cleaning up my closet

... literaly. Today was a activity filled Saturday. I had a bath. and there is a reason for the same. Somehow I felt like cleaning my books closet today. And I have found it as an interesting task. When you clean your books closet after a very long time, lets say, 5 years. There are some books that I always wanted to read and bought but could not. And there were some books that I read that I am now ashamed of buying in the first place. That makes me realise that there must have been changes in me since that time.
One very interesting thing that I found in the closet was a old flannel bound diary. It was given to me by dad since it was last years and of no use. I was in Standard VIII then. This diary was special because I used it to write poems. I am not a prolific poet or anything like that, but I liked to pen a few words in a rythmic fashion to express what I observed around.
That made me realise that I have changed, I dont like to read leave alone writing. But, I want to write. Something tells me that I will be lighter if I do.
So, beware if you are reading this because you will be hit "poetry". Excuse if you dont like it.

Trust !!!

Its just 5 alphabets but means so much when not honored. I am thinking about this with a backdrop of Satyam's fraud that has horrified every shareholder in India. My nature of going overboard made me devise a rule never to trust a person who has done anywrong at any point in time or has not shown integrity in a situation of commercial loss.
This makes me go back to the B School class of Prof. Vinod Kalia. Prof. Kalia is an ex-VP sales and marketing of Escorts Farm Equipment. He gave us a case study which went as:
- A productive worker was found cheating the company for his commercial benefit.
- His supervisor is pressing charges against him and requesting for his dismissal from duty
- The implications of his dismissal are that the Union may go up in arms against the management and there would be some loss of production incase the person has to go.
Question for the management: Should he be let go?

We recommended that he should be let to continue as there would be a loss of revenue but should be given a stern warning. We were surpised by Prof. Kalia's verdict that the management should take a stand on either side and there is no mid-way when it comes to integrity. Although, we were not happy then as it costed us grades but in the hindsight the suggestion was good, to say the least.
It s the responsibility of the management to instill the belief in integrity, even at the cost of commercials loss. This is something that may be hard and harder to keep up with time. But, when you look in hindsight with an example of Satyam, unless you do that you have to make a bigger lie to cover the last lie. This lying will end only when the position will become absolutely unrecoverable. This may lead to loss of face, reputation, and disruption in the lives of many workers who have spent their time and sweat for the company.
So, in essence Integrity is not an option. Its a virtue that will make customers comfortable, employees loyal, management alert. So be it.

SaaS Gold Diggers

Every peroid has its "El Dorado Gold Rush". Its a period when everybody is "irrationally optimistic" about his chances of finding gold and arriving home as a winner. The current gold rush in IT business seems to be a concept called Software as a Service or SaaS. If you dont understand what it is, its a service where all your business applications are delivered like Gmail delivers your email to you. And I did not mean free. Imagine this. You dont have install any software or hardware or networking. Identify the software (over web) that is good for you and buy (using credit card) an internet connection. Done. 

Now the gold part - since its a web based service, all you need to do is to get a team together and write your own version of the software that a customer has been using for donkeys years. Be it a simple accouting software or a diary keeping software. You can create a business plan to achieve as much as you want. The calculation looks like this, there are X million users of this software @ Y $ per annum. I am providing the same service at 80% discount (since I dont have a massive marketing and sales engine) I can get atleast 1% of the market. Even this market will turn out to be in millions of users. And voila, you have numbers touching many millions. GOLD RUSH, incase you forgot. 

The people who actually found gold were the people who were selling tools for digging, or hotels for diggers or even "professions soliciting services for relaxation". If that is true (assumption), then who are the probable gold finders in this scenario:

- Infrastructure providers:

- Data centres:

- Software: Billing and reconciliation

- Payment services: credit card services providers

- advertisers: I think Google 

Leaving the thought open to explore who are these in today's world.