Deepak Sharma's Blog

Driving in India

webjives — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:27:00 GMT

Came across this YouTube video, Driving in India. Shawn of Anecdote puts it well, it's really a good example of Complex adaptive system.

Google no more a Tech Company

webjives — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 05:02:00 GMT

With YouTube acquisiton, Google is no more a Tech company. From being a great search engine Google is moving slowly but very steadily towards being another Content Company (a.k.a. Yahoo or MSN for that matter). Apparently Viacom was also in talks to acquire YouTube. It will be interesting to see how Google's recent deals to distribute video from Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks on the Web and agreement with News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media division to provide it with search technology and broker advertising shapes up with this new acquisition. Google is now in the same business as these biggies (Viacom/News Corp).

Innovation and Leadership

webjives — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:17:00 GMT

Knowlege@Wharton has an article on recent Wharton roundtable discussion on how Innovation and Leadership are linked. There are atleast four great takeaways from this article.

One, Culture is a critical factor in promoting innovation.

Seth Waugh, CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas, cited culture as a critical factor in promoting innovation. Business leaders, he said, create this environment by offering incentives for workers who innovate and by making it clear that innovation is expected. "You must have people with that hunger to always learn, who are always open and who think about things in a different way. You always have to reinvent yourself tomorrow."

Two, Passion is critical for innovation

Wharton professor of health care systems Patricia Danzon, who has conducted extensive research on pharmaceutical industry mergers, identified passion as critical to innovation. She acknowledged that passion is difficult to quantify, but suggested it may be linked to workers who have a stake in the business, either financially or in small firms where there is clear authority and little bureaucracy. "So much innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is coming from the small firms ... and it seems to come from the passion and the involvement of being master of your own destiny."

Three, There are no "Aha!" moments in most innovations

Wharton finance professor Peter Linneman, founding chairman of Wharton's real estate department, said there is no magic "Aha!" moment in most innovation. "It's just all hard work -- showing up everyday in the morning, studying plans, walking around seeing what other people are doing. If you wait for 'eureka,' you are never going to have innovation."

Four, Execution remains critical

Execution remains critical, continued Linneman. "Great ideas are cheap. Ideas matter, but the execution matters more." Duckworth said successful leaders must possess emotional intelligence and sensitivity to multi-cultural and multi-generational issues. Awareness of social concerns, she said, keeps executives in tune with customers and open to new possibilities.

Some reasons for dearth of innovation

webjives — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:28:00 GMT

I recently finished reading the famed Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma. Since them I have been following Dave Pollard's website/blog. Dave who has been writing a lot about Innovation over the years has now posed three dilemma's and feels that "our culture, and the economic, political, educational and other systems that support it, are all stacked against true innovation". He feels that Most Entrepreneurs Aren't Innovative.

"...They aren't really interested in innovation (unless it's sexy and marginal and doesn't push them beyond their comfort zone). Real innovation is risky, and they're very risk averse -- even moreso, in my experience, than corporate executives. ....They have little or no knowledge of successful innovation practices and processes. They hate doing research. As die-hard do-it-yourselfers, they distrust (with some justification) consultants and others who might help them become more innovative. They read all the hype books and articles about corporate CEOs and actually believe the hype. ....In short, they're scaled-down versions of corporate managers, who are probably the least innovative people on the face of the Earth."

He also states that, Most Customers Don't Want Innovations.

"Customers are as change-resistant as managers. They want sexy, marginal enhancements (e.g. cosmetic design improvements) not true innovations. They want movies that are sequels of movies they liked and music that sounds just like the music they like. .....Most customers are terrible learners anyway -- they've never learned how to learn, so they rely entirely on trial and error ("what manual?"), and end up using the product ineffectively, until if they're lucky someone (likely half their age) shows them how to use it properly. Half of all product returns are due not to product defects but because the customer couldn't figure out how to use the product, and gave up. Examples of resistance to innovation and change are everywhere -- after fifty years, the US still hasn't converted to the metric system, despite the massive and unnecessary costs their refusal costs everyone. "

The third dilemma he poses is that Those Who Need Innovations Can't Afford Them:

"True innovation is about identifying and finding ways to satisfy deep, unmet human needs, but if you look at the 'wicked' problems in our society -- poverty, disease, dysfunctional health and education systems, crime, global warming and environmental disasters -- they have only worsened in recent decades. Inequality in our society is growing and accelerating, so that those with the money to pay for innovation have few of the problems that plague the majority. ....So we get a plethora of cures for impotence while millions of children die of preventable, treatable diseases each year -- there's just no money in developing innovative products, services, distribution mechanisms and channels, supply chains, and businss models for customers with no income and no assets."

While there are no solutions to these dilemmas, all are worthwhile thinking (and acting) about.

Google + MySpace - What it means to Microsoft in short?

webjives — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:11:00 GMT

Google scored a big win over Microsoft and Yahoo by tying up with MySpace (acquired by News Corp 9 months back). Google will be the exclusive provider of text-based advertising and keyword targeted ads (AdSense) as well as web & site specific search on MySpace.com starting 4th quarter of 2006. Google is paying $900 M for the same. But look at the returns it can expect. MySpace displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. It has user base of 100 M and with targetted 2007 revenues of $500 M, this is going to be big. MSN apparently was the other bidder and lost out.

What does this mean for Microsoft? This is the second big loss for MS when they have competed against Google, first being the AOL deal loss. Loss of entry into the biggest Social Networking site and seeing Google control others like Orkut makes that even more painful. So what does MS do? Time to Strut up the Live Search and make it more visible while keeping it simple to use. And where is AdCenter?

Then, today I am reading that Bebo (which became the largest Social Networking site in UK today surpassing MySpace) is looking to be acquired and possibly in talks with Viacom for the same. There is an opportunity here, Can't Microsoft just buy out Bebo?

Update: Since I blogged this, Microsoft has signed a deal to provide banner ads and sponsored links to Facebook (No.2 Social Networking site with 9 Million users).

Brouhaha around Google Spreadsheets

webjives — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 11:53:00 GMT

So many bloggers and media have commented and made big deal of the Google Spreadsheets. Now, this 'webification' of software used traditionally as a desktop app is a step in right direction but does it pinch Microsoft anywhere, not in my view. I have been running Google betas for some years now, I have tried almost all of the cool apps posted on Google Labs but to date Google spreadsheets is the most disappointing. The app is premature functionality wise. I can't think of any enterprise leaving MS Excel and going with Google Spreadsheets in the near future. So for now, it gets played upon by beta testers like me. Gets zero on that aspect. Innovation wise there is nothing new, just aping of few other Spreadsheets apps. Again a big zero for that. Anybody who is comparing it with MS Excel must install the Office 2007 beta (performance issues still) and check the new visual interface, usability enhancements, support for collaboration etc. The only 1 that Google Spreadsheets app gets is the ease of Access, Sharing and use of Web 2.0 features.

While I say that, Google needs to innovate much faster and in a better way if it wants to release any app where Microsoft is traditionally strong (Office, Windows etc).

Blog Innings 2.0

webjives — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 19:10:00 GMT

I have been meaning to restart blogging for quite some time now, but kept putting it off for one reason or another. But no more. In this second innings of blogging, I would like to give my blog a new focus, something I am more involved with now. The focus henceforth would be Microsoft and Google and all the innovation happening around and because of these two companies. Occasionally I would rant about other topics I am interested in like .NET, Web Services, Web 2.0, SOA etc.

Code Magazine = Great Content

webjives — Tue, 04 May 2004 02:35:00 GMT

At the last meeting at MAPAMDUG, I picked up couple of CODE Magazine's. This is the first time I was reading them and I must say, I am delighted to have landed my hands on these. While I completely understand Greg Robinson and other's sentiments over the current (or should I say futuristic) state of .Net Magazines, CODE Magazine is different. I found it very lean on Advertisements and with great content focussing current .Net Framework. There are few articles on Whidbey/Generics etc but as I said they are really few.

Feels Great !!

webjives — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 02:52:00 GMT

Thanks to the wonderful guys at AWP, couple of days back I received the "Developing Microsoft Office Solutions : Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97" book by Ken Bluttman. This is another book that I reviewed for AWP and it feels great seeing your name in the book. Needless to say, this book upholds the great technical content we all are familiar with coming out of AWP.

The book is very detailed and has very good coverage of Microsoft Office Object Models, Smart Tags and Infopath. The various case studies like, Generating "on-the-fly" Excel charts from imported XML data, Using InfoPath to overcome key XML processing limitations etc makes it even more worthier of a purchase.

I have written a more detailed review (slightly biased..:)) of this book under the Book Reviews section of my website.

Lack of Standards @ MSDN

webjives — Tue, 19 Aug 2003 14:36:00 GMT

I stopped by MSDN today and saw a great article by Scott Mitchell on Injecting Client-Side Script from an ASP.NET Server Control. The level of difficulty of this article is shown as 2. Now 2 on a scale of what (3/5/10??). I checked few other articles on the ASP.Net Developer Center and none of these mentioned Level of difficulty. Also the format of these articles varied a great degree from each other. Then after a while I checked another article linked from the home page, this one was on Build Interoperable Web Services using WS-I. The Overview of this one read:

Overview
Jonathan Wanagel, Microsoft Corporation. Andrew Mason, Microsoft Corporation. Sandy Khaund, Microsoft Corporation. Sharon Smith, Microsoft Corporation. RoAnn Corbisier, Microsoft Corporation. Chris Sfanos, Microsoft Corporation

It seems very less proof-reading is getting done for all these articles. It's not that I am not happy with these articles or MSDN, MSDN is the best technical resource, the content is great. It's just the format and presentation that needs to improve once again. Anyone hearing !!

WBloggar Testing

webjives — Mon, 05 May 2003 04:27:00 GMT

Testing WBloggar.

The Kerberos Story

webjives — Sat, 19 Apr 2003 05:40:00 GMT

I came across Jeffrey Schlimmer's blog today. At first I was glad I stopped over there. On one of his blogs, he writes:

To a novice like me, security algorithms seem like they're driven by detailed cat-and-mouse games; here's a lucid description of such games motivating Kerberos

After going through the dialogue he points to on Kerberos, I am not sure if I am too happy I stopped by his blog. Now I want all the CLR books, dialogue based similar to the one on Kerberos. For the actors, I won't mind Don Box or Chris Sells. Check out some of their past work here (scroll down for that most famous photograph)...:)

XML Enlightenment

webjives — Tue, 15 Apr 2003 22:27:00 GMT

Some days back Don Box pointed out to this excellent discussion by Aaron Skonnard. I bookmarked it then and got a chance only today to go through all the three articles. I must say all of these are a must-must read for all of us working with various XML API's presented by the .Net Framework. In the first part, he discusses the tradeoffs between XML API's for both reading and writing XML documents. The Second and third part describes choosing the right API's for reading and writing XML documents with the help of code examples.

SharpReader Rocks !!!

webjives — Sun, 06 Apr 2003 23:10:00 GMT

In a single day so many people have blogged about SharpReader. Not to be left behind, I tried it out. Guess what, it rocks. Best part of this RSS aggregator is great OPML support and ability to read threaded blog posts. Too cool !!

Understanding XML Schema

webjives — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 23:40:00 GMT

There's a new article on MSDN by Aaron Skonnard on how to use XML Schema definition language.

XML Schema is poised to play a central role in the future of XML processing, especially in Web services where it serves as one of the fundamental pillars that higher levels of abstraction are built upon. This article describes how to use the XML Schema definition language in more detail.

Good Read.