Time Value of Ideas

Assets depreciate over time. So do ideas.

A good product manager learns to listen to the needs of the market and faithfully records them (actually a lot of them don’t. I am sure you are not one of them) to feed the roadmap. Sadly, engineering resources typically are fewer than what is needed to satiate all the needs. Backlog builds. And here is where the trap-door opens up.

Product Managers often carry forward their backlog inventory of ideas into a subsequent development cycle. FIFO or LIFO? Personally, I am dead against the deadwood FIFO and lukewarm towards LIFO. FIFO is a straight reject because more an idea asset stays in the backlog the more likely that it has depreciated in utility value. What was a strategic differentiator when first recorded as a need might just be either a me-too thing or worse – something akin to picking nickels in front of a steam roller today. LIFO stands – a priori – a better chance because they haven’t yet wimped out by the sands of time (hopefully).

Creating a product roadmap is a much involved process than just collating a backlog. Relevance of each idea must be evaluated with the market and competition before engineering resources are committed to build them out. Yes, it does place an additional overhead on Product Managers but would you rather find out those irrelevant product ideas or leave it to the market?

The Business-Technology stalemate

Business: The product behaves in the way it does because we were told that technology demands it to be architected in a certain way

Technology: The architecture of the system was driven by the demands of the business

Stalemate. This happens because often – specially true of large companies – business and technology are on their own trips. And they are faceless (read the two sentences replacing business and technology with “Stephen” and “Anna” respectively and the situation would look very different).

Sometimes technology gets a bad name because they seem to produce a lot of the architecture astonauts. I’ve also seen Product Managers come up with their SUV type designs for a simple bi-cycle. The way – perhaps the only way – to solve this is to break away from the temptation of setting up Architecture and Product Management councils. Pinpoint responsibility and then empower. You will see the difference.

The Facebook ID

Facebook announced today that it will allow its members to choose an user name. This may sound terribly trivial because that is the first thing that one does while opening up any account – like say an e-mail id. However social networks that base themselves on mutual trust necessarily has to accept members on a disclosed full name basis. That is the cornerstone of social relationships – we shake hands and pronounce our names to each other. There is a downside to this transparency model in network implementation. This model has to allow for duplicate names – there are four people on Facebook with the same name as I. In this scenario comes the Facebook ID.

Facebook ID essentially introduces a smart version of what database designers call “perm id”s – an unique identifier for each member. The current identifier (note the profile.php.id indicator on your address bar as a profile loads up in Facebook) is numeric and non-intuitive. Allowing members to choose their IDs will allow members to treat their Facebook presence as good as a web profile. So you can just let your friends know that they can find you at http://facebook.com/first.last, first.last being your Facebook ID.

It is also interesting to see how the lines between social networking and professional networking are disappearing – albeit slowly. Professional networking site LinkedIn has been allowing people to choose what they call a “public profile”. LinkedIn displays an URL where you can modify the last component – essentially creating your ID. Some months back LinkedIn started the “What are you working on” status updates that look pretty much like the Facebook “What’s in your mind”. Anyone who has used both Facebook and LinkedIn will know how similar they have started to look in terms of widgets, applications, social clustering etc. Interestingly, even as they converge, they fundamentally remain walled gardens.

Anthropologists intrigued about the difference of human interactions in a social context and workplace (or professional) context would do well to study the differences that remain between Facebook and LinkedIn at different points in time. That will be a nice time-study in the metamorphosis – and possible convergence – of social interactions in worlds that were earlier considered rather kosher.

R.I.P. Peter L Bernstein

His book “Against The Gods” allured me into the exciting world of financial risk management. I have never invested in gold – and have advised, unsuccessfully, to all my women acquaintances – after the compelling arguments in his book “The Power of Gold: The History of Obsession”. In fact every book of his evoked thought and helped me understand the capital markets better. Peter L Bernstein – money manager, author, publisher and also a WW II spy – died on Friday at the age of 90.

I can only echo Justin Fox – I want to be like Bernstein when I grow up.

Rest in peace, Sir.

Squaring up Google Squared

Another extension of the search metaphor. They have been coming thick and fast in the past few weeks. Wolfram Alpha, Bing and now Google Squared. G-squared is the latest entrant and given its pedigree, deserves to get a closer look.

G-squared is essentially a search aggregator, presenting results in a spreadsheet like format. It is like business intelligence reports graduating from being row based to cross-tab. The format lends itself very elegantly to comparisons, and the suggestions put out by Google lead you down that path. The grid is expandable by adding rows and columns, each coming with Google’s own suggestions. Considering each cell in the spreadsheet as a single search, the aggregation definitely boosts search productivity. The quality of the output of the cells is very questionable though. And for once – and I thought I will not live long enough to say this – Big G gets the context of the rows members wrong very often. For instance when I tried “Indian films”, this is what it returned

All results in the rows are not films. Satyajit Ray is a film director, while Juhi Chawla and Raveena Tandon (neither merit a place in the same grid as Satyajit Ray, who was a legend) are actresses. Agreed that G-squared is yet in the Labs but hasn’t Google set our expectations right up there?

Google squared allows one to build a grid from scratch. This is particularly useful if you know what you want in the grid and do not need a search to tell you that. I tried building a grid to check out the competition of Thomson Reuters, my employers. I was disappointed at what turned up but was ecstatic when under FactSet’s financials is said “Not healthy enough to buy yet” and was bemused when the same against Bloomberg said “Forecast? More Bull? More Bear?” (I wish it dropped the last question and terminated the second last one with just one full-stop). Is this Google’s way of countering the easter-eggs of Wolfram|Alpha?

The question is bound to pop up. Is Google Squared the answer to Wolfram|Alpha. I think not. There is a difference between search (and its aggregation) and a artificial intelligence driven computational engine. Perhaps Google will encroach upon the Walpha territory, but time shall tell how that pans out.

Bing: Walks, (almost) looks and quacks like Live.com

I cannot vouch for the accuracy that Bing, Microsoft’s much vaunted Google-killer (?) stands for But it’s not Google though Seth Godin thinks it is. Even if that were true then MS has a lot of explaining to do – especially about the differentiation. Actually Bing is Live.com – try typing live.com in your browser and see where you end up. Only that someone laid out nice pictures on the background. The top nav of Bing goes as “Web|Images|Videos|News|Maps|More|MSN” and that of Google reads “Web|Images|Maps|News|Orkut|Groups|Gmail|More”. Excitingly different, no? I ran some sample searches and found little difference between what each engine fetched (by the way, I hardly ever go beyond the first page of a web-search because I demand my search engines to dish out what I am looking for in that. So if Bing was doing some mind boggling stuff differently from Google on the 2nd page then it was lost on me). Yes, Bing had this search preview thing which was something I never saw on search outputs. It is also a touch weird that Bing works differently depending on your locale. For example when I used an US route and used Bing, it showed me actual shopping options and prices for the search “used canon lenses” but none when I switched back to my original location.

Modern day web search has transcended the realms of hunting for static information on the internet. Search has integrated geo-spatial information, local businesses, media that is different from html text, people and thanks to Google has also taken the form of Wikis. Microsoft has to be clear in what it wants to acheive with Bing. Get market share away from Google or make the user experience of its own die-hard fans better. To me it looks like the latter and hence I fail to understand this But it’s not Google thing. Take a look at outputs from both Bing and Google when I try “vietnamese cuisine at Bangalore”

Besides the obvious embellishment that maps and local search adds to the result in Google, it is also interesting that the third result of Google is the first in Bing.

No amount of marketing perfume can kill the smell of a pig. Bing from MS is just Live.com in a different name. It looks like Live.com, walks like Live.com and moreover, even quacks like Live.com.

Google Wave: The Jesus platform of communication?

E-mail is like your normal post office mail. Send-wait-expect reply-get reply-start again. Only that the broking agent is electronic.

Instant messaging is like having a dots-and-dashes telegraphic conversation. Except that it happens over a digital network and in normal language.

Desktop sharing is watching your elder sister paint. Watch but don’t dare to touch.

Twitter is like sitting on the edge of an ocean. 140 character waves continue to hit the shores relentlessly. You sometimes walk and dip your feet in the water. Then you retreat and watch the tides again.

Facebook is like standing at the intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street (Times Square, that is). You watch different people, you hear their conversations. Sometimes a friend passes by and you have a short conversation with them. Often you mutter something that a passing friend picks up and responds to. Or she goes and tells that to someone else.

Zoho and Google docs are collaborative tools. Like 5 people standing at a giant white board, all editing the same item synchronously.

These are all examples of human behavior. Rather that of the human desire of communication. From the dawns of civilization 13,000 years back we have been interacting with each other for multitude of reasons. Unfortunately while the needs and the reasons for communication were always around, society found productivity solutions to them mostly based on priority. Once a need became a pain, people rushed to solve it. The next need either got solved independently or in some rare cases smart people discovered ways of interconnecting metaphors and extended a solution to solve another need. And this is why we have the list – which incidentally is way incomplete – of multiple communication solutions above (and what they borrowed from).

The inevitable had to happen. Someone either had to come and aggregate as much of the behaviour as possible (Facebook does a decent job but it is like a patchwork, not fundamentally changing any of the collated paradigms) or someone had to create the Supermarket of Communications. Google Wave (please watch the embedded video. 80 mins but worth every second) does the second – and does it spectacularly.

The first temptation of an engineer looking to amalgamate multiple paradigms of communication is to integrate them in their native state – a straightforward nice wrapper over the pieces (put GTalk into GMail. On selecting a conversation, open up a widget that shows collaborative docs between participants, and so on). Google Waves not only successfully stayed away from this approach but they re-engineered every paradigm they touched. E-mail is not like e-mail in Google Waves and so isn’t instant messaging and link sharing and photo uploading and wikis and document collaboration. The interconnection of these elements in human nature renders them just as parts of a larger whole. And Google Wave engineers them exactly like that.

Google went a step further to make all this open source. A vast population of developers will now develop extensions to Google Wave using their APIs. It is like how your i-phone apps make your phone much better than how you bought it from the AT&T Store. I sincerely hope that Google pushes ahead with Waves and while it does also thinks of how to monetize this initiative. The reason why Google’s search technology has improved leaps and bounds is because it is heavily monetized, unlike say Docs or Blogger. A build-first-market-later is typical of an engineering led company and quite the opposite of what the gurus preach, but it will be nothing short of a debacle if Google slows the momentum down on Google Waves.

Walpha plus Google: Best of both worlds

Wolfram|Alpha started dating Google sooner than I expected. This Firefox extension allows you to commingle Wolfram|Alpha’s output against a Google search retrieval. The Brin-Page smartness and the gumption of Stephen Wolfram – heady cocktail. I threw the same Bob Dylan rehtoric question at this newly dating couple and here is what it returned – each doing their bit to perfection

PS: Walpha is sluggish than the big G. The latter fetched about half a million results in 0.34 seconds while Walpha took an additional whopping 15 seconds to display its wares.

PPS: Contrary to my expectations, Walpha hasn’t yet figured out “how many bags of wool does ba ba black sheep have”. Big G dug up some 6,000 answers.

Question: If Big G and Walpha were real life couples, how do you think they’d split the household work?

Search Engines versus Wolfram|Alpha

In the year 1978, film director, musician and author of stories for children, Satyajit Ray wrote a short story named “Compu”. Scientists had invented the ultimate computer that could answer any human question. The I/O metaphor was voice and the twist in the story came when “Compu” – the ultimate computer – started getting a mind of its own and behaved like a human being. Twenty one years later we can – with the benefit of hindsight – say that this is like putting Wikipedia into a voice enabled computer with semantic web understanding thrown in, but the story was quite ahead of its time for 1978.

The quest for understanding human queries and having a computer responding back has kept the scientific fraternity busy. However, as content in the web proliferated, the obvious solution to this problem was to let the web answer the question rather than creating an engine. This led up to search engines and focus shifted to making search results more and more relevant (with of course an eye on the ad revenue pie). The trouble with search is that it points to a source rather than answering the question directly. While that is perhaps a smarter strategy, it is less fun.

So in this cauldroun appears Wolfram|Alpha, the quantitative knowledge engine from Stephen Wolfram. All it does is “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”. It is much less smarter in handling non-computable stuff because it has a bravado (bordering on hubris) that makes it do its own stuff – not fetch results from the internet to read. So it is much more fun (it is also secretly sponging up all those questions it cannot answer today – like “how many bags of wool did ba ba black sheep have” and is figuring out answers to it as you read this). Walpha (affectionate nickname) puts forth an entirely different way of unearthing knowledge – so long as it has to do with computation. I would be keen to see if it throws up alternative monetization models, deviating away from the traditional advertisement based ones.

PS: People are discovering interesting aspects of the engine displaying strong character and a funny bone (”Compu”?). It has a taste for good music too as I found out

Will There Be Indian Software Companies Anytime Soon?

Why aren’t there more global software product companies out of India? Basab Pradhan examines

A few years ago at Infosys I used to regularly get the question – why isn’t Infosys doing more in software products? In response I wrote this piece for Rediff where I addressed the question of why Indian services companies don’t do well at products and why they shouldn’t even bother. Since then Infosys-incubated OnMobile has done quite well, but that in no way disproves my claim that the two business models – products and services – are so different that they don’t belong together (OnMobile was a separate company well before it found its groove).

Lately I’ve been getting a different question – why aren’t there more global software product companies out of India? (I use ‘product company’ as short hand for any information technology IP based company). Clearly, it isn’t for lack of software engineering talent.

The single most important reason is the lack of a domestic market for software. India’s market for business or personal software is very small market compared to developed markets. And you can’t build software products away from the market.

Designing software products requires a kind of iteration with end users that just isn’t possible unless you are ‘just across the street’ from your end user. Demos, prototypes, white-boarding with users who are willing to give of their time is what creates a good product design. Something that just can’t be achieved by using tools and methods, however sophisticated, in an offshore model.

This, by the way, is true for all product development, not just in software. You have to first create a customer base in your home market that can then become the springboard for international expansion. The auto industry is a global industry and to my mind there is no company that started making cars for a foreign market before establishing a beachhead at home.

Why is India’s software market so small? Partly due to the size of the economy and partly because average income is so low that productivity gains due to adoption of technology don’t  pay off unless that cost of the software is really low. This is true about all emerging markets.

The software products market is dominated by American software companies. As the largest integrated market by far, the US has a great advantage here. But that is not the only reason. The most competitive companies in an industry tend to cluster, as Paul Krugman showed us, and areas like the Silicon Valley and Boston are the industry clusters for software.

Can Indian tech companies succeed? They can – by first serving needs in the local market that are not served by global software companies. Such needs could be underserved because the global players find the market too small and the prices too low to make changes to their software or because the market need is unique. The price that would work for say a small business ERP in India may not be something that any US ERP vendor is interested in.

Pricing, or ‘the bottom of the pyramid’ path is a very plausible path to success especially with business software. The world over, businesses will be able to afford computers before people at home do. Small businesses in third world countries, very much like in India, don’t like to pay (too much) for software. But you do need business software to scale your business. A successful Indian business software company will know how to make a profit at price points where big software companies won’t.

The competition at the bottom of the pyramid is going to come from Open Source. Open Source is slowly creeping up the stack. There are even a couple of Open Source ERP names. But perhaps Open Source is an opportunity itself. Perhaps Indian companies should use Open Source to play the IP game. I have yet to see much happen on this front although this could have been closer to the knitting of the Services companies. Maybe we will soon.

About the author

Basab Pradhan is formerly CEO of Gridstone Research. Basab blogs at 6ampacific.com