...It's not about the CEO lying as much it is off process gaffe

Ok. So, Scott Thomson, CEO, Yahoo is not a Computer Science graduate.  His resume is fake. My question - What about internal controls and HR processes..?  It's hard to believe that there is no such thing called credential verification in such a large corporation as Yahoo..  If HR has such major lapses while hiring its top gun, we can imagine how much sloth must have crept into other functions like Purchase, Accounting, Sales and Administration - something that explains why Yahoo is not able to shake off its `troubled' adjective even after close to a decade...

Thompson was hired from PayPal in January, four months after previous CEO Carol Bartz was acrimoniously ousted, and Yahoo — so far, at least — has maintained that computer science degree or not, Thompson is qualified for the job. He very well may be, but the perception of impropriety may be too much for Yahoo to bear.

Big Data - CRM by another name...?

The IT revolution has gathered steam with predictive data analytics (of  known customer data) catalyzing  enterprise fortune.  In came CRM with a lot of noise and indeed it was noise and not much.  People got frustrated as most marketing campaigns based on abstract data analytics misguided product launches and promotions religiously backfired, delivering lemons on their balance sheets. Company management lost interest besides money and CRM had its obituary written, for no fault of its own because it was the excessive expectation to blame. Not the concept itself because customer data is always valuable.

This is exactly what is being nicely clarified by Peter Fader, Professor at Wharton Business School while he says "There is a "data fetish" with every new trackable technology, from e-mail and Web browsing in the '90s all the way through mobile communications and geolocation services today. Too many people think that mobile is a "whole new world," offering stunning insights into behaviors that were inconceivable before. But many of the basic patterns are surprisingly consistent across these platforms. That doesn't make them uninteresting or unimportant. But the basic methods we can use in the mobile world to understand and forecast these behaviors (and thus the key data needed to accomplish these tasks) are not nearly as radical as many people suspect."

Superb elucidation... Hats off to Prof. Fader...!

Adobe quits Apple pursuit

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to preserve a relationship, you reach a point where it becomes clear the two of you have simply grown too far apart and it's time to cut your losses. After a long and unsuccessful campaign to persuade Apple to embrace the Flash multimedia platform on the iPhone, Adobe has finally found itself at that point, and it's goodbye Apple for Adobe now.

According to Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for Flash, the final straw was Apple's recent ban on apps built with unapproved tools and converted into an iPhone-compatible format.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa offered a big-picture view of Apple's developer restrictions: "From a developer perspective, the new legal language is bad news. The application development field is very diverse and many platforms are inherently layered with API's often stacked on top of one another as application platforms evolve. Apple's legal language seems to preclude even Apple evolving its own platform down the road when new languages or interfaces become more popular as computer science evolves. ... While this restriction can be seen in the prism of the Apple and Adobe relationship around Flash, this is not just about Adobe, but potentially a problem for every developer runtime or language that wants to hold on to developers and maintain its longevity. It is about programmers maintaining their livelihood. Probably even more importantly, it is about the flexibility to evolve computer science and software development."

Amen.

Converting an IT horizontal into an industry vertical

Leveraging IT is not just for outsourcing vendors in India. Other Industries are fast catching up. I would say it's a fantastic opportunity for sectors that are not particularly doing well, Real Estate and Construction for example.

HCC is a Bombay based infrastructure and construction major in India. The industry is going thro some real rough weather but that doesn't seem to have influenced their business propensities. Though operational departments have been sagging, the IT department of the company has warmed up to the situation and is now pitching in with its own might of experience gained so far. It is trying to develop as an end-to-end IT solutions service provider for the infrastructure industry. According to Satish Pendse, CIO, initially, the services sought to be provided by the upstart could be SAP implementation, GPS-based tracking devices, multiple-packaged application implementations, and end-to-end services going forward.

Innovation does not just mean feature addition or product enhancement. It can also me converting a horizontal into a vertical.

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Why I turned the Google Buzz off

There are three separate issues, only one of which is the defaults:

1) Having an engineering culture drive a social product.... And I'm not just trying to be snarky. Social isn't a technical problem it's a people one and Google's culture doesn't seem geared that way.

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2) Layering a social sharing product (explicit social) on top of a private communication product like email (implicit social). Why would anyone assume that I'd want to do this? I might email business partners, clients, doctors (mine), lovers... why would you ever assume that frequency of email connections maps to 'want to share with the world?"

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3) The settings. I despair of `society' as an industry sometimes. Ever since the earliest concerns over privacy a decade ago, people insist on ignoring obvious things - you don't opt people in just to build an audience and force them to opt out. You don't auto-subscribe them to a bunch of followers then make them removed those people one by one. You don't suddenly violate customer trust by changing the nature of a familiar product to suit senior management. These aren't hard or obscure lessons... but time and again otherwise bright people screw up by ignoring them.

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IT outsourcing vendors run for cover

"In what could be an important decision for the IT outsourcing industry and its customers, a London court recently ruled that EDS (now division of HP) must pay damages to a former outsourcing customer for failing to live up to its sales pitch.

British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB) had signed a £48 million outsourcing contract with EDS to build a customer service system in 2000, but terminated the deal early in 2002 after what it said was "woeful" performance by the IT service provider. SkyB alleged deceit, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract by EDS.

Although the total costs and damages will be determined at a later date, BskyB said it expects EDS will be liable to pay at least £200 million—more than four times the amount of the original contract."

Enough India's famed IT vendors? Now don't go promise the moon and hope customers would tolerate project failures like before. Though the U.K. court ruling was decided largely on the basis of facts from one person's statements as opposed to systematic failings of the outsourcer or outsourcing vendors as a whole, dissatisfied outsourcing customers may go digging through notes from the pre-contract courtship phase of their relationships to see if arguments around fraud can be made.

Tweak that Kindle, Jeff !

Amazon Kindle gave me a lot of hope. I was looking forward to ever-fresh, non greying pages no matter how many times I read a book. I longed for bookmarking at the press of a button, no chopping woods for paper etc.etc. The Kindle, I was told was all that and more.

But it hardly seems to be the case.

Ok. There’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

Too bad it doesn’t have a little kickstand,” . “You could prop it up like a dresser mirror and read while you eat.”

I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought “miss.” was the abbreviation of a state name: “He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi.” I turned the machine off.

Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. (Cook books / Recipes will suck when you try a new dish to see if the outcome tallies with the intention) If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel “Tequila Truth.”

Read in the sun the letters began to disappear. Readers had to press Alt-G repeatedly to bring them back. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all

The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion,

You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

And then you cut out the bad tobacco odor that you often get while opening books in a library.

The "Bing" outing

Ok. Microsoft is out with its own search engine, oops, they call it a decision engine – Bing.

There will be inevitable exploration of the meaning of the moniker. (Bing has a certain ring to it. It's much better, of course, than the boring "Live Search.") Plus there is the bigger question of whether Bing will make a dent in Google's dominance. But search for clues to another issue Bing brings up: Will it end the Microsoft-Yahoo search flirtation?

Anyways, Bing seems like it would be more useful than a Google or Yahoo search. If you're searching for something you'd like to buy, for example, Bing theoretically will serve up reviews, as well as places to buy the item and related accessories, laid out in a prettier and more organized way than just a simple vertical list of links. On a whole, a big positive for Microsoft: The depth of the searches seems to offer more opportunities for ad revenue.

Of course, people think simple is best, which is part of why Google's so successful. Early impressions suggest Bing will lure some people who want to achieve a specific goal when doing a search, but that users' trust in Google to bring them the most relevant results in the most basic of manners won't wane. The trick will be to get people to think of Bing, too, when they think they might want an enhanced search. Microsoft will be spending a lot of money on the Bing branding campaign, take CEO Steve Ballmer’s word.

So this brings us to what this means for the long-running Microsoft-Yahoo partnership possibility. Is it still going to happen? After all, would Microsoft invest so heavily in Bing if it really thought a deal with Yahoo was imminent?

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