The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Especially, when it happens to be about how organisations are getting affected. This one is from McKinsey Quarterly and answers questions on social media that managements would like want to know about. And in line with the state of things, the ‘ground bottom’ of the organisations know much more about what is being spoken in this video and, neither even care about some of the points here. But if you are the ‘management’ layer, do hit the play button to listen to MIT’s Andrew McAfee.

Well, if you cannot see the video, sorry, I am doing what McKinsey asked me to do. So what if the result is not there!

Just see the picture below and think if you ever saw a bigger discount before. I had not, till I saw this in Gurgaon few days back. This is one of the busy malls at MG Road. However, the large discount seem to attract no footfalls.

In fact, the attendants inside were busy chatting as there was no customer inside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning: Never discount your brand like this, won’t get you any customers.

Let me admit this – I never heard of Pranav Mistry before. However, the simplicity with which he presented his Sixth Sense technology at TEDIndia recently is an absolute stunner. Someone forwarded me this link and I watched this several times already. There are many people with several disruptive ideas and innovations, however, demonstrating their relevance to everyday touch-points is something to be truly seen and felt via this presentation. Due to Youtube duration limitations, the presentation is in two parts. Total duration is less than 15 minutes and you must watch this, even if you know nothing about technology.

 

The technology is called Sixth Sense, and in Pranav’s words, connects the real to the digital. It has some pretty amazing applications already.

 

Pranav, your presentation has left a promise.We wait for it to be fulfilled soon. And by the way, you rock!

It is daily that one finds car companies comparing their upcoming car and ‘any other thing on wheels’. It is also a common occurrence to find soap and shampoo manufacturers comparing their product and ‘any other ordinary’ product . People in my generation recall the ad with the line ‘adha kilo surf kisi aur sadharan powder ke ke ek kilo barabar hota hai’. Bike companies in India have long done feature-to-feature competition with competition products for ages.

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.