Recently eWeek carried an article Offshoring 2.0: The Post-India World - "Experts agree that India will soon no longer be the biggest offshoring center". I found the article to be baseless, shallow and far from truth. With the world economy (and Indian economy) growing for last 3 years at a stretch, many people want to stand away from the crowd and become instant doom sayers. It is sad eWeek wants to join the bandwagon of Prophets of Doom.

The article doesn't name the experts who say it is doomed or the studies other than the one by its sister organization IDC on a study of cities worldwide. Let me substantiate my views with our experience in Vishwak.

The article talks about increase in salaries as a primary (and only) reason for this, so let me take that up first:

1. Faster career growth - No doubt the Salary in India is increasing day by day. We have seen our salary outflow doubling in the last 24-36 months (this is apart from our Team Strength Increase). Just this raw data can be very misleading here and you can easily portray doom from this. Dig deeper and you will find this. We have found our people to be more ambitious than in the past, taken up more responsibility and grown up in their career. So we have been able to get better billing rates for the same person, obviously you don't want Person "A" to keep earning the same money for the company year on year. You want it to increase. This is more than productivity increase I am talking here, I am talking about a Software Engineer, becoming a Module Lead, Project Lead, Project Manager and so on. Here Indian IT companies have mastered the balance between career growth to technology training and hands on experience. It has taken Indian IT companies more than 2 decades to reach here. I doubt whether China or Vietnam or East Europe can come to this level instantly. No doubt one day they will come here, but it will take them atleast 5 to 10 years and by then Indian IT companies would have leap-frogged to the next level.
2. About a decade back when offshoring started from western countries to India it was primarily cost arbitrage of 1:10. Today it is not 1:10, but still significant and at many cases still at 1:3 or 1:4 levels. Senior level people salaries have certainly narrowed with US levels, but still there is a 1:3 or at least 1:2 advantage to India. Entry level salaries in India have grown but even now they are not even closer to US figures. Taking the minimum wage in many US states at $10 per hour, still there exists a cost advantage at a minimum of 1:2 levels to India's advantage and obviously software engineers in US get many times more than $10 per hour. Only graduates from IIT & IIM you will find higher salaries and clearly they are exceptions as they are premium across the world.

Next comes the productivity, process advantages:

1. Don't forget the complexity and scale of projects Indian companies are handling. Most of the CMM Level 5 and CMMI companies are based in India and compare that with East Europe and China, it will speak for itself. Just like China having the worlds largest manufacturing units, India has some of the largest Software Engineering campuses. Imagine where else in the world you can get thousands of software engineers in a day, get them organized into teams and start working - all the infrastructure, process, learnings for doing this is available only in India. In the last decade probably Silicon Valley had this, but now undoubtedly it is India. And again this has taken Indian companies a minimum of 2 decades to achieve this far.
2. Software writing is not all about English language, though it is a huge requirement. It is about Creativity and Lateral thinking. I am not saying that all Engineers who graduate in India or who join IT work force in India have it. But India has the highest percentage of these people, again this has been the result of 2 decades of work to come here.
3. I am sure Indian IT companies are already investing big monies more than their counterparts across the world on developing Automation and Code Generators, which will give them the advantage of solving problems using lesser human labour. I am only saying lesser and not about eliminating manual work altogether which may not happen in distant future.
4. Last comes the political stability that Democracy brings in (India is the world's largest Democracy that is proven to work for last 60 years) and the Law of Land (Intellectual Property protection) that Indian Judiciary brings in (though it is very slow compared to western countries).

Related links:

• Business week has covered the same IDC story here
• Check out the full presentation (and video) I made last year on why I believe Indian IT Exports will only grow?

This week one of my colleagues gave me a DVD of the movie April 1945, A Nation awaits its ...  "DOWNFALL". Surprisingly I didn't put it in my CD shelves for watching one of the days (which will never come) but managed to see it today.

In the last half-a-century much as been written and movies taken about the Holocaust & World War II. But many of them skip the last few weeks of Hitler or mention them in passing paragraphs. This movie is all about the last few weeks, when it was certain the Nazis have lost. This different perspective makes the movie different and enjoyable, even though it is 2:30 Hours.

Oliver Hirschbiegel (the Director of the movie) chronicles the last desperate days in Hitler's underground bunker, as the Red Army unrelentingly closes in. It's April 1945. The streets of Berlin are defended by armed children, and the fate of Nazism is sealed. Some blindly believe Hitler capable of some last-minute miracle. Yet there is still a human drama to play out... Read a nice review of movie here.

If you are interested in war history and the human toll it takes, this is a nice movie to watch.

In India, everyone likes to think the rich culture and close-knit families gives people the psychological cover to handle modern day stresses. This is believed to shield Indian (and Asians) societies from growing menaces of Gun shooting in schools, Sexual Harassment of kids, etc. which have now become repeated occurrences in the western world. Critics have said that, in this connected world no society can completely protect itself from these menaces - and in India though Sexual harassment of kids happen they go unreported due to community fears and pressures.

Recently (about a week or so back) I learned the news of a shocking incident that happened in a Chennai School, which was covered up and went unreported in any main stream media. The school is one of the popular private English schools in the city and I came to know about it through few of the parents who have their kids studying in the school and who were called for a meeting on this. The incident was about a school support staff (watchman or someone) had taken few girls (studying 4th or 5th standard) into a room, locked it and tried to misbehave with them sexually. Reportedly he didn't succeed much as the kids shouted and they were rescued subsequently. What was shocking was the attempt the school made to cover the incident up, they didn't handover the culprit to police and the school board's reluctance to even dismiss the culprit (he was eventually fired after pressure from parents).

As a parent this is a shocking news. Parents have been recommended by experts to teach school going girl children and make them aware to the extend possible (of course you can't make a 8 year old aware of sexual advances) of not going when strangers / adult males call them unwarranted.

Update 9/July/2007: After I posted this story yesterday I was pointed to the Deccan Chronicle (Chennai Edition) 8/July/2007 issue which has carried this same news.

Economic Times newspaper today carried couple of interesting facts about Mobile usage in India:

1. Mobile VAS (Value Added Service) business in India is poised to touch Rs.8,200 crores this fiscal - a 65% growth from Rs.4,950 crores in previous year. This reinforces our believe on the huge demand for Mobile Content Management.
2. India has 9.27 Million PC Internet Subscribers, against 31.3 Million users who access Internet through their Mobile devices. One out of every five mobile users (165.1 Million Mobile Subscribers) access Internet from their phones.  
3. For the first time in recent Telcom history in India, ARPU is growing but currently the growth is happening only in CDMA operators. So there seems to be some hope at the end of the tunnel for Telcos.

Reading this, I remembered an Interview I gave few years back "Mobile Phones will be the First and Only Computer for Many in Developing Countries".

Over the last few months I noticed tons of SPAM entries in the trackback lists in this blog. I realized it is better to switch off “Enable trackback service” in your dasBlog configuration:

But what about existing SPAM entries that are already present in the blog. I found it to be very tedious to delete every SPAM Trackback URL manually. That’s when I decided to have a tool written to address this issue. You can download this Free Open Source Application from here. Run the application and point it to your das-Blog content folder, it will read all the *.dayfeedback files and display all the unique domains in the Trackback URLs. Then in one go you can clean up all the *.dayfeedback XML files.

The Source Code (Visual Studio 2005 Project) can be downloaded from here. Please note the application is in Beta and no major code-audits and reviews have been done on that; so I strongly recommend you to take a backup of your content folder before using it. Download the application from here

Designing Windows Application UI with Visio: I had this application to be written by one of my team members in Vishwak. The Engineer understood the functionality and came back quickly with a working prototype. But the User Interface left much to be desired - it was a typical Geeky UI, it required me to select a check-box for each entry (I had to select 20,000 Checkboxes in a grid for the entries in my blog). So I decided to re-do it. I started writing the User Interface suggestions as a Word Document, that's when I thought there should be a better way to do this. Though we have Visio extensively for UML, Flow-Chart, Network diagrams, DB Designs I haven't personally used it for UI Design. I thought let me give it a try and picked up Visio 2007 and started doing the UI design with it, with the help of my Delivery Manager (Chandra) on Visio techniques I completed it in 20 minutes or so. The Engineer understood this instantly and the next day I had the application completed (Download the UI here in Visio format or in PDF format)

At the end, I felt good that I learned a new item (Visio for UI) today.

With the hundreds of usernames and password every typical Internet user has to remember, it is necessary to use a Password Manager. A typical Password manager is an application with a secure database that will store and retrieve hundreds of Usernames and Passwords with one key “Password“. Most of these tools have high level of security measures ensured to protect the passwords stored, both from in-memory and from-disk attacks.

I have been initially using Password Safe, then moved to Keith Brown's Password Minder that we extended in Vishwak. Password Minder was not managed by a community and we also didn't want to commit resources to keep the project alive - earlier 3 years back Password Minder filled a vacancy neatly. As a result the application has bugs that needs to be fixed in our extension and poor Windows Vista compatibility. In Open-Source now you have lots of Password Managers which have more features, works across platforms, offers better security - most important has vibrant communities behind them that keeps the projects updated regularly.

I have weight between the choice of commiting resources to fix Password Minder or to move to a new application.In the end, I decided to move. After evaluation of many products, I have ended my search with KeePass. This is a perfect Password Manager that offers state of the art security, works on multiple platform (Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, MacOS, J2ME, PalmOS) and very easy to use.

I still run Password Minder, but every time I need to access a site that is in Password Minder I first recreate it in KeePass, delete it in Password minder. This way I hope to fully move to KeePass in few weeks.

I feel someone in Civil Aviation Ministry is reading my blog posts on Airports or I am just lucky. Eitherways so far it has been only for the better.

Few months back I posted an idea on developing Puducherry Airport and boom few weeks later government is considering it. I talked about improving connectivity to green field Airports and now it seems Civil Aviation Ministry is considering a plan to do high speed rail links. The trains will run from city centre to the respective airports at 160-180 kmph, will allow city check-in. They are considering 10 ten major cities in the country to have this facility. But the cost looks staggering, just for Delhi Connaught Place to Delhi Airport (a project in piepline) will cost Rs.3,200 crores. This was reported in 30/Jul/07 Economic Times Page 13 of Chennai edition (I couldn't find the story online).

In every Indian Marriage (especially Tamil Marriages) in the evening there is an event called "Reception" where you have friends and relatives gathering and wishing the newly wed. In the event you have something named appropriately as "Loud Music" which is a performance by a local orchestra singing popular film songs, wishing the newly wed and to entertain the audience - so that there is festivity in the air.

A decade or so back, it used to be primarily classical / carnatic music that will be played which makes it enjoyable especialy by the elders, but nowadays it is only Film Music and "Kutthu" songs. With the advent of portable electronics and powerful speakers, the orchestra sets the sound volume to its maximum. On top of it, imagine these playing in indoors in a closed atmosphere - you have a perfect recipe for a headache. With nuclear families and with people having less time to meet friends/relatives face to face, marriages are the only occassion to meet and catch up on happenings. But songs at these sounds levels ensures no one hears anything, even the person next to him. The whole atmosphere becomes no more enjoyable, but leaves you irritated. 

I think the only reason the orchestra's do this is so that they can get away with any person pretending to be a singer - because at these levels the instruments shadow completely the human voice.  In my mariage (2001), we were lucky to have one of the popular carnatic singers Mrs.Nithyashree singing - and we enjoy hearing the CD even today. I am not saying everyone should have only classical music, but all I am saying is whatever music you have please have it set to low-medium decibel levels.

I get this question from our customers most of the time, on what should be the ideal time for a WebPage to load that consumers will be bear with and will not switch to an other site. It is not an easy question to answer, as each webpage (and its site) is different, offers varied functionalities, delivers wide range of contents and each sites objective is different. In my opinion only a Search Engine (like Google) can have the simplest (smallest) homepage as it just needs to have one TextBox and still do something useful. For all other sites it is a careful orchestration (and comprimises) between features exposed, richness, content & speed.

On this same topic I read in Business Line an interview "Trends in the making" with Chris Schoettle (EVP, Akamai Technologies) and he sa:

"End users today expect a page to load faster. Average user satisfaction for a page to download is now four seconds. If it takes longer than that, they will typically go to another site. People do not have the patience to wait for pages to load. A couple of years ago, it was seven seconds. And soon, it will be no more than three seconds"

At Vishwak, few months back we collected data on time taken for page load of Google and Yahoo! for academic interest. We did this from various Indian metros both with Dial-up connections and from browsing centres (Broadband).

Disclaimer: This study was done purely for academic interest and we don't guarantee accuracy nor we will be responsible for any consequences of usage of this data. Yahoo! and Google are trademarks of their respective companies.

One of the common things you want to do after you created all your content slides in a presentation is to put an Agenda slide or TOC (Table of Contents) slide. This was easy using the Summary Slide button in Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 as shown below. For reasons best known to Microsoft, this feature to have a summary slide automatically generated is not available in PowerPoint 2007. This MS Knowledge base article confirms this behaviour, and it suggests a tedious manual process of copyring each slide title and pasting it to create a summary slide

If anyone from Microsoft is listening here, please add this feature back. It will take hardly an hour to write a Macro that can achieve this..

Steps to do this in PowerPoint 2003:

• Click on View Menu
• Then on Slide Sorter
• Select the slides that you want in the TOC
• On the "slide sorter" toolbar, 3rd icon along is the "summary slide" clicking it will make a slide automatically