It is one thing to call your competition as ‘any other’ or common (‘sadharan’ in Hindi). Basically the objective in such communications is three fold. One, to show product superiority. Two, to show that the competition as a commodity. Three, not to allow competition any visibility at your cost.

But to call your competition fake?! I find it rather strange that an purported original, which actually came into being (or purported prominence) after the purported original (rumoured or alleged), reportedly calls the purported fake as fake?! Leaves you clueless?

It is quite a known fact that Zoho is among the most promising and closely watched SAAS based service provider for desktop services(and elements of enterprise services, just a bit of it). It is also among those that came into being before even Google Docs was launched. But it is being called fake! The purported original, to the best of my understanding, largely existed in a much different form and shape, though at one level they do compete for the same space. How about calling the pizza fake because the corn exists! And Microsoft’s pizza, though fresh and nice smelling, came after Zoho’s office productivity suite had celebrated its birthdays. So it is what, a fake based on another fake’s success, or a fake based on the implied original?

Some someone invented a writing instrument, say, a pencil. And another one invented another, entirely different in concept and ideas, let’s say, a pen. So, by the above logic, the pen is a fake pencil. And the guy who invented the computer printer is an absolute thief!Wow!!

Sridhar Vembu of Zoho is understandably ballistic. And look at Zoho’s creative (and humorous response to Microsoft). FakeOffice.org.

I normally do not read mundane notices, but this one somehow came in front of me couple of days back. There was a train accident near Mathura few days back, and I started reading this out of curiosity. Read this one carefully. This notification actually seems to suggest that the railways is part of Ministry of Civil Aviation.Ouch!

On another note, it also says how much of detail our official babudom can handle.

We are all taught to be trend gazers in numerous murder-by-presentation sessions. The bosslike figure will holler to a struggling deputy making the presentation  by saying, “don’t make hollow statement, show me the data”. A graph would come up, and a trendline identified and agreed. A few dots that fall far away from the trendline are laughed at and ignored. Action plans would be made based on the trendline. Sometimes these small far from trendline data points are also seen as bad data. In life, the exceptions are ignored, sometimes seen are crazy deviations. As a B-School student, anyone who went to bed early and woke up early were seen as outliers. Irregular and deviant. Ignore them.

As student of engineering, I learnt the term ‘outlier’. The literature suggested this is is out of line  data that can be ignored. I was also programmed to believe that by ignoring the outliers, the analysis quality would only become better. I held this belief all this years and this got further reinforced all these years.

Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent piece of work ‘Outliers’ gave an electric  jolt to my established thoughts on what is relevant and what is not. It has challenged my deeply entrenched belief around these outliers and next time I see an exception to the rule, I would surely be quite respectful to the exception. The core message of the book is, one can ignore the outliers only because you do not know what to do with them. Your inability to understand these outliers does not become them irrelevant. In fact, these outliers bring in new  and strong behavioural elements to a system. You would realize that Einstein was what he was because he was not part of the trendline. While I am just about a third into this book, I am madly in love with it. I recommend this book to professionals, students, artists, scientists (and everyone else) alike. Even to those who don’t read books regularly. And while you are at it, don’t miss reading Blink as well as Tipping Point by the same author.

In search of tea-bags and butter, I found myself at a store called Reliance Super in one of the many giant market complexes that dot the central area of Gurgaon. In Gurgaon, the term is mall. And it has to be pronounced as moll, as in gangster’s moll!

Call me biased if you wish to, but the thambis of Chennai are far quicker, squirm less when you seek assistance and run an amazingly well coordinated operation, whether it is a restaurant or any other store. The chokras of Mumbai are fairly quick too. In contrast, I feel a general disarray when I step out for shopping in Gurgaon.

They run a metal detector on you if you walk in by the main entrance. However, expect no such things in quite a few of Gurgaon malls if you park in the basement and take the elevator. Yes, they peep inside the car when you are about to enter the basement parking. And, the metal detector keeps beeping as people get inside, but I could not figure what they are trying to detect. Are they serious about security or serious about PR?

Coming back to Reliance Super. A reasonably spread out store in the basement and I locate tea-bags and few other things and head out for billing. No, there is no counter for ‘six items or less’, so I join a general queue. The lady ahead of me has come to do her monthly shopping and so her trolley is full. The billing assistant goes billing like this. Ten Amul Masti packs are run into the scanner one after another. Likewise, all pieces are scanned separately, even if they customer bought x number of the same item. Why apply brain to count?! Then, after scanning, he piles up whole trolleyful of stuff on the small table and tells the customer to take it. I could not fully understand, and I saw her putting everything in the trolley and heading for the exit.

Then comes my turn. I find that on the exit side of the billing counter, a one nine inch radius table is all the space on which the billing assistant can keep stuff after scanning (And I had heard that big chains get stores designed by experts!).  Thankfully, my things do not fall off that limited space. Then he helpfully tells me the amount payable, settles the cash and says, ‘le jaiye’. I asked him why he did not put my stuff in a carry bag. He said I need to buy paper bags, else he cannot help. Imagine, after billing, he tells me I need to buy carry bags. I did not see any text or visual notice to this effect which would warn my of such a possibility. I asked the billing assistant to cancel my billing and return my money. Instead, he suggested I see a counter at the exit called customer assistance desk and ‘maybe they can’ give me a carry bag. I felt I was not in India but landed in an alien land. Upon reaching the customer assistance desk,  I demanded a carry bag and I was given one, but no assistance was provided in putting the stuff inside the bag. The lady who was ahead of me at the billing counter was busy putting her stuff in multiple carry bags, since she had purchased a trolley full of stuff. Imagine, she had to do this business of putting and removing things on and from the trolley thrice, first time when she was doing her item selection along the shelves, second time when the billing clerk ran the scanner and let her stuff be strewn at the billing counter and told her to put it in the trolley and head for the customer desk and third, when the customer assistance guy lobbed some carry bags at her! Everyone had to do this thrice!!If this format of organised retailing was called ‘convenience stores’, where was the convenience? And what is ‘organised’ here? On my way back I was reflecting on the shopping experience - I had spent about thirty minutes inside the store, out of which twenty in the billing queue and beyond. The overall experience was awful.

However, I am not sure how much of it is Gurgaon issue and how much is by format design. The other day I was at Landmark outlet in Gurgaon where I wanted to buy Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘The Outliers’. The price is 399. The counter clerk wants me to tender exact change  since he has a change issue. I felt odd, how can I give an exact change of 99 when he cannot give me Re 1. Still, to  try to help, I search my wallet and tell him I did not have change either and ask him why he is running a store if he cannot does not have a one rupee coin with him ! A threat to cancel elicits the one rupee he had to give me!! And when he opens his secret stash of coins, I see he has plenty of coinage to take care of many customers such as me!!! Why, why????

Recall the hype around Android, Chrome, Gmail and so on. Google has demonstrated that it knows how to use the crowd very successfully, and is a master of the grapevine mill. The best in the game, to put it one way. When it launched Gmail, it was by word-of-mouth and referral. It carried the beta tag for years for that added glamour of being an early user. In short, the Google style is to fire the grapevine, and then confirm it after a while, which could be months away. So it completely beat me why they chose to announce that they are working on an Operating System, that would be available a year from now. Simply put, this is not Google style of promotion. It appears quite knee jerk to be so.

Its quite surprising that they even chose to link it to a product (Chrome), which is perceived as less than resounding success. What’s more, Microsoft has given signs of delinking Internet Explorer with the O/S, at least in some geographies.

In my view, this could have something to do with the favourable reviews Windows 7 and its impending launch in the next few months. It could also be a sign that Bing continues to do well. So, is it a kick-for-a-kick? One only hopes this will have a downward impact on Windows 7 prices. Like Ratan Tata said while launching the Indica car – courtesy his company, people could now by a Maruti car cheaper!

Inside CRM argues that generating more leads does not necessary lead to more sales, it is the quality of leads really matter. Essential truth about a well differentiated offering chasing dollars based on good understanding of buying behavior in a well segmented market. Blind lead chasing results in tower fabrication company brochure reaching a broker’s mailbox. Don’t compound by following up with a call and seeking a meeting. Stop!

‘Reach the decision-maker’- Am sure anyone in sales selling a high value product or service would have heard this sermon from his boss. CustomerThink poses the question, “Is "Call on the CXO" a Winning Strategy for Salespeople? ” I am not sure I agree with the premise in this article. At least, completely.

The long and short of any complex sale is that there are a set of influencers, a set of buyers and a set of decision makers.Sometimes these roles overlap as well so, it is not A vs B, but A and B.

The Mittals (Lakshmi and Aditya) were chasing an M&A target that did not see a point in the merger. The CEO was Guy Dolle, who was actually pursuing Dofosco, to gain a scale and not become an Mittal target.

Some very interesting facts. The two parties were advised by two top shot M&A advisors. One worked for Goldman Sachs and went by as Yoel and advised the Mittals, and his counterpart in Arcelor camp was Michael, who worked for Morgan Stanley. Michael Zaoui and Yoel Zaoui were real brothers!

The book is very well researched and written like a story. You feel like you are watching things on the screen. Only one complaint – periodically you come back to real life! A must read!!

This guy was riding atop watermelons. Correction, he was actually asleep atop the watermelons. Supply chain agility, or supply chain adaptability?!

At workplace many times, not knowing where a colleague is. More so in a multi-time-zone company. A Google Latitude like application, implemented within a corporation could be a great help. Tracking a sales team could be quite a nightmare ( When I say tracking, I don’t mean snooping on their planned vs actual travel, but merely knowing the time-zone for a call appropriateness. It is another matter that many organizations would like to see their guys on a screen just for that, usually fruitlessly).

Google already has this technology where your location can be shared with friends automatically depending on mobile phone connection. Large organizations buy big number phone connection from one or two vendors.

Maybe the blocks of technology of what I am proposing is already there. Imagine, on your personalized screen in the intranet/extranet, you cannot just look up a person’s contact details, but his current location. You would be wise enough to call a Tampa based colleague an hour beyond his normal time, when you know he/she is in Chicago on business.

Can I expect a reply to an urgent mail? I think that would be cool.

On the flip side, I do agree there are privacy issues. But then technology has to be used meaningfully deployed.. If an organization wants to snoop on the location of its employees, they can always do through other means. This is a cultural dimension and not a technology dimension. Imagine a positive deployment and its potential.

If one were to see the different IT applications, any application with regard to a financial transaction is considered a high risk, compared to one, let’s say, document management. That’s why it is long time since terms such as CC and SaaS are a few years away from online retail, financial services and so on. In comparison, Slideshare, a presentation sharing site and Twitter are hosted on Amazon web services. Risk perception = Difficult to answer the question – Is it a proven and safe?

It is not that SaaS is completely a no-no in the enterprise scene. Salesforce offers  CRM application as SaaS. Salesforce.com had a revenue of little under 250 MN in 2007-08 which is not small pennies. It surely hosts a great amount of valuable data. Google Apps has found great favour with academic institutions across the world resulting in some extremely large implementations. There are quite a few ERP applications on the SaaS mode. At this stage, it is not really a proven to say that data in a cloud of on a SaaS application is any less secure. One the other hand bulk storage is becoming cheaper, thanks to companies such as NetApp.

It is more of a perception thing. Which boils down to the same old point of consumer behavior- Does your product promise hold credibility to generate sales?

Trevor at Kinaxis blog has an interesting argument. He says one of the big issues in Cloud Computing is if the company hosting the CC goes bust, how do you get the data secured? He argues that the on-premise applications are no more secure than those based on the cloud. He also argues that data can be lost by way of a simple printout, which can happen either way. I go with Trevor. Every year we read about sensitive data lost via misplaced or stolen laptops or disks lost in transit, including credit card data. Why, a senior British law enforcement official recently lost his job because he carried a printout of a plan the cover page of which was visible to the media, thereby compromising on the operation.

In short, it is not A vs B when it comes to on-premise application vs SaaS or CC. Both these solutions will probably continue to evolve in parallel, and address different needs.

 After ICANN developed a mechanism to resolve such squatting, one would be tempted to believe that it is sunset for squatters of corporate brand assets, but clearly not everyone believes so. For instance the domain SatyamMahindra.com has been registered the same day the new identity announced. Clearly, the expectation is that the natural traffic arriving would get them some revenues on the parked page and also to possibly make some quick buck in case the company gets interested in acquiring this squatted domain.

If the above domain was booked on June 21, 2009, the domain MahindraSatyam.com was booked by a Gulf based cyber-squatter on May 08 itself. 

This was even before the announcement of Tech Mahindra becoming coming out the eventual winner was made. Clearly, someone was just taking chance in the hope of making good money.

What is common to the both the cases that both the registrants have not chosen the privacy protection option usually provided by domain registrars, normally, at a small fee. Clearly, both want to be reachable in case someone gets interested.

Mahindra Satyam should move internet governing body ICANN and dispute the ownership of these two domains for reclaiming these two domains. With appropriate documentation, reclaiming should not be so tough.

Updated: Very pertinent Computerworld article on cybersquatting and how to deal with them.

1. Good themes are in terribly short supply
2. Customizing a theme is quite painful.
3. Try submitting to Google Webmasters. In the face of inexplicable xml errors, you would not know how to do your site verification.
4. Circular loop error with Feedburner. If you redirect your feed to feedburner, you obviously cannot use the redirected feed to ping or to submit as a sitemap.

Frankly, when I was setting this up, it looked so archaic that I gave up. Not sure what the product management team of Blogger been upto. Good morning to you.

Decade and half later, times of changed. This time, the real form of bird-watching excites my family.  Here are some shots we took early morning.

I had to take about five shots from about 30 feet away to get a decent view of this bird.

A parrot was enjoying the mango breakfast.

This woodpecker was moving so rapidly from one branch to another that it was difficult to locate and focus. Even though the image is not so well focused, this is the best we could get.

The palm fruits are just looking so winsome. If only one could reach them.

It is said that mango loyalties are very strong. So a Mumbaikar does not consider a Maleehabadi equivalent to an Alphonso. Biharis think nothing but Langda as the real one, and perhaps the Bongs think all mangoes except for the Malda are fake.  In Chennai it is nothing but the Bainganpallis/Bangarapallis that rule.

Legends have it that in olden days, when the King sent a basket of mangoes as a royal gift to the neighboring kingdom’s ruler, the royal mangoes were punctured with a needle so that the seed cannot be used to grow saplings (ancient variety of terminator technology!).

But when you get a tree next to your house which is laden with mangoes like these, you enjoy them growing every day. Without looking at the variety or label. Why, my wife even made pickle which are just about getting ready now!

Yes, this is as good as they were. From the rooftop, I could get a basketful.

As it happens, the best mangoes are always, always, just outside the reach!

I mentally had the list of Google services I was using, but when I make a list, I find it has a long tail.

1. Google Search: Very often, several times a day.
2. Gmail: At least two times a day, more on weekends.
3. GApps Mail: Same as Gmail
4. Google Calendar: That reminds me when to pay the school fee and wish non Facebook contacts birthdays, though I am still very bad at it. See the mail alert daily. It comes in the morning.
5. Blogger: Ocassionally photoblog.
6. Google Reader: Is usually open, esp on weekends.
7. Google News: Several times a day.
8. Picasa:Multiple times a week. I love playing with my camera.
9. Feedburner: For those who follow this blog via feeds, the rendering is by Feedburner, which is now part of the great G.
10. Webmaster tools: Ocassionally I do login to check for any indexing issues on my blog.
11. Adsense: Never made any real money but runs on my blogs nevertheless.
12. Google Maps: I find myself using it on my phone few times a month(mostly to boast about my phone!)
13. Google Earth: When someone invites me to a new part of town, I surely look it up.
14. Chrome: Tried and hated. Uninstalled.
15. And how do I forget this - YouTube - we love tuning into Bollywood movie songs here. Couple of times a month.

After resisting considerably, I read one of his books - The Three Mistakes of My Life.  It has a historical backdrop, relfections of aspirations, drama, love, religion,turmoil, success and failures all seamlessly intervoven in a fast readable storyline. In fact, you do not even realize when he jumps from one to another aspect and still manages to keep the story alive. 

If you haven’t read anything in a while now, I think its time you did. Even suggest that if you travel frequently, you cannot have a better contemporary company. That’s why I am even classifying this post in ‘Business Books’