The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Mallika is a category 5 hurricane. She stuck India years back and refuses to subside.The most interesting attribute of Hurricane Mallika is that she’s hit India coast-to-coast and the only property she’s damaged is the male heart.Worst still, she’s going stronger by the day.Initially she was designated as category 2.Nobody knows where she’s heading next. Hurricane Aishwarya is now designated as category 1, which means she’s really not much lethal anymore. We also had a Muskee Tornado few years back, but its effect gradually waned over time. In any case this tornado damaged the female hearts alone.

Lets keep an eye as Mallika progresses towards the Hongkong coasts!

8 PM last evening just as I reached home from work I received a call from my cousin sister in Jalgaon. Her husband landed in Chennai a few hours earlier, she said. Delighted to hear that, I said, BTW, where is he? He was on his way to Vellore to attend a relative under medical care. Unfortunately, he had left behind his mobile phone in the auto from Chennai airport to the city as he headed for Vellore. Too bad, I said, this is a bad city. Close the connection with the service provider IMMEDIATELY I said. She said I did not get her point.The autodriver had just called her and he wants to return it! Interesting, I said.

My wife took the challenge of speaking to the autodriver as she speaks Tamil. He said he has a stand near the airport and if we come there, the instrument is all ours. See you in twenty minutes we told him. At plus 15 minutes we bundled into the car and headed for the airport. Everybody knows the Guindy/GST road traffic. We reached there at plus 60 mins(9 PM). We had been instructed to look for Anna Auto Stand, identifiable by a Jayalithaa picture near the Airport signal. There was no driver Sathya at the stand. I called him again and he said he was near Kilpauk dropping a passenger. I had a flow of not so kind words goading to be uttered, but I resisted.Did I travel 11 KM one way for this joke?!Please note down my phone number and address and if possible, deliver it to me today itself I pleaded. And yes, I will pay you your fare. I was worried about the phone being used to make STD calls.

At plus 70 mins(9:10 PM) we started our way back best-guessing whether we would get it back at all. Reached home at plus 120 minutes (10 PM) trying to get the phone out of my mind. Bad luck. At few mins past eleven pm(plus 190 mins), I received a call. The person said he is calling from a pharmacy few kms away from my house. What the hell I was about to ask him.It is past eleven and I have not ordered any medicines, thank you. No, I got him wrong. An autodriver wants to return a mobile phone. Can I come and pick it up please?!!

At 11:30 PM(three and a half hour after I was called by my cousin sister), I had the phone in my hand. It had not been used except to call two numbers. The first one said HOME, the second was mine. Two learnings:

• Chennai still has a soul.
• All wise men have an entry called HOME on their phone!

With Google’s creeping onslaught on the desktop space, Microsoft is in the danger of being reduced to middle layer of customer experience, Never mind the XP in Windows. Google is setting the standards through engineering innovation, and by keeping the customer in the center. Google has attacked Microsoft two fold – One by expanding the customer experience in a space that has hitherto been believed to be already exploited to full capacity, and second by building ab-initio innovations that have leveraged the computing power of the day, including good internet bandwidth, to give completely new experience. The first category includes chat , email and photo organising softwares, among other things. The second category includes the new products, such as blogger, Google Earth, Google Print and Google Maps.
This is also an example that innovation by a challenger can drive the marketing budget of a leader hollow, if the leader’s strategy is build around self and not around the environment.
Microsoft faces the haunting spectre of being the middleware in customer experience, and customers will interface with the Google and the likes!

Just finished reading ‘The World is Flat’ by Thomas Friedman. The subtitle suggests it is the ‘A brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century‘.

Once again an attempt at creating a stereotype. This book is targetted at western audiences, who have probably read about outsourcing etc through the media, but have not had the chance to read it in the form of a story, something the three times Pulitzer awardee is very good at.

Mr. Friedman conjures up images of Indian IT companies as replacing the jobs in the US, but he forgets some parts of the story, viz, most of the Indian Tier 1 IT services providers have strong sales arms in the US, which have many an American employed.Outsourcing is not new at all. A famous acedemician recently commented that Americans outsourced their undergraduate education to India decades ago. That remark, made half in jest, alluded to the large number of Indian students who went to(and still go) US to after earning their basic engineering degrees in India. Many are now part of American society and Industry.

Hollywood movies have been around for a while. For the duration these were (or are ) seen across the world, Mr. Friedman and like minded individuals have absolutely no concerns. The moment two or three out-of-US movies get adopted by US mainstream audience, we would probably have Mr. Friedman believe that the world is flat, and entertainment is outsourced.

Mr Friedman completely forgets that there is a certain commodity called oil where the concept flat is a liitle in favour of US and hence, does not merit a discussion. (BTW, the American commentators have been blaming “Scaled up Chinese demand” for the USD 70 a barrel oil price, completely forgetting that US auto industry never paid any attention to fuel efficiency!!)

Some other issues. After reading this book, you may ask yourself, what is new in this book. The answer probably is that here’s another well-packaged brand-managed item where the core is a little weak, but they still survive because they created the category. To that extent, we give full credit to Mr. Friedman and soon we might see many other books in this category. I call this category Outsourcing 101.

Some factual issues. Indian IT industry did not take birth because of Y2K. The major names in this business have been in the business for over a decade prior to Y2K. They merely leveraged the opportunity presented by Y2k to get close to American/Western customers. Likewise, they were not given free bandwidth due to dotcom overcapacity. They merely leveraged an available resource.Indian IT Industry is not Bangalore alone. Infact, most major names in Indian IT industry have very well spread out footprints, and have development centers in multiple locations in India, and indeed even in Eastern Europe and Latin America.