India is a land of contrasts. One India is on the move creating waves around the world. Another is stuck in the past, unable to break free to realize its full potential. There are some outstanding social entrepreneurs who have left their cushy jobs to help bridge this gap… Today as 2006 comes to an end, I’ll like to salute another social entrepreneur who has stepped out of a comfy corporate life and has decided to touch and uplift the lives of many.
Archive for December, 2006
Rethinking SaaS: Still a Horseless Carriage, Not Yet a Car
Published by December 29th, 2006 in software industry and SaaS. 2 CommentsThere is no doubt that SaaS is becoming part of the mainstream… Ultimately SaaS will be about market expansion, not displacement. It will not be about replacing horse carriages by cars (although that will happen), but about making a Model T affordable to a whole new class of buyers… Undoubtedly this will be another orbit shift. How soon will it come? Where will it come from?
An Indian Dream
Published by December 28th, 2006 in investing, entrepreneurship and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsI just got back from my short vacation, opened The Economist and was flipping the pages when a picture of Sanjeev Aggarwal caught my attention. There is a nice profile of him, called Delhi Dreams, in the Face Value section of this issue. What a pleasant surprise! For me Sanjeev represents an important new trend. I believe that we are close to a tipping point in seeing many more “India-out” ventures…
We are going away to Hampi, a World Heritage site, for a short break. I am not taking my laptop so you won’t hear from me till the middle of next week.
A hilarious “Christmas Parable”…
Innovation Is Like a Bamboo Thicket
Published by December 21st, 2006 in innovation and entrepreneurship. 0 CommentsIndia-based entrepreneurs don’t often realize that a single innovation, no matter how good, doesn’t get results. A collection of different innovations need to be clumped together to get results. They need to think of innovation as a bamboo thicket rather than as an oak tree.
Joel Spolsky had earlier suggested that that simplicity is not about fewer features but about the right features and “elegance”. This time he writes about elegance…
Rethinking SaaS for India
Published by December 19th, 2006 in software industry, entrepreneurship, bottom-of-the-pyramid and SaaS. 2 CommentsSandHill.com has recently published “Rethinking SaaS for India”, my second article in the series India DNA Talk. I write about how SaaS can be tailored to meet the needs of a whole new segment of micro-firms in India. The addressable market opportunity is large. Like with all bottom-of-the-pyramid opportunities, this requires in-market incubation and in-market experimentation to get to the right model. I am optimistic that this will happen soon. Do you share that optimism?
Tom Peters makes his iconoclastic points in a poetic form. Below are 2 of 14 samples. The whole presentation is available here (thanks Giri for sharing).
They say/acknowledge, “Okay, we need revolution.”
I say “REVOLUTION.”
They say “fast follower.”
I say “battered and bruised leader.”
They say “Conglomerate & Imitate!”
I say “Create & Innovate!”
They say “Market share.”
I say “Market CREATION.”
They […]
Growth Anatomy Series Roundup
Published by December 18th, 2006 in innovation, mobile industry, software industry, entrepreneurship, bottom-of-the-pyramid and roundups. 0 CommentsThis series started innocently enough as a follow-up to my SandHill.com article but somehow it quietly picked-up momentum. It covers a fair amount of ground about how to go about bottom-on-the-pyramid opportunities and why doing that is important to the software industry. Below are all the articles in this series. Check them out if you have missed any.
Change blindness is real. In a recent experiment, “eight out of fifteen direction-givers failed to notice that the person they were talking to changed in mid conversation! Eight out of fifteen!
Growth Anatomy: Call to Action
Published by December 16th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, entrepreneurship and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 1 CommentSuccess with BOP requires breakthrough product architectures, process models and/or business models. Often it also requires building new market structures and value chains. All this can only happen with in-market incubation and constraint-based management. It’s not easy, but it can be done. As we have seen, telecom, PC, semiconductor and healthcare industries are doing it. So far the enterprise software industry is watching from the sidelines. Why is this the case?
Who hasn’t had mixed feelings about the digital invasion of our lives. Victoria Shannon of IHT taps into that sentiment in her recent article, Batting Future Shock. The article supports the notion of a trusted ecosystem.
Indian Infrastructure Needs Orbit Change - II
Published by December 15th, 2006 in civic issues. 1 CommentYou know that I love Andy Mukherjee’s columns in IHT. I had commented on one of columns here which led to an email exchange with him that I would like to share with you. I conclude the post with some musings on the limits of privatization and decentralization.
Growth Anatomy: Building a New Value Chain
Published by December 14th, 2006 in innovation, software industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 2 CommentsWe have looked at several bottom-of-the-pyramid examples from the IT industry so far. Airtel vs. Verizon was about breakthrough business models. X0-1 vs. Classmate laptops was about breakthrough product architectures. TI’s LoCosto cellphone chipsets was about a breakthrough process model. eChoupal and the failed GramaTeller ATM was about creating a new market structure. Today’s example is from healthcare and is about building a new value chain.
If you work 60+ hours a week and meet some of the characteristics like fast-paced work under tight deadlines, responsibility for profit and loss, a large amount of travel, an unpredictable flow of work, and work-related events outside business hours, you are in an “extreme job”. So says a new report by Hidden Brain Drain Taskforce…
Ten Takeaways from the APSEC Workshop
Published by December 12th, 2006 in offshoring and software industry. 1 CommentThis Saturday, on Dec 9th, there was a day-long workshop on Software Product Development Challenges in India. It was held in Bangalore as an add-on to the APSEC 2006 conference. The workshop went really well; kudos to Pravin Bhagwat and Pawan Goyal - the organizers. Hopefully we can find a way to make this an annual event. (Disclosure: I moderated a panel discussion in the afternoon). Here are my ten takeaways from the workshop…
Yesterday I pointed to Joel Spolsky thoughtful post on simplicity. I found an interesting IHT article by Alice Rawsthorn about Apple’s take on functional aesthetics. It supports Joel’s point of view. In the article, Jonathan Ive, SVP of Industrial Design at Apple summarizes the Apple philosophy…
Growth Anatomy: Thinking Beyond Product and Company Architecture
Published by December 11th, 2006 in innovation, software industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsIn this series we have looked at two bottom-of-the-pyramid product examples so far. The first one, which was about one-laptop-per-child showed that success hinges on confronting legacy product architectures. The second example, about TI’s ultra-low-cost cellphone chipset, illustrated that sometimes breakthrough changes are needed not so much inside the product but inside the company (by changing the way of doing things significantly). But at times, the focus has to be neither inside the product nor inside the company but out in the market. Not addressing the market architecture issues can be a point of failure.
Joel Spolsky has a thoughtful post on what simplicity is and isn’t. He says: If you’re using the term “simplicity” to refer to a product in which the user model corresponds closely to the program model, so the product is easy to use, fine, more power to ya…
India’s Telecom Boom: Missing the Point
Published by December 10th, 2006 in innovation and mobile industry. 0 CommentsEconomist has an article on India’s booming mobile market. India is adding 6.6m new subscribers a month and is growing faster than China. The article says that this growth is unlikely to peter out soon. There are 136m subscribers today and the industry expects to get to 500m by 2010. But the Economist doesn’t do justice to the real story although it alludes to it when it says that “Bharti, in particular, is attracting attention from telecoms firms worldwide because of its innovative business model”.
I normally don’t write about BPOs, but there is something really interesting happening in that sector. Today’s Economic Times has a story about how BPOs in India are shedding their plain vanilla pricing in favor of performance/transaction pricing. In fact this is not it. From what I know there is lots more cooking on that front.
My first post went up on 8th Nov and I wrote 23 posts in the month. Today I looked at the list of most visited posts in November and I must tell you that the list had its surprises. Below are the top five in rank order. Check them out if you have missed any.
Growth Anatomy: Taking Inspiration from Ultra Low Cost Cellphone
Published by December 6th, 2006 in mobile industry, innovation, organizational design and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 2 CommentsWe saw from the OLPC example that radical value engineering requires confronting incumbent product architectures. This is one of the reasons why upstarts have an advantage. Another reason why this is so difficult for incumbents is because you have to confront the current way of doing things inside the firm. Occasionally market leaders succeed in doing an orbit shift in their way of doing things. Texas Instruments is an example of that in the cellphone chipset market.
The average American home now has more television sets than people … according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said. - The Associated Press, Sept. 21. This promoted Rick Moranis, creator of a country music album, “The Agoraphobic Cowboy” to write in New York Times…
