Though I was thinking about this for sometime, I didn't feel like posting this till today. Today I had a general discussion with a colleague on the extremely low cost (sometimes free) pricing model of Air Deccan and other LCCs (Low Cost Carriers) in India. I don't fully agree on the extend of price cutting done, which definitely is below cost and is non-sustainable for the long-term. At the same time I feel you cannot term the whole business model unvaiable. If the same approach of low pricing was to be done by groups with deep pockets like Reliance, Tata or UB, then it will be seen by media as a bold step and a big strategy. Just because it is done Air Deccan, it is being criticized heavily.

Anyways, for these LCCs to succeed the approach has to be different in India. Unfortunately every carrier is targetting and falling over each other for the big six metros, instead it will be wise to go after Tier-II / Tier -III cities. This is more like the approach Wal-Mart in its founding years choose to do - go after towns with less than 10,000 people, which eventually makes them circle completely big cities without getting into them. Also in many cases, though the tickets are sold at few hundred rupees or even Zero (free by Air Deccan) it costs more than Rs.1500 for the consumer because of the huge Taxes. India doesn't have a Low Cost Airport like Singapore has for LCCs .

The problem for the carriers certainly is a lack of necessary Airport infrastructure in the non-metro cities. But here, I see a big oppurtunity for them. The plan should be to start tens of mini-airports in private or in partnership with Government. Each of these Airport should be situated in Tier-III towns or certainly not inside a Tier-II/Tier-I city.  The Airports themselves can be extremely small, handling the smallest commercially viable planes and should cost few hundred crores (as low as say Rs.100 Crores). Government can help by giving the non-agro lands on lease and the airports can be on a BOT (Build Operate Transfer) model. For a country as big as India, where it takes 2 to 3 days to travel by Train/over a week by road from North to South (or East to West) this will produce tremendous movement of labour and oppurtunities.

As an example, consider this. Instead of building a new Airport for Chennai, it can be build on Pondicherry. The new Airport can handle mainly International traffic and Airlines should be charged considerably less (or Zero Tax like in a SEZ) to land in Pondy than in Chennai Airport. This way consumer will get a choice, it should cost few thousand rupees cheaper if I choose to land in Pondy. As a consumer I will go for it, because it just takes just 2 to 3 hours and few hundred rupees to travel from Pondy to Chennai - which I won't mind for the savings I got. Hypothetically consider the venue instead of Pondy to be the temple town - Tirupathi. Airlines can offer a package deal of Lord Balaji's Darshan plus flying, they can even advertise with the slogan "Pray and Fly" (Pun Intended).

15th June 2007 Update: I am surprised that my wish for a Puduchery (Pondicherry) Airport is coming true with in weeks - though not for international flights but Pondy Govt has decided to give land to AAI to make it operational and expand a domestic airport.  

I was reminded yesterday while reading Economic Times paper, of a book "Far from the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy. The book was in my 12th Standard syllabus and our English Teacher "ShantiShri" was very fond of the book that she made us read it umpty number of times. The most likely question on the book was to be on "Chance Happening" - on how few of the unplanned events resulted on big turning points in the characters lifes.

(Scanned copy from my XII school book)

Anyways, the reason for me to be reminded on "Chance Happening" and hence the book, was a piece on the paper's ViewPoint section. The piece was an extract from a lecture given in New York University-Stern by Infosys Founder Mr.N.R.Narayana Murthy. The lecture was titled "Learning from experience: Some lessons I have learned from my life and career" where Mr.Murthy talks about "Chance Events" that changed his life and hence Infosys. What I enjoyed most was his first paragraph where he talks about the impact role models or a one-off speech can have on an individual. I could relate to that in an indirect fashion.

"The first event occurred when I was a graduate student in Control Theory at IIT, Kanpur in India. At breakfast on a bright Sunday morning in 1968, I had a chance encounter with a famous computer scientist on sabbatical from a well-known US university. He was discussing exciting new developments in the field of computer science with a large group of students and how such developments would alter our future. He was articulate, passionate and quite convincing. I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library, read four or five papers he had suggested, and left the library determined to study computer science."

LIFCO's (our family publishing firm) guide to Far from the Madding Crowd (Published:1957)

Yesterday I felt very happy, special and humbled all at once by my well-wisher Mr.J.Kesavardhanan, CEO of K7 Computing - the makers of World Class Anti-Virus Solutions for nearly two decades.

The reason I was happy was the occassion of K7 Computing moving to a new sprawling 25,000 square feet new office in OMR (Old Mahabalipuram Road) about a kilometre from Tidel Park - in between MARG and HCL buildings on the left hand side when coming from Madhya Kailash Temple. I have great admiration for Mr.K7 (as he likes to be called), learned from him over the years on both technology and on running a business. As a matter of history, K7 Computing is the only employer for whom I worked for (for about 3 months), before I started Vishwak and I greatly cherish the experiences I went through in that short duration.

I was feeling special, because K7 after honouring his guru Mr.Pulikesi, gifted me with a "Gold Coin" for being their first customer of Vx2000 15 years or so back. In 1991 or 92, when I bought the copy of Vx2000 for Rs.190 for our publishing company LIFCO, I was in my school and honestly didn't know I was their first customer nor realized it will become history one-day. I remember seeing the below issue (November 1990 or an early issue of 1991) of SysReader, going to a small lane in Saidapet, Chennai and meeting a smart, bearded person Mr.Balu in a tiny room with a PC. Balu acted normally, sold me the product and that I time I didn't get to meet K7. In the next few years from then, I met K7 many times in SysReader office and events. It was in 1996-97 when I worked briefly (thanks to my other long time well-wisher Mr.Asokan P) in K7 Computing I got to meet K7 closer and the Balu I met in 1991-92 was my line manager (he was a tough manager to satisfy on delivery schedules). 

 
(Vx2000 Floppy placed on top of a November 1990 issue of SysReader)

See here Vx2000 earliest advertisement copy that appeared in the above SysReader issue.

Finally, I was humbled to see the simplicity of K7 - even with all these successes behind him, K7 hasn't changed a bit, he is the same person I met 15 years or so back.

Instead of gifting people items which never gets used, they kept a selection of books in the exit. People were requested to pick their choice. A very thoughtful act, considering that K7 Computing is a Knowledge (IP) Company and even on these Google days - what is more apt to symbolise knowledge than books. Earlier someone gifted me a book was in an event at TCS - read that post here.

Today in HBO I saw a good comedy movie "Vice Versa". Simple story line on how a father and son get switched between their bodies through a magic. It was hilarious to see a 8 year old brain for a 30+ Year successful manager and vice-versa. When I searched Internet I was surprised to find the movie was 20 years old taken in 1988, and around the same time about 5 other movies and TV Serials had come with similar story lines.

While watching the movie, the boy actor was very familiar. When I searched on the Internet, I learned his name as "Fred Savage". Going through his movies/serials I recollected having seen him in his very popular serial of 1980-90s - Wonder Years and enjoying it a lot in my high-school days. I should have seen the entire serial, the serial had the boy speak out his feelings to the audience in an adult voice. Every boy in adolescent age could relate to this serial, an all time classic.

I also learned the boy seen above has now grown up (obviously of course), married and have a kid!

Recently I read in Economic Times this article about a forrester report. The report said over 60 per cent captive centres in India are struggling and this trend would further accelerate the move favouring third-party outsourced vendors by 2009. Running a outsourced IT services firm this is a topic of significance and interest to me, I have lot to say, but I will try and keep this post brief. 

In the early 1900s the trend was to do everything yourself to ensure quality, classic example for this was Rockefeller's Standard Oil, India's Tata and others world wide. They didn't have much of choice to do it any other way as well. Rest of the industry (eco-system) didn't exist or was not yet ready. In the late 1990's the trend with Jack Welch in GE and Louis Gerstner with IBM was to focus on your core competence and outsource everything else. This helped cutting costs certainly but more than that freed management focus and time to do what the company was all about in its core. This is why Indian IT companies are successful and I believe will help them to retain their edge.

At Vishwak, we have been working on Live.Com gadgets, Vista Gadgets and other mash-up technologies for quite some time. Out of this, I personally feel the Vista gadgets to have the most potential to be useful. Lot of people seem to understand its potential though a bit delayed - including BBC Radio in the Vista gadget that I talked about in my Mix '07 posts.

When we published to Live Gallery few of our experimental gadgets, we were really surprised by the number of downloads they made. The gadgets we published were Dictionary Gadget, Media Player Gadget, System Notify, CPU Meter, History on Today, Outlook Task and Radio Gadget. Out of this Dictionary and Media player have got over 9000 downloads and growing.

Few months back I was interviewed by DataQuest magazine (a popular IT Industry Magazine in India) reporter, on our Mobile and Portal Initiatives at Vishwak. The interview got published in their April Issue. Interactions with Press is an interesting oppurtunity but at the same time a stressful one. It is an oppurtunity for good marketing and publicity, but it is stressful because you can't afford to have your tongue slip even a bit. Having said that if you play it too cautious and textbook fashion, then the reporter gets bored and you are un interesting as a news item. So you got to walk a fine line, for this I admire the industry stelwards who keep meeting press everyday.

A brief from the Interview: TNC Venkata Rangan, CMD, Vishwak says, "Primarily we are into portal management. We provide solutions to both desktop and mobile environments. Our portal framework is a valuable tool that provides a single point access to information resources and services."

Read the full article - DataQuest Online, Print Copy (PDF format)

Yesterday was a big day for me and for the entire team at Vishwak. We had completed 10 Years in Business as on 1st April 2007. We had a big dinner to celebrate this on 10 May 2007 at Courtyard Marriott, Chennai. We were joined by many of our customers on this happy occassion - including Microsoft India, Hindustan Times, Hutchinson Essar, Bharat Matrimony, ChennaiOnline, K7 Computing, Wipro and others. Mr.Jaspreet Bindra (Country Manager India, MSN & Windows Live) was the Chief Guest.

We had many enjoyable programs in the dinner, but the one I treasured most was when we had the 10th Anniversary cake cut by Vishwakians (shown in the photo below) who had been with us for more than 5 years. In this time of great volatility in Indian IT job market - we are lucky to have these dedicated individuals powering "Vishwak" for 5 years+.

Since it was celebration time, few of us spoke and that too briefly. In my speech, I touched on How did I decide to start Vishwak, what does the name mean and what I enjoy in running Vishwak?. 

See the entire photo album here | Video of the event here.

The US Patent Office has already granted 150 yoga-related copyrights and 2,315 yoga trademarks.

Indian Government normally reacts too late in protecting against Patents being awarded in Western world for age old Indian traditional practices. In an unexpected sense of urgency it seems to be acting now on Protecting several Yoga techniques from being patented.

"The Indian government is getting old Sanskrit and Tamil texts translated and is also cataloguing ayurvedic medicines. The information will be made available in five languages so patent offices around the world can access it, according to the International Herald Tribune"

Earlier it was expected by Industry pundits that Sun in their JavaOne conference this week, Sun and Adobe will announce a version of Flash with Java Runtime to combat Microsoft's Silverlight. But Instead Sun has gone alone with their announcement of JavaFx which promises to give a Scripting Runtime, access to Java VM, 2D Graphics and more.

Adobe with its Flash, Flex and Apollo is clearly the incumbent with over 98% of installed base of Flash runtime. For Microsoft Silverlight is a huge step forward in this space and they have the advantage of bringing on board day 1 - millions of existing .NET Developers to Silverlight. Sun looks more as a late comer to the party. I am yet to study in detail on JavaFx - so I will hold on from making any technical comparisons at this stage.

If you look historically, what is happening now is clearly a re-run of the Browser Wars (to be precise Browser Based Applications war) between Microsoft with ActiveX and Sun with Java Applets. In the first round Java Applets got a slight majority, but Sun as a company didn't cash on it. Sun and Netscape let Microsoft eat from their hands royally.

What was interesting was what happened later - Adobe (Macromedia) who never were in the platform business suddenly in the early 2000s became a dominant force with the ubiquitous of their Flash Player. Thanks to Microsoft who bundled Flash Runtime (probably without realizing how much reach it will have later) with every Windows/IE installation and there-by making Flash the de-facto plug-in. In the last few years, YouTube's of the world made Flash, a great Media Platform. Now Adobe wants to build on this huge advantage of Flash with Apollo and there-by make the Operating System (Windows) irrelevant - let us wait and see. Read here on what Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe has got to say on Microsoft's Silverlight. Interesting days ahead ...

Another entrant gaining ground in last few years is the camp of Web 2.0/Ajax with Google Map's and SalesForce's of the world trying to build everything with HTML/JavaScript. I have my doubts on the scalability of these Ajax solutions for serious business applications - even for simple effects the amount of lines of JavaScript and CSS you have to write is mind-boggling.

When I was writing this I was reminded of a presentation I made in 1997 titled "Building Browser based Applications (PPT)". Worth checking it out.
(The presentation is given as last edited on 22/11/1997 - My contacts and company logo are all out-dated)