on life, business, technology & all that

Being in the software product development we often get questions like how are software product development firms any different from offshore outsourcing firms? What is your differentiation?What do you offer that infosys and wipros do not offer?

These are valid questions but not surprisingly they often come from people who are not looking to innovate a product, people who are looking to innovate a product or service inherently know in their minds a regular software development firm will not fit the bill.

To start with a innovator looking to create a product or service is like rugby player who has the ball in his hand and is running towards the goal post like his life depends on it. And it does.

Only an innovator can understand an innovator. Period.

The major offshore outsourcing companies have been around for decades yet they have never attempted or delivered a product. This in the face of an appreciating rupee and shrinking margins.

There are various factors  that differentiate a outsourced product development firm from a regular software outsourcing house.

We mention the top 10 reasons why an outsourced product development firm is completely different from software outsourcing company.

1. Approach

2. Process

3. Delivery

4. Design

5. Trusted Partners

6. Risk Ability

7. People

8. Project handing

9. Service level agreements

10. Ownership

We will discuss all the points in details in the coming postings. Meanwhile if you would like to provide your point of view feel free to comment and let us know.

SaaS or Software as a service has been around for a decade but never really took off into the mainstream, the main reasons why it never took off were security reasons, reliability & availability, user adoption,  preference of major players to keep SaaS out, technology limitations.

Salesforce.com was the first one to break the barrier to entry into SaaS enterprise space forcing major players like oracle, sap, ibm, microsoft to get on the SaaS bandwagon.

The bigger players had a vested interest in enterprise software remain on legacy systems. few reasons are stated as below.

Since the hardware is shared in SaaS the sale of hardware in the enterprise segment will go down for server makers.

Its easy to sell software to less for more.

Making software available online also means letting the intellectual property in the open for smaller players to immitate the same software and pose a threat by reducing margins in the segment.

SaaS levels the playing field up for smaller player, which is something bigger players will not want.

In a 5 part series we take a look at the history of SaaS, its failures and successes, advantages and disadvantages, technical perspectives and architecture, issues in user adoption and marketing of SaaS and what the future holds.

Recently Googles orkut followed footsteps of facebook and opened orkut website to developers, which means developers can built apps that cna be consumed by orkut members and use orkuts data.

More importantly Google has built orkut on the open social platform which promises to make every social website a container which can lend itself to be used by application developers to harness the social data that these social networks have to make application which can leverage these relationships between friends and networks.

In the coming time as the race to become a container for opensocial platform becomes hotter, application developers who know how opensocial platform works and facebook application will see a huge demand.

As stated on google blog a social web is good, but it will not come without its share of problems. We will write more about the negative impacts of the opensocial platform in the next series.

A Great company:

Sees an opportunity

creates a product

creates a market

A good company:

sees a market

sees the opportunity

creates a product

A bad company:

Sees the competitors market

Sees the competitors opportunity

Creates a product

The best companies do not plan to catch up the leader, they do not force into other peoples space, they find vacuum and expand into it.

 Sometime back on Matt Cutts blog mentioned that Google is testing new techniques to fight paid links affecting their search engine results.

According to Google webmasters who choose to sell text links on their website should use some method to dislose it to the search engines. More small webmasters use text link ads to generate revenues from their websites.

Its ironic how Google is using webmasters to serve its purpose and sting them back when its jobs is done.

Most of these text links are bought by search engine optimization firms to promote websites in search engines. Its easy for Google to say paid links are bad, but the content that Google serves comes from these webmasters, the ad revenues on Google search engnes should be shared with webmasters too then.

Instead of bettering their own search engine to counter these problems they are resorting to arm twisting whihc will never work.

But this brings me to the main point, has Google become too strong and godlike than we need? The answer is yes.

Something’ gotta give, maybe another good search engine or other ways of finding information on the web so that webmasters can create and sell content like they want rather than how Google tells them to.

As seth godin mentions marketers want to reach the unreachable, maybe something that helps them do that on the web too.

Found on seth’s blog orginally from guardian
1. Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won’t do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.

2. Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

3. Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it’s practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they’re stars, not because they’re good looking.

5. Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t always matter which edge, more that you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

6. Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire the talented.

7. If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister’s record wasn’t. He was just faster … but it doesn’t matter.

8. It’s not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that’s for sure.

9. If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don’t care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right?

10. What’s fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you don’t reinvest and reinvent, you won’t be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.

Moslows Pyramid

In a conversation with Steve harmon wos a well known startup evangelist i realised how entreprenship has a relationship with maslow’s law.

According to maslow confidence achievement freedom comes at the top of te pyramid and security at the bottom.

Every entreprenur knows that freedom confindence and acievement comes before security for him

Internet and mobile association of India has publised some eye popping jaw opening facts about the state of Internet in India

Here are some facts

Job search online
Job Search is one of the top 5 key online activities that Indians do online [Email, Surfing, Chatting, Search and Job Search]

The number of job seekers Online is further expected to cross 9.2 million this year (2006-07) with the estimated market size of the Indian online recruitment industry to reach Rs 241 crores for 2006-07 from the current Rs 145 crores in 2005-06 .The industry is also likely to maintain a year on year growth in excess of 60%.

Referals online

Interestingly 31% having found a shopping site through word of mouth referrals and 18% shopped on a particular website because it was referred.

Online Bill payment
According to research by IAMAI, the number of Indians paying bills online is expected to increase from the current 0.3 million in 2005-06. to 1.8 million by 2007-2008.

Search engine marketing
Rs.230 crores of ad spend on this media is aimed at Indians alone. Of this, about a third, over Rs.70 crores is spent by Indian companies. For an industry that barely got off the ground a couple of years ago, it’s a huge leap.

Though the most interesting figures would be about ecommerce. One thing is for sure the internet and mobile industry will see a huge upswing for the next 5 years.
Surely are good times we are living in.

So What is Cocoon syndrome?

A company creates products and services so that they can sell it to as many customers as possible. The number of clients grow each day and the revenues start flowing higher, with each passing month the revenues keep growing bigger, but suddenly you realize that all though the margins remains same, the profit-revenue ratio as gone down.

Cocoon syndrome is your unstructured growth killing you.

But what happened there?

What happens is that as the number of clients increase, the expenses to provide support operations increase, that takes away your margins, further if market pressure makes you cut down your profit margins, all your profit might just go away in maintaining your previous client, on the contrary if the prices go up but if you have lots of clients in your earlier plans, again your profit margin sinks because you need to provide support to them at a lower price.

This is serious issue with many businesses.

The answer to this issue is to keep your operating costs low, keep your support costs minimal, and keep the minimal support staff.

But you can’t afford giving bad customer support can you?

Learn From Google.

Google in its advertising program services millions of customers. With most customers it earns just few dollars. It’s a volume game for them.

Google cannot afford to have a call center agent for every 20 clients, they need to automate support, in a way clients themselves prefer using the automated system rather than calling an agent or emailing.

How can we help?

To remain in the business you need to scale up, but scaling up does not mean more support staff. You need carefully designed support staff automation.

We increase a company HQ (happiness quotient) and free them from the worry of how a small bunch of support staff will manage thousands of customers.

* We Analyze, priorities and strategize
* We create automation of your support function
* We do it in a way, your clients prefer using automated
system
* we reduce support costs by 15% to 70%

The investment you make with us will be recovered within 3 months by itself no matter what business you are in. If not, we will quietly put the money back in your pocket.
Email: punit@appliedeye.com to know more.

Visit us at AppliedEye.com

A very fundamental question to ask is whats the difference between data , information and knowledge?

I learned in college that data has a surprise value, data can have value for not have any value, data becomes information when it has some value for the one who recieves it. The second time the same data is received it has no value and is not information any more.

The difference between information and knowledge is a bit more tricky
Information becomes knowledge when experts in a particular domain with hands on experience and success use the information to create varifiable understanding of a subject which can be used to serve a purpose.

Now why am i giving lessons in philosphy?

Because as we transit into the knowledge age where knowledge will be the most prized commodity i believe  google and search engines that collect data and sometimes information will need to find ways of presenting knowledge

Its not easy, with googles raw and easily manipulated algorithm its not easy to see the difference between data, information and knowledge.

But theres a opportunity for the ones who would bravely venture into googles territory. A pay for use search engine maybe?