Indian companies can actually use the support for lakh and crore instead of millions and billions that they are forced to use with other software packages.

Indian style: 12,34,56,789
(That is 12 crores, 34 lakhs, 56 thousands and 7 hundreds…)

European style: 123,456,789
(That is 123 million, 456 thousands and 7 hundreds…)

This is very cool and shows Microsoft is working hard to ensure they get the localization right. Way to go, M$!!!

Sorry. Some background to this outburst.
Indian mobile operators have only recently figured out how to give users access to technology that allows callers to leave a voicemail in-case the called-person is busy or unreachable. So far so good.

Lets see how this works in real-life?
If you ever call an Airtel mobile number and get the voicemail prompt, you are requested  “To leave a Voicemail, dial * followed by the 10 digit mobile number of the person you are trying to call”

Didn’t I just DIAL this number to make the call in the first place? Doesn’t Airtel know the number they just tried to connect me to? Are their systems so disjoined that during the same phone call, I need to enter the number again?! Do they want me to hold the call, dig through the phonebook, lookup the number, then type it in? All of this DURING the call to that very same number?

Airtel Mobile has a bad, sad, stupid and terrible sense of customer service.

The good:
I like Tata, they are decent to their clients.
I’ve heard good things about NTT for years.

The bad:
Tata’s mobile experience in India is limited to CDMA. Not GSM.
NTT’s entire business model is non-GSM.

The ugly:
I walk into a Tata Indicom “company owned store” to find out more.
They say Tata’s GSM service info. is only available at normal retail outlets. Non-Tata branded stores.

Seri-fracking-ously. So I am wrong in my assumption that Tata’s new GSM service will be available for purchase at a Tata Indicom store that already sells their CDMA service?

Now I’m scared. Maybe I should just goto an Airtel store and be safe!

And this happened on day 2 of a 11 day trip. Yes, bhagwan help me, I know.

However, the logic I follow with laptops or desktops is that I keep a separate partition on the hard drive with all my personal data, documents, device drivers, setup for basic utilities (anti-virus, firefox, SSH, etc) just in case of random formats and OS reinstalls and such. Being the genius that I am, I obviously thought about backing up my Outlook emails to this second drive also. However, somewhere, somehow, during the backup, I only asked Outlook to backup the main inbox. Not the sub-folders under it that I use to actually store my old mails (I am anally organised that way, ask anyone who’s Start Menu and Windows Desktop I’ve had the chance to clean up!!!)

However, I only found this out AFTER i had formatted my laptop (and reinstalled Windows (and reinstalled Outlook (and tried to restore the backed-up emails))).

So, basically, for the last two weeks, I’ve been running on emails from only the last two months, that I could download from the server again. It is a  bloody nightmare for someone like me who has to often refer emails months and quarters old.

Today, I get back to Bangalore, turn on my portable hard-drive and guess what I see? A completely functional backup from a day before flying out. I had forgotten that I habitually backup my laptop a day before leaving for any trip.

You know you are a fanatic back-upper when you remember to actually backup even when you forget that you had back-upped.
Muscle memory, boys. Muscle memory!
Total damage: 0 lost emails.

Jai ho!

Firing an employee is never easy for the owner of a company. It doesn’t matter how the media portrays the evil business owners. What you read may be true very very few times. In cases where the business owner was backed into a corner where it was either fire a few and save the rest, or take a risk and gamble away every single employee.

Before you ask, no. I am not defending a GM, or even a Lehman. Definitely not an Enron.

I’m not talking of nameless, faceless, management types who know excel and little else. I’m defending the actual entrepreneurs. The men and women who have worked from the ground up and built a living, breathing, wonderful organisation.
A Company.
A Business.
A Store.
A Factory.
An Office.

A few weeks ago, I fired an employee.
Whatever be the reason.
Whoever be at fault.
It is not easy at all.

Maybe it’s not the best thing to do. No one has 20/20 hindsight. Maybe the person you fire tomorrow, given the right training, could have been employee of the year in a few years’ time. That is second guessing. That is being unfair to the person who had to make the decision.

When it comes down to it, the business owner has to decide. He doesn’t get points for putting it to vote.

It’s been a few weeks now. And I still think of what was done. What may have not been done. But thats not how businesses are run.

No turning back the clock.
Got to wake up tomorrow.
More customers to visit.
More sales to close.
A company to grow.

Destruction is so easy.
It takes balls to construct.

Of course it’s all in my mind and the people in the office must have started looking for better jobs where the boss isn’t a half-retarded geek. But what the hell. There have GOT to be some benefits to being boss!

So, what have you DIY today?

As far as I am concerned, this isn’t always cool, but usually necessary.

Market and competitive forces demand that our solution works well in the least amount of time. The overriding factor here is the inter-operability with existing solutions installed at manufacturing, distributor, retail and marketing partners in the supply chain.

This directly translates into fewer opportunities to innovate and/or think outside the box.

(This post, btw, was handwritten and recognized by Windows 7’s awesome ink recognition system. The awesome-ness becomes more apparent in light of the fact that I was travelling by bus (BLR airport to home) while writing).

Airtel has done a decent job on the connectivity and signal clarity (it’s available most places, including restrooms, etc)

However, one peeve of mine … it’s impossible to use my mobile browser with this connection.

Problem is that I cannot get to this landing page on Opera Mini (or Nokia’s default browser on the E63) – needed Firefox or IE to get there. But once I’m there, the username/password is sent as an SMS on my mobile.

So basically, mobile browsing is not possible. Only laptop/full browser works for me.

Still, cannot argue with the fact that it’s a decent connection for free.

However, I just decided to check up on something I’ve only read online … what kind of websites are good (or bad) enough to be blocked.

And surprise, Facebook seems to work ok (even defaults to Arabic script)
But searching on Google for “blocked websites in UAE” leads to a few websites with listings of what is really blocked.

Funny thing is, sites listing these blocked websites are blocked too.

See …