Here's an intersting technology development - its called AJAX ( short for Asynch Javascript and XML). As this Microsoft Watch article talks aboutCould Ajax Wash Away 'Smart Clients'?, and Mary Jo questions - will we see a world divided between Ajax and Smart Clients? The reality is that smart clients are no different from Ajax if MS truly wants to see this survive and get adopted.

The interesting piece is that it is not an either/or situation - smart clients will need to have common foundations, and perhaps the only way they will deviate is in the usage of Flash. As my buddy Chuao points out, here is one company called Xamlon that integrates Ajax and Flash( you can also read the news article here).

Don't forget to check out their cool demo here.

CTIA presentations from New Orleans

Here's the link:
Business Wire: The Global Leader in News Distribution

Don't miss ESPN's George Bodenheimer talk.

Too much tech

Last week, I was in New Orleans for the CTIA Wireless 2005 conference. This was the happening place for Gizmodo-heads. Everyone who was anybody in telecom was there. It easily seems like the whole industry which was facing a slump is suddenly awake and alive with ideas. There were CxOs from all kinds of companies - service providers, applications, device manufacturers, chip manufacturers with a conspicous absence of systems integrators. Of course, the exception to this rule is the telecom unit of Patni where your's truly is currently employed.

The funniest part of this event was networking. With everyone having a cell phone stuck to their year, it was really difficult to have a normal F2F (face-to-face) conversation. On once occassion, I called the guy in front of me who was on another line and introduced myself as the person standing in front of him, just to get his attention! That worked!

More on Desktop Search

OK, so after some experimentation in the best way to find information on my PC, I stumbled upon ViaPoint here. This is a new class of applications that are becoming increasingly prevalent - founded upon the new platform for the web - Google web services. ViaPoint simply extends desktop search and sits on top of the Google Desktop Search tool.

The goal as I understood it was to make it easier to categorize and provide a rich user interface to find your stuff. The concept is great, but falls pretty behind on the execution, IMHO. The scan process takes infinitely long, the install is a whopping 75 Megs and at the end of the day, what a Google can do with just 3 Megs seems more than the sloooow unintuitive interface that ViaPoint provides.

I see that as a problem. Anyone else care to refute?

Yahoo! now jumps into Desktop search

Try out the beta version here. I have the Google version installed, and the absence of indexing PDF is very painful... since most marketing collateral are found that way.

Are you a HedgeHog or a Fox?

Obviously taken from Jim Collins "Good to Great", here's an interesting read for those who have asked about what their next career step should look like. It should be something like this:



Here's an extract:
... a Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles:

1. What you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competence. Just because you possess a core competence doesn’t necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. Conversely, what you can be the best at might not even be something in which you are currently engaged.

2. What drives your economic engine. All the good-to-great companies attained piercing insight into how to most effectively generate sustained and robust cash flow and profitability. In particular, they discovered the single denominator—profit per x—that had the greatest impact on their economics. (It would be cash flow per x in the social sector.)

3. What you are deeply passionate about. The good-to-great companies focused on those activities that ignited their passion. The idea here is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate.

Google Maps

Talk about changing the way maps work with a cleaner neater interface, and introducing some great technology! Google Maps takes the cake.

Here's a link to an explanation of how this works.

On a related note, here's a link to a visual overview of the California Coastline. This is a manual painful process of accumulating photographs of the coastline.

10 Years on the Web

Yahoo! turns ten today and releases this to commemorate.

Sayonara Oracle

Well, 'tis 'bout that time to day Goodbye. Just sent a note out to my friends and colleagues at PeopleSoft (now Oracle) that its time for me to move on.

There has been a lot of changes and yet so much remains the same. Its hard to look at the empty offices. Its hard to imagine the dramatic nature of change of leadership at the top. But it happens. There's a lot going on right now... except that very few of us are privy to what it is. I'd love to tell, but you know as much as I do now.

I've been fortunate that I chose to leave, was not laid off, unlike my friend Skanda here. He has a heart rendering tale that is a must-read - we have successfully evolved modern society into a heartless, terror ridden economic machine where people's contributions absolutely do not make any impact as compared to the bottom line.

Is it impossible to hire people and run a profitable business? I asked myself this question over and over again. I think I have an answer.

I'm betting my career on it.

P.S. ex-PeopleSoft folks, you need to take networking opportunities in your own hands.. so don't delay, register here at PeopleSoft Alumni Network now!

This one was too funny!



(c) Dilbert.com

This scenario is not too far away

As noted earlier on BoingBoing, this link to the ACLU's clip may be closer to the truth that we can imagine. I've had the pleasure of working with different vendors on several technologies that come very similar to this all under the umbrella of CRM.

In a nutshell, we want to run a large company as a small business.How do we do that? By enabling all pieces of customer information in the hands of the company representative.

Let's say that you are calling your mobile phone carrier. It is likely that they have all the phone numbers you dialed. They also have your social security number. It is not inconcievable now that they can get a lot of information about - who you dial the most, or who calls you the most; they can link with a host of publicly available information, crossreference your email id with all public accounts and get consumer data from Axciom and similar providers about your details.

What will the company rep do with all this information at their fingertips? Something very similar to the video clip above. All the public domain knowledge must be balanced responsibly with commercial interests. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if taking a legal approach to this problem is the only solution.... shouls software vendors be held accountable for explicit violations of privacy?

Robert Cringeley's expansion on the Mac mini

As quoted here Bob Cringeley has a great theory that involved two companies that I greatly respect in terms of their innovation and business models - Apple and Netflix.

Quote:

"You do realize that the MiniMac is the Netflix killer, and the next wave of the "digital content" revolution? With the MiniMac, a decent set of HD movies as well as old content, an iFlix client connecting to legal content and BitTorrent to transmit, Apple has eliminated the most costly part of the NetFlix model while maintaining all of the good pieces. When you examine the NetFlix annual reports you can pull out the fact that one of their most expensive costs is the handling of physical media. The man power, physical shipping, and multiple location warehousing is much greater than the cost of getting the content.

"Apple can use their existing contract with Akamai to deliver graphics to instead act as a collection of Torrent Tracker nodes. All they need to do is to start to build the actual content and then wrap it in a reasonable DRM solution. Tie it to a program that keeps the list of movies that you want to watch in a download order, and then keeps the top 5-7 on your MiniMac. You sign a subscription with Apple to pay $20 a month to have 4 movies. Since the top 7-5 on your list are down, you could instantly check in one movie and check out the next one.

Compelling? I think so!

Knowledge Management, Part 2

Jon Udell wrote an interesting article on the (in)ability for vendors to invest in
basic web pages for knowledge management and allow a collaborative
community based approach for knowledge gardening.

I blogged about this here a while ago.

There seem to be a few basic problems here:
a. Vendors are highly skeptical of trusting knowledge outside of the boundaries of their own company - although it has been repeatedly proven otherwise
b. Vendors do not have a correct strategy to reward the contributors
meaningfully.Vendors, however have talked internally about tracking via points that
can be exchanged for training credits, marketing goodies etc. Reputation management is a key here to sustain the contributions.
c. Message Boarding - by this, I mean the perpetual fear that there would be an outpouring of negative feedback on the products that would overwhelm the site admins and would add unnecessary overhead on the maintenance of the site.

Knowledge management is very much a fundamental part of CRM and self
service is on the priority list for every large customer I have worked
with - but in a very limited way. Until the fundamental perception of
how a community can change the support costs can be communicated,
companies will continue to do business the same old way - if you have
a problem call 1-800-help!

Andy Hertzfeld on Blogging and Podcasting

In this Cnet News.com interview, Andy Hertzfeld (of Folklore.org) says:

No. I think people overrate blogging. I think the overall phenomenon to me is Web pages. Blogs are just Web pages, a certain stylized form of Web page. Much of the blogging is driven by egotism.

Is it really? It is easy to mistake this as egotism due to personal nature of the information being shares. Andy - would this be non egoistic if this was a simple web page? The real point here is that blogging has unleashed a simple way for non technical users(read: not webmasters or developers) to post information on the web in a universally searchable manner. This, I would argue, has far more benefits to the community than to themselves. The blogs that singularly focus on themselves are very lonely indeed.

Andy goes on to say:
I'm down on podcasts. I think that's ridiculous. Suddenly you're taking the information and making it completely inaccessible. You can't read it, and besides a podcast is nothing. It's streaming MP3s that's good, but no one can take credit for inventing a new term because streaming MP3s is simple and has been around for a while. Doing it through RSS enclosures is basically bad--to automatically download big files before hearing them.

This is an interesting observation, and I tend to agree with this to an extent. I have several MP3s that I listen to from IT Conversations, but sometimes it takes me at least 5 - 10 minutes to determine even if I am interested in the content of the conversation. How nice it would be if I could immediately see a transcript for this even before I download, and that I have the ability to search for the content that I need before I decide to download ?

RSS and Enterprise Applications

Here is a phenomenon that is sweeping the next generation of the Web often called Web 2.0 - the ability of expose information to a devoted set of people via RSS. What is interesting here is the lack of adoption in the Enterprise application areas. Do Enterprises do not need this ? Here are few examples:

CRM - can we get a RSS feed for new Knowledge base items that have been added for the products that a customer may have purchased? Or a Sales rep being notified when new marketing collateral comes out, competitive information is published or pricing is changed?

SCM - how about when a customer can easily track shipping information, replacing or augmenting formal ASNs(Advanced Shipping Notifications) with RSS feeds - that are personalized and relevant?

Typically event based frameworks have tried to get a stronghold in the enterprise application space - the ability to raise alerts and explicitly manage subscriptions, role and permission based content management, and end user filtration to ensure only the relevant messages get to the end users. This is a typical example of the control and auditing that is common in enterprise apps. Contrast this approach with the ones that we are seeing right now, founded on very basic principles:
a) There is only one set of information
b) The end user decides what is relevant and interesting

Now only if we add the capability to audit this information, and provide the ability to aggregate the RSS information into a portal, enterprise apps will now have a capability to participate in the next wave of the web.

Finally, a Mac for the rest of us

Apple today unveiled a $499 version of the Mac called the Mac mini. Why is this significant? Price. Steve Jobs has historically been opposed to pricing things cheaper, preferring to innovate rather than compete on a price basis. Look at the Mac family v/s anything that is out there - Mac is always more expensive, and feature-rich.

Jobs says that they would now like to go after a low cost market that has historically not seen any innovation. So, does a stripped down mac mean innovation ? Or does it mean a demo-ware loaded machine that serves as a sampler to upgrade?

Marketing books tell us that there are 4Ps that you need worry about - Product, Placement, Promotion and Price, and that the last one is the easiest to change, but is the hardest hitter towards profitability. Undercut the market and you set the stage for low-cost innovations, a la Dell. There is no other way to go but down. So being caught in a commodity war with the other PC makers hardly seems like a prudent step. I would expect similar cuts to follow from Dell, Gateway and others-hey, if Apple can release a Mac for under $500 with 5% market share, why can't the big boys for the same reasons?

The new $99 iPod shuffle does not seem to have the same oomph that the original iPod did - most notable is the lack of display and the innovative roller wheel to control what was playing. This like a direct strategy to capitalize on the iPod brand and sell it cheaper to unsuspecting crowds taken in by the iPod glitter and make a very ordinary purchase. The other way to look at this is - how could Apple keep their music download business healthy if the original iPod is still out of reach of a large market segment (the under $149)? Since $0.99 download must be losing money, this is an excellent way to make sure that the volumes will push that part of the business into profitability.

Simplicity of Computing

Adam Bosworth recently posted an article that is required reading for all technologists and product managers. He argues that we have made software more complex than necessary in the B2B Entrprise world and there is a great need to simplify in order to effectively adopt these into mainstream technologies.

Case in point: consumer oriented technologies have overtaken enterprise technologies in terms of adoption, collaboration and data sharing. Why is it easier to have an RSS feed that can be subscribed and read by hundreds of users immediately, whereas trying to attempt the same via a commercial Integration Broker is a pain in the wrong place ? Not that this is not possible, but setting up the perfect configuration with the layers and layers of abstraction to get a simple message to go between two systems is incredibly difficult in my personal experience.

Bosworth argues that the technologies that have survived are simple, flexible and imperfect - they have allowed for immediate easier adoption and hence evolution. If people are interested in a technology, they will improve it. Trying to come up with the most perfect technical solution the first time around will probably ensure an immediate demise due to lack of adoption.

Quote: "On the one hand we have Blogs and Photo Albums and Event Schedules and Favorites and Ratings and News Feeds. On the other we have CRM and ERP and BPO and all sorts of enterprise oriented 3 letter acronyms."

The reality of this statement is that computing for enterprise users should be no different that for consumers for easier adoption. Yes - the requirements of running a business is arguably more complex, but if the future of computing is going to be based on reputation (as proven by eBay and Blogs) we need to take a serious look at this from a CRM perspective ASAP.

Pricing in Hi-tech companies

This is a favorite topic of mine - pricing. It intrigues me when we have so many ways of pricing to completely confuse customers. Here are some common ways, and what works and what does not:

a. Price by CPU

You pay an egregious amount of money like $one kajillion per CPU. If you add more - perhaps indicative of excessive usage since more CPUs = more people using the app - you need to pay more.

Pros: It's a logical premise to an extent.
Cons: Difficult to capitalize of falling hardware costs. If you can now afford a multi CPU box for much cheaper, the costs are offset by the increase in payment to your vendor. Definitely a bad strategy for a customer.

b. Price by Seat/Named User

You have to declare the number of people - internal and external - using the application.
Pros: For a small company with a back office role, it probably makes sense.
Cons: This ignores one critical aspect - growth of a company and user adoption. More users should mean good things for both the company and vendor (from a reference perspective). Definitely doesn't make sense to penalize the customer.

Companies like Chordiant, and other call center companies like Genesys have made their $$$s here.

c. Enterprise Pricing

The pricing model is not restrictive and is based on the revenue growth of the company. If the revenue increases over the next few years, you owe more to the vendor. You do not if the investment does not affect revenue.

Pros: Very customer centric, profit sharing model with growth actually being encouraged.
Cons: Not every vendor's solution has a direct impact on revenue or growth. Customers will be reluctant for such pricing schemes from smaller vendors.

Some examples of who do this are PeopleSoft, PeopleSoft and PeopleSoft :-)

d. Subscription based pricing

Based on per user, this is a monthly subscription fee that will be charged.

Pros: Useful is stretching out payments over several months, resulting in better cash flow management.
Cons: Lack of stickiness (really a vendor problem). Easy to switch. Low F

e. Utility Pricing

Pay as you go pricing,you pay by the drink. More you use, more you pay.

Pros: The nirvana of Sun and IBM and HP for utility computing. Helpful for companies that have a spike in computing for some weeks based on seasonal demand - so a period of spikes followed by slumps.

Cons: Practical solutions that have been put into place is still in the early adopter phase. Large upfront investments will need to be made by some companies desirous of introducing this functionality to their customers to budget to spikes in demand.

f. Free

Now what can beat this ?

Pros: You gotta be kidding me!
Cons: Cost of support, maintenance. Necessary to have skilled resources and/or a quick relief support structure to be viable for the enterprise.

So what about Knowledge Management?


After working with several large Fortune 1000 companies re: their Knowledge management(KM) initiatives (or often called "contact center consolidation project", "web self service project" or by several other names, the end result remains elusive - KM is still remains a buzzword.

So what is KM anyways ? Is it search? Is it classification of information? Several vendors have attempted to define it their way - notable among them are Primus (recently acquired by ATG - the content management company), Kanisa, Serviceware, SupportSoft etc.

The basic problem with this narrow definition is that it ignores the people and process aspect. Knowledge Management is the ability to harness knowledge between the ears of the your assets - the ones who walk out of the door at the end of the day. The boundaries of the enterprise are expanding - they include your partners,suppliers, distributors and customers - who have more knowledge about the quirks of your product that some of your employees. The challenge then is not limited to your enterprise that these vendors attempt to address, but how to extend these to others and bring them into a referenceable but growing database of information.

It is interesting to note that given the current parameters of a fixed time and fixed budget - the initial wave seems to be of expanding service by outsourcing/offshoring by adding new bodies at a fraction of the cost. Lets extend this forward to 5 years or more and offshoring too will become cost ineffective due the real problem - information explosion. It is impossible to keep pace with the exponentially increasing information and the demand for accurate service about specific products by relying on people addition alone.

So what's the solution? Transparency. Allowing all external parties like customers etc to collaboratively participate in documentation, review and feedback. It starts with basics - discussion groups. Then advances to Wiki-webs and more. Open source by definition is more open to this process than established oragnizations, even though the number of users touched by the latter is several orders of magnitude more!

The key concept here is keep people and externals interested in the contribution process - reputation tracking and rewarding is key. Can a customer or partner gain points in exchange for contributing solutions ? Do the points mean something? (for e.g. a million points at one point an answer to get a PeopleSoft Shirt is certainly not worth it).

Today the concept of reputation is silo'd and locked into systems (so laments Marc Andreessen) - for e.g. its impossible to pull your reputation out of eBay and apply it to Amazon or to a business website). One notable exception to this rule is credit history - it seems to be consistently followed in the USA - and again is silo'd in one way due to three credit agencies :). Can the next logical extension to credit history be reputation history? Hmm....

Will an enterprise automatically campaign to have the most reputable people in the industry be their contributors? Will Microsoft expand their Passport strategy to include reputations? And then again - maybe not!.

Tracking back to the original issue tof KM - the bottomline is simple - multi-million $$$s in procuring search software will not help here. The real problem is far deeper than that and requires thought and persistence to gain a competitive advantage in the long run.

Tell me what you think.

Will Product Managers get Offshored?

Intriguing (and scary)question. One that needs to be examined a little further. Here's some facts:

• Most of the offshored/outsourced jobs are for call centers(inbound and outbound-telemarketing etc), back office workers(claims processing, underwriting etc) and HR related(payroll processing etc) .
• With the exception of these above jobs, most of the customer facing occupations are not being offshored - sales, business development, account management etc
• Companies have not yet learnt to leverage lower cost nations for strategic advantages, only for cost savings
• Strategic guidance and direction is still being closely held in the US, with the execution activity being delegated to offshoring destinations
• The mass job layoffs in Hi-Tech seem to be all those kinds of jobs that directly overlap with execution related or otherwise known as "non-strategic jobs".

Let's switch to India for a minute. Talking to my cousin who works there for a major software company, he mentioned some key challenges for workers there:

• Emphasis on working US hours leads them to work graveyard shifts, causing a complete imbalance in their social life
  
• Irrespective of the location of the work being done, collaboration is key between local locations/employees and remote workers. The knowledge that local employee may soon been let go causes a severe strain in building smooth business relationships, and delay in the work being performed; sabotage and process delays are very common.
• Smarter employees in offshore nations often complain of lack of quality work being sent, and lament the lack of creative/design work - this leads to tremendous turnover and lack of job satisfaction.
  

So on first thoughts, if we define product managers as "representatives of the voice of the customer"- there is still a great chance that this will remain as an exclusive US-only activity. The reality of the situation is that most US centric companies have a poor understanding of product needs from a global perspective(short of multi-language transaltions and running on Unicode databases).
Customers in various geographies have unique and distinct needs that are very different from the US, and true representation is possible only when product managers are recruited from local regions, and are encouraged to enlist the participation of local customer groups in the evlauation of a product before launch. Unfortunately, this means a couple of things: The perspective of the company has to change from "offshoring product management" to "global product management" and empowering regional product managers to take business decisions that are not overridden by the US based HQ.
The shift has started from the bottom end of the labor pyramid and is slowly making its way to the top.
Bottom line: There is a plausibility that product management jobs will get globalized, albeit not in traditional sense of the "offshoring" word.