The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

The Washington Post suffered it. Amit Agarwal talks about it. Rishi Raj laments it. Mani Karthik says he does not care. A zillion posts are already up on Google’s recent PageRank update.
After

While the web is full of commentary on Google’s recent PageRank update, here’s some food for thought. We compared the PageRank of some of the leading IT Companies corporate websites in June and October. It is quite puzzling that Infosys.com and Accenture.com suffered a PR drop by one notch from 8 & 9 respectively to 7 & 8 now. In the same timeframe, TCS.com has gone up one level from 7 to 8 level. It is also notable that in the same period the Google reported inbound link to Infosys.com has dropped, which is quite mystifying.

When one compares the Google reported backlink figures among the top names in IT industry, IBM has seen its backlink numbers jump from a high figure of 62,100 to astounding 1,11,000 which perhaps explains its PR 9, before and after.

Most people have speculated that the PR update has affected those sites that have sold text link ads without the nofollow attribute, but that would not apply to Infosys.com and Accenture.com, and perhaps, there are other, less understood factors as well.

As someone said, “my mom will continue to type www.washingtonpost.com to read the news, no matter what PR they have”. Well said, that is the habit based consumption, however if conventional wisdom is to be believed, organizations selling services would see their traffic drop in due course.

In the last ten days or so, we have seen a spate of ads, on TV, Billboards etc announcing the rebranding of Indian Telecom operator Hutch to Vodafone. Newspapers have been talking about the huge sums that has been marked for this transformation.This NDTV report event mentions about a sum of 300 crore being earmarked for this brand makeover.The entire campaign, including creative is very tasteful and simple.The blitz appears so pervasive.

However, there is branding in nooks and crannies, which is still to be done.

Look at the network signature of a visitor who visited this space last night from a handheld device on Hutch network.The network is still identified as Hutch.

Don’t blame the brand managers though, this is one space that they may not think much about(or know about). Don’t blame the network guys either, they are not incharge of the brand. It just goes onto show that such mammoth brand makeovers have more dimensions than a brand manager can possibly think about.

Few months back, a friend of mine sought to transfer some money from his ICICI Bank account to to my ICICI Bank account. We choose the most convenient route, which was an online transfer. Was it that that convenient indeed?. Read on.

It so appeared that the account number I sent by mail to my friend was wrong by exactly one digit. A real costly mistake indeed. My unsuspecting friend promptly executed two transfers and the money, a sum of few thousand rupees, landed in a third account, which wasn’t his intention.

As soon as we learnt of the error, we reported to ICICI Bank, and surprising enough, this completely wired bank decided that this cannot be reported to the call center. One has to visit the branch. So be it we said, and dutifully filed a written report at the ICICI Branch where my friend has his account. We were advised, that the Bank would seek to reach out the third account holder, and after his/her permission , reverse the transaction. Not so simple. For months, my friend kept following up with the ICICI Bank staff by phone.In the course of this period, the bank kept saying that the delay is because the customer has not updated his/her telephone number and not responding to postal communication.

We then visited the branch once again. We were pointed out that bank really cannot give any SLAs on rectifying this error, since the error has happened from the customer side. Also, that the receiving account was short by ‘some amount’. We also learnt that this is not an unheard of occurrence at that branch.

The error happened because in ICICI Online Banking money transfer, there is no payee validation mechanism to ensure if the account indeed belongs to the person who you are seeking to transfer the money to. A paper instrument, bears the payee account name, and has to be deposited along with the correct account number. In case of a mismatch, it would not be processed. In ICICI online system, it just vanishes behind a number. So risky.

So with much follow-up, a major part of the money was transferred to my friend’s account, which I helpfully took from my friend, and the mode chosen was non electronic. The deficiency of an amount of over thousand rupees, one understands, is because the wrong payee had that much deficit in his/her account. So, whatever he/she owed to ICICI Bank for whatever reasons has now become my friend’s liability and therefore, mine.Cool!

We were told, in slightly coated words, that the Bank has taken some precautionary steps to prevent such an error, and we have neglected that. The hint was to an sms message that goes to the payer whenever he/she adds a new payee to make a transfer. The sms contains a numeric code, which has to be keyed in to complete the process. According to the bank, we should have noticed the error at this stage. I am tempted to challenge this. A real validation would happen only if the sms comes to the payee who would pass it on to the payer.

So, next time you are about to make an online payment via ICICI Bank, look at the good old cheque leaf as a valued alternative. Or consider transferring an amount of 10 rupees first, call up the other party and check if they received the same. Do not assume fancy systems to be more robust and foolproof. An application is only as good as the process design given to the programmer.

In response to my previous post on Conversational Marketing as discussed by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book, I received a counterpoint from my friend Rajeev John, who is a marketing professional with one of India’s truly home grown and respected consumer goods company.

“Its like the Star Wars program. Extremely relevant for 2020 but irrelevant now with internet penetration still in single digits in our India.There are still (& sadly so) a lot of marketeers who think marketing is a tool to attract SEC A + consumers only. They forget (or are simply not aware) that 75% OF POPULATION STILL LIVES IN VILLAGES. Now reaching out to them & bringing into the branded fold is the real challenge.”

John, many thanks for the reminding us of the brutal truth. I am sure that there are others who might want to side your argument, like me.

Now stepping aside this argument for a minute, let’s see that there are several companies that are selling their products or service in different parts of the globe, where net penetration is not an issue. Who would not want to read what Ratan Tata has to say, or Mittal. Or, the IT behemoths who are serve their customers worldwide. I would personally want to read what Capt Gopinath would write, if he were to start a blog.

Yes, SEC A is certainly maturing. We have seen communities being created around Sunsilk, Maggi and so on. But this, I am sure is just the start.Time is coming, very soon.

Subroto Bagchi was at Madras Management Association Forum yesterday and gave a captivating talk on High Performance Entrepreneurship. I would have expected a usual stuff on Entrepreneurship laced with lofty terms such as passion, idea etc only if I hadn’t been following his a-spade-is-a-spade columns in magazines. Perhaps others too had, since it was a housefull. And Subroto did not disappoint them at all. With true elan, he began by asking the audience what is the foremost quality needed in an entrepreneur. Lots of hands went up, and audience provided predictable answers such as passion, idea, marketable IP such as an invention. Subrato dismissed these at once and stated that that one quality was the love for money!

He ran a thirty minute film that featured three modern day entrepreneurs of very diverse type – V G Siddartha of Cafe Coffee Day, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon and Capt G R Gopinath of Deccan Aviation. The background and the triggers for these three to take to the journey of entrepreneurship are very different. Siddhartha is from a family of coffee estate owners and wanted to go beyond the family vocation rather than continue to trade in a commodity. Kiran went to Australia in the 70s to train as a brew master and when she came back, no company would offer her a position as a brew master – it was considered a man’s job in those days.She started Biocon from a garage (Yes, it is not just HP that started this way!) and found an Irish customer, did lot of things right, and today Biocon and Kiran are what they are. Capt Gopinath, contrary to my previously held impression, is not a pilot himself. Infact, he is from the Army’s Aviation Corps but he is not a pilot. His turning point was when one of his (newly retired services) pilot friends informed him that he got a job with a courier company. Recalled Capt Gopinath in the film, “I was at Phoenix airport waiting for a helicopter to pick me up and while waiting there, I calculated that this airport handles about 1000 flights a day. This is the number more than all the airports in India put together”. He had to do something.Simplify he decided, and created Deccan Aviation.Interestingly, it turned out while watching the film, prior to plunging into Aviation business, Capt Gopinath had taken to bio-farming as a career and was quite successful in that too.

Subroto Bagchi traced the steps of entrepreneurship with the help of more than a few slides, and it would be a great ready reckoner to anyone who reads them. He cautioned potential entrepreneurs against common problems and emphasized the need to define the values of the organization at the very outset.He also impressed the importance of a written business plan and pointed out that most entrepreneurs, shy away from having a documented business plan. He interspersed his talk with several anecdotes and we got an example of the personality that he is.”When Mr. Premji would come to my office, he would ask me if I was available to meet him at a specific time. Not that I could say no, but I would make the pretense of checking my calendar and then tell him yes we could meet. It was such a convenient arrangement”. (Azim Premji was Subrato’s boss at Wipro).

A very memorable evening. Next time you hear Mr Bagchi is in your city, find out where he is speaking, drop everything and run. Promise, you won’t regret. For the records, Subroto has authored a book on this subject called High-performance Entrepreneur. Thank you Mr. Bagchi for the truly wonderful session.

(PS: And if you are from MMA / Mindtree and have the copy Mr Bagchi’s slides, please mail them to me!)

Wikipedia defines Open Source as follows:

“Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice.”

So, when I read about a car being made ‘Open Source‘, I halted to read about it. At the Dutch auto-fair Auto RAI 2007, The Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment and the three technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Twente launched what was termed as their stimulating vision on mobility. In plain language, three universities have come together to design a car on the collaborative movement called Open Source. The car of the future is called c,mm,n (pronounced ‘Common‘). Essentially, that would mean, collaborative, shared designing of a car(‘a car‘ -isn’t that an oxymoron in the context of Open Source?!) by car design enthusiasts. The blueprints are available for anyone to download, improve and productionize if you wish, provided, you plough back your improvements to the common knowledge pool.

Hang on, the cars aren’t rolling off the assembly line anytime soon(and certainly you would never download the car from Sourceforge), we are just talking about the initial phase of this new idea. If you would like to see a visual of c,mm,n, Core 77 has a picture of the concept car showcased at Auto RAI 2007.

Car design is a complex and very expensive affair. Maybe, like Linux avatars, a bunch of talented car designers form a ‘kernel’, from which many derivative models can be made. Maybe the frame, the engine, the powertrain designs would evolve in public domain. That is the idea behind this Open Source Car movement.

Another related point. As cars become more complex, they carry more an more of embedded software for control, in a field called infotronics. Not sure how far how much Open Source movement really fits into that, since most of the infotronics (some estimates put it over 10-15% of overall cost of some categories of cars) is believed to be proprietary, and in a very competitive space.

Overall,c,mm,n brings the concept of Open Source to the physical domain. A very interesting idea indeed. Move over Ford, GM, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Tata. The kids are on the drawing board and they know what they are doing.

The newspapers, television and radio are screaming- Indian Space Programme goes commercial and likes. Indeed, after decades of research, our scientists are all set to do a commercial launch- a 309 kg Italian satellite would be lobbed into a polar orbit this afternoon on board a PSLV rocket. This is a low orbit satellite would find its position somewhere 300 kms above the ground and orbit earth every 90 minutes or so.

Communication satellites of any real worth – running communication channels and costing megabucks – operate in geo stationary orbit at about 36000 kms, and they must be transported to 8000 kms by rockets.These satellites weigh 3-4 tonnes.This is where the real money is. The US space programme and Arianne rockets compete heavily in this commercial space. China and Japan have their own programmes and at least China does not outsource the launches though not sure about Japan. India’s own GSLV is far from ready, even after burning time and money and couple of Russian engines to tow.Apollo 11 took four days to reach moon. That was 1969. We are in 2007. Indian geostationary satellites are still launched from Arianne rockets.

And now hear this.

In 2008, they want to launch a mission to moon, called Chandrayan – 1. Dreams are alright but should our feet not be on the ground?Should painful truth not be confronted for better results? My thoughts.

Updated Nov 20, 2008: You may want to read my recent post on Chandrayaan success.

Helpful links: ISRO website

Kiran Karnik, the venerable President of Nasscom is all set to leave, Economic Times, reports. Nasscom is the premier coalition of Indian IT and BPO companies and apart from lobbying and awareness building about IT and BPO, Nasscom has been playing an active role in envisioning future business opportunites in IT & BPO space. This news comes the same day when Infosys(INFY) announced Q4 results and several others are all set to come out with their Q4 numbers in the next few days.

Nasscom’s previous president was Dewang Mehta, who established Nasscom’s name to what it currently is. Kiran’s tenure was marked by days in which IT companies have come across stringent non-tariff barriers such as visa quotas, and outsourcing becoming a negetive term in the west, and other countries having earned the ‘emerging destination’ label.Whoever joins next, will have quite a challenge on his hands.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Solution architect who succeeded Bil Gates for that position, did something on 27 Feb 2007 that leading executives of Microsoft are not known to do- acknowledge the succcess of business rivals. He acknowledged that Google’s success with its advertising model was a “wake-up call within Microsoft”. Many within Microsoft would possibly consider such an acknowledgement as nothing short of sacrilege but it clearly shows the yeah-they-got-it-right-we-didn’t thought process in Microsoft’s top management quarters.

They possibly acknowledged it silently by allowing you to choose your own search engine such as Google and ASK in IE 7.0 i search box rather than force MSN/Live search on you.

Another interesting development is his comment about the success of MS Office as having withstood the onslaught of the likes of Zoho and Google Docs saying they ‘compromised functionality’. Not sure if he was asked on the declining marketshare of Internet Explorer but surely his take on Firefox would be something of interest to many.

Microsoft is known to orchestrate large programs and projects which take years to mature(start with a ‘code name’, make the ‘code name’ public, build excitement over years), where most successful web comanies such as Google and Yahoo remain nimblefooted and keep a very sharp eye on promising startups which they acquire and make it as part of their services block, recent example being YouTube, which Google acquired for USD 1.6 BN, which incidentlly Steve Ballmer reportedly likened to a copyright disaster waiting to happen. They are also yet to figure out who is their competiton in the Web 2.0, merely few named companies(which if they acknowledge would be good) or the mushroom kind of evolution pattern of the internet(which if they acknowledge would be better).

Another possible aspect possibly overlooked is the service versus product issue. The service vs product line has somewhat blurred in the recent years, and Web 2.0 is dominated by things such as widgets. The internet usage itself has changed over the years, it is not just a platform where corporations run websites and users visit those sites- lot of users themselves create content, and I am not sure how Microsoft is enabling anyone other than providing a browser.

All said, Microsoft remains a great company, and a well organized one. Perhaps too well organized for the Web 2.0 era, where organizational chaos often leads to innovations.

Detailed Yahoo Report

Microsoft