A discussion about the software industry and their coders

Today afternoon, 7 serial blasts have hit bangalore within a span of 1-2 hours. Most of these blasts are in general areas like bus stands, parks etc. -- none near offices or complexes of IT companies. Most of the concerns about terrorism in Bangalore have been about hits on key IT companies till now.

These serial blasts are first of a kind in Bangalore though prior to this Bangalore was hit by blasts at a science conference at Indian Institute of Science in which a professor from IIT Delhi was killed.

I loved this quote from a Yahoo! employee at Alan Wilensky's blog post on "Yahoo Culture - What was, is, and Could Be" (Alan's blog is creatively titled BlogWhine :) ). To repeat the original words, that I modified in the title, "Competition is a constant, and the execution of imaginative products is the true variable." This simple 1-liner captures an essential idea of great product management and I salute the un-named guy quoted in Alan's post.

You can't worry about competition too much or too little. Its a waste. Competition will always be there. But what you can do is build insanely great products that consumers would love. That will keep 'em coming. That is the only mantra. Amen.

My good-old-yahoo-friend Sridhar Ranganathan keeps coming out with witty 1-liners : "Winners take most of it" a Corollary to which was offerred by another good-old-yahoo-friend Ravindra “To Win in a Market, create the Market”. Have fun!

Mint has highlighted interesting stats for most trafficked Indian websites. Rediff.com, a horizontal portal, with 8.1 million unique visitors in the month of April 2008 reached 29% Indian netizens was ranked first. Naukri.com, the job search vertical, with 4.3 million unique visitors reached 15% of Indian netizens and ranked second. Indiatimes.com, a horizontal portal, with 3.1 million unique visitors had a reach of 11% and ranked third.

Ranks 4-10 are unequally spread between horizontal portals (3 - Sify.com, NDTV.com, Ibnlive.com) and vertical sites (Bharatmatrimony.com, shaadi.com, yatra.com, cricinfo.com, moneycontrol.com, techtree.com).

According to the Mint report Naukri.com (42%), has seen much greater ad revenue growth than the horizontal and first placed Rediff.com (8%). Apparently Ad revenue in India is flowing away from horizontal to vertical websites.

India Development Centers (IDCs) of Software firms like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Adobe, Google – are basically run on a Global firm model. IDCs are  steeped in the philosophy of making and selling “the same thing, the same way, everywhere”. After all Microsoft Windows, Google Search, and Yahoo! Messenger are globally used homogenous products, so IDCs would be primarily focused on developing such globally deployable homogenous technologies.

Secondarily, the India Development Centers also do some local modifications such as Indian language versions of portals (Google Search in Hindi), content, fonts, user interfaces (Microsoft Office in Indian Languages - Microsoft Bhasha site) etc.

In my previous post I had mentioned about the 4 types of classifications of Multi National firms by Bartlett, Brikinshaw and late Sumantra Ghoshal, in their book “Transnational Management” : (1) International (2) Multinational (3) Global (4) Transnational. Here is a detailed description of each type

International
This is the earliest stage of a company which tries to go from being a single nation to multi-nation company. Such companies regard themselves fundamentally as a domestic company with foreign appendages.

Relationship between foreign and home-country operations
The main role of the foreign outpost (s) is to “support” the domestic parent company in various ways such ass incremental sales of domestic product lines, supply raw material, or components for domestic manufacturing operations.

Management of foreign operations
Decisions related to the foreign operations are made on an adhoc basis.

In a globalized Tech World we are often consumers and /or employees of multi-nation or international companies more than firms that operate within the domestic confines of a single country. According to UN estimates by 1991 there were about 36,000 multi-national companies with 170,000 subsidiaries, and total revenue in excess of $ 15.5 trillion. Together these firms accounted for 25% of world’s GNP.

Bartlett, Brikinshaw and late Sumantra Ghoshal, in their book “Transnational Management” have classified 4 types of multi-national firms:

1. International
2. Multinational
3. Global
4. Transnational

Shilpan Patel has written a lovely post on his blog "Success Soul" about 7 habits to cultivate to fight against odds. I have seen several ups and downs in my life and career and even now I am going through a phase which I wish would pass away soon. In any case his words came as a refreshing reminder of whats important -- staying course when delay completely freaks us out and makes us want to give up.

This is what Shilpan has to say:

Real world Social Networks hold Social Capital for people in that network. With Social Networking going Online I wonder whether the Social Capital holds any relevance or value. In other words is "social" part of social networking just a misnomer? Is Social Networking just an advanced version of online communication tool rather than really enhancing what is considered Social Capital?

I recently did a short survey with friends and colleagues in my network and found the Social Networks are primarily working as communication tools. Social Networks and Social Capital as studied by Sociologists -- are subjects with much more substance than just communication and playing online scrabble. For example see this early paper "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital" (PDF) by late James Coleman  (Univ of Chicago) in The American Journal of Sociology. (Its a 1980s paper)

• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day
• 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs 
• 120,000 new blogs are created every day 
• 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006 
• 51% of blog readers shop online 
• Blog readers average 23 hours online each week 

Bill Gates logged off Microsoft finally. Its a inflection period for Microsoft and Bill G has been unable to steer his company anywhere near Google or show real leadership in the Web 2.0 world. For a man who has lead Microsoft through several controversial periods, its perhaps time to retire. But Microsoft is on shaky grounds as he logs off.

Bill Gates's role will be covered by 2 people: Craig Mundi and Ray Ozzie who are "Chief Officers" along with Ballmer (with others). Though these guys have significant achievements, none of these individuals have been a part of a significant Web revolution.

Microsoft's official statement: