This is a plea to President Obama and the Congress. Let us prevent foreign engineers and scientists from working at any healthcare related business – healthcare machine makers (X-Rays, CT-Scanners, etc.), software makers (diagnostics etc.), pharmaceutical reserearch and many others. After all, none of them are certified & regulated engineers and scientists – we can’t […]
Facebook and Twitter – What Are the Killer Apps All About?
Facebook – the future of social networking. Twitter – the future of future of social networking, and of media. You know the story of how these are changing everything from how teenagers communciate, tweeners look for and are denied jobs to how those on Social Security are turning to Social Neetworking. We know the commonly […]
Enterprise Software Gotcha
Seth Godin, one of my favorite reads, recently had a nice little post about how product marketing tries to trick people into believing that their products are more than they seem – bigger, cheaper,stronger, healhier and so on. Rather than working with what value the product can actually deliver the marketing folk get carried away […]
Strategy: On Death of Newspapers and Impending Dealth of Airlines
I don’t think too many airline CEO’s read my blog. I do know a few tech CEO’s that do read it. Let’s pretend to be an airline CEO – I want you to answer this question: What business are you in? Flights or Meetings? Just as newspapers thought they were in the business of gathering […]
McKinsey Report Misses The Mark on Cloud Computing
Couple of McKinsey guys have kicked up a micro storm in the Cloud Computing world with a presentation that claims that moving your data center into the cloud is not advantageous for IT. I am quite confident that others at McKinsey would differ – perhaps those presenting at another conference that is not catering to […]
Take Twitter and FriendFeed to Go with Feedly Mini
Feedly today announced its launching Feedly Mini – a floating toolbar that shows up at the bottom of your web browser as you visit a website – and lets you engage in conversations via FriendFeed and Twitter. For those who don’t know what Feedly is – it combines the best of RSS Reader, a magazine-like […]
Multi-tenancy is Better for You – the Customer
Lately, the topic of multi-tenancy and single tenancy has again come up for discussion. A leading on-premise vendor recently argued in favor of single tenancy by saying: “The bad thing with multitenancy is when it goes down, you guys write about it on the front page. I don’t want to be on the front page […]
Barry Diller is Right – Stop Laying Off People
Barry Diller speaking at the Reuters Media Summit opined that companies with healthy revenues and profits should not add to the economic misery by laying off people at exactly the wrong time – when its hard to find other jobs. There is a certain perversity to the recent layoffs. In good times, smart companies like […]
Satyam CEO Exposes Faux Capitalism
Fascinating. Incriminating. Disappointing. Satyam’s CEO has written a mea culpa letter to the regulatory authorities indicating a fraud of epic proportions that included inflated cash balance, fake earnings and more. He said, the scheme reached “simply unmanageable proportions” and he was left in a position “like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off […]
Predictions for 2009
The season for predicting the future is upon us. Except its become extremely hard to predict the future after what happened this year: the financial system nearly collapsed, an African-American with Hussein as his middle name became the President, the Iraq war became a fringe issue, Alaskan geography and bridges became the center of editorials […]
Heart-warming Story
The San Jose Mercury News has a heart warming story on Foundation For Excellence (FFE) – a silicon valley based charity that helps bright kids in India that can’t afford education stay in school, go to college and achieve success. The best part is that the gift of education transforms not just a single student […]
Crowdsourcing the Terror Response to Mumbai
The disheartening events in Mumbai have saddened me. Most people, whether they align with India on substantiative issues, would agree that terror is not an acceptable route to meeting one’s objectives. While this mayhem went on and I tried to keep track, the most upto-date information came from neither CNN nor New York Times – […]
Guest Post: Handling a Referral in a Job Search
With the economy headed south and tech feeling the pressure, many of you may soon be looking for a job. The best path is through a referral from a former colleague or friend. That’s how I landed my current role at salesforce.com (which is hiring developers and others in San Francisco). Another way to help […]
5 Ways This Economy is Great for You
The stock market is in a free fall. Housing is depreciating in value. Commodities demand is coming down and prices are crashing. There is a liquidity crunch and no one can get a loan. Government is taking stakes in private banks. So is this all bad? Gloom and doom? Yes, its bad. But here are […]
Krugman’s Nobel Winning Theory and Software Industry
Paul Krugman won the Nobel in Economics today. Before you jump, I know its not a real Nobel prize. I have enjoyed his writings on New York Times along with other favorite economists like the one’s behind Cafe Hayek – who funnily enough or sadly enough denounced Krugman’s award today. In any case, how does […]
From – You can’t make this up department
I don’t re-post news stories on my blog because you can always read them elsewhere but this one is just a killer. And, it will make you feel good on a dog day on the Wall St. CNET reports: In an elaborate robbery scheme that’s one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple […]
Dear Recruiter
Dear Recruiter, I know you have a stressful job and it feels like a sales gig where the more number of people you cold call, the better your chances of success and social engineering are. But here are a few tips before you call my phone or that of my reader friends: Search My Name […]
Thought Experiments in Understanding Fusion and Cloud Computing
I have been struggling with what Fusion is now with all the announcements coming out of OpenWorld – and so are the likes of Gartner. Then I saw Larry Ellison’s not so optimistic view on Cloud Computing and the profitability of the industry. So, I replaced each “cloud computing” reference with “Fusion”. See if this […]
Wisdom of Not
Who do you think is a genius? Not Flying: A man who escapes a plane crash alive (Crash Survivor is a Hero proclaims newspaper) or the guy who cuts down on air travel by using video conferencing because he knows that the best way to lower your odds of dieing in a plane crash or […]
The Year of Black Swans
Here are the black swans of 2008 that very few could imagine a few years ago. And Taleb is proven right, and so is Warren Buffett. US Government takes over Freddie & Fannie Lehman to file for bankruptcy Countrywide falters and acquired for peanuts by Bank of America AIG Seeks $40 Billion to Survive All […]