Simply Steve

“Aha, Mr. Steven Jobs. Welcome Sir. I daresay the world has gone into a mourning with your untimely death. And we are trying to understand why”. St. Peter’s at the Pearly Gates was both anxious and curious as he welcomed the technology magician
“Quite Simple”, said Jobs. “Let me show you” – and he unslung his backpack and took out a handful of Apple products and laid them out
“That’s it?”
“Yeh, that’s it. Sorry if you were expecting more but I guess you have to wait for some more while for that. Not until Bill shows up”, Jobs chuckled as he took a dig at his favorite punching bag

I woke up the news that Steve Jobs is no more. Pages of flowing eulogy has already gotten written by authors who are better and people who were lucky to have had personal run-ins with the great man. So I will, like Jobs’ product portfolio, keep this a short affair.

And Simple

If there is one lesson Jobs taught us businessmen it was simplicity. Simplicity in business models, simplicity in portfolios, simplicity in design and simplicity in commercial models. The world is already far too complex and evolution isn’t exactly an accelerated science – which means people in this world have far more deconstructions to handle than expect to have to do the same with technology. Technology whose calling card promised to make life simple in the first place. Jobs’ business played purely to that feeling. In world where everyone was designing with the SUV Syndrome, Steve Jobs discarded layer after layer of complexity to finally reach the core. And then he drew as few concentric circles as he could. Doing less is not a sin, doing more – and spectacularly complicating things, is.

With this knowledge, what would you do to your product? To your business? And to your life?

PS: This post is my tribute to Steve Jobs. I wrote in on Pages on my i-pad 1 and posted using the WordPress app. Thank you, Steve. I know it’s tough, but try to get some rest Sir.

Playing in a Sandbox

What if LinkedIn decided to play in Facebook’s sandbox? Afterall, both are about creating social connections and sharing networks & information within that social circle.

The answer to the choice lies in aspirations. A newbie firm wants to test the waters and looks at the path of least resistance. A social business, they might argue, has got to mostly do with people. So why not gravitate to where most people are? The trouble with this is that the answer is correct but the question is wrong. The fabric of a social business is not the people per-se but what those people do within the sandbox. A social sandbox is like a society – and people get enamoured by reciprocating behavior as much as they put off by actions that seem incongruent to that sandbox-society. Example, notice how many times your eyes roll-over when you notice someone posted that “my cat’s just rolled over” type update on LinkedIn?

The sandbox you choose has got to answer a very important question. If you were given the choice of asking the entire population of your intended audience live inside a gated community what would that community look like? If that looks like Planet Facebook, please go ahead and play in that sandbox. But please ask yourself this question before you make the choice

PS: LinkedIn was a poor example perhaps – it had critical mass – and a different sandbox already as Facebook started its own growth. But you get the drift. Branchout is a better example and they made a choice of playing in Facebook’s sandbox

Of Embargoes and Selective Scarcity

My first career was as a spot FX (foreign exchange) trader on a corporate treasury desk. Esoteric theories I had learnt at business schools around currency pricing very quickly went out of the window (for a strange reason, our dealing room did not have windows, but that’s not really the point). The ubiquitous volatility of the trading day however seemed to take a breather around 5:30pm India time (around when my boss would go down for a smoke) – a mere pause before the madness resumed in doubled frenzy just after 6:00pm. Precisely at 6:00pm, which was 8:30am EST, the US markets released macroeconomic/monetary data that traders instantaneously interpreted and positioned themselves to trade accordingly. I later learnt that journalists were all herded into a room ahead of the news release, given copies of the about-to-be-released data to digest but they could only wire out the information (and analysis if any) at 8:30am IST. This was the information embargo

Institutions mostly apply embargoes on news and research for different reasons. Non scoop: Ensuring one news agency cannot “scoop” the news ahead of others. This is particularly important if the news has potential to cause a major disruption of status quo. Client protection: Applied in case of research, premium client engagement conditions might dictate that the wider distribution happens after a period that allows premium clients to digest the content.

Embargo, looked differently, also allows the creator of the embargo control the subsequent distribution (news is just a special case – my intent here is to generalize). For example, Department of Labor releasing US non-farm payroll data embargo at 8:30am EST ensures that all wires – all of them – write about it precisely at that hour, creating a critical mass, rather than fragmented reporting. Same goes with film reviews coming out on a Friday morning after special screenings on Thursday nights

Technology – both software and hardware – has started with embargoes (in a different way, though). Premium agencies – like All things D, Techcrunch, Wired etc – get advanced versions of gadgets they write on.  What if commonly downloaded software had embargoes? Several people could download it and use teaser versions before all of them got authorized at a precise time. It will allow creation of a crescendo that culminates in the same news-styled time-synchronized buzz. The software creator could actually control the period and pitch of the crescendo by creative releases of used features. I wonder if this approach has ever been tested with software

On the other hand, creating a non-synchronized embargo (kind of a carefully-careless embargo design) is interesting. This is where a software releases selective features to users depending on their usage. So it will be likely that two users will see, during the embargo period, different features of the software attuned to their usage. Imagine the social media going crazy with “hey, my version of <insert software name> allows me this, how come yours cannot” and “oh, hell, why on earth can I not do what you seem to be doing with your <insert software name>”. Yes, it will be crazy, but it will be fun. And it will start a conversation going

Now, the LinkedIn Walled Garden

Professional networking site LinkedIn announced on 6^th April something that Facebook had done a while back. LinkedIn was opening up its platform to developers

A platform company has the luxury of creating an illusion of openness. There is a term for it too – walled gardens. You are free to plant a tree, trim the bushes and grow some vegetables but all within the confines (or constraints) defined by the wall. The platform company, LinkedIn for example, provides the markup language that defines what you could do – maybe on your website – with their assets.  If that asset happens to be people, profile and their social behavior then the platform company is sitting on a proverbial gold mine. People – and social relationships – are ubiquitous. It is difficult to imagine a web service that does not have – or would not benefit from – some analysis of people, perhaps their members or people they refer to in stories or people that comment on their website – the list can be endless

I had written a post sometime back about how Facebook and LinkedIn seemed to be converging in terms of how people were using it. The two platforms continued to nudge – knowingly or otherwise – users in the path convergence with features like “what’s in your mind” (LinkedIn) and polls (Facebook). Indulging in some amount crystal ball gazing, the evidence of trend seems to imply that open social networking and institutional social networking will find their own spaces. In other words, time will see the emergence of specialized social networking. Think of a social network of medical professionals, researchers and investors that have interest in commodities and so on. Open social platforms have the right technology to diversify their ad-centric and premium membership (in case of LinkedIn) business to platform walled garden initiatives, but they were never designed to be specialized networking venues (This has worked, in a way, against LinkedIn earlier. While LinkedIn had “Answers” for a while, it never was able to offer what a StackOverflow could. Or for that matter Quora, which incidentally I think is a touch overrated)

Keep a keen eye on how social network platforms evolve. And watch out for firms that leverage the APIs to create innovative extensions

Picture courtesy: LinkedIn Developer website

+1? I don’t Quite Think So

While a sizable proportion of world population was watching two sub-continental teams battle it out for the ICC Cricket World Cup, the folks at Google were doing a +1 (for those who don’t know, “+1″ is digital shorthand for “that is cool”. I have seen many do a +100, especially on Twitter, which I extrapolate to “that is 100 times cooler”. But you get the drift). So here is what Google will do with “+1″.

As you see results of your search, you will notice a “+1″ icon next to the results. You could, depending on how useful you found a particular link, click that “+1″ button and in a way vote that link up (you can instantly undo a “+1″ too). Now say your friend Jason also was searching for the same (or similar term) and your “+1″-ing of a particular search result will get highlighted to him in the results he gets to see.

In a way this is Google’s way of overlaying a social graph on search results, which is where the world seem to be going. Opinion however is divided on whether it makes sense to overlay the search on social graph or vice versa (I am partial to the former part of the argument). Here is a rather quick analysis of Google’s +1 strategy

1. This is not new. Remember, Google used to allow users to “star” search results – that is, one could vote up a particular result in terms of relevance. The “+1″ strategy in a way expands that, bringing in a social angle (Update: It seems Google has withdrawn that feature. However, I could still see a yellow star against some of the old search results I had previously upped)
2. The success of Google’s “+1″ depends on the strength of its social platform, which by any indication is quite weak. It failed to do much with Orkut, which has been obliterated by Facebook in user acceptance. Buzz landed up in a confused state and has remained that way till now, unsure of where it belongs in Google’s social assets and strategy. The bottomline is that not many use Google as their social platform for the company to be able to show the most socially relevant searches to an user in “+1″
3. Google can however do smarter things with “+1″ using GMail as lever. With the ability to snoop on our GMail messages and GTalk activity, it can not only understand some of our social relationships (not to the extent that Facebook can, though) and the strength of nodes of our social graph. That information can be brought back to enhance the +1 experience. It could do the same through Google Reader, bringing back to “+1″ the sharing activities that it allows within the RSS Reader.

The long and short of this is that Google has a fair amount of assets to become a serious player in social search. It however starts with the disadvantage of having to build the social graph as an afterthought to its core strength of search.

Experiences in Intrepreneurship

I recently finished up an internal program on intrepreneurship (entrepreneurship, only that it is from “in”side a corporation), with the intent to discover profitable businesses in emerging economies. While the entire journey was truly remarkable, even more interesting for me was some lessons I learnt about (a) such programs in large corporations and (b) pitching the idea to senior management. This post shares some of those experiences with my readers. Statutory Disclaimer: The learnings are personal and under the circumstances of working within the framework of a specific large multi-national corporation. Interoperability is not guaranteed.

The conduit

It is absolutely vital the corporation sets up the team as not directly interacting with the sponsors. Sponsors are busy people with day jobs of running the business and can ill afford any more drag on their bandwidth. This does not however dilute their good intent around the project they are sponsoring. This is where the mentor comes in. The mentor is key (not saying the sponsor is not) in not only guiding the team towards the goal but also in managing upwards. Never underestimate what it takes to manage upwards and the mentor does two absolutely vital things for the team (a) keeps visibility of the project (b) filters down expectations, tempers them and sets up the team in a direction that is closest to what the sponsors expect. Larger a company, more are the labyrinths one has to navigate to reach an end goal and more important the mentor becomes

Establish the market and focus on competition

In almost all instances, the senior management wants to understand the landscape. This is especially true if you are engaging in a project that the sponsors know less about – like India perhaps. Build out the landscape and half the battle is won if you can convince the sponsors that the market is attractive.

Remember that competition validates a market. Sponsors are very happy to see a market that has competition and nothing like being a fast-second. Lavishly mention the competition and establish price points and trends in pricing. A sponsor is getting long term skin in the game – trends matter to her

What if the landscape is known or you have had a separate opportunity to lay out the landscape? Then jump straight into the problem you have identified and looking to solve. Weave in elements of the landscape that builds up the problem so they audience can relate

What does it buy me?

Remember this – if you are asking for money, state upfront what the sponsor is going to get from it. Not what you are going to do with the money. You would have run your models and know exactly the amounts you are going to require at different points in time but stick to the tranche you need now. It is quite likely that the amount you have budgeted for the future will change so do not waste your breath – and the sponsors time – on that.

Bite size

Sponsors get nervous about large projects. On the contrary as a part of the project you cannot just focus on a part – you need to think of the whole. It helps you complete the picture of the business in totality. Here is the tricky part – once you have the whole, break the thing up and ask yourself “which is the one that is a logical starting point and gives most bang for the buck”. Leave the rest as detail and sharpen your pitch around that one thing you have identified. It is most likely that success of the initial slice will automatically bring in the other aspects you had kept aside and funding those will be easier as you move on.

Leverage assets

A large company has several assets. And nothing excites the senior management more than being able to leverage them to create new opportunities. It is an engineer’s dream to build a system up from scratch if software is what we are talking of, but for a businessman (which the sponsor is) it is all about getting more out of less. Internal assets are well known, loved (believe me – even the crappiest assets are loved by someone) and proven. Sponsors connect with them much more readily than any wireframe or graphics you may put in front of them

Death by Powerpoint

Bullets kill people – bullets in Powerpoint slides that is. If you have the gall and you want your penny to drop, use different approaches. While doing your market research, video record an interview session on a Flip and put it right up there. 2 minutes of video would possibly have taken 3 slides to explain. Use new presentation tools like Prezi. And if you want more tips on how to make effective presentations look here and here and here

Which way are you looking?

More a company (and it’s employees) looks outside, the more it stays closer to its customers with a finger on their pulse. So is your company doing that or are you wasting most of your energy on internal cycles? Here is a quick and dirty way of finding out – inspired by Joel Spolsky. On a given day, try to keep a tab on the number of phrases and acronyms that you use (or someone does on you) that only folks within your company will understand.

You know how to interpret the numbers and watch out for the trend.

PS: Funny situations happen. In my first career as a spot FX trader I was once summoned by the CFO to his office. “Bring your TP along”, he said. Completely baffled about how to bring my “Take Profit” orders to his office, a colleague explained that the boss meant “laptop”. ThinkPad, that is.

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

Cloud Computing and Enterprise Information

Gary Orenstein on GigaOm has an insightful piece on the enterprise effect of cloud computing. Cloud Computing holds out enormous promise of liberating divisions within an enterprise – especially small and medium enterprises – of the draconian clutches of its in-house IT department (if it is rich enough to afford one, that is). Vendors will have setup multi-tenanted cloud platforms and applications that divisions can sign up and use (and stop subscribing when they wish). Imagine the productivity impact this will most likely have on businesses.

I was thinking how this may impact enterprise level information aggregation and decision support systems. “Single version of truth”, “three-sixty-degree view”, “firm-wide, firm-wise” were just some buzz words that the DWH/BI practitioners have gone around with for quite a while now.

And they had a valid point (how much that translated into efficient and effective implementation is another matter though). So now in the new world where the workflow, processing and storing are all happening on the cloud, where does the Enterprise Intelligence box sit? Most likely that will move to the cloud as well. It will be a fascinating space to watch as it plays out. The application vendors on the cloud will – someday – want to forward integrate into BI/DWH/Analytics on the cloud but size could be restrictive. I would rather prognosticate that the BI/DWH/Analytics vendors with cloud infrastructure will integrate back stream into applications. What happens when only parts of the enterprise are using the cloud while the rest is using in-house applications hosted in local data centers – how does the mashup happen then? And where?

What do you think? How do you feel this game will be played out?

To Farm or Not To Farm

Human beings started domesticating wild plants and animals sometime around 8,000 B.C. That started the shift from a hunter-gatherer existence to domestication and settled farming. Hunting-gathering is an okay way of subsistence so long as there are more lucky days than ones when not much turns up. On the contrary a settled-farming society can expect (a) more predictability of food, (b) predictable – perhaps lesser – work schedules, (c) greater attention to family and raising children and (d) greater longevity.

This shift took millenniums to achieve, but most importantly the early humans realized that their end goal of species propagation cannot be sustained through an erratic hunt-gather way of life. While the start and end of this metamorphosis is well understood, for a moment think how it must have been towards the middle – or around the 25^th percentile. Undoubtedly there were rival groups supporting either forms of existence. And they would have had their cogent reasoning. All said, hunting-gathering was proven and yielded results. The settled farming camp had it tougher, I am sure. They had to sell a concept, perhaps build a prototype of a farm and wait for a drought or famine to come about that would conclusively prove their argument.

I view the start-up, adrenalin pumping way of life versus the “large company” process driven existence as symptomatically similar to the example above. Just as a small tribe that has existential needs of only a handful can be profligate in their ways to not farm and only hunt and gather, a start-up company often exists in a similar bent of mind. A more process driven, settled existence is derided – mostly with the argument of slower turnaround (our early ancestors also had to deal with it, I am sure. “Today I can just go out and kill a boar and eat it. But in your way we’ll have to wait till it becomes big enough for it to be food”). It takes a phenomenal amount of evangelization before the change can be brought about. The problem becomes compounded when a start-up is bought out by a large company and the matter assumes tinges of cultural conflict.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet but the metamorphosis need not (a) take as much times as it did in human evolution (b) simply subsume into a bureaucratic maze that masquerades as settled existence. The hunter-gatherer culture depends on rock-star performers and the start-up equivalence is also somewhat similar. And once these individuals buy into the settled existence idea, it spreads like a virus. Like our ancestors, prototyping the concept may help and it is important that both forms of existence be allowed to continue just so the experiment has a control sample to refer back to.

Many equalize a settled existence with a sloth existence. The reality is far from it. A settled existence merely allocates human enterprise and intellect to initiatives that result in maximum return rather than spreading them thin over fragmented activities.