of Policies and Trust

Its amazing how companies devise policies that treat the highly educated individuals they hired as children! Its all too often that an over ambitious policy maker creates a policy clouded with the fear of abuse rather than with the intent of making a difference. I think lives are complicated enough without daft policies that increase angst.

Here's a great link on from Business Week on "Ten Management Practices to Axe".

IPhone - A miscalculated marketing campaign

5 reasons (oh, there are so many many more) as to why the IPhone is a miscalculated marketing campaign in India. To start with, I don't own one, would love to, but am not going to, because its priced ridiculously.

1. An unlocked IPhone in the US after penalties and a 30 day plan works out to $200 + $100 + $172 ~= $500 x Rs. 45/$ = Rs. 22,500 for a 8GB IPhone.
2. At Rs. 31,000 its still locked to Airtel and Vodafone, oh pray tell me why?
3. If AT&T can give me an unlocked IPhone at Rs, 22,500, I wonder what prevents our friends at Airtel and Vodafone? Perhaps they should render unto Cesar... :-)
4. No 3G in India for another 1.5 to 2 years.
5. The IPod Touch costs ~ Rs. 17,000

Either Apple thinks Indians are very rich or it must be something I drank last night. This is logic defying for what is arguably the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. (Okay I stretched that a bit, its China I'm sure) Apple could have had a lot more sales than Airtel and Vodafone are now witnessing. Look around and tell me how many IPhones you see at the company you work at. Meanwhile, I'll just wait a couple of years.

Emerging Storage Markets - Spotlight on India

India has a urban population of 286 million, with Mahrashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamilnadu, West Bengal and Andra Pradesh accounting for nearly 150 million of these urban people. Additionally, India has a 742 million rural population. Of the total population, some 68 million use banking services and 34 million workers are in manufacturing industries. With the highest person density between the ages of 20-45.
One can view this as huge human capital, which it undoubtedly is. Also, as the economy grows, this same population will result in a very very large data storage market. Consider that a market such as the united states with a population of about 281 million proves to be the largest storage market with its financial, utility and governmental needs (to name a few) fuelling over 50% of the revenues (unsubstantiated at this writing) of most storage companies. 20 years from now given reasonable economic growth India and China will prove to be markets of much larger magnitudes. Already most storage companies have a strong presence in both these markets and are very bullish about the future.

As an example, the drive by the Indian Income Tax department to move filing from paper to electronic forms. Even without a regulatory requirement like Sarbanes-Oxley, the sheer volume of data is stupendous. Take the State Bank of India, The Planning Commission, The Election Commission (Voter ID cards) and you have a database that needs replication, disaster recovery and high availability. Who is tapping these markets today. Oh yeah, we haven't even started with electronic ration cards (cards for availing produce at government controlled retail stores that offer fixed price to low income households).

Many decades ago the major car manufacturers of the United States worked with their government to build roads so that their own sales and revenue would increase, will our storage companies do the same?

Defining and Extracting Value in Change

One of the problems in India today is our disinclination towards drastic change. We often choose to take the path more travelled and thereby bereft of risk. While this evolutionary methodology give us the stability we expound with so much pride, I believe that we should also chance the odd revolutionary change.

This brings about the question, why should we support change. It could be risky. We could lose all that we have cherished and protected. Is it worth the risk? I think the answer to this question is unlocked by determining the value in change. Value in itself could be short term or long term.

As an illustration, for decades India struggled with what was termed as a Hindu rate of growth resulting in a languishing economy, while the Asian tigers were roaring. Given a young population, this was shocking, but not unexplainable. Manmohan Singh's opening of the till then protectionist economy has shown spectacular results over the past decade and a half. But at the time of implementing this change, there were enough vocal nay-sayers that even the most ardent lobbyists of the free economy would have crumbled into self doubt. But the result of this change is well known.

Let's study another example. India is facing crumbling infrastructure. Our inheritance from the colonialists is all but dying and has neither been improved nor sustained. Yes, we hear about new airports and highways. But take it down to the streets and you notice two things.

1. Lack of proper well designed and laid out pavements.

2. Lack of well laid out roads and systems that allow free vehicular traffic

The resulting situation is that the pedestrian is watching every step he takes to ensure that he does not inadvertently visit an open manhole or drain and the motorist is weaving across the road to avoid a pothole or another unplanned urban obstacle. This is of course on streets that have some semblance of pavements and roads. Many have neither.

The outcome is that, the citizen is busy looking down at the pavement/road rather than looking ahead. I believe that this act of self preservation is what prevents us from looking ahead and walking tall. Our psyche has been damaged to an extent that we tend to look down and inward rather than up and outward and therefore tend to defer change rather than embrace it, withdraw from aggressors rather than meet the challenge and shift blame rather than accept responsibility. Good infrastructure can inspire and challenge people to raise the bar and to achieve objectives they may not have envisioned before.

If we extend the same concept to the work place, we will notice many similar situations. Have you ever wondered why this particular team member is low on motivation or why that particular project is languishing? The reason sometimes may be due to an inward view instead of outward and therefore there may be change opportunities that are being ignored!

Do they have the right tools, the right skills, the right manager, the right assistance. Are factors at the workplace, may be lighting or could be the coffee machine hampering people from asking the right questions, the questions that drive change?

The War of the Consoles

A few weeks back I realized that I had become a dinosaur as far as the world of gaming was concerned. The last game I had played was over 10 years ago on my Intel Pentium PC, the Lucas Arts smash hit, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Playing a puzzle game without the benefit of a walk-through gives a completely different gaming experience that gamers today may find interesting. Enough nostalgia!

An ex-gamers re-union resulted in one of my friends, Ashwin, bringing over his X-Box. A few hours of playing with it, A sad truth dawned. The PC was dead as far as gaming was concerned. Inspired by the X-Box another friend bought a PS2. Now before you say, "hey there, don't you know that the X-Box 360 and the PS3 are out. Go get one and do some real gaming", let me delve further into the heart of my post.

10 years ago, if my friend had a fun game, I could swap it with him and we could both play. Gaming 10 years ago was not a multi-billion dollar industry that it is today. Microsoft was just getting in to the turf hitherto ruled by Id, EA to name a few. It is also not that consoles did not exist, they very much did. My first games were in fact played on an old Atari console. So there, let get all those assumptions out of the way.

Cut to today. My friend on the PS2 can't swap his games with my X-Box friend. The controllers are vastly different. However the consoles themselves are not much cheaper, At about Rs. 16,000 for an X-Box 360 and Rs. 32,000 for a PS3, these things are not exactly cheap. A game costs anywhere between Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 3,500 and online gaming is the rage!

All of which reminds me of enterprise hardware vendors such as Digital, IBM and HP, who in the 60's, 70's and 80's tried very hard to lock their customers to a particular platform. History while noting their success for a good 30 years also records their eventual convergence. A matter driven more by market forces and less by noble thoughts.

I believe that a similar situation is going to occur on the console front as well. While companies such as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will try hard to lock their customers into their consoles and have/will succeed in the short term, in the long run, convergence is inevitable. The field is ripe for gaming standards. Its in the interest of consumers and media companies who create these games. It offers unparalleled gaming convenience for the former and access to larger markets for the latter. I am sure every X-Box'r has a PS2 friend who he wanted to play against.

Already mod-chips, allow gamers to unlock the potential of their consoles. Emulators allow PC gamers to play console games. It is only a matter of time before we see universal consoles. What shall we name them? PoX? or XS2?

The future holds exciting options. Will the console lords listen?