An optimist says “Good morning, Lord.” While a pessimist says “Good
Lord, it’s morning”.
A friend send me an email with this quote as a part of his signature. Simply brilliant who ever thought this one!
- Rajesh
I hate to admit it, but I think I lost my mojo for funny, creative art a long time back. Of course, what I am trying to say is that, at some point in the past, I was actually pretty good at it 
. So, these days, everytime I get this blurry and vague (creative?) idea of creating some art work (in this case for a section of my web site), I try Googling (have they made it an official word yet?)for inspiration. Today, even Google couldn’t help me. However, did come across some really funny and creative tech toon sites. God bless these guys for their humor and creativity. Here are the links - John Klossner cartoons and Cartoons by John Pritchett. My personal favorite was the one titled The Internet and Newspapers on John Pritchett’s site (the reason I don’t have it as the splash toon for this posting is because of usage restrictions). Go through their work. Some of the stuff is really hilarious.
- Rajesh
I landed (literally) in Silicon Valley in the fall of ‘99. It was a wonderful time. There was the “tech boom”. The stock market was in full spree. Brian Cooley sounded like a beautiful bird chirping away on sunny mornings. But very soon things started going downhill. The “boom” went “bust”. The economy just slumped. People started getting laid off. During those tough days, I remember observing a few things in the valley that I thought was…well…strange at best. Yesterday, while reading Russell Beattie’s posting - Where’s the Mobility? - I got reminded of my “strange” observations.
I mentioned the other day that I thought Silicon Valley would eventually come to dominate the mobile services space. I still believe that, but it doesn’t look like the established leaders have gotten the idea yet - it’s obviously going to be left up to small startups to lead the way in this area, which is fine. Netscape wasn’t an HP project after all.
I first noticed that the leaders of Silicon Valley are *still* behind the times when I saw the line up for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference. Not a single member of telecom industry there and only one session that talks about telecom - and its focus is VoIP. Are you kidding me? Anyone who doesn’t realize by now that the Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by mobile devices must be living on, well, here in the U.S….
Back to my “strange” observations: I remember that for a good part of my first year (99 - 2000) in Silicon valley, I was still surfing the net using a 56Kbps dial-up connection from home. Ah, but I was getting the same bandwidth from my ISP back home in India! Back then, within the Indian IT industry circle, people were talking about high-speed internet connectivity using ISDN, cable modems, DSL, ADSL technology among other things. Of course, all this talk was based on the trends coming out of U.S. high-tech industry. And here I was in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, to be specific) - the cradle of high-tech innovation, the haloed ground for knowledge workers - barely chugging along at 56Kbps. Besides that, there was the small matter of having the option of choosing among competing ISPs. Well, Pac Bell (now SBC Communications Inc.) was the only option we had for more than four years. And that was the case till about a month back. The early DSL services were offered somewhere around late ‘99 or early 2000. The price was exorbitant - I think it was well over $50. One would think that in time, at least, we would have other options in the vicinity. Road Runner, Excite@Home (one of the victims of telecom industry’s excesses during the “boom”), someone…after all this is Silicon Valley. As a matter of fact, Excite@Home had its headquarters approximately 15 miles away but no service in our locality! But still, the fact was that we had no options. Whatever happened to competition, choice for customer, capitalism, blah, blah, blah.
Here we are now - mid 2004. The scenario is not very different. The cost of DSL has gone down somewhat (mid $20s/month from nearly $50/month when we first availed of the service) but so has the customer services, generally speaking. And for those who don’t want to sign up on a yearly contract - people like me who are planning to move - the price remains the same - nearly $50 per month. A few things have changed. Pac Bell is now SBC Communications Inc. As far as more options are concerned, we have a variation of SBC in SBC Yahoo!. However, almost exactly a month back, Comcast brought our local cable company (Castle cable). So, now we have an authentic non-SBC option - finally! High-speed option of as much as 3Mbps! Come to think of it, for almost three years, our “neighbors” half-mile down the road had high-speed internet services from AT&T Cable services (eventually taken over by Comcast) but we were only allowed to sniff it! Took a while, but we are getting some options now. I guess, it says something about corporate America and its absolute aversion to risk - especially in down times. And then there is the bureaucracy. FCC and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Doesn’t help corporate America. Doesn’t help innovation. Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away, in South Korea…
- Rajesh
It is official. Sony is virtually withdrawing from the PDA market with the decision to stop selling its Clie range of products in the U.S. and European markets. Sony’s move may well be the beginning of the end for the PDA as a product in general. One of the main reasons for lackluster PDA sales - once a hot gizmo among the upwardly mobile population - is the strong competition from “the communication business’s 800-pound gorilla: the cell phone.”
So, will PDAs be relegated to the dustbin of great products that failed? Or will it reincarnate in a different avatar? The debate is on. The product gurus are definitely trying to answer some of the obvious questions: Did Sony (and the others) didn’t foresee the threats from the substitute(s)? Were there simply too many features (do I hear some one say “the iPod lesson”)? Did the price reflect a fair value proposition from the customer’s viewpoint? How do PDAs differentiate from today’s feature-rich cell phones and “converged” mobile phones?
All said and done, it will be a while before the customers give their final verdict on the value of PDA as a product. Sony will more than survive even if the PDA market collapses. Thanks to their wide range of product portfolio and business units. But what about companies whose market presence is solely based on PDAs and related components and services - a company like PalmSource Inc., whose software powers the PDAs and which counts Sony as its second biggest licensee? They would definitely need to do some serious rethinking about their product portfolio. A single product strategy is always dangerous in hi-tech industry - especially considering the fact that technology is itself in a stage of flux.
So what are the lessons to be learnt? The one lesson that I will take home is that product managers within a company should always plan for failure. Always. Even in the best of times - when company’s products are raking in great returns, no competition in sight, substitutes are weak, the party for company’s “Killer Product of the Decade” is underway, etc, etc. - it pays to be a paranoid product manager. In fact, employers should pay product managers to be paranoid! In my book, a good product manager is one who is constantly aware that the next product to kill his/her company’s flagship product may come the very next day. Or while (s)he is sleeping in the night.
- Rajesh
In my opinion and experience, there is a very compelling reason (or reasons) behind all the horror stories about the high percentage of IT projects that fail. Johanna Rothman’s posting - How Much Rework Does Your Project Perform? - provides one of the answer. I am definitely not surprised by her assessment about the proportion of time that is just spent on rework in a typical project. My term for this “phenomenon” is “(Re)work in progress”. And by every account it is a very common occurrence in most IT projects. Companies can adopt numerous, fundamental approaches to overcome this problem. But this has to be complemented with a more lasting solution to the problem.
rework accounts for somewhere between 75% and 80% of a “normal” project’s time…
In my opinion, the main problem lies in focusing too much on the end product and too less on the process that takes us to that end product. Yes, I am talking something on the lines of CMM (Capability Maturity Model) for software development that describes the principles and practices underlying software process maturity. Of course, companies whose core competencies are not software products and services would not (and should not) invest the time and money to achieve CMM levels for their small IT or IS departments. However, in this age of global competition, efficient business/operational processes hold the key to a business organization’s ability to survive and thrive. In the absence of well-defined processes for managing in-house projects (IT or others), companies are unwittingly bleeding themselves of precious resources.
Every time a project is undertaken, there is widespread reinventing-the-wheel. It’s high time that managers and decision-makers ask themselves: What happened to the company’s software assets used in the last project? Can’t we use them again? Where is the documentation for the projects done till date? Where is the knowledge base? Where are the APIs? Where are the reusable components? Well-thought out project/product management processes can go a long way in addressing some (if not all) of the questions raised above.
- Rajesh