One of the concerns for everyone in the Indian IT Industry - for both the insiders and the (abroad) customers are the rising cost of man power. In the last 3 to 4 years (Indian Financial Years Apr-Mar) the industry has grown tremendously. All the 3 Indian IT majors have joined the billion dollar club, continued to double there revenue every year and are now multi-billion corporations. All of them are close to having over 100,000 employees. They have been joined closely by Tier 2 IT companies as well in the multi-billion dollar club and many of them have over 50,000 employees with them. This is formidable human resource capital but they don't come cheap, this unprecedented growth has been pushing the salary further to unsustainable levels.

Further more, for Indian IT services firms nearly 50% (it ranges from 40%-60% depending on the size and offshore/onshore mix) of their revenue is spent in salary and related expenses. Only in few other industries, a single raw material* costs nearly 50% of the revenue. Certainly no other industry (may be Oil and Steel in recent years) have seen its raw materials* cost increase over 30% year on year. So far the Industry have been able to cope with this in several ways - productivity gains, fresh resource augmentations, training, process/tool improvements and more but this certainly gives sleepless nights to CEOs including myself. I strongly believe whether it is stock market, economy in general or salaries, all of them cannot defy gravity for long and keep growing upwards. Indian Stock market which sky rocketed with its BSE Sensex hitting 21,000+ few months back is now trading at 15,000 levels. All goes through cycles of ups and downs; bearish days are also good for the economy in the long run. In Australia conservationist welcome forest fires because they burn the outer layers of the trees which fall down and add nutrients to the soil. In the long run this helps the soil to remain fertile and nurture new life. This is nothing new, it has been happening this way there for millions of years.

Am I forecasting doom days here? - Certainly No. Tough days - Definitely Yes. There are several indicators for this trend. First is the obvious US Slowdown (and a short recession), second is the Indian Rupee to Dollar appreciation, Third is the increasing cost of raw materials and the lower margins - gone are the days of hefty profit margins in IT industry. All these have started to show their impact - news are trickling in of delayed joining dates for campus hires by the IT Majors (at this time this sounds more as rumours to me) and if slowing down in the rate of lateral hires/job market. The best indication I follow for sensing Chennai's Job market is "The Hindu" newspapers Wednesday Opportunities supplement - this week I hardly saw 1 or 2 IT related openings. Normally you see here several full page and half-a-page advertisements by all popular IT brands.

What are the consequences of this:

• First, it will separate boys from men (girls from ladies). The "me too" players will get killed and consolidation will happen in the industry, which is good for any industry to mature
• For the 3 Indian Majors this will mean little, it is likely to be business as usual. The senior teams there would have easily seen this coming for several quarters and they certainly had time to fine tune there strategies
• It will be difficult for Tier 2 companies who are aspiring to get into the elite league as their growth rates will slow down
• For small and emerging companies tough days are certainly ahead. There will be churn but the blood-bath may be limited and short
• Niche players depending on their offerings and geographies have better chances of surviving this and also growing a little due to easier talent access and lesser competition.<Shameless plug begin> This includes companies like mine "Vishwak". We are focused on Media Industry and have been investing heavily on the Indian domestic market for last few years. We are witnessing good growth on both these areas and our investments in Indian market are starting to paying off . Here first mover advantage give us significant head start along with our better understanding of the market<end>

I know this can start a lively debate here and I welcome it, please start posting your comments, observations and thoughts.

*I prefer calling them as Human Assets but that will give a different financial meaning in this context, so let us have them as raw materials here

Yahoo! has released an exclusive Women portal called Shine. You might be wondering why I am writing about a Women site!. It is to highlight a small innovation they have done in the site. Most of the times you use a newly released application or a website you may not be aware of all the features. As a result you will end up using only 20% of the features. To overcome this, Yahoo! in Shine has come up with a good idea of showing "help balloons" the first time. The balloons auto-scroll to various sections below and introduce you (this negates the complexity associated of scrolling to novice users). To top it, they don't show it (by remembering with a cookie I suppose) the next time and irritate you. Check out the screen shots and judge for yourselves.

For last two days my son has been down with fever. As any parent will know it is very difficult to get them retain (without vomiting) what they ate when they are unwell and to make them have their medicines.

My son is now 5 years old and can understand things if told to him in simplified fashion. So today I told him that if he takes his food and medicine, they will combine together as friends and fight with the germs (bad guys) inside his stomach. Since they  are now two against one, the germs will be defeated and his fever will be cured. Luckily he bought into the idea, took his food & medicine. He kept repeating the story to the entire family and that probably gave him psychological comfort as well. Oh what an idea!

Update 1/April/2008: He has recovered and fine today.

I recently finished reading "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho. The book reads like a novel of a story of a Spanish Boy who follows his dreams (or listens to his heart) and finds his love and treasure by venturing into the unknown in the middle east deserts. Nice self-motivating book which is fun to read and as well encouraging. Must read.

Though it has been hotly debated for last several months, I have kept away from writing on the Office Open XML (OOXML) proposed by Microsoft and currently a ECMA standard. With the ISO voting due today I thought let me write my views before the results.

Basically what OOXML means is a standardized file format based in XML for Word, Excel & PowerPoint documents. You have convertors to convert from OOXML to MS Office native formats or to ODF (ISO standard supported by Open Office & Open source). Accepting OOXML as an ISO standard increases the openness of your documents, there by you can safely assume that your grandchildren can open and read the documents created by you today long after the programs that created them are dead and not available. OK agreed, this may not be important for your monthly budget spreadsheets but certainly crucial for E-Governance applications that are used for exchange between different governments and with various departments within them.

Recently India has rejected (which I feel is sad) OOXML. Yesterday I heard the most convincing reason on why OOXML should be accepted by ISO and surprisingly it was not from Microsoft camp - it was from the Editor of the competing standard ODF 1.2. The argument from Patrick Durusau in the article "Who Loses if OpenXML Loses" where he has made several points on how ODF itself will loses if OOXML is rejected. Key arguments to note are on Spreadsheet formulas support and support for legacy MS documents. 

You can track the status of voting from this site.

2/Apr/2008 Update: NewYork Times has reported that OOXML has been approved as a standard by ISO. This is a big win not only for Microsoft, but for consumers and governments as it now provides them with a choice. IBM, SUN and the other open source backers of ODF on one side, Microsoft and its partners on the other side with OOXML will ensure that the document format area is being innovated because of intense competition. Without this choice between ODF and OOXML, this critical technology area would have been left to suffer stagnation and resulted in lock-ins for e-governance applications.

In the corridors of Mix '08, Scott Hanselman (PM, Microsoft and Ex-Regional Director) got hold of me & my fellow Regional Director (Delhi) Vinod Unny for an Interview. The topic was on "Outsourcing" and how it affects both sides of the world - we enjoyed talking on this hotly debated topic, hear it out and post your comments below.

Full Interview: AAC Audiobook (iPod) | MP3 Full Show | WMA Full Show |WMA Low-Fi

Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.

There was a news item today that India has decided to adopt a new accounting system (IRFS) by 2011. IRFS is presently adopted by over 109 countries including China. I was curious on this move, found two references on the Internet to understand this.

1) Accounting in a global world

2) Debits & Credits of IFRS

This is what I understood: Just like how Technology standards and Protocols are vital for the Interconnected world of Internet to work together, it is equally important in globalized world today to have a common way to report financial's of companies around the world. Without such a standard it brings in huge disparity in disclosure thus creating loopholes to hide facts. All of this affects investor confidence and long term sustenance of the global economy. In short, it is a welcome move provided our government enacts all necessary law framework without delay.

Early this week Apple released their Safari browser for Windows. Safari is a neat, standards compliant web browser and I feel its arrival for Windows is definitely an important step. You might think the usefulness or the need for yet another browser. Look at it this way - with Web becoming ever more intervened with our lifes, innovation in the browser space is super critical. Personally, I love Internet Explorer and I think IE 8.0 will be a technically advanced browser with dominant market share, but still we cannot leave the fate of web to just two companies - Microsoft & Mozilla. Recently AOL closed for good Netscape, of course Netscape has in real terms died several years back itself. This leaves us with only one other credible competition which is from Opera but Opera never managed to garner any significant user base in the PC. So Apple coming in to this space should be welcomed.

While we welcome Apple, their entry has not been without controversies. Mozilla CEO John Lilly has taken serious objections to Apple offering the new browser to Windows users via Apple Software Update which is part of iTunes & QuickTime Player. This means several millions of iTunes & QuickTime Player users will without there knowledge get Safari, there by increasing the surface area of attacks on their PC. I agree 100% with the objections raised by Mozilla CEO on this that it undermines the trust users will have on software. Adding on to this, is Apple's licensing terms for Safari which permits you to install this only on "a single Apple-labeled computer at a time". This is weird considering Apple never makes or sells any Windows PC, so you will never get a legal way to install Safari. While  Register in UK and many in blogosphere are making fun of this, I guess this is more a goof-up and a human error (copy and paste problem) from Apple's legal team and sure to be corrected out in days.

Finally, when I tried to install Safari in Vista x64 I get the following file corrupt error. I tried downloading half-a-dozen times from IE, Firefox, FDM - same error. It installs fine in a Windows XP x86 machine. Seems Apple has some more work to do.

This is a simple tip for MS Excel 2007. When using Outlook 2007/Word 2007 and working on a Table we get the "Design" menu which is very handy to make our tables look beautiful.

When working with MS Excel 2007 I couldn't find this feature (Design Menu for Table) till yesterday. It suddenly struck me that in Excel though everything appears to a "Table", but they are not and we need to explicitly create a "Table". That's it, feature found!

Steps to follow: Just select the cells you are interested in, choose the "Table" menu option from the "Insert" Ribbon bar. Viola. You get the Design Ribbon bar.

By default, when you insert a "Table" in Excel it comes with Data "Filter" enabled. You can disable it from "Filter" button in the "Data" Ribbon bar.