E-Mail

To : Myself, 20 years from now
Subject: What happens to Model - T?
From: Me, Today

Hi:

Today, I am departing from the traditional gaze into the oracle and am taking a break from wondering what Man will do to Man. Instead, I'm turning the spotlight inward.

Why do we maintain journals in the public domain? I wonder if its for the same reason that criminals like to leave clues - because deep down, we all want to be found out.

If so, what is in hiding that I'd like to be brought to the surface? The more I ask, more the criminal in me returns a cryptic reply - "I don't know".

You know as well as I do that everything immoral, illegal and fattening has happened; all that needed to be destroyed - well, the needful has been done. Interestingly, I never did pick up the pieces. I just brushed them aside and built another model, each time with a stronger immunity system and able to brush off the latest viral attacks.

And then I waited - for the model to be destroyed again. Each time, the Weapons of Mass Destruction were different - excessive lifestyles, betrayal by those trusted implicitly, 100-hour work weeks, collapsing health, sex, lies and videotape etc.

You'll be proud to know that the latest model, Model - T, has doubled productivity and puts in only fifty hour work - weeks. Sixty, tops. Took a lot longer to make than I envisaged, but the project is very nascent, the model very much a work - in - progress. Model - T has newfound self-respect, but that process has, sadly, been accompanied by a near total loss of respect for several people, values and ideas that the earlier model knew.

Inspite of that, there has been considerable progress in making peace with the past. Convenient memories, faded images and incredible darkness had to be forcibly scythed to forge a path ahead, and that came at a dear price. Someday, perhaps, I'll reconcile differences and re-build all that has been razed. Then again, maybe it's not that important. Either way, the piper in me plays on.

Until then, what becomes of Model - T?

Regards,

________________________

To : Myself, Now
Subject: Re: What happens to Model - T?
From: Me, 20 years from now

Hey:

Am busy with the orphanage and don't have much time to frame a reply. I can only quote what the Wise had to say.

As a wise man once wrote - they can't touch Model - T, because Model - T has a sound mind in a pure body and is as strong as an ox. They can't touch Model - T because it is Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. It is Bill Shakespeare. It is Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; it is Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. It is miracle ingredient Z - 247.

It is immense. It is a real, slam - bang, honest - to - goodness, three - fisted humdinger. Model - T is a bona fide supraman.

Now, if you'll excuse me, have to check on the soup and math homework.

Regards,

________________________

To : Myself, 20 years from now.
Subject: Re: Re: What happens to Model - T?
From: Me, Today

Bastard :-)

Louis Armstrong

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world












I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world









The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin' hands, sayin' "How do you do?"
They're really saying "I love you"






I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world

*****
Genius is best appreciated alone and in complete silence;
Satchmo - I salute you!
*****
Oh, yeah!

Who let the blogs out?

Information is not yet democratized.

Content continues to remain in the hands of large media conglomerates, and turf wars over Internet-based media is heading towards content. Large media distribution companies have realized that while they have several decades' worth experience and rights to content, they do not have the software expertise to drive traffic towards that content. Software companies that do have the expertise are driving traffic towards that content. Revenues continue to be earned off advertising; this is similar to placing billboards along the highway. The roads are free of cost, but the money is recovered from the billboard advertiser. The winner is the guy who intelligently places the roads.

Enough said about that - there are enough consultants and experienced folks who can discuss this threadbare. What caught my eye is Rupert Murdoch's remark that the online advertising market is still small and not grown fast enough. I think he is bang on target - never mind the valuations that Yahoo! and particularly, Google, continue to enjoy. The fact remains that the market of 'content' has been demarcated into publishers and consumers, and ne'er the 'twain shall meet.

The success of MySpace, however, points to a different reality. Publishers and consumers are one and the same, which essentially means that there is a massive marketplace where people are engaging in dialogue. This is much more than a large host of blogs or even another version of Craigslist; this extends to music as well, where amateur musicians are posting their works and receiving reviews, free of charge, from the rest of the online populace.

What is new about this? Nothing, except that there is no clearly defined market segment, and what ever segments do exist, would have a very short shelf-life. The reason for this is that people are gradually creating their online persona and creating a long-lasting means of interaction with other personae, but have very different expectations from what they do and find on-line. Secondly, content is generated dynamically and in huge quantities; the recent blog wars on management institutes led to a depth of reporting by 'bloggers' that surpasses any reporters efforts.

With nearly a quarter million users being added to MySpace each month, this trend indicates that future content providers will need to participate in communities, and start bridging the divide between professional services and amateur works. However, this is easy to state as a strategy - the art lies in the software geeks who will be at the heart of the media company. Between the movie moguls and the Googles, my hunch is that the latter will reach the top faster and stay there longer. However, for that to happen, the geeks will have to find ways to earn than off just advertising revenues. (For example, one could offer to spot amateur talents who have the potential to progress much further. Venture Capitalists, contact me for further details!)

Any which way you look at it, the message (as articulated by Steve Jobs) is clear - the future will lie at the intersection point of humanities and technology.

Quo Vadis?

In early July, I asked - what if we were measured by how much we gave out and not how much we made? Judging by that yardstick, Bram Cohen would be a hero.

The creator of BitTorrent, which has more than forty million downloads till date, has removed the problem of downloading large files. The solution is elegant - the file to be downloaded is fragmented into multiple pieces. Each piece is then not downloaded, bit by elegant bit, from the source site, but through trading with computers of other people who are also downloading the same file. So what is downloaded (on priority) from the original site? The fragment that is the rarest. This way, movies, songs, large softwares like Solaris, RedHat Linux etc. can be downloaded without crashing the network or the host server.

But all that has nothing to do with the fact that he is a hero. He is a hero because he has measured his success by how much money other people have made using his application. You see, BitTorrent is free. It is registered under the open-licence policy. Bram Cohen does not make any money off the application. In fact, some of the new business models that he has introduced are already taken over by my favourite monster - Google. The article in Fortune points out that he is finally considering buying a car, now that his wife is bearing their child!

History is not known to reward pioneers - but is known to preserve their ideas for posterity.

But what is even more fascinating is an observation that a professor made of him - “If BitTorrent was outlawed and went away, I don’t think it would hurt him emotionally at all".

His response? "It wouldn’t leave me emotionally scarred,” he says. “I mean, I’m certainly going to try to keep that from happening. But if for some reason the shit hits the fan, you just deal with it. That’s the way I’ve always been.” If not for the fact that he is about couple of hundred IQ points ahead of me, I'd say we were twins.

But what is the wave of things to come - especially in the "open source" era? With companies like Software AG and Fujitsu jointly developing an SOA architecture, the direction is summed up beautifully in Scott McNealy's comments - "The simplest way to put it is that the network is the computer, and software-as-a-service is the tactical implementation of that."

Open

The secret to a successful journey is to travel light
The secret to Ratbert is that he is forever optimistic
The secret to a successful business leader is paranoia
The secret to today is to leave yesterday behind
The secret to managing bad debts is to not let good money chase bad
The secret that is lurking in your drawers is better left in the dark
The secret to infinite prime numbers is in factorials
The secret to investing is managing risk, not returns
The secret to not fly too close to the sun is better navigation controls
The secret to a good nights sleep is not to have secrets
The secret to my tiredness is that I rarely get a good nights sleep
Secrets .... what's yours?

Evolution

Some hunches on which way we might be headed ....
Technology is no longer going to be bought; 2008 will mark a huge shift in IT spends from purchasing technology to renting it out from the big boys. Recent television ads appear to be priming the target markets towards this phenomenon

Technology as a "Service Oriented Architecture" with key messaging standards, distributed database architectures, grid computing technologies etc. will become more prevalent.

Entrepreneurship will go on the rise as the entry capital required to start business will shrink as well as time to market of the products; this will leave a very product oriented approach to business building and administrative overheads will go down.

The current monolithic structures of software product vendors will be challenged as Technology Service Providers will become an aggregator of IT services and hence the big budget spending (and therefore the balance of power) will shift to these providers

Pre-fab desktops will disappear, and growing needs for local memories will disappear. Focus will be on providing large cache-ing abilities. Every other need, be it OS, software applications, email access, file storage space etc. will be outsourced to an internet / local intranet-based player. This will be a virtual life in a Google world.

Value pricing will play a key role, as is seen in Enterprise Solution services of leading telecom equipment manufacturers

The fastest growing cost will be employee salaries and benefits.
a) Keeping it low will get the Government to spend, thus raising taxes; take the case of large, global retailers
b) Keep it high and the organization will sink during a down-turn, like various global auto and auto-component makers
c) Keep it variable and the organization will invite the wrath of the employees and face increasing churn.
Makes you wonder about ESOPs, doesn't it?

There will be two or three types of business organizations : manufacturer, service provider, financier. There are three types of people: industrialist, entrepreneur and trader. At any point of time, two out of the three will reign supreme. Take your pick.

Centralization and de-centralization of internal processes will be reduced to a fad. Loosely coupled and "Independent PnL" units that share certain common infrastructures such as Branding, IT services, HR, procurement efficiencies etc. will become a de-facto approach.

On a more nostalgic note, why am I so sure that change is always round the corner and change will be random? Because nearly ten years back, I was enjoying a "cigarettes - and - tea" break at a favourite 'adda', accompanied by two chaps. One was a programmer at Netscape, working on the Communicator product. The other, told that he lacked adequate credentials by Netscape, had to settle for Microsoft. The project that he was working on? Internet Explorer 2.0. Needless to say, the chat session over tea and cigarettes revolved around the Netscape chap passing un-flattering remarks about Internet Explorer. The other chap merely smiled and said nothing. I was so taken in by the first chap's technology evangelism that when TCP/IP based internet access was finally introduced by VSNL in Mumbai, I went around bashing IE and praising Communicator to the hilt. Then, change slapped me in the face and taught me a lesson in humility. Never forgotten since then the power of keeping your eyes and ears open and mouth shut. One of the very few lessons I've learnt: it will always be the end of the world as I know it, and I feel great.

Strange Loop

Over the last few months, this entire concept of structures, number theory etc. has continued to vex me in a very vague, un-definable, un-scientific way. Hence, seeing that grasping fundamental sciences is beyond ordinary mortals such as I, it seemed more prudent to hear what various greats had to say and discover any isomorphism with other fundamental sciences, such as music. The thought process was revived today morning, after scanning an article that covered the recent Noble Prize awards. Here's what some of the leading thinkers have to say.

Nobel Prize winner Robert J Aumann: “While constructing a theory, we are not trying to get at the truth or even to approximate to it. Rather, we are trying to organize our thoughts and observations in a useful manner.”

Douglas R Hofstadter: “What is important is not finding the answer, but looking for it. You probably have made some attempts to produce MU” … [NB: MU is not important for the discussion here] … “ In so doing, you have built up your own private collection of strings. Such strings, producible by rules, are called theorems.”

A translation of an undecipherable statement by Godel: “All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include un-decidable propositions”

Robert M Pirsig: “Quality is the phenomenon that occurs when subject and object meet” (I’m quoting this from an eight – year old memory, so forgive me if the statement has been disfigured beyond belief)

What is clear here is that thought structures and formal systems attempt to synthesize observations or inferences in a rule-based fashion. Having done so, the test of the system is the power to be predictive, repetitive and stable. Once accepted by the public at large, any observation that destabilizes or proves that the system is not repetitive leads to large-scale paranoia e.g. bumblebees cannot fly as per the principles of aero-dynamics, Black Sea is actually a lake, platypus is a mammal that lays eggs etc.

However, the true test of a formal rule-based system is its ability to absorb changes and morph accordingly based on the relative permanence of the changes. Take, for instance, music. Bands that stuck to the original format of lead, rhythm, bass guitars, optional synthesizers, 4 x 4 riffs and basic drum rolls are out. Musicians who are social ambassadors are thriving e.g. Bono, Bob Geldoff etc. Or musicians that have decided to seek inspirations in lesser – known cultures e.g. Page and Plant going to Morocco. Or music systems such as Thai music that doesn’t follow the traditional “octave” system, continue to survive.

There are three things that a formal system can do when de-stabilizing change occurs – observe and do-nothing, reach out and measure or become change. This is described extremely well in various philosophical treatises. (Take the Hindu philosophy, for instance.) The point is that change is random, and hence there needs to be an element in any theorem design of being prepared to embark on a "Random Walk".

This leads to a very obvious and well – worn conclusion, which was articulated by Mr Aumann:
If you are rational, you will break rules.

On that note, wishing your family and you a Happy Dassera, Durga Puja, Navratri and Vijaya Dashami (or Bijoya Dashami)

Stuck in a moment

You learn stuff, and then you move on
Funny part is,
When it’s time to learn, learning is the most difficult part
When it’s time to move on, moving is the most difficult part

Then there are memories; usually, they are play - grounds for spiders
You’re never quite sure how to remember
All that you were supposed to learn;
When you do decide to stop moving, learning stops

When you want to sink into a bed, and claim your right to dream
You wonder, isn’t there much more
Than imaginary confrontations
Played out to perfection inside your head?

When you gaze at the stranger six feet in front of you
You wonder who is staring at you from six feet behind

You email, fax, sms people; you communicate in silence
And after all you’ve drafted is over
You open your mouth, and no words come out

You lunch in silence; you are a stranger to your own food
Today is a quiet day, but lunch will not last ten minutes

You return home in silence, you are yet to pick up that book
Which would have made you a better person
Had you stuck to that promise you wrote to yourself
One month ago.

But then ... you learn stuff, and then you move on

Holy Matrimony

I am an unabashed fan of Google. Right from Google Desktop to Google Earth, I have sampled the entire buffet of products with mixed experiences but nonetheless with a sense of awe. They represent one of the ideal applications of mind - bringing innovation to everyday tasks.

However, the recent arrangement with Sun has puzzled me. On the one hand, Sun will allow the download of Google Toolbar alongwith the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), while Google has made vague references to helping distribute Sun OpenOffice. Like all great companies with fiercely loyal employees, Google is very secretive about its plans. Thus, to the public at large, it would seem like a tepid marketing arrangement in place.

Personally, I think this is a publicity ploy. More importantly, the vaguely stated plans are a decoy. Just as Toyota Qualis in India was a decoy to get Tata and Mahindra to spend like crazy in that segment. (Compare the Capital Employed by each company and the returns, and you'll see why). But if this is a decoy, then who or what is the Real McCoy? The answer, I think, lies in separate initiatives that Google is undertaking. After all, a secondary offering has helped them to nearly $ 4 Billion in cash.

One of the hints lies in Internet Access. Google is offering high - speed internet access to the entire city of San Francisco. Naturally, they deny that this is going to be replicated anywhere else. Yes, of course, and the $ 4 Billion was raised to be put into bank FDs. But if we consider this move for a moment, it allows Google further access to customers, and as a portal, continues to grow as a media giant - especially into video. Replication of this move will push Yahoo! out of the future top 3 as a media player and relegate Microsoft to number two.

But what has this to do with the Sun alliance? Everything. Consider a few random points:
a) JRE allows execution of simple Java applications on virtually any device, be it desktops or cell phones
b) OpenOffice, being a 70 MB+ installation file will require high-speed access to desktops to be of any use. Currently, it is no match for MS-Office, and is unlikely to be a match. However, it is free.....
c) Rumours are on that Google has multiple ongoing development activities aimed at mobile users in critical areas like payment gateways
d) Growth in international adoption by mass retail will not lie in desktops but in stripped down versions, delivered over hand-held devices. Over these devices will be delivered important information, like weather, crop prices etc. alongwith cheap Talk facilities
e) Machines can be shipped out with free OS (like RedHat) and installation of relevant productivity applications on the desktop can be outsourced to the customer, who merely requires an internet connection

In light of all this, it is a significant move that Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt shared the podium. Steve Ballmer was quoted in the press as having vowed to kill Google, in reaction to several senior MS employees leaving to join Google. But the last thing he would want is severe pricing pressures on MS-Office, which contributed $ 11 Billion to the kitty last year alone and really is the funding source for loss-making X-Boxes, Longhorn / Vista and future expansions. Thus, Microsoft is on a world-wide campaign denouncing open-source software (as seen in some recent german ads).

So, who or what then, can stop Google? The answer would not lie in faster search engines but in the Holy Grail of Advertising - Pay per Sale. Realizing that would require software engineers, storage solution experts and human behaviour experts to collaborate. Until that happens, Google will pretty much hum along.

Not bad for Google, which is only an eight-year old company. There is enough to be said about beginning business from a lowly "PageRank" algorithm.