the wow moment!

its two am in the night and i am strolling through random blogs trying to kill time, i have a feeling i am suffering from internet addiction disorder; wikipedia has a lengthy description of it, have a look at it. i personally feel addiction to the internet is not a bad thing, the ‘kind’ of internet addiction is what matters here. 

a lot of strange things have been happening lately to me and i am kinda ok with all of them. my root canal treatment failed and i have a swollen jaw, i have terrible cough for two weeks now, i tripped down the stairs and got a hairline fracture and from the time i gave up swimming, i have a feeling i am growing fatter,that apart, i am perfect. 

bill gates left microsoft last month to devote his time full time for charity. this man, despite what people have to tell about him has lived a remarkable life and continues to do so. bill gates was definitely not the pioneer in software industry, he was the pioneer when it came to making money through software, the man was responsible in a major way why you are reading this blog now and why i wrote it, it’s definitely not about the great software, there are better OSs and better computers around but they somehow never reached our homes. microsoft did. and that’s where gates the businessman comes in. gates was definitely not a stringent innovator, he was a businessman, a blunt businessman. he knew what to do where and was emotionally secure and cool almost always, very much unlike the monkey boy steve ballmer who is known to have vowed to ‘kill google’ and not let his children use an ipod. (yes, you can smile here ). 

this week had yet another news item as the blogosphere buzzed with verizon ceo commenting on steve jobs getting old and wanting him to die. even though he didn’t explicitly state it, the meaning was obvious. people might see it any way they like, but as far as i am concerned, this is some sort of honor, your competitors are so pissed off and jealous of you, they’ve given up all hopes of any competition and are wanting you to die. what can be cooler than that ? given the elegance, style and the awesomeness of the iphone, i am pretty sure that there is no one in the whole market who can even come half way of what apple did. and with the costs coming down, it wouldn’t be surprising if you end up seeing iphones with just about everyone in an year or two. 

two days from now and india will have it’s first sci-fi movie. i am normally a persons who abhors movies but i just had this feeling that i should be commenting about this movie. love story 2050 reminds you of star wars, minority report, xmen and so many others just by the look of its trailers . the point i would want to make here is that the target market which the makers of this movie might have speculated have already a lot of sci-fi in hollywood flicks and its unlikely that they’ll boo boo at it. also, you can’t expect the basic indian crowd to come out and enjoy sci-fi movies. for those who are going to see it, there’s nothing new in it, the others don’t quite bother about it. i am no astrologer but i have a feeling that all those projects which people take up just because they are ‘cool’ and have ‘worked before’ never quite work out. 

by the way, i saw schindler’s list yesterday and i think its an amazing movie.  we’re all so lucky we weren’t born at the time of the war. 

ps: the punctured parachute was blue in color. and contrary to what you might have imagined, it was discarded, no one ever used it. 

so, here we are. the 25th of june and guess what ? well, honestly there is nothing much to guess, it’s still the same boring, lustless life, but i am still blogging even if it be are weeks. there is one slight problem as always, there is nothing much to share, in other words or in the words of Mr. Guwadawingo ‘ the stuff i have is not worth sharing and the stuff i wanna share is not supposed to be shared ‘. now, some of you must have got that. be tee 2blu this Mr Guwadawingo is an amazing person. 

blogs are supposed to be the ‘let me shout it out’ space for anybody on the web. everyone, literally everyone these days has to say something to the world. our problem is we are running short of listeners despite increasing populations. which brings me to a very important question. do you have anything very important to tell out to the world ? i guess everyone does, but your ‘important’ doesn’t quite gel with the rest of the world’s ‘important’ . at least Mr Guwadawingo is very happy and content that his word is being heard and i am happy for him.  

a couple of days ago, i was so sick and tired with myself that i finally decided to something very daring. i saw the TV (yes, i am serious, i saw it when it was actually on and running, i bet you cant do that!!! ). even Mr Guwadawingo thought i was bluffing. he believed only when i told him about all the stupid stuff i’d seen on tv and he was like ‘yes, you couldn’t possibly have thought all this up, you are not that smart’. so, what did i see on tv ? there was a truckload of people all interested in singing and dancing who wanted to be ‘the stars of tomorrow’ and who cried and drooled when the judges (who themselves look as if they are suffering from serious ADD, attention deficit disorder) ‘emotionally charged remarks’. whatever be the case, if everyone gets to singing and dancing, who will write blogs and what will become of Mr Guwadawingo. When i told Mr Guwadawingo that there are actually people around who are addicted to tv, he got so excited and was after me to introduce him to such people, i finally convinced him that these people are very much from our planet and addiction to something as dumb as the tv is totally a terrestrial phenomenon.

then there was another big news about the indo us nuke deal. neither me nor Mr Guwadawingo understood much about it, so we are not going to comment. then there was the question of Obama’s presidency. i am not quite bothered about the american presidency, but i personally like black guys who are decent and who make sense, i dont know why but their poise and charisma shows up much more than the whites. eg: will smith, tiger woods and now even obama fits in my list. i just wikipediaded the black percentage in us and its about the 12%, which in other words means that a lot of whites are going to have to vote for obama if he has to win.  this election would be a litmus test to prove it to the whole of the world whether americans actually give a damn about the race issue or do they still have prejudiced reservations. america still has one of the worlds largest percentages of oldies which means a lot of conservationist ideologies. let’s see what happens. i know only one astrologer whose predictions came true, he is Mr Guwadawingo’s cousin and he predicted that he would be working on just one prediction for all his life.i tried to contact him regarding the us elections and whether that big eyed hot chick would really talk to me or not, he was very busy and couldn’t even return my call. 

in 1948, Garry Davis, a leather jacketed world war II bomber pilot had walked into the American embassy, turned in his passport and renounced his american citizenship. he said he was sick and tired of wars and rumors of war. he then tried the UN to declare him as the first ‘citizen of the world’. 

he failed. he shouldn’t have. 

sixty years later, we still fight for fictitious reasons in the name of national and religious pride and honor. agreed national pride and honor helped countries like japan and germany come up after the war, but around the world it has done more harm than good. 

also, i fail to understand why people give so much importance to their motherlands and are even ready to die for it. as far as i think land is lifeless. how dumb it is to give away lives for something lifeless. instead of valuing human life, the soul, the heart and the intellect, we value a stretch of stones and mud. 

agreed i would be sadder if there happens to be an earthquake or something like that in india than anywhere else in the world. but that shouldn’t be the case. in an ideal modern society, logically speaking, there is no reason why there should be any difference between people. 

in fact, as far as i think, people should be given the highest priority, not their faiths or nationalities. imagine where we would have been had all of us considered each other equal and worked for everyone’s profit. there would no stupid wars, people would be working hard everywhere, the world economy would have bloomed, science and technology would have grown and we would have been at least ten times better than what we are now. 

in fact, with the formation of european union and the development of BRIC nations, more or less, the entire world is expected to achieve some sort of a economical saturation throughout. what i am suggesting is that we speed up the process as much as we can. national pride and honor didn’t do anyone any good. loving your country is one thing, feeling proud about your country and looking down upon others is bad. these things are only empirical, the sad part is nine out of ten people actually endorse the ‘my country greatest’ ideology. it only ‘feels’ good, very soon you are going to die and the stretch of stones and land which you call your country is going to remain unaffected. human life is precious, scarce and dignified. why invest your emotions and intellect on lifeless things which can’t even reciprocate any of your feelings. 

on experience: 

some people are of the opinion that experience plays a major role in any task you take up. i disagree. unless the context here is as trivial as say, brushing your teeth or something like that, its not going to make much of a difference. In both business and life, we all faces new problems and if everything could be solved in the same way, then there’d be no fun left any more. every new challenge is a different from the other(that is exactly why its called a ‘challenge’) and all the experience here will not fetch you anything because this is the first time you are facing such a problem. if however you face the same problem twice, then the question here is about your capabilities i.e the problem persists to be a problem only if you left it unsolved in the first place. 

so you see, experience really doesn’t matter, instinct does. 

looks: 

to say that looks play a very important role is not quite agreeable, similarly to say that looks don’t have any importance at all is also insane. the same goes for persons as well as the stuff around you. we all like good looking things. as a businessmen, we need to know that it is very important for us to give the customer just that. you might have the best service or product quality around, but if the packaging is bad, people are not going to like it, one example here is that of windows and linux, the old linuxes despite being amazing on the functionality took a beating on the looks , people fell for windows which was infinitely better looking than any other oss then, except of course the macintosh. even now, microsoft is pretty much trying to sell vista on just one ground: looks. the only good thing about vista is that it looks better, it has got some visually enhanced apps, thats about it, people still seem to like it. giving another example, just think about it, would you have bought 7 up and sprite if they were in transparent bottles instead of the usual green ones? 

ethics: 

google has an amazing bit of advice in their ‘ten things’ corporate policy and it goes somewhat like this: you should not give up long term futuristic gains for immediate or short term gains. i totally agree. this is where ethics come in. like buffet once said: it takes twenty years to build a reputation and an instant to ruin it. logically thinking, the odds are that, you will stay for the most part of your life in one or two to three fields at max, and the kind of person you ‘actually are’ will eventually show up, you cant hide for long from people. keep in mind that you are not the only ’smart’ guy who walk this planet, there are thousands like you. people can never be fooled, not all of them, never. you have to be honest, else you will be exposed and cleared. or else, just look at it this way: say you had to trust a big assignment to someone, would you not study that person and make sure if he really fits in, after all its your hard earned money and market respect, you wouldn’t want to toss it off just like that.  the same applies to you as well, when people deal with you, unless and until there is an  ’umbilical cord’ of trust, no amount of legal agreements and memorandums are going to work. 

predictability, my friend is a bigger virtue than patience. 

no one is, was and ever will be  in the same space-time coordinates as you are now, so the same rules, tips and tricks which work for you now may not work for others or even for you at another time(or even vice versa).  

every disease has its cure, and you cant swap ones medicine for the other. 

the same logic applies to both life and business, what might ‘totally rock’ today might be dull and drab tomorrow. 

the 1980s saw the sony walkman coming into the music market, it was the right time and the right attempt, it ‘totally rocked’. 

the ipod came somewhere around 2001, once again they hit the right shot at the right time, business bloomed.

then came the zune player(did you hear about it ), bad timing, bad hitting. 

the thing about the market is you have to give them what they want, no matter how meaningless or foolish it is. and often the market only asks for a ’sequel’ to what already existed. the desktop market asked for laptops, the laptop market asked for better laptops and so on so forth. the task of the company is to give them that. plain and simple(so, it may seem! )

people will always want more and better stuff(human nature, my friend , human nature) , its the job of the company to give them that and when you cant meet up their expectations, you are simply wiped out unless there is nothing in the market which is as good as yours. perhaps one big reason why zune didn’t work is because people had already seen the ipod. perhaps one big reason why windows works is people haven’t yet seen a mac.

this can best be explained by the automobile market, all cars have four wheels and a steering, until you see a better car, you are going to be very happy with your old one, the moment you see a better one, you are going to want it.

 say you didn’t know about ice creams, then you wouldn’t have bothered about them, but now that you know what an ice cream tastes like, you are going to want it.

‘wants’ might be said are subject to viewability. (business is more to be ‘want based’ than ‘need based’).

your product should shout at the customer: ” dude, this is what you have been looking for all your life”.

 the challenge here is to rightly anticipate what people want and i tell you this is not at all easy, there will always be error, the trick is to minimize the error. six sigma helps here, but you know, being humans, you can never predict anything to an entirety, how much ever you try, there will still be loads more that could have been done. 

beauty, my friend  is when you look a little less uglier. 

point 1 : you are not alone, there are tens of hundreds of people like you sitting out there with more or less the same ideas.

point 2 : read the first point again, and then got to the third point.

point 3: you think your idea is great and unique BECAUSE you think its so, what is the guarantee that the people around you also like it?

point 4: you think your idea is unique in the sense that because no ones ever tried it, and you are the first one, it must be great, you don’t think why someone else DIDN’T do it.

point 5 : even with the greatest idea ever conceived and the perfect timing, you are still going to have to compromise on a huge market.

point 6 : you analyze yourself, are you sure others will also think just like you? where you see value, the market might see worthless. what you might consider futile, the market might resonate to it.

point 7 : never judge people to the extent that you discard them , humans have the tendency to find more wrong in each other than the value, people whom you think are worthless might prove out to be dealmakers.

point 8 : you cant do everything, in your entire LIFE if you can do ONE THING PROPERLY, its GREAT. and you have to do many things in life, you always need people.

point 9: just because you don’t see the value in something, it doesn’t mean that its like that, may be you are a fool, theres every chance.

point 10 : people are busy, really busy, and they have no sympathy towards you, why should they spend their precious time with your product or idea, you might see the value in your idea, do they?

are you interested in my life ? i dont think so , i am not Albus Dumbledore.

did that make sense ? if it didnt, then obviously you are senseless.

the question remains ..now that you are senseless, lets figure out how senseless you are ?

still reading ? u sure are senseless to the core.

seven fifth of the world population does not know fractions.

there are more mosquitoes in India than there are in Sri Lanka, obviously, Sri Lanka is a smaller country. Also, India has Himesh Reshamiya.

two out of every five people are different from the remaining three. and those three are different from the first two.

despite all the jargon, money is still a very important thing.

workload increases with decreasing time, efficiency however decreases.

for most part of their lives, people will more or less remain the same, there are hardly any ‘enlightenments’ or ‘gyan’ sessions.

at the start, you say quality, then you come down to adaptability, then you say compromise, then you come down to availability and finally to desperation. ( the context here is both girls and gizmos )

in business, the bottom line is that you are there only for one reason: to make money.

in life, the bottom line is that you are here only for one reason: to get better.

as far as i am concerned, business and life are very closely intertwined, businessmen need to understand life much better than any one else. and the more you try and understand business and life, the more deeper they get, as long as you get too desperate or messy, things will go pretty smooth. i am a believer of the ’cause and effect’ doctrine from which it follows that if something is going wrong now(the effect), then there have must been a cause, things simply don’t ‘happen’ on their own.

lets us now analyze the jaundiced causes which end up in goofed up consequences, life is very short, one way is to go ahead blindly and ‘learn from your mistakes’, the other is to look at others and learn from ‘others mistakes’, like they say it makes no sense reinventing the wheel, you simply cant keep making the same mistakes which others made, also, you cant keep yourself from making mistakes, so its perfectly ok if you if you make ‘new mistakes’, in fact its great!

there are some mistakes which keep repeating so often and are so obvious that it becomes hard to notice them, people screw up their prospectus in all possible ways and they do it very stupidly. here are a few of them

i love what i am doing/my work is cool: like what Covey said in his book, its important that the ladder is leaning against the right wall, people are busy climbing the latter, mindlessly, senselessly without bothering where its heading, the kind of work that has to be done is the kind of work which is in demand. ever wondered why the so very cool gadgets produced every now and then don’t survive the market. well the answer is obvious. your product should be adaptable to the market, and if possible cool, not the other way round.

target market: yet another goof up when the managers don’t do their homework properly, you can’t sell a helicopter to someone afraid of heights, however cool it might be. this explains why diet coke never worked in India.

Now now , look at the meaningless topic , it only shows how jobless and innovationless i am.(Whats the opposite of innovation? ) It also indicates something else, so are you.

Still reading ? well you see i am out of topics to fill up my blog, but i guess its been so long something has be posted.

any suggestions? now !!!! we have a topic ? why do people write blogs and what do they get out of it ?

one reason is simply because blogging is a hobby, some find it ‘cool’ , some others want the world to know what kind of person he is ‘actually’ , then there are some like me who are simply jobless.

the bottomline is blogs are written for people to ‘read’, thats it. if you have the best blog in the world and people find it useless, hardly anyone will read it, this brings me to a new topic, i am on another cloud now: usability and value, unless and until people find value in what you are offering, no one is gonna give a damn about it. people are too busy (trying to get into newer better relationships, discussing statistics of some sportsperson or simply gossiping, more about this a little later.) to give a damn about what you have to tell or do.

The Right Thing:

In business as in life, people look for the ‘right’ thing and ‘right’ decision always. To be very honest, it does not exist. The world is big, very big and theres room for everyone. Whatever decision you have made will gave their own consequences, you simply cant categorize anything as entirely right or wrong. For eg: Microsoft decides to focus on increasing profits and they do everything in accordance to it, Apple decides to stick to quality and they do everything in accordance to it. Both of them have their own markets and following. Now tell me who is RIGHT?

I am busy.

We’ve heard the sentence written above a zillion times. I am too busy to rewrite it. Lets put it to test now. Lets have a look at the world around us, dozens of TV shows around are running successfully, tickets for sports matches sell like crazy, especially if its Indian Cricket or European Football, people have time to get into new relations every now and then, there are people bragging about their jobs, lifestyles, parents etc etc(social networking will help you soothe your emotions if you are one among them), people have time to flaunt their expensive clothes and goodies(thats why brands sell), movies and music are a huge market, entertainment was supposed to be an accessory, not an addiction like it is now,…. and the sickest of all: page 3 news: how is it going to matter to you if some socialite or actor is busy with whatever makes them busy, every magazine and newspaper has a gossip column which discusses personal shit about senseless actors, thats sick enough, whats sicker? people actually read such stuff, it sells, they have ‘time’ for it.  people like me have time to write meaning less blogs like this, thats bad enough, and you: reading such stuff : thats worse.

I am asking again, are we busy? am i ? are you ?

Love you, hope the next post makes some sense, this was just a reminders to my ‘readers’ that i still exist.

Right now, I am pretty busy!

OK…so here we go…of late i have had a chance to be a part of several teams, it doesn’t take an Aristotle to tell you that in the real world nothing is ever perfect, there are always nasty curves and bumps, but, people don’t quite seem to realize that, everyone wants everything else around them to be perfect. Humans have that inherent tendency to want perfection everywhere, they spend days and months trying to put things in order, waiting for the perfect people to come into their lives et cetera et cetera, i personally don’t endorse this theory. Life is short and it makes more sense to work with whats in hand than wait for perfect timings and perfect people around you. Sorry i went a little astray from the topic but that doesn’t quite matter. Coming back, all the team members have both the good and the bad things about them. It takes a leader to spot the good in them and use it to the best possible extent, leaders in most cases want all team members to grow and learn. i say all that is crap. lets be very simple and logical, no high funda theories, any team is like a system, and when it comes to considering what a system is all about, look at yourself, the legs do the walking, the hands do the work, the mouth does the eating etc. Now, if you want the hands to learn the walking, do you expect it to be of any use(unless you are a circus clown), the hands should be taught to work better, the legs to walk better so on so forth. That is exactly how its supposed to be for a team. One more thing i noticed in team work: heroism, the moment this comes in, the entire team is screwed. If you are someone with the basic common sense levels, you’d surely realize that in all teams, each and every individual needs others from the team, is needed by others by others from the team, else they wouldn’t have formed the team in the first place! So heroism in teams sucks to the core. It doesn’t benefit anyone. As in everything else humans do, teamwork also involves a lot of ego and emotion running across, there will always be weird people around you with strange ideologies and mentalities. The smarter you are, the swifter you glide through them.