Usually, this is a good sign. This means that the customer is serious about RFID and is already in a “ready” state of mind.

However, when talking with the client, he started using phrases such as IP68 protection, etc, etc. Now, usually, IP (Ingress Protection) shows how much environmental damage a piece of equipment should survive through (dust and water damage).

Context: This client required RFID readers put by the road-side in a relatively dry part of the country.

An IP level of 64 should do. Maybe IP 65 if you are really paranoid.

The customer was being pitched IP68 by the other guys with stories of how to protect the investment for the long term, etc, etc, blah, blah.

What does this mean? Higher protection means more money on the project without any real parallel benefit to the client.

__________________

This shows a different way of selling = The FUD (Fear - Uncertainty - Doubt).

It works very well too. Everyone wants to Cover-their-ass and let the boss know that they got the “best there was”.

I don’t have experience with this and don’t believe this is how customers should be sold. But I see this happening all the time.

Too early to tell, but we’ll see how this specific project closes and who gets to win. For now, all I can do is educate the customer and give them the information to make the right decision.

Well, if that is the way you frame an argument, you know who has the biggest, most geographically spread-out and oldest app lock-in in existance? Microsoft.

Sure, people are buying 20+ million ipads each year and that is a great thing, no doubt.

But I believe the so called 1% of the blogosphere or twitterati need to look outside their closed shell!

Every single ipad sold is an added device to an existing PC infrastructure. Again, don’t compare graphic/audio/video artists/kids/excited-gadget freaks to the actual business users who buy thousands of desktops each year)

There is lock-in with accounting apps, with custom software (some even still using Foxpro apps), with manufacturing/erp/crm tools, with calibration apps.

The apple store majority caters to the entertainment set. Not the at-work set. Sure that can change over time. As will other things.

But trying to cry out “post-PC” era today is like looking at aircrafts and crying out “we don’t need roads anymore”. It’s just not logical given the timeline, given the context and given the real-world needs.

For every person with $500 to spend on an iPad, there are a 100 people who will wait all night in line for a $10 phone or a $100 Cheap-o-top.

For all their BS in “writing about companies that looking at the big-picture”, the tech journalists forget to look at the big picture themselves. The big picture with a few billion users.
I’ve owned a tablet since 2005. Before that my first ever laptop was a thinkpad without a CD drive back in 2001, seeing the demise of optical media and proliferation of broadband. So I can look a little ahead of the curve too. And I don’t need to be a superstar tech-writer for that.

If you are interested in the RFID Active/Passive, AIDC or  SmartCard market, you would like to follow the rfid blog.

Let me know what you like or would like to add/change?

Should we focus more on India specific solutions or talk more about popular global deployments?

Should we write more about hardware or middleware or case studies?

However, over the last few months, I have noticed my laziness manifest itself in the form of my becoming a consumer of content vs. an active producer.

I read more blog posts (through an RSS reader) per minute than I write per month.
I simply “like” more facebook photos/posts per hour than I write per week. Even adding a text comment would somehow make me a part-producer. But no, I am simply happy with single-clicking “like”.

It makes life just so much easier! Adding to the crowd/mob’s flow.

Disruption in any form, even through becoming an active producer of content is so bloody damn hard when I am lazy.
Hope this isn’t a long term phase.

My mom ensures that we save old newspapers, bottles, plastic bags, etc and that they are sold to the “raddi-wala” (it is a nice article, read it) at the end of each month. The total cash is then given directly to the maid/cook/house-help.

This does two major things:
1) The amount from this isn’t anything much for us, but it helps the people who work for us as a mini-bonus each month.
2) Because they know they will directly benefit from all the recyclable stuff, it is in their best interest to make the extra effort and separate the plastic, glass and paper and ensure it is properly sent to the raddi-wala. Simple incentivising.
I am sure many of us in India can share similar stories. Just goes to show, sometimes, what works in the west doesn’t work here. And what works here, may not make any sense there. But the goal is the same.

These guys are out there doing the kind of thing I would like to do and selling to an audience I love selling to. Good job, fellas!

He was limping in the morning and we took him to the 24×7 CUPA clinic at 7am. After an X-Ray, the doctor showed us how the hip joint of his right leg was already wearing thin.

Sherlock just turned 6 months old last week.

There is no cure. We can eventually get his hip replaced. Otherwise there is only slow walking, pain getting up or worse in store.
The number one reason this happens to dogs is when the gene pool is not varied enough.

The only right kind of exercise for him is swimming (where the muscles get stronger without any stress on the bones). Needless to say, there will be tons of swimming in our household today onwards.

Today hasn’t been a great day for Surabhi and I.

I mean, they had the Tablet PC with wonderful handwriting recognition, Windows Mobile (PocketPC) with on-screen transcriber running on a low low 128MB ram with sub-200 Mhz processors. Visual Basic (and Visual Studio by extension) allowed really newbie programmers to just get in and start coding. They acquired and promoted WebTV long before AppleTV or GoogleTV were even being thought of. I mean, look at the WebTV hardware specs. And this is just a short list I came up with in a few minutes.

So, with all of the above, what went wrong? Sure Visual Studio is a success, but that is also the only non-consumer product in the list above. In fact, it is such a success that even Google knows that Android development can only be pushed ahead with such Visual tools, hence the Android AppInventor.

Microsoft has always tried to talk about their R&D spending ($9 billion, in the last year, recession, et al). Why then do their actual consumer products not have spectacular successes?

I think what Microsoft needs to do is start shifting a lot of their Tech R&D budgets towards Market Research. If they had done market research, they would know that the Kin phones/devices are not working out. If they had done market research with college going kids, they would know that Tablet PC are ok, but OneNote is the real killer app. If they had done market research, they would know that the Courier device, even with half the marketing budget hype of the UMPC (whats that, you ask? heh) could be a real competition to the iPad.

Microsoft is still trying to compete with Google and Apple using the tools they used to originally compete with IBM. Doesn’t work.

And when Microsoft does get it’s market research right, even a Bing can happen!

However, this is also the time for the dreaded “too big net” effect. Due to the sudden deluge of calls, there is a tendency to drop the ball on some of the leads.

How the hell does a salesperson do this? I mean, isn’t the salesperson’s goal to answer every email and respond to every call?

You wish. I wish, too. And no one is to blame. I miss out on leads all the time. Some leads just slip past the “unread items” of my inbox all the time.

The only real solution for this is to seriously, religiously, regularly enter incoming leads into your company’s CRM. It can be Microsoft Excel, SugarCRM, Basecamp or anything else. Just getting every lead entered into some sort of electronic system HELPS!

This takes diligent practice and constantly reminding oneself that “yes, data entry sucks! But you’ve got to do it. No two ways about.

Heck for the super lazy, atleast write down the leads and details about the phone conversations and pass them along to an assistant in the office who can then type it out into your CRM.

However, let me tell you about stuff that has happened to me over the last week …

Outlook did something stupid last week…
I could not see the “content/body” of my emails. Just the “from address” and “subject line”. I could not see the “body” of the emails in the preview pane or when I just double-clicked it to open it. ONLY when I clicked on Reply or Forward would the actual body of the email show up in the “quoted” text area. So the data was still there. Just not being displayed in one view but was shown in another.

Not a very nice way to read emails, you will agree.

While all this was going on, I somehow got hooked on to gmail (Thanks, Mangu!) with their feature for 3rd part email inboxes (basically, I could use gmail as a web-based Outlook and read my company emails in there!)

It has been so effortless and smooth, that I have not bothered to open Outlook in the last 4 days. I use Gmail, GCalendar (which I sync with my Nokia E63) and other Google stuff!
I also have had my sights on an Android phone for a few months now.

I am still using Windows Live Writer to write this blog post. Win 7 as my primary OS. Office 2010 as my favourite application suite.

What does this mean? Microsoft needs to make more killer products that WORK for the average user. Anything they make that is not simply 100% great, will move people away from them.

Also, this mean that it is *not* difficult to make easy to use products with the right features. Especially for a large organisation that supposedly hires very “smart” people.