In Jony Ive, Apple’s industrial designer, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for deep rather than superficial simplicity. They knew that simplicity is not merely a minimalist style or the removal of clutter. In order to eliminate screws, buttons, or excess navigational screens, it was necessary to understand profoundly the role each element played. “To be truly simple, you have to go really deep,” Ive explained. “For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured.”

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Yesterday, the news was out that the American companies were also out of the fray, in addition to the Russian MiG-35 and Swedish Gripen. The decision to shortchange the traditional Russian partners and the more contemporary Americans looks foolhardy but it looks like the GoI and the IAF pulled off a coup d’état.

To start with the background India is the fourth largest Air Force in the world with about 1600 aircraft. The fighters comprise of about 740 aircraft spread over five operational commands. About a third of these aircraft are of French Origin and the rest are of Russian Origin ( again about a third of these are Sukhoi’s ).

A typical fighter aircraft is serviced by around 11 personnel ( including weapon loaders). So, the decision to buy an aircraft not only is about the technical superiority or strategic interests but also the familiarity of the aircraft from an operational point of view. Falcon, Hornet and the Gripen if inducted would pose new challenges to service and maintain the aircraft. Rafale , MiG and the Typhoon ( the SEPECAT Jaguar fighter bomber in IAF is of anglo-french origin ) on the other hand are ‘somewhat’ familiar.

Falcon, Hornet and Gripen are the Fourth Generation aircrafts. Considering that the Tejas itself is a fourth generation aircraft and the service life of these aircraft is typically 20-25 years, the decision to eliminate these is completely logical. The MiG,Typhoon and Rafale have a ‘half-generation’ added capabilities like AESA radars and powerful data links.

Now, coming to the ‘strategic’ advantages for going with the American Planes, the US would be eager to bury this hatchet only sooner . Considering that India is the largest arms importer, the US still has tons of oppurtunities to sell ( like 5 billion USD contract for 10  Boeing C-17 cargo planes ). India’s doctrine of maintaining the edge over Pakistan would be negated if we have similar aircraft.

Between the Typhoon and Rafale, the Typhoon is technically superior compared to the Rafale but comes with a higher price. It is ‘stealth’ ready and future models could be equipped with TVC that would add to its already impressive operational capabilities.

The Typhoon has landed?!

Check out my posterous account here : http://sridharo.posterous.com/

How true are these tests?

Update 1 : Discussion on Aardvark.
Update 2 : Discussion on Quora.

Question : When do you draw a line that a project is not ambitious anymore but foolhardy ?

Responses :

Twitter : Venkatesh Rao (check his acclaimed blog RibbonFarm ) replied about half an hour after I tweeted. But again, the response depends on seemingly arbitrary parameters like who’s logged into twitter, timelines, who are your followers, whether the question gets retweeted and so on. Not the best option unless you are aplusk.

Quora :  Quora is a one stop portal for questions exactly like this. Various experts can opine and both the questions and the answers can be edited endlessly. I got a reply from a seasoned veteran about his experience and how he tried to resolve the situation. Very useful. But the problem was the question had already been re-drafted to

When should you stop working on a project that may be ambitious but has very little chance of success?

Aardvark : Aardvark is a social service  that connects users to answer their questions. The reply was almost real time from a CXO level executive. When I posed a corollary, the reply was again almost instant. The site has nifty featured like asking questions through IM, email etc.

So next time you have such a question, try it on Aardvark.

Note : Though the comparison  of the three services mentioned is like apples to oranges, the attempt was to reach out to the community and get a ‘satisfactory’ answer.

This is precisely the reason you test things out, especially if your job is customer facing. If you frequently conduct email campaigns or just send many emails, this email checklist might be of help.

However Twitter is a cool way to connect and interact, I am back albeit a few set rules.

1] Twitter is a firehose of a firehose . To make it work now, I’ve trimmed my timeline by about 150.

2] Many use twitter as a group chat tool. To not (hopefully) miss their one-off good tweets, the list feature should come handy.

3] After playing around with all the available clients, I have zeroed on Opera Portal. The Twitter app has a cool feature to ‘Snooze’ someone trying to hack their way into otherstimelines.

You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to much. That’s what was missing at Apple for a while. There were bits and pieces of interesting things floating around, but not that gravitational pull.

People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it’s easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there’s a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That’s a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM ) is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

Look at Microsoft (MSFT ) — who’s running Microsoft?