Random thoughts..at the end of the day...very long day...

Well after a day of using google and i have reached 1% of the space and that is a measly 10mb...and yes this is a web mail service that is free that i am talking about.

I have two invitations to give out of the google mail service...NOW who should i be giving it away tooo..let me think about it....who will really freak out with it????

How can RSS be used in the Enterprise

What is bio technology...i am really bored stiff with everybody talking about it. i think i better get around to finding out what the hell it really is.

Why is it so difficult to get to run and piece of code downloded from the new

I am trying out the Blogger API to programmatically load my posts....TRYING....@$#@#$@#

i like the labels feature in GMAIL, i think it is great that we can create our own labels...

Visual Treat, Here is a site which provides various static pictures, but when you look at them they feel like they are animated.....quite cool... check it out

i got this link from a blog "Marc outlook on productivity"

I read this article in business week , an interview of larry page the co founder of google there are lot of interesting Q&A I am going to comment on a few topics that caught my attention,

1. Brand Google, I am not a particularly savvy in this space but I wonder what brand google stands for, well when we think google we think of the following things

- High Tech
- Best technology solution
- Quiet
I cant think of much more, I think like Microsoft has people blogging for it, similarly google should also get some bloggers.

2. Microsoft bundle internet search on its desktop (no technology discussion is complete with out a mention of Microsoft)

I am quite sure Microsoft is going to put their back into getting a good search product in place, as they realize the importance of the "search a key to the information gen"

Predictions are google is to the information age what Microsoft was to the computer age, I don't think google is going to get away that easily it is going to be a fight...but at present the odds are with google.

i caught this information on a blog called "conversations with Dina" it was about a conference conducted by HBS on india and its prospects, then i went to the HBS working knowledg site to review its contents, i found it was woth a read....link.

after a day of using the gmail facility,

I am impressed by the following features.

1. Their spell check mechanism, I think it is way too cool....it is the better than even word.

2. I think the keyboard shortcuts piece is pretty cool, but takes a little getting used to, but this an ideal feature for any person who plans to make reasonable use of the space provided by g

3.i think their user interface needs some amount of reduction in complexity for the novice users...I think the user interface my intimidate them a bit - well its only an opinion

The advertisements are pretty non intrusive.

And their targetting technology works I had mentioned a word blog in my emails bang I hand an add on the some blog...IT WORKS.

Gmail should incorporate a RSS aggregator as well and an enhancement should be made to incorporate a suggestion made by lenn (scoble boss) in his recent post about how it should be possible to send comments back in from the aggregator

Where do I send in all the suggestions I have for Gmail

The new MSN version has been released, need to download and check it out. Link

I was reading this article on eweek about IBM coming out with one of the first aspect oriented programming supported commercial product...for those of you who like me dont know what this whole AOP thing is all about here are some tit bits

AOP is a programming technique that lets "aspects" or "concerns" that cut across a system be programmed in modular units. Developers familiar with AOP say it is a next-generation programming method that increases programmer productivity and software reliability and quality more than current methods of development, such as OOP (object-oriented programming).

Well this is only the definition let me find some time today during the day to learn more about it,

I am thrilled , I just got a GMAIL account, I feel like a kid who has got the latest toy in the market... I am pleased...what I really liked, was the way I registered it took me a grand total of 1 min, it was really good, but I just send my self a mail but that hasnt yet been delivered let me go and find out what in gods name is the problem.

I am just reviewing their getting started document, well they have a couple o f focuses here

1. The new view - the conversation view, this one we are used to in outlook but in a webmail..it is new and it is good facility to have
2. Flexible filing system...I still dont get it, but I dont completely get it let me try it out and then comment on it
3. of course the amount of space they provide they seem to be directly mentioning yahoo, as it provides 4 mb and ofcourse google provides 1000mb, man I wonder how many mails will fit in there.
4. An easy way to see all your messages at once - not clear will review and comment later
5. Search..how can they talk about google and not talk about the ability to search....

Highlights for me are
1. Space
2. Ability to search
3. Conversation view

Okay I am getting back to reviewing the mail facility now....more later.

Scoble, in his attempt to get clarity on what the fair use principal is in the blogsphere particularly for his aggregator blog has provided a link to a primer on what is fair use?

I think india we dont pay enough attention to copyrights, patents etc...we would better start looking into those areas for the long termThe Primer

Thought of the day

Your life is now, your life is now, your life is now
In this undiscovered moment
Lift your head up above the crowd
We could shake this world
If you would only show us how
Your life is now


From the Song 'Your Life is Now' by John Mellencamp
Source : A Life of Possibility

IT pros, Whats happening with us ??????? i just read this article in the economic times...man this is scary.

Need to back up your DATA, most people I know atleast have had one/two bad experiences of being caught in a scenario where they have lost all their data due to a crash or virus attack, to protect my self I went ahead an bought myself an external harddrive, which connects up thru the USB, Is it usefull or is it usefull. Saved my life many a time.
But there is one question that bothers us when we try and get into the act of creating a back up of the data ...what do we back up here is a blog which is a pretty good guide by marc

Technology Misuse

Can you believe this there is a company that has developed a product called the SounderCover, which provides nine background themes, including a thunderstorm, a dentist's office, factory machinery and a busy office, while you are on the phone....for all those who want to play hookie in office this is probably a great tool, but honestly I think this I a big waste of time and technology

May be something usefull will come out of it as an offshoot.

Great people

As I watch this program in BBC on nelson mandela I cant help but wonder what is it that makes people great?????

Circumstances
Ability to Deal with various circumstances...
Opportunity
Ability to sieze the opportunities and capitalise on them
Passion
They are extreamly passionate …about the cause, about their work, about their beliefs
Need
Ability to understand needs..of self and of people around him

I am sure there are many more ….will add….

i just read this in Tom Peters newsletter...

"Commit! Engage! Try! Fail! Get up! Try again! Fail again! Try again! But never, ever stop moving on! Progress for humanity is engendered by those who join and savor the fray by giving one hundred percent of themselves to their dreams! Not by those timid souls who remain glued to the sidelines, stifled by tradition, and fearful of losing face or giving offense to the incumbent authorities."

Why do Indians when traveling to different parts of the world, go around hunting for Indian restaurants and not try the local cuisine.

In one my trips to Bangkok, I met this American student who was traveling the Asia pacific area, he was eating the customary Thai food, in the most common of places in Thailand on the street. Here is a person, who particularly in Bangkok has all the options to feed himself on American food and is sitting and eating the local cuisine this is one end of the spectrum, and at the other end there is colleague of mine who day in and day out walked all the way down to a Indian restaurant and ate the same dish (rajma chawal) for close to 8 months, two meals a day.infact this case has become an legend in the office now.

Why don't we as a community atleast most of us not like trying other/local cuisines..what is it that prevents us.

Program Manager a concept all of us in the software business are familiar with, but here is somebody with some historic perspective to it. Chris Pratley

An interesting view on how to persuade? by the scobleizer.. Authority the way to go...

Today, as I was getting ready to head to the office when I heard this interesting piece of stat in Asia Today(BBC).

"India has 17%of the worlds population and 2% of its wealth"

Interesting!

Man, I was having a tough day, but reading this blog by atanu dey was great fun along with being an immediate revelation on a couple of points,

1. Hard work and hard thinking are substitutes
2. Indian economy is not focused on how to get things done with the least effort.
3. The focus is not on production, it is on employment. Because so much of the effort is totally pointless and wasteful, we don't have sufficient production.
4. Less production" is "more poverty

Yesterday we moved into a different office space (floor) in the same building, and I realised what the whole point behind an ergonomically designed office is all about,

I, like most people I know, spend a lot of time in the office, Yesterday I went back home with pain in my lower back and in my neck when I did some thing I realised there were two causes, first the chair I am sitting on it is very badly designed and so is my desk position in conjunction with my chair, while typing or holding the mouse my hands are not supported adequately ...may be if this were an organisational blog my boss would read it and do something about it but for now I think I need to take it up one on one with him.

All offices particularly ones in software/BPO space I think need to spend more time analysing and designing the office/work space keeping in mind the working habits of the employees. I know there are organisations focusing on this, but I think a lot more can be done in this space.

Blogs Away!!!! - Looks like the whole blog thing is taking on new and very intereesting dimensions, there is a article in fastcompany that is worth a read to get an idea of how the whole blogsphere is developing.

Today as I was doing my usual rounds of the various blog I came by this article in Rajesh jain blog on India's Development, It was a good article I think Rajesh jain is continuously driving home the point of rural India and SME being the key to India becoming a developed nation...but in this article he mentioned one more point about the age of India, India is young, for those of us who have read the book adventurer investor, you will be able to appreciate how important this is, What I am going to do is do a little ground work on how the age of the country effects the economy.

Also in this article he had added the dimension of the NRI, the non resident Indian and indicated that they can also be a factor in driving the growth.

Lots to think about but limited time.....will write a more detailed dissertation later this week

Last night I had a good discussion with one my friends Bharath, it turned into a real interesting discussion, I must say I came back with probably a more clear understanding of some of the things, the discussion started with the red hot topic of out sourcing, I subscribe to an email group called the PEG it is an technology related group and one fine day in the beginning of this week one of the people decided to talk about outsourcing man you should have seen the flurry of mails on this topic, some really made me feel bad, you know when you think of the whole things as a concept or as an activity you don't feel so bad but when you put a face to it or identify it with people you begin to understand how it is impacting people.

Well I am not of the opinion that outsourcing is bad, infact to the contrary I think it is pretty good for the whole world economy.

But I also feel strongly that organisations that outsource or are planning to cut jobs because they are outsourcing should have a more detailed plan for the people who are going to be pink "slipped"..I think these organisations should literally take a page from jack Welch's book straight from the gut (where it shows how they managed the show when people had to be let go in one of the organisations).

Then the discussion tended towards my pet problem, Indian IT companies, and our unwillingness to innovate and how we still get by or make our money or become one billion $ behemoths just by doing the plumbing work, honestly I am not complaining, I cant be my salary is paid due to this work but I also think we need to move up in the value chain.

The last point in our discussion was on our culture as a society and how we it doesn't permit the masses to be open about other cultures and society more on this in the next blog.

RFID goes mobile, i read this article in the redherring and wonder.

Is RFID or smart dust first step towards a "minority report (steven spielbergs movie)" life style...

i walk into a store and it becomes AWARE of who i am ? what i like, dislike? what kinda of prefume i prefer?

Man the possibilites anre inumerous,

but What about privacy? there is still time before this topic hits the roof.

An interesting view on the Kashmir issue between India & Pakistan at Deesha

http://www.deeshaa.org/archives/2004/04/13/index.html#005926

Models to Reality....

What difference does IT make for small companies, ones that are there in the 5-15cr segment??? This question has been baking my cookie for sometime now,

most present day enterprise applications I think are an overkill for them, concepts like real time , service enabled systems seem unreal or still only concepts organizations don’t have the time nor the resources to go after these catch words or flavors of the month or pipe dreams.

They need real solutions, cost effective solutions, May be commoditized solutions. Post the "Does IT Matter" article by n carr all the industry gurus have jumped up in arms to say that IT is not become commoditized, but I am of the belief that at some level business solution commoditization is a must to provide the small enterprises as mentioned earlier with the required solutions. May be even the revisit the not so widely successful ASP model.

Microsoft word, tally are used by the organizations in reference, but MFG Pro isn’t - WHY????

Today there isnt a peice of work that i can begin, end or do without the use of email, and a lot of usefull and required information is stored in the email client, So when i read this article on somebody trying to data mine the emails, it hit me as a brilliant idea, particularly since i have been given the responsibility for knowledge management implementation for our helpdesk. I am going back to do some more research work on it will post more on my discoveries.

During the holidays, I have spent a lot of time thinking what are the technologies/technology related areas that I need to focus on with an eye towards the future.. I ended up with the following list,

1. Real time computing
- Various forms of implementation
2. Mobile Computing
3. Leverage Social Networking software
4. Home Entertainment
Media Centers
5. SMART (MOBS) Applications
6. Technology for the Rural Areas
7. Control Devices

(the list is not complete .......still thinking)

I am going to spend the next couple of days thinking how these areas/avenues are going to affect lives/society and how the business and home communities should prepare to leverage these.

Stuart Hart and Clayton Christensen in Sloan Management Review: Disruptive Innovations compete against non-consumption ; that is, they offer a product or service to people who would otherwise be left out entirely or poorly served by existing products and who are therefore quite happy to have a simpler, more modest version of what is available in the high-end markets.

I once had the pleasure of attending a talk by the management guru "Ck Prahalad", it was a long time back and i was pretty young, most of what he said probably went straight over my head...but a couple of points that stayed with me were...
1. Create market..dont build products fexistinging markets .."Create the Market"
2. There is a large untapped market in rural & poor india
3. How nirma captured this market and give the behemoth HLL a run for thier money.

I think there are lot of technology products that can be made avaialble to this market and this can greatly benefit the people to whom these technologies become availabe to and organisations that go about provding these facilities/technology products.

Prediction : Enabling this market with technology is a must if we need to get our GDP upto 10% as planned with Mckienzy.

Today after almost a 4 months or reading blogs, last evening for the first time i downloaded an outlook based news agregator called intraVnews..well for one it was pretty simple to insall, though i also had to download 23 mb dotnet famework package and install it before i could install this peice. i must have been done in all, in about 15 mins and now i have all the blogs that i am interested in available to me in my outlook clearly classified into different folders, very easy to read and manage. Everybody who seriously wants to ofollow blogs should get himself one of these otulook based aggregators. till now i was using the application developed by james gosling which i downloded from his blog called JNN(Juicy News Network), that was just something like a quick fix, but i must say i prefer the outlook based agreggator.

NOw i need to get my site set up with moveable type for blogging and then i need to test the outlook MT , developed by kunar and scoble...i downloaded it a couple of days back from thier site. Its functionality is very simeple everything u put into a folder in outlook get directly transferred to your moveable type blog. Well lets see how it works.

One other thing i did was to import Rajesh Jain OPML, in addition to the blog that i follow, i am slowly becoming a fan of RSS.

Tonite i want to spend some time trying out skype and its facility.

India is no place for a guy who really wants to work in/on information technology.

No I haven't lost my marbles, no I am not on drugs. Well then why the hell am I making such sweeping statements.

I work at one of the biggest software parks located in India, the other day because it was pretty late in the office and I was waiting to talk to my counterpart who had probably just got up and was on his way to the office and at that time my mind began to wonder on a range of topics, after some time I was wondering what is it that all these companies really do,

Well the answer to that question, is no shock to me or to the rest of the world what is a shock to me is what are the Indian companies doing about it.

Well coming back to the answer to the question, lets take the software value chain the lowest part of the pyramid are talent donators, next come the system integrators then come the IT consultants and finally the business consultants, Well no prizes for guessing where India IT companies are kings..Talent donators and system integrators.

India IT is almost become synonymous with talent donation and system integration, nobody, rather very few companies are looking above these two pieces/stages in the value chain or beyond this pyramid of software development outsourcing to what the other avenues are.

True tech work still gets done in coaters outside India, they set the direction, we just follow it, to represent it as an analogy it seems like we are the foot soldiers in the army and the generals/commanders/president are from else where.

Am I right, If yes WHY????

Why is this the case? - What are we lacking in?

FOOD FOR THOUGHT!

As a follow up to an earlier post of mine dated, Tuesday, April 06, 2004 - 09:31 am.

Somebody else seems to share my thoughts on this topic of how google is all ready to take over the desktop. BEWARE MICROSOFT.

Below is excerpts from an article by Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan chimes in with his thoughts on the "Google Desktop":
>
> Will Google's new free e-mail system, Gmail, be just the first of many things we'll see in a new Google Desktop? If so, Microsoft could have a lot more to worry about than just Web search.

Today, plenty of people download mail to desktop-based e-mail programs. But Google might convince some of them to take up its e-mail storage offer.
After all, even if you do have a great way to search through desktop-based e-mail, you might like the idea that all your mail is backed up, stored offsite, and easily searchable from anywhere.

Now, take things a step further. Imagine next year Google provides users with 5, 10, or more gigabytes storage space for personal files.
Got a ton of text documents, spreadsheets, and other material? Push it to us, Google would say. We'll store it, index it, and make it easy to retrieve what you want. Google already indexes this type of material across the Web and has done so for ages.

As broadband expands, such an idea becomes increasingly more feasible. With it, the notion that Microsoft might trump Google with desktop lock-in becomes less of an issue.
>
> There is an interesting opportunity for Indian broadband companies - think like Google on the platform side, and combine with thin clients (akin to handsets) for users to build an end-to-end alternate computing platform the mass market (today's non-users) in India. There are 40 million home users waiting.

Random points on real time enterprise:

technological constraints are less of a problem. We are awash in computing power in every corner of the corporation. Technologies such as wireless and broadband connect a mature suite of tools and enterprise applications We have huge computing platforms and massive storage capabilities. It is more technology than we can really absorb.

the barrier to the real-time enterprise is understanding how to put all of this power use to its fullest capabilities

architecture works end-to-end, but how much of that architecture is actually assisting our processes all along?

How far can we actually get the right architecture out of our imaginations and into reality?

So the Real-Time Enterprise is about getting real – taking thoughts and visions, and making them real. It is about realizing the capabilities we already possess in current technology. In theory, the Real-Time Enterprise already exists, but in practice we are not there yet. Getting closer to the vision, closing the gap, this is the challenge going forward.

this can easily qualify to be the news of the month, last bill gates is not the richest man in world,

Ingvar Kamprad, the Swede who founded furniture retail chain IKEA is now the worlds richest man.

i would definitely like to work with these people who arrive at these stats / figures. I want to know the methodology they use.


well, i really wonder if bill gates keeps track of this as much as the rest of the world,

On this topic I read some thing interesting on bill gates in another blog, for the first time it had something nice to tell about him, though the blog belongs to a Microsoft employee it came across as being quite honest, that gates really doesn't care about the money and feels very strongly about the social causes that he supports, thro the gates Melinda foundation.

Google search on the word Linux took just 0.4 seconds, but it had 95 million hits. Too bad if the one you need is No. 10,000 on the list.

But researchers are poised to revolutionize search technology over the next few years. The most common thrust is to personalize search engines

I am checking out the Google Version of the personalized search service, well I provided it my profile and then tried a search on both the regular engine and the personalized one, but there was no difference in the result set ...Let me give it a shot again and see if things get better....

To try it out the URL is http://labs.google.com/personalized.

Yesterday, I read the best the most interesting news in a very, very long time, Most of us have heard about VOIP, but probably dont know how it can change/improve things for us, Well here is news about a software that can really change that,

skype, is a software that allows for internet based voice over ip calls, but this required you to have access to a terminal with the required multimedia kit, here is the interesting news today they launched the mobile edition of it that works on PDAs they call it the PocketSkype, this really changes the voice call scenario, imagine you are in one of the airports in between flights or at the cafe on an holiday you can use your PDA in conjunction with the Wifi Hot spot which are now becoming ubiquitous, you can make voice calls back to your office or may be check in back with home, or may be the girl friend for that long chat at limited(only cost of hotspot) or no cost.

I can wait to try this out, Any body who has had a chance to try it out please send in your comments.


Pre-Requisites
PocketSkype works on any PDA running MS Pocket PC 2003 OS with a 400 MHz processor and needs to have a WiFi card.

background:
Skype, Is created by the same people of the Kazza fame, I read an article (cover story) in fortune about them sometime back, Very Interesting

I know lot of us are going to find this difficult to believe but here is something that might just need all of us to change the way we develop software , this concept is called situated software ..what is it? - "the rise of software that works because it isn't intended to scale"

Well on this topic I went on to read a piece by clay..man was it interesting...

well for those of you who are wondering what is it that I am talking about well here goes, today most software development irrelevant to the context of the development is built with the premise that they will need to be complete, general & scalable, this is referred to as the Web School of development, but by focusing on/prevailing value of "scale", web school based applications put other kinds of value, particularly social value, out of reach.

When you give it some thought you realize that it is true, the guiding principals for development is that it should be scalable to take and a sea of growth of users, but the fact is most applications will never reach that number of users. But we still go on to build such huge capacities...IDLE CAPACITIES.

But this whole thought process didn't come into being with out any basis..The basis for this whole line of thinking is "expense of adequate hardware", "the rarity of programming talent" and "the sparse distribution of potential users".

but these are no longer constraints any more and we need to view the whole process of development in new light/with new lenses.

The idea is that application should be built to take advantage of social infrastructure or context sensitive information. There should be a keen focus on "Communal Attention", "Group Capabilities"

I strongly recommend everybody who is interested in software development should read this article

http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
HATS OFF TO MR.CLAY....

These days, every blog seems to have some mention about google atleast once, the launching of the GMAIL service is getting them a lot of publicity some the good kind the other they could do with out, let leave the commercial ones out and lets focus on the technology they use, today i was reading another blog on the "possible" technologies that google is using, possible i say as there was no definite this is the way it is done,only this is the only possible way it could be done, i will just pick some lines from that blog so that we here can get an idea of what they are talking or doing at google,

"While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming."

I two thought come to my mind when i read this line, first is "Superior Technology is a great competitive Edge", Well there have been many search engines before google, there have been many webmail services providers before gmail, but with their superior technology they have become the Microsoft of the internet, they didn't come with the first mover advantage, they are the best case of the "Better Product Wins"

The second thought is about the "general purpose", okay today he has a search facility and mail how much longer will it take for him integrate a web based office application, i am thinking may be open office should try and tie up with google to provide their package as a web based facility, me and my wishfull thinking..or is it wishfull or just the future...well we will know in the next year or so.

The next line that was thought provoking was "Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system."

I think somebody needs to make a return on investment calculation on how r&d spending has really paid off in just googles case, this hopefully should encourage Indian & other IT companies to invest in R&d dept more or probably even support start ups working on interesting technology.

Wake up IT, INNOVATION CALLING!!!

Today during my daily blog reading session(I think there is a need to coin a one "worder" which means reading blogs), when I was reading "Rajesh Jains blog" I was very pleased to see the mention of Landmark, Chennai as one of the good book stores in the world, it was mentioned along with the likes of Stacey's in San Francisco, the Barnes and Noble near Union Square in New York, Harvard Co-op in Cambridge... I couldn't agree more with this comment , I spend atleast an hour or two every week in that place..it is a real pleasure. Their collection of books is very good and their staff is well pretty helpfull but I think one area they need to focus on is the plenty of places to sit and read.

On the topic of books I am presently reading..."The Mckinsey Mind", its a pretty good book. I suggest everybody who has identified that having a defined approach the problem solving is important both for the individual and the organization, please read this book. It gives us a peek at the good tools and practices that can be used in everyday activities.

Today I read an article in a weekly which carried excerpts from an interview with the legendary vinod khosla, it was on a topic of "Micro Finance" this was probably the second time I am hearing about this topic in the last couple of days, but have found very interesting.

What is Micro Finance?
The micro-finance industry, which began in 1976 with the establishment of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, is now a world-wide movement comprising thousands of specialist banks, credit unions, co-operatives, village credit societies, NGOs and charities spanning both the richest and the poorest countries. Their common purpose is to extend the outreach of banking services, especially business credit, to those who do not qualify for normal bank loans. Micro-credits are granted at commercial interest rates, though at much lower rates than those charged by informal money lenders. This reflects the status of micro-finance institutions as not-for-profit but able to become fully self-supporting after a number of years.

A few points mentioned by Khosla on microfinance:
Microfinance is simply applying the principles of free markets and capitalism to the poorest people. That is what is interesting. It is more about the economic system of capitalism and how to enable it for people who have been outside of it.
We will see a much bigger economic divide between the rural and the urban unless we do something about accelerating the economic growth of rural India. I believe microfinance is a very, very powerful tool. In fact, it is the only tool with a potential to revolutionise growth in rural India. That's why it is important. It is not only important for the macro numbers of economic growth to be great, but we also must distribute wealth creation.
[Microfinance] is a tool that doesn't interrupt or interfere with any of that, and it can work without that change. In fact, it accelerates that change but is not totally dependent on it. It is an independent axis of economic development. The government can keep doing things to help people from within the political structure, and there will be some good things about it. In the end, what is important is that this tool goes directly to those who are below the poverty line. It enables them, and it helps them sell. And there are thousands, if not millions, of stories in Bangladesh alone.

Another concept that intrigued me was on "Mega Cities" and problems there in, I need to do some reading on this topic before I can write a piece with any sense to it, you will see one on this topic in the days to come, if you have any thoughts on this topic please feel free to send it to me.

Some time back I read an article in the harvard business review (HBR) on getting IT right and I sent a mail to the author, though I never got a response on that mail, I thought it was a pretty good mail, so what I am going to do is just "Copy&Paste" the mail, you can get back to me with your thoughts on the same.

"After reading this article, I has some thoughts which I will present below, I would be very interested to hear your views on the same,

First, I would like to highlight that I believe that all the software/IT solutions/systems that are provided today are only version/phase 1 of the so called IT revolution. Indicating that there is going to be a version/phase 2 which is going to in entirety change the our perception of IT, infact we would stop, calling it IT and referring to it as a separate field. The Systems then would be "Networked" …"Real Time"…"Intelligent(AI)" & "Ubiquitous". I might be taking it too far when I say that the phase 2 will be our first step to a world with MATRIX like possibilities.

Second, Coming to the issues more at close to us, I have heard of all management thinkers/guru say the IT needs to learn more about the business and align itself with business goals, but I don’t see the same force or pressure on the reverse, I would like to see the business people seen pushed to leverage/understand IT & incorporate it in as many facets of their work as they see fit, the IT staff needs to be looked at as a implementer the picks & shovels in the IT enablement of the business, it is the business/functional people that need to point the location where there is a goldmine sitting to be excavated. My thinking is also that as the baton gets passed the older give way to the younger in the executive levels, there will be more people in the "Executive World" who would have spent that last 10 years in the lap of technology. Also I think all the "Executives" in waiting need to today have had a stint in the IT wing of the organization or headed an IT implementation project.

Third, Evaluation of IT systems success, I am a firm believer that ROI is not a good way to evaluate IT systems, I think the best way to evaluate a system is to analyze "how it Adds to the Competitive Edge/Advantage of the organization". I think the systems that show ROI will be common across the top players in that vertical it will have to be system other than those that provide one a competitive edge against another organisation."

The topic that I am particularly thinking about is the one on Real time systems, As if from my mail, this month I read another article in the HBR titled "Give me that Real-Time Information", though too short to give an meat on the topic it highlights some of the key thoughts on the enterprise side requirements for real time systems, but my thinking is that we are a good distance away from the real time enterprise as our software & hardware infrastructure at various levels is not in a position to support it, so is the inherent software architecture, not ready for the real time systems.

Just another thought "should real time systems be restricted to the enterprise only".

Does the future really need PCs/Laptops at least in their current state, I am seeing a shift in the computing world from device based computing to the world of network computing, if we really put some thought to it we soon realize that the functionalities that an average user uses on a PC are Microsoft Office, Mails & Messaging and in a world where I can do all these online I don’t see any reason why people would invest in PC/Laptops, yes the network computational world presupposes availability of good network/bandwidth and a device which can get you online with the capability of running a browser.

Predictions
New breed of electronic devices, which will not resemble PCs
High/Good bandwidth becomes ubiquitous
Office on the web
HDD on the web

Today is the 2nd of April 2004,

I am very impressed with the whole concept of blogging and intrigues by the possibilities/opportunities it throws open.

I think this is the first step of many to create a virtual society, I seem to be able share thoughts with people in different parts of the globe, by reviewing their blog I am able to attach a social character to them.

Knowledge sharing is another benefit that I see happening with blogging, I have atleast garnered a lot of knowledge from blogs, I read a wide variety of blog but primarily they are technology related.