engage Nokia Siemens Networks as our Technology partner for our 4G network roll-out in the country Videocon Mobile Services Director and CEO Arvind Bali said in a statement. He said that going forward, the company will look to provide data service (internet) experience including Video Chat, Mobile TV, HD (high definition) TV content, digital video broadcasting etc,over its 4G network. [news report]

Nokia and Huawei in Mobile World Congress

2013-02-28T18:00:00.000+05:30

Mobile World Congress, being held in Barcelona from 24th Feb till today [check this page for the latest report from BBC], is decidedly one of the most prestigious and sought after annual congregation for both technologists and Industrialists across the world. Every leading vendor brings its latest inventions here be it a technology proof or a product, to make its presence known to the world. While there were different themes, I was particularly interested in how the leading vendors are positioning their products in respect to LTE (4G) and more curiously how they factor emerging markets like India and China in their strategy.

As for LTE adoption is concerned, MWC, 2013 has very little to showcase. LTE still is a high-speed data service for the most handset vendors. I instead tried to find what Nokia people are talking about.

Nokia, as always, an interesting component in cellular wireless Industry. Not the least because of the way it brought itself down from its unique leadership position in the worldwide handset market with windows strategy. In the changed market scenario, when most of its competitors from GSM days [before 3G], like Motorola, Sony-Ericsson have given up the race for the leading handset makers, Nokia still is trying its best to remain relevant. As per the recent survey, the top two positions in the handset vendors table are well-secured by Apple and Samsung. The top two OS in the race for smartphone OS are clearly Android and iOS. The dominance of Android and iOS is so overwhelming [check Apple and Google duopoly] that Blackberry positions itself aspiring for No.3 positions [CEO Thorsten Heins famously told reporters at the company's BlackBerry Jam developer event that BlackBerry 10 has a "clear shot at being the Number three platform in the market."- source: Neowin.]. Nokia's Windows-phone strategy is at best a limping response to the challenge, albeit slowly pulling some revenues for Nokia.

So I was curious what Mr. Elop would say in the MWC. Mr. Elop predictably sounded both ambitious and optimistic in numbers of interviews with virtually all media representatives in MWC. You can watch him below in the Bloomberg interview [courtesy Bloomberg]

Mr. Elop thinks Lumia strategy has started to pay dividends and his winning strategy is to make Lumia platform accessible to low-cost mobile market such as India. He appears to have claimed that Nokia would be the first in the market to make advanced features, that are only available in high-end smartphones, also available for cost-conscious customers. He mentioned about Nokia's Asha series of phone in India in one such interview.

Anyone who has been following the industry may beg to disagree with him. Fact is it was Samsung who first adopted the strategy of creating one platform for all its phones and tablets and then executed it to finesse. Once Samsung Galaxy proven itself as a good competition for high-end smartphone and tablet segment, Samsung aggressively pursued cost-conscious market by launching numbers of low-end galaxy-based phones, delivering popular features like wireless LAN, Facebook app, dual-SIM, touch phone to multitudes of India at affordable price [Trust me Samsung did not pay me to write this!]. Nokia's Asha was at best a delayed response to Samsung. The question is whether same strategy with Lumia will deliver bigger success for Nokia. There is no doubt that notwithstanding the loss of reputation of Nokia as the most sturdy phone maker in last two years, Nokia still is a force in the Indian handset market.

Huawei Ascend P2: courtesy PC Advisor

I, however, was particularly intrigued the way Huawei has been slowly becoming a serious brand in the handset market and cranking up newer products. In fact Huawei claimed to have brought out world's fastest smartphone with the launch of Ascend P2 which is its latest LTE-based Android smartphone making it position against both Samsung Galaxy and Nokia Lumia. [ you can read complete review from PC advisor here]. Silently Huawei has got its new LTE chipsets as well as brought out a new platform over Android following Samsung. Huawei in fact has been pushing its low-cost CDMA phones to India for quite some time and if one has to go by the buzz, people like them; they are cheap, light, sturdy and provide nice UI. I would expect Huawei to be lot more aggressive in Indian market when LTE takes the dominant position in India.

Indian Mobile market is one of the most attractive segment for the handset vendors; almost all of them agree that ignoring 250+ million strong customer base in India would be a strategic suicide. Fortunately beside being cost-competitive, vendors hardly need any large customization to their phones unlike Chinese or Japanese market. All that the Indian consumers want are proven technology and a sturdy and nice-looking phone. As far as LTE is concerned, as I mentioned in my last post, the technology needs another year to mature to replace the 2G for voice. So Apple, Blackberry and Nokia can afford to be slow with LTE -based product release but there is no doubt that in about two years when 4G replaces both 2G and 3G, chinese Huawei and ZTE will figure prominently in world-wide handset vendors table.
My previous posts on Nokia handset strategy:

India one step closer to pan-India 4G adoption

2013-02-19T16:01:00.001+05:30

Reuter reports that Indian Government has taken a decision this Monday to allow all the wireless broadband airwave holders to support voice over 4G by paying a one time fee of $306 million. This will remove the last regulatory hurdle to deploy LTE as the technology for both data and voice. Three large players, Reliance, Vodaphone and Airtel are expected to go full-steam in this year with LTE. For voice however, technology is still in the catch-up mode. Ideally, with LTE, the bearer protocol for the voice was expected to be voice over LTE. But voice over LTE still has some distance to cross before the technology can mature to substitute existing circuit-switched voice service provided by GSM. This is a case where market is moving faster than the technology. For countries like India, who do not have large technology R&D investment in LTE or 3G wireless, market driving technology is in fact a boon. India does not need to follow a particular country (e.g. USA) or a technology, it has the freedom and latitude to follow the best of the breed. Fact is although GSMA adopted voice over LTE as the bearer protocol service for LTE technology in 2010, world's first ever commercial deployment of voice over LTE happened only in last quarter of 2012 when SK Telecom of South Korea launched the service with Ericsson and LG as the technology partner in September, 2012 [news announcement].
Operators in US and Europe have been trying with alternatives to voice over LTE as an interim solution but none of them match the spectral efficiency that VoLTE can provide. Heavyreading article provides a good summary on the alternatives that operators are trying for providing voice service over LTE. I have pasted their summary table here for those who are hard-pressed for time.
As one can imagine, lack of clear choice impacts not only the network readiness but the handsets too. Huawei spokesperson stated last year that the aim is to bring voLTE enabled handset by 2013. Operators definitely want a single IP-based voice delivery solution, for LTE, which can simultaneously deliver voice, video and data so that it becomes credible deterrent against existing VoIP service like Skype. So there is no doubt that all the handset manufacturers would focus their resources to bring out fully voLTE capable handsets but challenge of interworking with multiple evolving technologies can be a serious hurdle. The hurdle can be somewhat reduced if the handset manufacturers work together. For a service to function smoothly, handsets from different manufacturers must agree on a single common procedure for voice call transfer, or voice/video call switch or roaming service. Some of them are part of the standard, but many are design artefacts which handset manufacturers must settle between themselves. For the first generation voLTE smartphones [from LG or ZTE] call switch quality appear to be satisfatory but power consumption appear to be on higher side [source]. Fallout of all these is, we may have to wait till the end of 2013, to see fully functional voLTE handsets from leading handset manufacturers like Samsung, Nokia or Sony-Ericsson. Indian operators have another hurdle. Indian operators have adopted LTE-TDD, as opposed to LTE-FDD that European operators adopted, following China and other Asian countries [check my previous posts]. This may mean that Indian operators may have to depend on Huawei or ZTE to bring the first set of handsets for Indian LTE voice/video consumers.Incidentally Airtel last year launched LTE multimode based Huawei smartphone, in India, that actually use 3G CS fallback alternative for voice calls [first alternative in the table]. In other words they do not support VoLTE yet.
So what does all these mean to you? If you are a technology enthusiast looking forward to buy a 4G smartphone, it means that you perhaps would like to wait till the end of the year when voLTE enabled handsets will be launched. Otherwise you are quite likely to replace your handset with another 4G handset in 2014.

Towards the next personal evolution

2013-01-21T23:30:00.000+05:30

The simple fact that this piece is posted in 2013 and you are reading this sentence tells that we both have survived 2012 and its doomsday psychosis.
Congratulations!
Now let's buckle up and prepare ourselves for the set of neuroses that 2013 has brought for you.Well that statement may not be very accurate. Fact is 2013 is just a number that identifies certain number of days that our present civilization started counting from the 1st of this January (for historical reasons) and the neuroses are our gift to ourselves to make living that period more meaningful! After all, life is all about crossing milestones, achieving targets, isn't it? Now that running behind targets, goals, ambitions, has its cost, which we keep paying, most certainly, remaining unblissfully unaware of it.

Ravi, an employee in a large IT company, is finding his office environment too political for him to survive. But he carries a large EMI so he cannot leave his job till he finds another job. But market is bad and he lives almost every moment with an unconscious fear, fear of losing job. He has taken to heavy drinking; he drinks almost every evening, six days a week. His kids complain to their mom about their Dad, his wife complains to him that he has become more inaccessible to his family. Ravi accepts that his interaction with family is lot less that what should be, but he simply cannot help. They do not know that drinking is his only escape from the constant fear that he lives with, every sleepless minute of his day.
Anusha is a bright young working girl. She was promoted to a manager last year and got a new boss a couple of months after assuming new role. For last few months, she lives under a constant agony. She is almost sure that her new boss does not like her much and wants to replace her with one of his cronies. She thinks that he is after her career and is always trying to do something to show her in bad light. Every Friday she has a meeting with him and her heart starts besting faster before she enters the meeting room. Whatever they discuss in the meeting turns up negative for her. The dejected feeling remains with her long after the meeting ends so much so that she prefers to stay in her room during the weekends. She loves her job but she gets very stressed whenever she thinks about her boss. Rarely there is a night for her that passes without a nightmare. In fact she often wakes up in the night sweating profusely.
Murali is a VP in a mid-size marketing firm. Last year, he barely reached his target and this year he is not even sure if he will meet last year's target. If he cannot, he knows it would be end of his .....He refuses to think what will happen if he cannot. In this market there are very, very few positions in the market particularly at his level and there are always too many contenders, the younger, the more preferred. These days he hardly manages to get sound sleep. He lives with a constant fear everyday and he cannot even dare to think what he is afraid of.

All these scenarii [names are unimportant, in any case they are fictitious names], above, have one thing common, everyone of them is suffering from high neuroticism; there is a constant tension that each of them is living with. Tension, we know, is an effect of two opposing forces on the subject. A rope, that is pulled by two warring parties in a Tug-of-War game experiences a tension which in language of physics, is proportional to the non-differential components of the forces applied on it in two opposing direction [Differential component will pull the rope to one direction, likely to be winning team's direction]. But for Ravi, Anusha or Murali, or for that matter, you, where are the two opposing forces coming from? They are being generated by one's own mind. When one lives in two different realities at the same time, one inevitably feels the tension. One reality is created by one's desires, one's ambition and the other is the effect of the fear generated by one's reading of the situation and the environment one is living in.

Quoting Dr. C. George Boeree, an eminent psychologist, "Generally, neurosis means poor ability to adapt to ones environment, an inability to change one’s life patterns, and the inability to develop a richer, more complex, more satisfying personality.

The first point to note is that there are predisposing physiological conditions, for the most part hereditary. Most obvious is the temperament trait (or traits) referred to as neuroticism or emotional instability. Other traits may also contribute, such as extremely high or low conscientiousness. It may be that any inherited trait, when present in the extreme, makes the person more liable to develop neurotic problems.
The second point is that one’s culture, upbringing, education, and learning in general may prepare one to deal with the stresses of life, or not. These factors may also serve to override any predisposing physiological conditions, or to exacerbate them.
The third point concerns the triggering stressors in people’s lives which lead to the various emotional, behavioral, and cognitive symptoms of neurosis. These stressors can be understood as consisting of situations of uncertainly and confusion, usually involving interpersonal relationships, that overwhelm the person’s capacities, learned and/or inherited, to cope with those situations.
Basically, we deal with the world by using our previously acquired knowledge of the world, in coordination with our inherited capacities, to solve the problems presented to us as efficiently as possible. When we are up to the task, our emotional responses are kept to within tolerable limits. When we are not up to the task, we experience anxiety. This anxiety may develop into other emotional responses as well, depending on the details of the problem, our inherited traits, and our learned patterns of response to problematic situations.
When we experience repeated occasions of stress and anxiety, we begin to develop patterns of behavior and cognition designed to avoid or otherwise mitigate the problem, such as vigilance, escape behaviors, and defensive thinking. These may develop into an array of attitudes which themselves produce anxiety, anger, sadness, etc."
Interesting aspect is those who have complete faith in oneself or on the conjecture that everything in this world is happening as per a divine plan and is orchestrated by as one would call, God almighty, hardly goes through this trauma of neuroticism. There are plenty of examples where those who have overcome impossible hurdles or impossible targets against overwhelming odds demonstrated supreme faith in their abilities or God. Only those who do not fall in either category, is seen to be victim of neurosis.
Carl Jung observed many years ago, "[Contemporary man] is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food – and, above all, a large array of neuroses."
So, it appears that rationality, an extraordinary gift to mankind, which is central to all the scientific and technological progress that the humankind achieved so far, inflicts equally difficult challenges to a man's (woman's) existence. Rationality helps us to comprehend the world around us but it has its limitation on its capacity to absorb information. 21st Century with all its connectedness and hyperactive information flow, continuously bombards on our senses but our limited capacity of information processing creates incomplete description of the world around us. Our emotion tries to bridge that gap by creating a belief system or a system of faith which filters out any information that is incongruent to world-view of the mind. That in turn simplifies the reality but more importantly helps us to remain consistent in our thoughts and feelings. But if that belief system gets weakened by one's rationality what we are left with is a neurotic mind, a mind that has lost all the surety of its beliefs and faith. Is there a possibility that this mind will evolve into something better, something that is more advanced from the evolutionary perspective? Is there a possibility that this neuroticism can act as enabler for one's personal evolution?

What happens when a neurotic mind suddenly becomes aware of its own neuroticism? It is quite similar to when someone, who always criticizes about others' clothes and looks, suddenly becomes aware of his/her own grotesqueness. All pretenses fall, a solemn realization sinks in, the person evolves into different emotional being. That opens up the path to freedom from one's own neuroticism.
Not quite surprisingly it is similar to what Gautam Buddha taught 2600 years ago. Buddha told people, that one must accept the reality the way it is. Buddha called it living in suchness, tathata. The world is just the way it is, it is perfect in the way, it is. The problem is rather in the way we interpret the reality; in terms of good and bad, desirable and undesirable, long and short, left and right, right and wrong, positive and negative, always brewing tension between the two opposites. Reality however is not separable between two opposites. Just like there is no magnetic monopole, without 'wrong' there is no meaning to 'right', without 'right' there is no meaning of 'left' and vice versa. We must learn to be conscious of the world that is created inside our head by our senses and emotions and know both factually and emotionally that the world that we carry inside our head is not the same as we interact with our senses every moment. Reality at any moment is far too rich and too complex to comprehend with our limited information processing capacity. As that understanding comes in, one slowly becomes aware of one's own neurosis and at that very moment the mind becomes ready for the next evolution. It sees the essential nature of its own self vis-a-vis others. It sees the same energy that once exploded with big-bang around 14 billion years ago (or 14 billion light-years away), manifesting itself now (or here) as the face of one's dearest person and also as the face of one's worst enemy. In that it finds its own zen moments, the moments of true freedom, freedom from all ignorant differentiations, freedom from all futile and senseless attempts, to separate its own existence from the reality as a whole, the very seed of one's own neurosis.

Why we behave the way we behave

2012-12-24T17:17:00.001+05:30

"1984 is so popular because it's trivial and it attacks our enemies. If (George) Orwell had dealt with a different problem-- ourselves--his book wouldn't have been so popular. In fact, it probably wouldn't have been published" - Noam Chomsky

Noam chomsky was talking about 1984, George Orwell's classic novel that depicted a fictional dystopian system in future (1984 was future when George Orwell wrote that Novel) where people are always wary of 'Big Brother watching' from everywhere. It was a story of clear good vs bad, us vs them that fits well with our simplified mental model where problem is always 'out there'. But if at all, speed of information flow has changed drastically from Orwell's time. Pervasive connectivity and information sharing of 21st century, among many other things, also are bringing many facets of our existence close to each other, [somewhat like a cubist painting] forcing us, sometimes, to look at the problems as extensions of our own being.

Consider, for example, the following cases:

Krishnan is a young software programmer and is regarded by his friends as one with high analytical skill. Krishnan got very offended when he was prodded by one of his colleagues to try a non-vegetarian dish. "I am a brahmin!" He told his friend, in a tone of stern rebuke. His friend was surprised with the reaction for he thought food habit is one's personal choice and should not have anything to do with one's cast/community identity. However, Krishnan with his high analytical faculty could not see for himself that he is correlating two unrelated aspects of his life.
Pavan, an NRI, came to India to marry his long-time girl-friend. Otherwise quite liberal minded, and an advocate of gender equality, he did not see anything wrong in his family's expectation that all expenses of marriage must be borne by his fiancee's family.
Mrinalini is a retired college professor and is a mother of a son and a daughter. Although quite progressive in her views she is steadfast that her son should not be asked to enter kitchen nor he should be asked to serve his food by himself. Those jobs are either for her or for her daughter. She cannot see that this viewpoint of hers is starkly inconsistent to her otherwise progressive outlook.
Many otherwise reasonable and educated people were shown in many news channel who wholeheartedly believed in and prepared themselves for doomsday prediction imminent on 21.12.12 although NASA and other scientists have been diligently explaining in various media that all predictions are unscientific and unsubstantiated.
In the context of attitudes towards rape,an Open magazine article tells us that, "for victims above 12, their(victims') behaviour comes under scrutiny. There is always a suspicion that this girl must have done something that led to it. Since anyone below 16 isn’t old enough to give consent, the defence is always trying to prove the girl to be above 16. When it comes to victims in the 16 to 18 age group, “the court almost never believes it was rape”.

I guess I needn't tell that all names above are fictitious which only means that names do not bring any additional import to the situations they describe. The cases are not about the person as much as about the inconsistencies that they portray. When we look at those incidences together, the import and irony of Mr. Chomsky's comment are unmissable: We are pretty good at objectively analyzing an event when it is far removed from our own everyday behaviour and experience. But we are poorly equipped to see the inconsistencies, for what it is worth, in our personal viewpoints and therefore behaviours.
Many would argue that it is simply due to the fact that our belief-system is not amenable to rational analysis and our behaviours stem from long-held views and beliefs that became part of our identity as we grew up, quite unconscious of the very process. In other words, our behaviours, views and their inconsistencies are in essence, an expression of our self-inconsistent identities. An identity is self-inconsistent because certain aspect of the identity is inconsistent with some other aspect of it and different situations evoke different aspect of the identity and therefore if one were to find rational correlation among all the viewpoints, one is bound to fail miserably.
That brings forth two questions:
1. Is Identity a solid unchangeable entity?
2. How does the Identity form?
There are many scholarly article written by eminent psychologists that tell us that identity is quite malleable and plastic as opposed to what is commonly believed. Sometimes consciously but more often unconsciously we pick and drop elements of identity to adapt to our environment. For example, we pick up food habits, outdoor and indoor activities based on what majority stakeholders in our available social circles, like. One interesting observation that some of my friends made is relevant. It seems that many american-resident Indians adopt an US persona when they travel to India but act from the Indian persona when they are in US.

Self portrait by Salvador Dali

It appears that one's identity has few layers, the core of one's being mostly remain unchanged through various experiences but upper layer keeps continuously expanded, compressed based on psychological effects from those experiences. The core of our being determines our attitude to our basic needs of life, how we relate to others, what we look for in our lives. It also defines our primal fears and our perspective about God. This core Identity shapes up mostly when we grow up as children. Essentially emotional in nature, the formation continues till teen-age and remains very much unchangeable afterwards unless one goes though certain experiences that shakes up the very basis of one's existence. This core Identity is shaped by behaviour and beliefs of our parents and our immediate family, our teachers, our social structure and the emotional experiences that we undergo as children. We learn mostly when the parents and teachers are not trying to teach us. As a child one's critical reasoning faculty is under development and trust becomes his/her encompassing filter for information. Any information that comes from that trust circle is very likely to be taken as testimony [ref] unless that information challenges existing world-view in which case the world-view will be adjusted suitably. However it is very rare that core content of this identity change drastically after one grows up. In other words through this continuous and very active process of psychological dialectics we build up a lens, quite early in our life, which pretty much defines our beliefs, our values, our moral fabric, the way we see ourselves vis-a-vis others when we grow up. Eventually that lens defines one's identity, becomes the windshields through which one sees the world and the reflection of her along her journey of life. One therefore can understand why we are unable to look at our own inconsistencies objectively, even if that inconsistency is very apparent. Perhaps we can make an attempt to be aware of those inconsistencies and since childhood is the most important and therefore most vulnerable time for every person, as the parents of our children, if we are more conscious of our own limits of rationality and our beliefs, we probably would help them to develop to better grown-ups, little more consistent than we have been, little more rational in their outlook and behaviour, more objectively aware of their selves in respect to the rest of humanity and universe.
That appears to be the best gift a parent can give to his/her child. Life for them would then be not a fearful and isolated sojourn of survival of selves but a ceaseless opportunity to learn about the wonders and elegant laws of nature, which we are intricately and inextricably part of, as a single undivided whole.

21.12.12, Mayan Long count Calendar and collective fascination to Doomsday

2012-12-20T18:43:00.001+05:30

My friend's ten-year-old son was not his usual self; he was not talking, asking questions or showing any interest in chocolate bar. He, his father told, could not sleep last few days because he is very afraid. "Why?", I asked. He said, his son has been reading all stories of global warming and doomsday prediction and is very worried now about future in general. I was almost choked in my attempt to restrain my sudden urge to laugh. Kids, I know from experience, take it as personal insult when adults do not take them seriously. Only if they knew that adults become adults only when they learn not to take all that is said and professed with utmost seriousness! Fact is our daily newspapers in desperation of making everything in print newsworthy, put colours in order to catch readers' attention. Often that makes a docile information like certain end of counting cycle, an ominous prediction! Mayan long count calendar ends their longest cycle on a day which incidentally happens to be 21st December, 2012 in Gregorian calendar (there are different opinions on the accuracy of the date). As such this snippet of information is simply an archeological artifact. A curious mind could find interest in how they calculated and why they started on the day that makes the end day of the day coincide with winter solstice but nothing can catch everyday-person's imagination unless it can be translated to something ominous, some startling prediction, that aligns with his innate fear. Evolution has made our emotion particularly biased towards fear. Fear has been one strong guiding emotion that helped us, the human species, to survive against ruthlessness of nature but in the 21st century, when our everyday existence is less connected to natural cycle, fear has been out of job and has become a tool in the hand of institutional PR machines, Religious zealots and attention hunting media. Doomsday prediction is one easy way of grabbing attention, albeit an innocuous, harmless one. Unless someone becomes possessed by his fear [I am not making any connection to Connecticut shooting as yet] there is very low probability of any physical or psychological harm to anyone from this type of prediction. So I told him, only the stupid believes such kind of extreme prediction and being afraid of such stuff where one cannot do much is not a very intelligent behaviour. For a kid, it is embarrassing to feel afraid but not as much as to live with a stigma of being considered unintelligent. So that worked and next time when we met he ensured that I am updated that he is not afraid any more!

Mayan Calendar: photo of stone artifact,
courtesy: http://blog.needsupply.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/mayan_calendar1.jpg

For those who are curious to know more about Mayan calendar, this wiki page provides a good synopsis. It seems that Mayans may have understood the precession of equinox, but perhaps not as precisely as we know today. It is highly unlikely though that they understood the basic science behind it or actually made any connection to it [Science as we know, did not have any explanation before Newton]. Far less probable that they could connect it to galactical alignment [Solar system appear to be crossing the equator-equivalent of milky-way galaxy for last few years, although many object to use of the concept of equator in the context of galaxy] as many doomsday predictors have alluded to.
But all these illustrate an interesting aspect of human thought process. Psychologists tell us that human mind as such is not adept to comprehend statistical patterns and more often it replaces that searching process with causal analysis by drawing line with only two dots, sometimes even approximating the second dot. More startling the conclusion is, more it is capable of invoking innate belief system where the answer is made readily available. In its bias towards definite actionable knowledge, the mind often makes mistake of substituting with belief for missing facts, succumbing to known fear instead of diligent fact-finding, choosing to panic without being conscious of the choice. It requires lot more emotional awareness to be not swayed by meaningless sensationalism and active opinion campaigning process, prevalent in digital media.
On a more factual but less dramatic note, scientists made a prediction in june this year that, a giant gas cloud is on a collision course with the black hole in the center of our milky-way galaxy, and the two will be close enough by mid-2013 to provide a unique opportunity to observe how the super massive black hole named Sagittarius A* [mass equivalent to mass of 4 million suns] sucks in material, in real time.

And here is one recent photo that NASA published that shows the location of the super massive black hole at the centre by capturing X-ray burst which likely to have happened due to a large mass of gas that got sucked by the black hole Sgr A*

However this event is very unlikely to impact us, the earthlings, at least for now.

Microsoft's online adv business after its first quarterly loss and aQuantive writeoff

2012-07-29T07:35:00.000+05:30

We are continuing with your fictitious Microsoft interview in this post too. You were little lost in your thought when the interviewer came back with another person. Customary to strange interviewing process, the interviewer stepped out of the room 30 minutes ago, requesting you to wait for a while.
The interviewer simply introduces his companion as a colleague who works in Microsoft’s online advertising vertical. For our convenience, let’s call this colleague of the interviewer, interceptor. The interceptor thanks the interviewer, greets you nicely at which point you notice that the interviewer gets up and takes leave from both of you. As the interviewer walks out of the room, the interceptor tells you that he would like this to be free-format discussion rather than a strict question-answer session. This is a new tack and it could mean that he will judge you based on how forthcoming you are in picking up the leads and how resourceful you are in fleshing up the conversation.
So, you start neutrally, “I read that Microsoft wrote off aQuantive and took a hit of $6.2 billion in its quarterly result. But you guys must be seeing this for some time?”
His eyes flickered, “Yes, you could say that.” He seemed to weigh his words before going any further. You decide to use silence as your tactical tool. Finally he spoke, “Online Advertising itself is a very new area and is going though continuous changes both from providers and advertisers’ point of view. Market saw explosive growth of online advertising spots in last two years, far exceeding the demand. In the hindsight, Microsoft may have put a little too high price for aQuantive.”

This is as far as it could get, you realise. You decide not to press further. The interceptor goes back to more familiar line and asks you to talk about your experience, your achievements, and your failures. These are fillers and you know that all you need is repeat your well-rehearsed pitch, not too aggressive, neither too submissive, not too short, neither too elaborate, leaving pointers that lead to known territory, your space of comfort. You know that he will play with them for next 30 minutes. The important thing here is to maintain the flow but to not make any obvious mistakes. Eventually he will move to the ‘challenge’ phase. He will use chosen few questions as deal-breaker, assuming you have managed to maintain his interest till that point.

“What in your view is situation with online advertising space?” he changes the line and gives you a large canvas.
“Online advertising is the future, no doubt, but it is highly likely that advertising itself will see a large transformation before we reach there.” His eyes tell you that you have grabbed his attention. Now you need to carefully steer it.
Basic purpose of advertising, to start with, is to reach out to its potential buyers. It starts with a process of building general awareness of the product, its functionality, its value both at functional and emotional plane. In a world that is information-deprived, such as in the post internet-era, advertising was essentially broadcast. Print media or TV/entertainment media were the avenues to reach its audience and the advertisement content producer’s sole aim was to create content that sticks in viewer’s mind the longest. Building a brand is all about creating lasting impression in customer’s mind, creating emotional connectivity with customer’s thought process.

In the internet-era, information access has been practically ‘on demand’. It is buyers’ media now. While TV and print media advertising continues and will continue to remain broadcast in nature, internet advertising must be focused on customer’s need and reaching to customer when his need arises. If broadcast advertising is more ‘push’ type, internet advertising is more a ‘pull’ type. Depending on the type of information that a person is searching/reading in the internet, the advertising agent has to pick and display the ad. If the agent provides too many irrelevant display ad, the viewer/user may block the content. So the role of the advertising agent is much more delicate, much more crucial here. With doubleclick, if Google has showed how to appropriate the value of display ads, it is also largely using its strength and dominance of its search engine. Microsoft with aQuantive and Bing although tried to emulate the model, fact that Bing commands a lot smaller share went against the model. Of course, with meteoric rise of Facebook, like the interceptor said, supply of advertising spots exceeded the demand by a large magnitude, bringing down the tariff of internet display ad overall.

Note : The average cost to reach 1,000 people with an online display ad fell to about $11.50 at the end of 2011 from $13.35 in late 2009, according to SQAD Inc, which tracks negotiated ad deals – source: Reuters

“Interesting! So how would you correct the course for Microsoft, if you are allowed to? What changes will you bring in?”

This unmistakably is the challenge question. Shying away is not only inappropriate, it will weaken your position. You must take this square on and try to be crisp while you are on it.

“I would start with basics. Microsoft is what it is because of Windows. I will start there. Windows is not only an operating system, it is a complete platform with whole lot of computing resources and with lot of crucial user-specific private data. Transferring the data outside user’s device would be tantamount to violating user’s privacy, so I will incorporate a sophisticated analytical engine inside Windows. It will continuously scan the information content being read/browsed and create a some sort of a live ‘top of mind’ list. When the customer invokes Explorer, I will provide a space which user can disable or resize or run in the background, if he likes to, but like news feed, this space will show display ads or links to the company that is absolutely relevant to his ‘top-of-mind-list’. More it is contextual, the better. Once this done properly same scheme can be used for Windows Phone too. Fact is with Phone the potential is lot higher. The phone soon is becoming the electronic gadget that will treble as communication device, entertainment device, gaming device as well as mobile commercial device and if I have a sophisticated platform like Windows, I will take full advantage of it by incorporating an analytics engine that maintains a live four dimensional profile of the user, the four dimensions being location, time, finance and emotional/behavioural state. With voice-assistance, I suspect that this, if it is done properly, it will be immensely useful to the customer too. Look at how popular Siri is for iPhone/iPad users and this will be lot more smarter that Siri! For amnesiacs, it will take the role of careful companion.

We will feed this engine with all the relevant advertising content which will be entirely contextual where high premium will be attached to relevance and physical/temporal proximity. That would not only create the channel that Microsoft is looking for, it will also be welcomed by its customers.

However, with the knowledge that Microsoft always works on competing strategies, I suspect that Microsoft’s post-aQuantive engineering team already is working on this line for it is the only way to deliver the promises of internet-based advertising which essentially pulls the right ad at right time to the right person, as many say!”

You did not notice when the interviewer came back but you seem to notice their momentary eye-contact as you were coming back from the whiteboard. You know that you have been fairly logical and accurate but were you a bit too assertive?

The interceptor tells you that he thoroughly enjoyed the discussion and gives you his card, when you realize your second interviewer is a Vice President in Microsoft.

How would you design a smartphone for Neanderthals?

2012-07-24T06:00:00.000+05:30

If you have been in the software industry for a while, it is likely that you know about famous questions that are supposedly asked in Microsoft Interviews. Questions like ‘How would you move Mount Fuji?’ or ‘how would you design Mr. Bill Gates’ bathroom?’ are so publicized that there are popular books that are written entirely on Microsoft interview questions. Imagine yourself sitting in one such interview and the interviewer throws the question nonchalantly to you. Now that Microsoft is seriously investing to establish itself as serious Mobile Operating System player [marketing campaign for Windows 8 in so advance shows how serious they are!], you better be prepared to expect such questions.

Smartphone for Neanderthals, a species that got extinct 30,000 years ago?? What would a species that barely might have learnt to speak [even that is debatable], do with an advanced communication device like smartphone in a world where the most advanced technology perhaps was about making a stone axe!

While they may be perfectly legitimate questions, you also know that, putting them across is not an option. It is the interviewer who gets to ask questions and only right that is given to you as an interviewee is to answer them sincerely.

Since the interviewer did only ask about handset device, you assume that interviewer already has some kind of teleporting technology and also the right to erect wireless towers going 30,000 years back in time. Your job at present is to decide about the form-factor and necessary functionality that would be useful to Neanderthals.

So you start jotting down few artefacts that you know about Neanderthals.

Neanderthals are not Gorillas, they are almost like us, so they can learn faster.
Neanderthals had no script, which means no SMS.
Would they know numbers? Very unlikely so no number keypad is needed, in fact no keypad is needed.
How would they identify each other? Visual cue should work, so the contact book would simply have images of different people.

Wow, that is good progress and in just a matter of minutes! You mentally pat yourself. In fact you now have started enjoying the exercise.

Those artefacts tell you that your form factor design should be very simple and mostly visual. That means you need two powerful cameras: one for watching the caller and the other for capturing the environment. Will it be confusing to use two cameras? You take a mental note that you will revisit that later. Next, you need a large LED display, may be a AMOLED, that gives bright pictures but also is more flexible and sturdy. It also will double up as touch screen where any visual cue can be treated as a clickable object. Each visual object will have a sound profile so that communication is closer to their senses. Poor Neanderthals do not have alphabets or numbers, right? So the device will look like a large rectangular tablet so that it is easy to hold in hand. Powerful microphone and speakers should be fixed on that.
What about battery recharge. Since neanderthals would not have any electrical charging facility of their own [except those that would be installed by the interviewer], you decide that you will equip the device with high-density thin solar-frame on the back and side faces of the tablet.
Now that you have decided on the form factor, you realise that two digital cameras, preferably with a wide-angle and auto-zoom lens, would be useful, one at the front and the other at the back of the display. Both would capture and transmit the feeds simultaneously, so no control is needed. It would in fact be a videophone. Caller will see the feeds coming from the receiver while the receiver will see the feeds from the caller.

Okay, good so far! Wait a minute, didn’t the interviewer mention, ‘smart’? He definitely did but what does it entail to make this device smart?

Your geek friend’s face flashed in your mind. With a few exceptions like when is sleeping or is in toilet, he spends almost all his time with his Android smartphone. His facebook updates (accompanied with photos and video captured in his smartphone camera) come almost every 30 minutes and updates include the most mundane things like how his pet dog licked his face in the morning or what he is taking for breakfast or how he showed his affection to his girlfriend in the café last evening to more esoteric stuff like how he realized that he is a genius. His phone is practically his all-weather companion, a kind of surrogate for a living friend who listens to him all the times without talking back and fills his personal space which otherwise is almost devoid of any human touch. You felt you have hit a streak of discovery. Neanderthals inhabited a world that was psychologically similar to your friend’s world: cold, isolated, paranoid. That tells you that they would have similar need for exhibitionism and emotional warmth, although they would not have internet or facebook.

So you deduce that smartness for a communication device in this world would necessarily entail a capability to communicate emotionally; the device must not only be 'always on and connected’ it also must be able provide a sense of emotional presence. It should be able to sense his mood and reciprocate with empathy e.g. when he is emotionally down, the device automatically would pick the video of his most pleasant experiences in the past and play them for him, or when he is afraid, it should assess the situation and suggest him possible choices and/or play some visual cues which can help him regain his courage. Based on his physiological condition and weather condition, suggest him to take shelters, pick certain herbs or wear clothes. All these are in fact technologically possible, they require few more sensors like temperature, humidity, around a terabyte of space for data storage, an application that maps facial experession and voice cues to emotional artefacts and a sophisticated analytics engine which will sift through past and present data feeds in real time.
Once such a phone is built, it will also become the smartphone for the facebook+ generations. This capability will convert the existing smartphone into a really intelligent personal companion gadget in addition to its present use for mobile communication, entertainment and online gaming.
However, it is more likely that data storage and large part of the analytics will transition to a computing cloud infrastructure maintained by the Operating System provider. This strategy, for example, is already adopted byApple for its iPhones with Siri and other apps.

You confidently finish your exposition. Your eyes did not miss the appreciative smile of the interviewer. So, you ask, “If I may ask, why Neanderthals?”

The interviewer magnanimously obliges, “Could any other way drive the point better?”

You acknowledge that he has a point there. Genesis of technology for future lies in understanding the basic human needs that remained unchanged through cycles of evolution for almost a million years.

Next disruption after smartphone

2012-07-19T17:58:00.000+05:30

In Feb, 2011 I wrote in this blog, "it appears that soon smartphone by itself will be considered as a separate segment, decoupled from GSM/CDMA/3G and soon 4G handset market. People's expectation and usage of these device are going to drive this transformation where iPad-like device and smartphone will merge to create one single smart-mobile-device segment." I thought it would be interesting to do a reality check.
First, on smartphone, Gartner's May 2012 report says, “Smartphone sales are becoming of paramount importance at a worldwide level. For example, smartphone volumes contributed to approximately 43.9 per cent of overall sales for Samsung as opposed to 16 per cent for Nokia” Gartner provided a table on comparative positions of different Smartphone OS in the report which shows Android's global dominance in 2012 and loss of market share for both Nokia and Microsoft.

Gartner Table :
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q12 (Thousands of Units)

Operating System	1Q12 Units	1Q12 Market Share (%)	1Q11 Units	1Q11 Market Share (%)
Android	81,067.4	56.1	36,350.1	36.4
iOS	33,120.5	22.9	16,883.2	16.9
Symbian	12,466.9	8.6	27,598.5	27.7
Research In Motion	9,939.3	6.9	13,004.0	13.0
Bada	3,842.2	2.7	1,862.2	1.9
Microsoft	2,712.5	1.9	2,582.1	2.6
Others	1,242.9	0.9	1,495.0	1.5
Total	144,391.7	100.0	99,775.0	100.0

Source: Gartner (May 2012)

So, I appear to be on track this far. How about iPad and iPad like devices? Let's again go back to Gartner. Gartner says, "Apple's iOS continues to be the dominant media tablet operating system (OS), as it is projected to account for 61.4 percent of worldwide media tablet sales to end users in 2012."
Gartner's projection for this segment:

Worldwide Sales of Media Tablets to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)

OS	2011	2012	2013	2016
iOS	39,998	72,988	99,553	169,652
Android	17,292	37,878	61,684	137,657
Microsoft	0	4,863	14,547	43,648
QNX	807	2,643	6,036	17,836
Other Operating Systems	1,919	510	637	464
Total Market	60,017	118,883	182,457	369,258

Source: Gartner (April 2012)

Although there is clear dominance of Apple in this segment, Android tablets are forecast to account for 31.9 percent of media tablet sales in 2012, as per Gartner. Gartner dutifully adds that once Windows 8 is realeased, it will become a game changer in this segment. Apple, however, will continue to dominate the segment for entire forecast period.
Numbers always make a very strong case, however they rarely tell the full story.
Will the consumers keep buying both smartphone and tablets? If they do, how will they use these two device differently? Tablets for reading document, watching media but smartphones for rich communication, or so does it appear.
But how strongly can one hold on to that argument? At the end, it is just the screensize that makes the difference, doesn't it? Both smartphones and tablets at present, are primarily touch-screen based. Communication protocol stacks are available on both the devices as part of the OS [Operating System], although may not be enabled. So why would you carry two devices if one single device can provide both viewability of iPad or Amazon Kindle and rich communication capabilities of a smartphone? In fact, if you had options you are likely to consider little larger screen size for tablet, especially for watching HD media content. What if the screen were foldable? That would let us spread out the screen when we need and fold it neatly to fit into smaller dimensions of smartphones when we do not need. That way smartphone could double as media tablet.
There is another option too! Thanks to large scale proliferation of 3D content, people are getting comfortable to wear special glasses. What if we could have a special viewing glass for display device? That glass would convert the smartphone to media device. Fact is however futuristic they sound, the technology is almost within our grasp. We already have OLED display that is as flexible and hundred times as thin as human hair. Called spintronics OLED, they promise to be more efficient and brighter compared to present OLEDs Within a year or two, these devices will replace all exisitng display devices on tablets or smartphones.
Thanks to continuous miniaturization of processors, multi-core CPUs already are finding their ways to smartphones, which means computing bandwidth will never be a bottleneck for these devices. One can expect to watch 3D media content over these mobile devices in very near future. If there is anything, the question is how fast will be the transition of these technologies. Given that almost entire electronics manufacturing of the world is getting concentrated in China and its neighbours, it is very likely that technology replication will be rapid bringing down the overall adoption cost dramatically for the entire handset industry. One in fact can expect that the technology upgrade will be viral pushing the latest of technology changes to the cheapest of the devices.
So it is quite apparent that display device will bring the next disruption to this segment. When it will, it is expected to sweep all the three segments of smartphones, tablets and laptops converting them to a single unified huge segment of mobile devices. It is too be seen who will ride that wave of disruption. Will it be a chinese player, this time?

Nokia in 2012: a luminous end of a glorious past?

2012-07-04T11:51:00.000+05:30

Recently I walked into a local cellular phone shop and asked for a not too inexpensive but sturdy phone set. The salesman asked me if I am looking for a smartphone. I said that I have nothing particularly against smartphone as long as it is stable and inexpensive. Fact is I have personal allergy to all these marketing terms especially when everyone knows that there is nothing smart in a smartphone. The salesman gave me too sets, one Samsung 'Guru' that cost around Rs 1800 and another Samsung Galaxy SII, that costs around Rs 17000. Being a majorly Nokia user so far, I was a little hesitant. "No Nokia set?", I asked.
He said, "Sir, we do have Nokia set but my honest advise is that you do not buy Nokia. The Nokia phones are not like those in past, quality dropped drastically."
"Even for the basic sets?"
"Yes, Sir, even for the basic sets, we get so many complaints every month these days that we warn customers upfront; after that, of course it is their choice if they still like to buy Nokia set".

Yesterday, a friend of mine called me and told that he needed to replace his old handset with a new one and asked me if I had any suggestion for him. I told him, quite unconsciously that he should consider samsung or Sony-Erisson or blackberry models but not Nokia.
But I am sure I was not the exception. Nokia clearly lost its customer loyalty drastically in last few months. It is said that problems do not visit alone. If the customers and shoppers complain about detoriating quality of Nokia phones, the market is exceptionally pessimistic about Nokia's future. Rating agencies like Moody, S&P have downgraded Nokia's credit rating to junk status.
For last one year, we have been witnessing the impact of Nokia's CEO's landmark direction change and one does not need to go too far to sense how well Nokia is doing. Internet is abuzz with reports about how Lumia turned out to be a dud, how Nokia lost 52% of market share in just few months, how Mr. Elop, the ex-Microsoft Nokia CEO has wasted billions of dollar (e.g. in Lumia campaign) and made Nokia taste loss in last quarter by taking successive wrong decisions. Now it is debatable if Nokia would have fared better had Mr. Elop not taken those bold decisions. Fact is symbian was a dying elephant albeit 57% Phones in the market had symbian OS when Mr. Elop took over. People blame that, between 2003 and 2008, 'rather than spend its resources on building a next-generation software ecosystem—an OS that depended on novel interfaces and sensors, that allowed for outside development, that offered a brilliant user experience—the company “managed down” its cash by paying huge dividends and buying back its shares." During that period, Nokia spent 27 billion euros in dividend and share buy-back - a clear sign of organization trading long term engineering future with short-term stock appreciation. Were Mr. Elop's manoeuvre successful, Nokia could truly turn around and challenge iPhone dominance riding high on Lumia and Microsoft WP7.

Summary of the present situation

1. Nokia wanted to cannibalise Symbian with Microsoft OS but market cannibalised Nokia smartphones with Samsung and others. Android proved to be much stronger market force than WP7.
2. Nokia's deteriorating engineering focus had its toll in the low-end basic phone category too; customers are moving to alternatives to Nokia sets. People expect mobile phones to be lot sturdier than PC. Call-drops due to poor quality of handset cost customers money and fact is Samsung low-end phones are lot more stable compared to present Nokia models.
3. While Apple, Samsung, HTC have successfully established themselves in the tablet space, Nokia missed the bus altogether.
4. Nokia's network division, once a very strong market force is also struggling against Chinese competition from Huawei and ZTE, even after merging with Siemens Network.

It is interesting that all the present predicament of Nokia are hinged on single failure: its successive unsuccessful attempts to secure its platform strategy.

Is this the end of a Glorious past?

Many argue that from where Nokia stands today, it is very difficult for it to get itself out of the mud and only viable option left is buyout by Microsoft. Although Nokia's past and stack of IP would be valuable asset for Microsoft, it is very likely that a direct buyout would bring the combined net worth further down, effectively eroding the value of Nokia to zero. A better path would be if Microsoft lets Nokia find its survival path rather than direct buy-out.
But then Nokia needs to change in many front. It must figure out its strategy for low-end phones where stability and robustness count higher than features. On the high-end segment, it has to open itself for multi-platform strategy like HTC and Samsung rather than firing all guns on Lumia. That should help Nokia to find its competitiveness against Samsung and HTC. But above all, Nokia must find one software that its engineering should focus wholeheartedly. Something like a platform-independent Nokia mobile software that can work seemlessly on both Android and Microsoft Windows. Alongwith that a great developer SDK could be a game changer. It could help Nokia to capture large unorganised app ecosystem making the Nokia Mobile software the de-facto platform for mobile app development. That would help Nokia to integrate tablets into its product portfolio like Apple and Samsung. On the technology front, using its strength in wireless technologies, Nokia could focus to bring the first stable 4G (LTE) smartphone that can seemlessly transition from 3G and 2G networks.
But then that would take time and lot of patience from the market. Question is if Nokia has so much time!
Last year we witnessed Motorola going down the same trajectory ending with Google's buyout. Will 2012 witness fall of another hero of Telecom yesteryear? Negativity brings more negativity but gratification of 'I told you so' is too pale to such a loss if that happens.
A company that in its more than 150 years of history changed its core business 17 times to remain relevant and successful, if turns itself to such an end, it is not only painful, it is demeaning too.

the Software Industry and its malaise

2012-04-30T17:56:00.000+05:30

First Quarter results of the companies are coming out. While TCS reported the strongest result of all the biggies of India, others did not fare too badly. Infy's and Wipro's results may be a bit disappointing for their shareholders, but it is still not something to be alarmed about. Irrespective of the results, all have expressed high confidence in the long term growth of the sector and the prospect for their organization, although hardly there were any mention about their future growth engines. If there is anything, there is a mention of cost rationalization in Wipro executive's statement: "We have improved our people pyramid cost. Our margins have expanded by 60 basis points because of the higher proportion of freshers." With consistent downward pressure on outsourcing pricing, it is only rational that cost of service must be brought down to maintain profitability margin. And Wipro is not alone there. Almost all Indian medium and large software companies have adopted this method of cost reduction i.e. by increasing the share of freshers and junior practitioners in its employee-base. The trend is not limited to service-based profit centres like Wipro, Infy, the trend is equally strong with Indian cost centres of large software MNCs. A casual scan on all job portals will tell you that demand, wherever there is, is almost always in 0-8 years experience bracket.
So what happens to not-so-junior practitioners? That's a question, both media and company executives would like you to not ask, which gives a perfect alibi to talk about in this blog.

Big Fame of software Industry and its blindside

Software Industry got its fame particularly on couple of accounts:

Spectacular company growth and
Spectacular increase in salary during boom time.

First one brought a lot of eager shareholders and fans and second one brought many people fresh out of college opting to join the IT industry. In US, there was another very strong incentive, possibility of a startup company making big and its employees retiring rich on its shares at young age. Retire by 40 was the catchline, not too long ago. In India, since successful startups hardly come by, one incentive that worked for it was 'assignment abroad'. However none, if you look closely, actually are about structural strength of the industry. If one compares the industry with other engineering industries [with an obvious exception to Financial Engineering Industry], there is a stark difference. In those companies a typical growth incentive was to participate and contribute to large and complex engineering projects and thereby make one's mark in the Industry. Credibility and market value of a firm in those Industries were expected to grow only when the firm brings out better products, executes engineering-wise ambitious projects. That was good incentive to retain experiences and knowledgeable people. In Software Industry, it is generally accepted that technology changes lot faster. So organizations need people nimble and adaptable enough, who can learn fast and deliver faster. It is also commonly accepted that younger people are more adaptable and faster than older colleagues. Naturally software firms tend to bias towards younger lot. Most of the companies prefer average age to be closer or below 30.That needless to mention, helps the company in keeping the cost down. The tagline is bring more people at the bottom of the pyramid and flatten/trim the middle layers of the pyramid as much as possible. Net effect, as engineers become senior they become more vulnerable to be replaced by younger ones. If you are thinking this is only true for Indian software Industry, think again!
A recent article in Bloomberg talks about how software professional in US are vulnerable to lose job as they approach 40. The article argues that unlike legal, medical or educational profession, software engineers tend to be less desirable as they age. The article observes,"even if the 45-year-old programmer making $120,000 has the right skills,“companies would rather hire the younger workers.” To add to their woes, the article reports, there are young engineers from India with H1-B visa who are cheaper and easily available to American companies. The author clearly is unaware that same treatment is meted to experienced professionals in India.
'So what?', you may ask, 'if the industry prefers younger population, as long as the Industry grows? It is not that all the people above 40 are getting laid off!'
Absolutely! But is the Industry really growing? If the industry really could grow as it used to be there won't be any need to remove people. And secondly what happens when one trades experience with cost?
Let's look at each question carefully.
If we look at the results from Indian software vendors, it is fairly evident that they are struggling to maintain even low double-digit growth rate [previously average rate of growth used to be 35%] and if we follow closely executives' discourse, it is clear that they are focussing more on pushing the bottomline in order to improve profitability. Above 95% utilization of existing resources and reducing average cost/resources figure prominently in strategy-speak. Even a college kid understands that only when the topline projection flattens, people get forced to find ways to push the bottom-line further. If this is true for Indian Software vendors, let's look at IBM. One blogger observes that IBM's strategy to improve EPS [Earning/share] in next 3-4 years hinges upon reducing cost of their work-force. One may argue that it is in tune with global macro-economic scenario; if the global economy is in tatters, software industry cannot escape from that. While that statement is generally believed to be true, one cannot miss that Apple also became enormous during this time. It is those software firms that primarily look at cost arbritage for software development as the primary determinant, are particularly finding growth as challenge and that covers majority of the known software houses.
Coming to the next question, let's look at the effect of reducing senior people from rosters. Long-time customers [e.g. Walt Disney] are walking away from companies like IBM because they do not find the quality and timeliness as they used to get from IBM earlier. Many attribute that to large segment of young relatively inexperienced work-force who fill the botttom rank of IBM's cost pyramid. You can bet that other software vendors face similar challenges. Customers often complain about skill and experience inadequacies in the vendors' resources and relatively poor (technically speaking) fixes or long fixing time for a customer issue. There is overwhelming belief in many of the software companies that Quality processes adequately take care of loss of experience. Those who have seen it from close quarter, know well that it is cultivated myth. Fact is impact of loss of experience never seriously mattered to those who matter in these firms. It is not much of surprise that Sofware engineering fares lot worse compared to other engineering stream when it comes to long-term quality [durability, scalability, maintenability] or execution success rate. Standish Chaos 2009 report showed only 32% success rate for software projects. Dr. Dobbs journal who question methodology of Standish Chaos report, report for 2010 from their own survey

Ad-hoc projects: 49% are successful, 37% are challenged, and 14% are failures.

Iterative projects: 61% are successful, 28% are challenged, and 11% are failures.

Agile projects: 60% are successful, 28% are challenged, and 12% are failures.

Traditional projects: 47% are successful, 36% are challenged, and 17% are failures.

Irrespective of which side you are, it is not a pretty picture, even though you may question about sampling universe. Any other engineering stream report lot better statistics.

So what is it really?

One can blame on many things for that bad score, like poor requirement definition or poor change tracking or poor project execution, but chances of getting it right is low. Fact is software Industry is not going to be like any other Industry. Most of the software projects, successful or not, very rarely finish the way they were envisaged in the beginning. Understanding what is to be developed, many times build up gradually. Because of this reason, the cost of repairing an error is less of a consideration in determining 'success' of a project, which for any other engineering trade, constitutes one of the primary metrics. That translates to real lack of motivation for creating objective measure of cost of losing experience and skill depth but there are both carrots and sticks to reduce the project expenses. Company managers take this advantage by stressing (quite mechanically at times) on following process at the cost of prople but that hardly solves the issue, as the scorecard shows. Quoting Steve Jobs [source], "Companies get confused, when they start getting bigger they want to replicate their initial success and a lot of them think well somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created so they start to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.” The managers forget that process is not the end goal but the product is and it is peeople who develop the product and more experienced a person is better is his output quality. Following process can be easily monitored but hardly that guarantees great product. In other words, one can keep expanding the base of pyramid but that will never give a company run-away success or high double digit growth. Having the right vision for the product/solution for the customers, getting the right people who know how to develop product and retaining them are critical for that. That needs inspriring leadership, creative passion for the products/vision, skill depth and experience which the organizations trade for lower expense today. As long as the executives are measured against the numbers but not the creative forces that they unleashed in the organization, it is very unlikely that the present scenario of the Industry will change.

Finally India figures in 4G map

2012-04-10T16:50:00.001+05:30

Yesterday, Airtel launched 4G service in Calcutta, first time in India. When I wrote my post, "will India leapfrog to 4G?" few months back, little did I imagine that it will be so soon, although it definitely gives a sense of pleasure to see it coming in real. Airtel picked the TDD-LTE as the technology and ZTE, China as its technology partner. With Airtel already adopting it, we can expect Reliance to follow the suit some time this year. That would make LTE-TDD the technology of choice for 4G in entire south Asia with China taking the lead. It also looks like that China's dominance in 4G technology space will be complete. Why Airtel chose ZTE:

ZTE says it is a leader in developing LTE technologies and has applied for 381 essential patents (EPs) for LTE standards, which account for approximately seven percent of the total number of EP applications globally.
ZTE has won 30 contracts for LTE commercial application and has deployed test networks in cooperation with more than 100 operators across the globe.
To date, ZTE has signed three contracts related to deploying and upgrading 3.5GHz TDD-LTE networks in Asia-Pacific and Africa.
ZTE is a major global vendor driving the use of 3.5GHz and 3.6GHz bands. The use of these bands has now been approved as an industry standard by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project.
ZTE also has helped operators like Japan's Softbank, Sweden's Hi3G and China Mobile successfully deploy TD-LTE networks.
and ZTE is dedicated to becoming the world's No. 1 TDD-LTE brand. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), ZTE filed for the most PCT patents of any company worldwide in 2011 with 2,826 filings.

Sounds great! Since the number of 4G handsets available in India is quite low at the moment, Airtel is launching dongles (made by ZTE) with the SIM cards built in. The tariff also looks quite reasonable compared to existing ADSL+ or 3G broadband rate. Presently they have three plans:

plan name	rentals (per month-INR)	free quota (GB)	speed post FUP (kbps)
breakfree	999	6	128
breakfree max	1399	9	128
breakfree ultra	1999	18	128

Airtel says they would be starting pan-indian broadband service soon. Although theoretical limit for 4G service is 100 Mbps [download] and 40 Mbps [upload], one cannot reasonably expect that speed with Airtel at present; 128kbps for that matter is a good starting point.

What made Airtel launch the service so early? It appears that world, primarily led by Chinese technology developers, are moving for fast 4G adoption. This Financial report article said that China telecom has decided to accelerate its 4G deployment. Deployment also became more cost-effective with average cost coming down to $10K for converting a 3G Base Station to 4G Base station. China telecom has invested most of all the telecom operators on 4G trial so far. They have good reason to accelerate the 4G deployment. But it appears that many countries will be in 4G map before this year ends. Srilanka already is, for example. While European and US operators may be slow with 4G deployment GSA expects that south asia will drive the 4G deployment this year. As per their latest reports there are 300 operators invested in 4G and 347 LTE User devices launched by 63 vendors.

While Network side deployment is going on full-swing, one area that concerns the market is there are not many 4G handsets available. Handset technology is little more tricky since it involves voice, video telephony and roaming over 4G and probably 3G and standardization effort continues to be an ongoing process. However all existing handset leaders are gearing up to launch 4G-enabled smartphone sometime this year looking at both China and India as the major market segment. In fact there is already news that Apple's iPhone 5 as well as new iPad will support LTE-TDD.

Overall, it looks like, 2012 will be a very exciting year for high-speed mobile telephony and Indian consumers are not going to be left behind.

In case anyone is interested, 4G World Asia is scheduled on 21st May in Singapore