Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 20 Jul 2014 13:03

I have a Jolla phone - not impressed. Plus where is the ecosystem?

rohitvats · Post by **rohitvats** » 20 Jul 2014 13:23

Fact that Flipkart has itself sold a million Moto E/G/X phones in a pretty short time period, shows the value people attach to a quality product. And these phones were not marketed anywhere or endorsed by any celeb. The publicity happened by word of mouth and in an era of me-too phones, these phones have stood out with their good features and performance.

Another important inference is in terms of growing comfort people have in ordering things online - and expensive things at that. I myself went to a Croma store plus couple of other mobile vendors to touch and feel various phones but placed the order online at flipkart. It helped that NEXUS 5 on flipkart was almost INR 2,000 cheaper!!! And came with option of 3, 6, 12 or 24 month EMI facility.

Indian retailers have a tough competition at hand for sure.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 20 Jul 2014 14:35

The brick n mortar retailers usually have displays with no info on the phone, and clueless salespeople. The flipkart type sites actually have much better info on product. Many dont even let you touch and try the real phone, only a inert plastic dummy.

abhischekcc · Post by **abhischekcc** » 20 Jul 2014 18:21

Moto has a good brand recall and brand image - even after many years of not having a blockbuster.

The success of Moto (and even Nokia sometime ago) is based on the fact many buyers think of quality as a hygiene factor now - they are swayed by design.

A good design, that stands out from the prison uniform style Sammy/Apple phones, will get higher curiosity factor and if you throw in a good brand image - will produce a blockbuster.

archan · Post by **archan** » 20 Jul 2014 21:55

You're missing the value part. Motos were exceptional value till Xiaomi was launched.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 20 Jul 2014 22:44

Tried a friends motog today. Very fast ui and apps launching. Faster than lumia 720.
body material does not feel premium but good enough.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 20 Jul 2014 23:14

Raja Bose wrote:And that proves the PM position was created for H1Bs and L1s? er...what? Anyways you are making no sense to me so no more on this from me.

I am not talking about PM position in MS specifically but suggesting that this could be a vestige of the INS rules of that era. As these companies grew in size riding the wave of software becoming more important than HW and Internet revolution follwed by dat cam boom-bust, the reasons for some positions to exist with strange designations were probably lost in the mists of time. The designations were never eliminated due to inertia.

To repeat in a different way, I am giving a plausible explanation for these kinds of positions but MS happened to be the subject in those series of posts. For all I know my explanation may not apply to MS but you were the one who went on a tangent about whether MS would or would not reorganize their development org structure based on external conditions. I have no knowledge of what happens in MS internally though I know that it is riven with mile high egos, politics, axes to grind, and backstabbing. That is not an exception in any big organization. Add inertia to the list too while we are at it..

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 20 Jul 2014 23:51

Rohitvats.

If you dont want gaming, consider MotoX.

Here is Sinofsky's talk on what PMs do in M$ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archiv ... 04872.aspx

Program managers got started at Microsoft while developing Excel for the Macintosh.

Quite a few of my madrassa co-talibs joined as PMs in Microsoft. They were bullsh1tters then, they are bullsh1tters now. Admittedly my sample is biased.

M$ still has the technical chops and the money to be a great company. Nadella seems to have reversed Ballmer's "Devices & Services" idea (or lets become appil). Is touting his new "Mobile first/Cloud first" mantra. If M$ can give up their paranoia about losing control over the device platform (device OS) and instead concentrate on developer experience/value in the application platform (Azure) they can be quite profitable. If they invest a lot on web-development (which they would if a majority of mobile devices are running android/iOS, because then they dont need to close the "app gap" in windows phone. If a developer only needs to develop once and can deploy across iOS/Android/Windows) it will be beneficial for everyone. Before that, I would expect them to deploy IE on iOS and Android so they have a uniform platform to target.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 20 Jul 2014 23:53

You yourself chose to use hook on to that specific example. A plausible explanation does not remain plausible when the example you are using is incorrect.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 20 Jul 2014 23:56

Anujan wrote:If M$ can give up their paranoia about losing control over the device platform (device OS) and instead concentrate on developer experience/value in the application platform (Azure) they can be quite profitable.

That's lahori logic at best. Which platform vendor will do that? Will a company like Chacha give up their paranoia about losing control over the device platform (device OS)? As we can see here

Google reportedly confronted Samsung over its approach to smartwatches

All the write once deploy anywhere mantra sounds great on YumBeeAye giri ppt slides. Which platform vendor will allow that? Not Chacha? Not FruitCo? Not Mickey? Owning the platform provides leverage, plain and simple. Every platform vendor uses that leverage ruthlessly whether they are ones who openly claim they are a closed ecosystem (FruitCo, Mickey) or the ones who openly claim they are an open ecosystem (Chacha).

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 21 Jul 2014 00:05

I did not say M$ should give up attempts to control the device platform. I implied that among the alternatives available to them, that strategy has the least chance of success.

When it grew, Google didnt have control over the platform. Search was from Windows mostly (well maybe a bit of mac thrown in). Till about 2011 or so, when android was less than half of mobile marketshare, Google didnt control the platform most mobile phone ran and neither did it control the platform which was most active on Google (iOS). What Google did control then and now is the services and applications on these platforms that are heavily used (search, youtube, gmail, maps). Only with android, Google had platform control. You can throw in chrome too in that mix.

Microsoft has a problem. They do not have online services the size of Google, facebook or Amazon. It is an uphill battle to regain mobile marketshare (they are at what? 3% now?). If you were microsoft what would you do?
Winning strategy would be to

(a) Be the no 1 place where services are deployed. Even if they cant be the No 1 OS where applications are deployed. M$ has the technical chops and institutional memory to make the lives of developers pleasant
(b) Make sure all apps/services are accessible no matter what OS you run. So you dont have people returning phones because windows phone does not have instagram.

Most online services now run on AWS. If you use an iPhone, android, Mac, PC, AppleTV, Roku or FireTV to watch Netflix, Netflix is making money *and* Amazon is making money. That is food for thought.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 21 Jul 2014 00:15

Let me elaborate: The thought process is quite simple. If you are in the platforms/services business how do you make money?

1. You could have a captive audience and charge developers for access to that audience. iOS does that. They have a boatload of users and developers pay FruitCo 30% cut to sell apps to them. M$ cant be currently profitable in that space on mobile. Their audience is not that big.

2. You could create an application that is popular. Deploy on all platforms and charge users for the application/service or monetize it using ads. Netflix does that. They will happily write an application on any popular platform and charge people $10 to access it monthly. M$ does not have a profitable service of that scale to replace windows revenue. They can however port their office suite to all popular OSes out there. They already have it for Mac and iOS and soon for android if rumors are to be believed. But that means that there is no differentiation for windows. I will still buy an iPad because I have all the apps due to (1) above *and* all of Microsoft apps due to (2).

3. You could create a cloud services platform that is popular. Charge the developers for running on that platform. Amazon does that. They dont worry if someone watches netflix on iPhone or Windows as long as Netflix pays them. In addition, they have their own integrated play: FireOS and tablets, which represent the best of their own services.

Now what should Microsoft do for maximum success?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 00:24

In your own words, Chacha went from services and applications onlee to owning their own platforms and gaining platform control. Why do you think they did that? The logic behind that is simple. Controlling the platform provides them the insurance to ensure that their services and applications can directly reach the consumer without depending on someone else. There are no permanent friends or partners, just permanent interests. Android gives Chacha that insurance. Chrome OS is an attempt by Chacha to get that in PC (so much for PCs are dead, all hail tablets). If it was all about services and applications while giving up control of the platform, Chacha would not do Android or ChromeOS, would it? It did so becoz it cannot trust platform vendors like FruitCo or Mickey anymore than Mickey can trust Chacha/FruitCo as platform vendors.

(b) which you mentioned above Mickey has been doing for last 2-3 years already. That is a web-based approach onlee and all their services are online nowadays. One thing which helped them here is their renewed focus on UX (a role played by PMs in their org) which makes the UX of a web based app/service as good as native. That for example helped outlook.com overtake Gmail in number of active users despite being late to the game. Like I have been saying for the past few years.....whoever does Gmail UX needs to be shot and hanged. It went from a minimalist excellent UX to bad to worse to total turd over the years.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 00:27

Anujan wrote:Let me elaborate: The thought process is quite simple. If you are in the platforms/services business how do you make money?

1. You could have a captive audience and charge developers for access to that audience. iOS does that. They have a boatload of users and developers pay FruitCo 30% cut to sell apps to them. M$ cant be currently profitable in that space on mobile. Their audience is not that big.

2. You could create an application that is popular. Deploy on all platforms and charge users for the application/service or monetize it using ads. Netflix does that. They will happily write an application on any popular platform and charge people $10 to access it monthly. M$ does not have a profitable service of that scale to replace windows revenue. They can however port their office suite to all popular OSes out there. They already have it for Mac and iOS and soon for android if rumors are to be believed. But that means that there is no differentiation for windows. I will still buy an iPad because I have all the apps due to (1) above *and* all of Microsoft apps due to (2).

3. You could create a cloud services platform that is popular. Charge the developers for running on that platform. Amazon does that. They dont worry if someone watches netflix on iPhone or Windows as long as Netflix pays them. In addition, they have their own integrated play: FireOS and tablets, which represent the best of their own services.

Now what should Microsoft do for maximum success?

If you read the developments for last 2-4 years, Mickey already does #3. And guess why Amazon went from a cloud platform onlee to owning their own devices and app ecosystem? The reason is given above and that is why like I said earlier, this whole giving up on the paranoia of controlling the platform business is lahori logic

If anybody follows that strat-e-jee, they will be left up Paki creek without a chaddi on their mush.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 21 Jul 2014 00:29

Outlook.com is a bad example. Hotmail and Gmail were running neck and neck and they still are, except now hotmail is called outlook.com. How did outlook.com UX help them surpass Gmail? That is a fallacious argument. In fact it is an opposite argument as to why UX does not matter. The fact is that so many people stuck to hotmail till they had an upgrade path. So how many new users to outlook.com to how many migrated over from hotmail? That would be an interesting stat. The second counterargument is yahoo mail. It sucks. But is in the big 3, No 1, 2 or 3 depending on who you ask and how you count.

PCs are not dead, just like how big iron isnt dead. PCs are still the no 1 for productivity and will likely remain that way. The question is which platform is the most profitable. That has shifted from PCs to mobile and to datacenters. That shift is very real.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 01:51

If Mickey has put out some of their ppts from Build last year, they should have the stats of how many migrated from Gmail and Yahoo to outlook.com - it was a pretty nice number iirc. Yeah UX doesn't matter. That is why Apple gets away with charging a premium

That is why Chacha suddenly woke up to the importance of UX in Android 2 years ago. Its again simple logic, not rocket science. You treat your users right and make their lives easier, they will be loyal to you. Otherwise they will ditch you at the first opportunity. That is why suddenly Sammy is realizing that churning out turds is causing people to ditch them.

I wonder where are all those anal-e-cysts who were predicting the death of PCs 2 years ago? Must have gone in hiding or switched jobs to safer horizons.

And I wonder what do they think of the stagnation in the tablet market once it hit the same upgrade cycle snags like the PC?

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 21 Jul 2014 02:46

Okay let me repeat what I said. Hotmail and Yahoo were arguably lagging behind gmail for quite a few years in terms of UX and features. People did not switch over in droves to gmail. Gmail became "merely" competitive with yahoo and hotmail and that too after what? 6 to 8 years? There are reasons to believe that most of the growth came from capturing bigger and bigger fraction of new email users over a period of 6 to 8 years.

The point is simple. Switching cost of email is perceived by people to be high. They have to update all their contacts with their friends and signup emails on various services like amazon and netflix. Also there is the question of moving your inbox over. You might argue that most email service providers offer seamless path for moving data over, but BRF population is not representative of most common email users. We are talking about people who complained when yahoo moved from their static pages to ajax which enabled drag and drop, users wanted their old yahoo email back. People dont go in droves to new shiny email service provider because inertia is high. Wrap your mind around this: About 3 million still pay for AOL dialup and AOL has about 70 million email users.

I made the point that your argument that outlook.com has high user count, with my observation that most of them are switchovers from hotmail can be equally validly used to make the point that email UX does not matter: or otherwise why did hotmail users stick around for so long, why is yahoo among the top 3 email service provider and why is AOL still serving millions? Also stating outlook.com has so many users "despite being late to the game" is a disingenuous argument, most of their users are from hotmail and hotmail wasnt late to the game.

Let us break out a few numbers. Last time people did dickwaving in public, yahoo, gmail and hotmail had about 400 million users each. Are you implying outlook has 800 million now? 400 million from hotmail and 400 million new users because of the shiny new UX to "surpass gmail despite being late to the game".

Let me repeat: Outlook.com has awesome UX and millions of people created an account and made it no 1 is a fallacious argument. Historically people have not switched email providers in such numbers, which makes me very skeptical. Hotmail had equally competitive usage statistics before outlook.com and all of them were migrated. I am willing to believe outlook.com, yahoo and gmail are the big 3. I also agree that outlook.com has very good UX. What I do find hard to believe (and can be persuaded otherwise) is that the UX caused about 400 million people to switch.

I never argued about UX of other products like phones, pcs and tablets in which case I have always argued that Apple products are usually the best in class.

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 21 Jul 2014 03:03

Raja Bose wrote: I wonder where are all those anal-e-cysts who were predicting the death of PCs 2 years ago? Must have gone in hiding or switched jobs to safer horizons. And I wonder what do they think of the stagnation in the tablet market once it hit the same upgrade cycle snags like the PC?

The Great Mahdi also used to refer to a "Post PC Duniya".

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 03:06

You are confusing 2 types of users for these type of services - new users and users who are switching i.e. migrating their old data to the new provider. Specific to a service like e-mail, good UX plays a key role in attracting new users. Nobody saying that the effect of UX is so dominant that other considerations like migration of data and inertia don't play a role in user retention - an example is Sammy. But if your product's UX is poor, people will jump out of your product the 1st chance they get i.e. as soon as it becomes convenient for them to jump - again Sammy is an example. If your product's UX is good, your user's don't do that jump - just look at FruitCo even when their services & ecosystem grip was not that strong.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 03:12

The great Mahdi was a very chankian strat-e-jist. Remember when he said FruitCo will never do a phunwa or a tablet?

Bawarchi can be a good CEO for a injineering driven company like Chacha/Mickey/ChipZ/SAP/YechPee but not for FruitCo. If Sir Jony was not such a vicious a-hole with zero management capability, he would have been a good choice as CEO.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 21 Jul 2014 03:13

bought a data card 4g-lte from sprint for 20 bucks.. 6 months service agreement for 35 bucks per mo.. 3gig plan, but 5 bucks more for 6gig.. i said, not necessary since, I would be rarely using this.. i wanted this just for travel with mom and kids during summer, and to keep up with job and works.

also, i am going to narrow down to a new upgrade phone that should handle the hotspot services.. which is like 20bucks for 3gig - with a disadvantage that phones will be inactive while on hot-spotting., a tradeoff worth it.. not analyzed the plan rates, and min service agreements..

btw, all these are kith&kin plan of employees. thanks for friends who work in sprint. each employee can sign up for 30 friends. if we assume 500 indic employees of sprint, i can safely guarantee there would be 15,000 signed up plans from employees alone. i hope they bump up the kk plan numbers.

now, that onlee one employee friend i know, might be soon quitting.. so, thinking.. verizon is the only option to jump to.

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 21 Jul 2014 03:34

Raja Bose wrote:The great Mahdi was a very chankian strat-e-jist. Remember when he said FruitCo will never do a phunwa or a tablet? Bawarchi can be a good CEO for a injineering driven company like Chacha/Mickey/ChipZ/SAP/YechPee but not for FruitCo. If Sir Jony was not such a vicious a-hole with zero management capability, he would have been a good choice as CEO.

Sad to say, but FruitCo seems to be done. They will just meander along, Bawarchi will bring out more and more meaningless iterations of the same thing until people stop having expectations. The spark is done, I don't think even Sir J could be a good Mahdi replacement. This is not about "getting things done".

Mickey maybe on the ascendant with Satya garu. Let's see, good thing Uncle Fester is gone, that crazy man.

I bought stock-e-FruitCo in 2005 and made good money.

Sold all in Jan/Feb 2013, don't think I will buy again.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 21 Jul 2014 03:58

so, getting good bandwidth for upload now on the data card.. i had to disable wifi to get the 4glte access.

so tested this reaching bangalore atria convergence endpoint from home

8.8k miles

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 21 Jul 2014 04:08

back on wifi, what a difference!!

dunno the routing hops my local isp surewest provides.

check additional miles 4g-lte packets traveled!

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 21 Jul 2014 05:23

Raja Bose wrote:You yourself chose to use hook on to that specific example. A plausible explanation does not remain plausible when the example you are using is incorrect.

Actually it was putnanja who said he knew people who were in PM positions 20 years back. My argument was that a few years (like about 5 years) before that was when H1Bs were arrived at as a compromise between shrot turn around B1s and long turn aournd H1s and L1s. That was the time when MS grew very fast (exponentially in fact when OS/2 was made to fail with BG's anti-trust games and bringing out first the buggy and unusable Win3 and then bettering the tech in Win3.5 and then Win98? and WinNT etc.) and it is anybody's guess whether they created PM positions in these 5 years to take advantage of the burgeoning Indian Software Developer pool to cut costs. Lots of other businesses did. Otherwise why did TCS/InfoSys/PCS/Wipro grow that fast in spite of Cap Gemini, CSC and others in the fray?

I am not hooking onto anything. Replace MS with some other company and you would find these kinds of anamolies in their organizational charts at lower levels.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 21 Jul 2014 05:24

KJoishy wrote: Sad to say, but FruitCo seems to be done. They will just meander along, Bawarchi will bring out more and more meaningless iterations of the same thing until people stop having expectations. The spark is done, I don't think even Sir J could be a good Mahdi replacement. This is not about "getting things done".

Mickey maybe on the ascendant with Satya garu. Let's see, good thing Uncle Fester is gone, that crazy man.

I bought stock-e-FruitCo in 2005 and made good money. Sold all in Jan/Feb 2013, don't think I will buy again.

Quite early to say that. Fruitco is still insanely profitable with plenty of optionalities. They process more payments through itunes than mid sized banks. They have millions of credit cards and payment options on file, they can friction-stir weld LCDs to aluminium with tight tolerances and have the worlds largest deployment bluetooth LE devices. Now they have partnered with IBM on the enterprise. If you can do all these, what more products and services can you roll out? Which other company is executing this well in the PC/devices space?

I think I mentioned once before that fruit co has taken anywhere between 3 and 6 years to start a new product line. First ipod was released in 2001, iPhone in 2007, iPad in 2010. It has been only 4 years since iPad was released. Let me make some predictions. They will make a wearable and sell 10 million of them in the next 4 quarters. They will make a larger screen iPhone and sell 150 million of them in the next 4 quarters, they will make a macbook air-sized iPad with a keyboard and sell 70 million of those and maybe retire their intel-based macbook air. People will yell "innovashun!!", fruitco will become cool again, institutional investors will come thundering back in and push their stock to over 120$. Lets visit this back in a year to see if it comes true.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 05:51

matrimc wrote:it is anybody's guess whether they created PM positions in these 5 years to take advantage of the burgeoning Indian Software Developer pool to cut costs. Lots of other businesses did. Otherwise why did TCS/InfoSys/PCS/Wipro grow that fast in spite of Cap Gemini, CSC and others in the fray?

To answer your question, no. PM positions did not magically get created in those 5 years. Like putnanja said, they existed since the 1980s. TCS/Infy/Wipro have a different business model than product companies like MS and can do such tricks.

matrimc wrote: I am not hooking onto anything. Replace MS with some other company and you would find these kinds of anamolies in their organizational charts at lower levels.

Does Google have such anomalies? How about Oracle? How about Amazon? I don't think so. You are mixing body shops like TCS/Infy with product companies. The latter don't mass hire people to put them on the bench and anyways they mostly hire from within US, from people either already in the industry or those with US degrees. Hence, they don't import people in any significant numbers and certainly not enough to change the entire organization and development process of a 100K person company.

KJoishy wrote: Sad to say, but FruitCo seems to be done. They will just meander along, Bawarchi will bring out more and more meaningless iterations of the same thing until people stop having expectations. The spark is done, I don't think even Sir J could be a good Mahdi replacement. This is not about "getting things done".

Mickey maybe on the ascendant with Satya garu. Let's see, good thing Uncle Fester is gone, that crazy man.

I bought stock-e-FruitCo in 2005 and made good money. Sold all in Jan/Feb 2013, don't think I will buy again.

KJo, don't forget that FruitCo has a very loyal and strong user base with deep pockets who stood by them even during John Sculley days. All FruitCo has to do is bring out a well designed product with last year's specs. Say it brings out a super sexy looking wearable with specs which are a year old and 1/3rd the features. In one sweep, it will leave the sum total of Android Wear with their kitchen sink of features and 20 Ghz processors in the dust while people trample over each other to buy the new Appil innovation. That is the power of good UX - it makes people feel good about owning and using a product And that is what engineers don't seem to get since ages.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 21 Jul 2014 07:00

arrey Bose babu, which year of 80s? First batch of H1Bs were issued in August of 1985. Before that nobody had heard of this category of a visa.

You are the one who is mixing up the issues (or shall I say non-issues

at this point). MS would not have had applied for a large number of H1Bs (or other visa types) as it was a minnow in a mass of sharks like IBM, Software AG (now SAP) swimming in the seas. Different matter that MS learnt its lessons of monopolizing well from their benevolent uncle. They do not have to directly apply for H1Bs - once they create those funky PM positions and show that there are no Americans to fill those slots, they can get TCS/HCL/Roltas (does anybody even remember this company today)/PCS/Wipro (or what have you? Infosys was an unknown enitity at that point of time and Satyam had about 10 employees where a UG classmate of mine and a dear friend to this day was hired directly by Raju was working) to get the visa and place them in their company. The numbers were far smaller - we are talking TCS headcount ~500, PCS ~220, HCL ~300, Roltas ~75, and so on. Think small numbers my man, real small numbers.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 Jul 2014 07:15

with such small nos , couldn't they have just hired locally there?
why did they put their trust in these tiny unproven indian cos?

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 21 Jul 2014 07:21

Khan was just trying out the model in those days. There were a lot pilot projects. 250k PA for a 10 on site MTechs from some of the best Indian educational instis were the kind of projects running those days. IBM just entered RDBMS with db2 where network DBS were ruling the roost at the cost of ims.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 07:38

matrimc wrote:They do not have to directly apply for H1Bs - once they create those funky PM positions and show that there are no Americans to fill those slots, they can get TCS/HCL/Roltas (does anybody even remember this company today)/PCS/Wipro (or what have you?

I guess you are hell bent to prove your kaans-pee-racy theory that the PM position in MS was created for some immigration purpose. One problem with your theory is that imported labour from TCS/HCL/PCS/Wipro etc. did not fill those roles and don't do so now either. PMs are FTE roles primarily and as someone pointed out, they were predominantly filled by non-SDREs till a few years ago. A PM is integral to the development process and cannot be left to depend on contractor labour as they have to be present during the entire life cycle of the product, typically across multiple generations. Use a better example to prove your point instead of trying to shoehorn one in.

And why would MS want to import staff from overseas for FTE positions on a large scale? MS probably has one of the highest Cost To Company expense per employee due to its employee benefits and salaries....more than any large Sillycon valley company AFAIK. Why would it want to add more to that expense instead of creating offshore Dev centers.

Sorry to make your theory go phut.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 21 Jul 2014 07:44

they may sell appil macs to kb-walas as workstations and clients. interestingly, the competition comes from integration of platforms and non-independent software systems. most legacy systems have anyway lot of integration points, and perhaps this is where oracle can step in by tie up with microsoft.. they already have platform independent java systems, plus that could be merged with platform dependent IIS servers. there is a big market in joint hosting of .NET and Java apps. such a merger might be monopolistic though.. but ibm-appil can give oracle and microsoft a good competition if they merge well.

there would be more mac integration as client stations, and more importantly enterprise workflow systems. good move by appil.. considering most mobile platforms are appil ios... kb-walas are moving towards mobile integration to cloud services.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 21 Jul 2014 08:02

Pandyan-ji

Big blue has entered into the lucrative "services" sector. What happens is this. Let us assume some in the trenches SDRE mentions to the veepee of technology that they should to implement Bitkeeper for doing source control in your organization because the old system sucks. The the veepee who has nothing to do, will take it up as his next "challenge". Then the veepee who doesnt know what source, control or bitkeeper is, will hire Big Neela.

Big Neela will send 3 consultants who charge $50 an hour and gravely nod their heads and say "yes, yes you should install BitKeeper. By the way, you need our "domain experts" to consult when implementing it". Then Big Neela will send 10 consultants who charge $100 an hour, who know nothing about BitKeeper. Meanwhile the SDREs from BitKeeper who actually install the software and move the source from the old source control system to BitKeeper are working hard. The Big Neela consultants do will do nice powerpoint slides explaining what these SDREs are doing. Will contain words like "action items", "deployment schedule" and "learnings" and "asks". Veepee will feel he understands everything. The BitKeeper SDREs who are actually competent will do a good job.

Then these 10 consultants will make a powerpoint slide on how much the company saved by moving to BitKeeper and how hiring Big Neela consultants has made the process smooth. They will congratulate the veepee for doing such a great technical job singlehandedly. Then these consultants will recommend an Big Neela developed web frontend to monitor the bitkeeper installation which costs more than the bitkeeper installation. Veepee, flush with his "success" of doing such a deeply technical job, will buy the monitoring solution and tell the board how a smart and technically savvy veepee he is and get 18 million more in stock options.

The deal with FruitCo means that Big Neela will now sell their web frontend along with 100 iPads to the organization.

I have no idea how Big Neela entered into this gig and why companies hire their consultants instead of consultants from the actual company they are buying solutions from, but this is insanely profitable for Big Neela and their clients keep coming back to them.

PS> Only part of the story above is fiction.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 08:14

They entered that gig when some YumBeeAye figured out, why not apply same hot air model as the other consulting firms such as McKinsey or BCG and get into the business ourselves. And that has led IBM to sell just about every good technical asset they had, not to mention reducing the once respected IBM Research to a shadow of its former self. Sad....

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 21 Jul 2014 08:22

Any kb-wala that is strongly tied to IBM suite of services and solutions is taken for a big ride.. IBM is the Sony for KB wala circles.. good reliability coming at huge cost, but lagging behind on next generation of things... at least spoken from few of their products and services. I'd expect most of them are the same.

their hardware otherwise are pretty good on the mainframes.. but times have changed.. the workstation and servers have become million times more powerful than mains.

perhaps appil can answer some of their bad images there.

If Oracle and MS merges their solutions, then we will see big time big bull lock horn clashes. duopoly in big markets is better in some sense, especially when competition picks up.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 Jul 2014 08:31

Huawei continues to report massive growth.

H1 revenue is $22 billion up 20%

no one can say whats their real profit, but in topline they are in striking distance now of netz which reported $48b in FY2012-23 and is growing much more slowly.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 21 Jul 2014 08:32

The consultancy business is actually profitable for everyone. This is like filing taxes. The rules are super complicated, nobody understands anything. Which means that tax preparers and tax softwares exist, which means people actually hire their services because they dont know anything about tax rules. You have peace of mind you did it right. Tax prepares rake in a huge ton of money. Everyone is happy. This gig is so profitable that tax software companies and tax consultants are lobbying against simplifying tax code http://www.propublica.org/article/how-t ... tax-filing

In the consultancy business, VP of the client who knows nothing and has vaguely heard about product X will hire a consultant who will tell the VP "yes yes everyone in your domain is using product X". VP has the warm fuzzies of making an informed decision. Then the consultant will tell the VP "Use product X". The company who actually makes product X will be happy for clinching a sales, will install it for the client. Will not tell the VP that the consultant sucks and knows nothing because then the consultant wont tell the next company to install product X. Everyone is happy. VP is happy, solution provider is happy, consultant is happy.

If something goes wrong, VP blames the consultant. Consultant blames the solution provider. Everyone's mush is covered.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 Jul 2014 08:54

Singha wrote:Huawei continues to report massive growth.

H1 revenue is $22 billion up 20%

no one can say whats their real profit, but in topline they are in striking distance now of netz which reported $48b in FY2012-23 and is growing much more slowly.

Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei are the next big kahunas....the Khan cos will be dumping bigtime payloads from their collective mush.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 21 Jul 2014 09:44

RB babu we are going to come to the end ... Err No ... Back to the Start of the story. MS was no great shakes in 1985 (déjà vu all over again as my favorite urban philosopher yogi Berra said). Replace MS with some other big KB of that time. No I am not trying to shoehorn to MS. Moi making a general point in abstraction.

PS: looks like your older and younger tau jis (mort and vina resly.) are on a vacation. Till they return I will stand in for them in spite of being a poor substitute.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 21 Jul 2014 09:53

no two history events can be the same.