let me explain. a typical company starts out with an innovative idea for a product – it procures [...]]]> somewhere on the route to from good to great, it happens. companies start with an innovation, create a marketable product out of it, and produce it at scale. then they transform from innovators to ‘sourcers’ of innovations.

let me explain. a typical company starts out with an innovative idea for a product – it procures the raw materials/parts that it needs, combines them in the unique way to create a product that is valued higher than the cost of the sum of the materials/parts. as you can see, the value addition happens in the way the materials are combined. e.g. you can procure a piece of sheet metal and mould it to make a very ordinary water bucket, or the next best mousetrap. very different ways of creating value.

along the way, hoping the product is hugely successful, it becomes good and very familiar with handling the parts it procures. it develops the expertise in the materials and the whole org is tuned towards making that particular product that it invents.

but the catch is, sooner or later, the innovation is going to become a commodity, and the the money you can earn from the value you have created is going to diminish over time. so what is a company to do? well, it has to come up with a new innovation again – one that adds a large amount of value, but that will use almost the same materials/parts and people that the organization is tuned towards. e.g. companies diversifying from selling airline tickets to adding hotel reservations, etc.

this happens a few times, but then, there comes a point when this cycle yields lower and lower value innovations – e.g.the traditional internal combustion cars are a great example. a car can improve only so much from chassis, carburetor, tyros and engine.

at this point, the company starts to outsource innovation, and to an extant, even the supply chain. the company starts buy into new ‘adjacent’ supply chains and new innovations that they foster. e.g. car companies go into financing. computer makers go into home electronics.

assuming you an do this diversification successfully long enough, you come to realize, that you aren’t good at any particular product, but you are getting good at picking winners. i.e. looking at the budding innovations and supply chains that are ready to hit prime time, and pushing them over the hump. you become a pure marketing company – one that’s good at ‘research’ (knowing what the market is demanding), and ‘development’ (taking an innovation and developing it to reach it’s market at scale).

coca cola does it well with water bottling firms, energy drinks, and sports drinks. cisco does it well with networking innovations. drug companies have mastered this part. proctor and gamble does it all the time. oracle has started to do it in the last few years. that brings us to my side of the world – have the web companies matured enough to go this route? that for another post.

just look at the load pattern : 250,000 total test takers, taking the test over 10 days, spread across 105 testing centers, where they have 2 test [...]]]> it appears like the testing system for Common Admission Test (the aptitude test for admission into Indian business schools) crashed on the first day it opened to students.

just look at the load pattern : 250,000 total test takers, taking the test over 10 days, spread across 105 testing centers, where they have 2 test sessions per day –> pretty much yields 12,500 concurrent test takers across the entire system, and 119 test takers/center.

Update: each test taker takes about 150 questions over a 3-hr period, so that’s about 1.875M transactions over 3 hrs, 173 transactions per sec. Can India not achieve THAT? What a shame.

not being able to handle this type of load pattern is outright pathetic. blaming it on a virus is even more tragic attempt at someone covering their butt with a transparent plastic sheet.

the folks that took the test wont get a credit if the entire testing method is invalidated. those that didn’t take the test need to go through the stress another time. those that took the test will stand at a disadvantage because the question bank gets leaked in nano-second.

Update 2: according to WATBlog, here’s the notice against leaking, provided to test takers: “Disclosing, publishing, reproducing, transmitting, storing, or facilitating transmission and storage of the contents of the CAT or any information therein in whole or part thereof in any form or by any means, verbal or written, electronically or mechanically for any purpose, shall be in violation of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 and/or the Copyright Act, 1957 and/or the Information Technology Act“.

Are they really going to hit with an 1872 law?? really??

whoever deployed this solution should be fired for massive incompetence.

… and ironically, i found this ad in a newspaper couple of days ago. this is one sure way to solve all scalability problems – beg users to spare the system.

You call THIS simple?

contrast the state of simplicity elsewhere – e.g. designing simple personal web pages made simple -

You call THIS simple?

contrast the state of simplicity elsewhere – e.g. designing simple personal web pages made simple -

The ‘Before’ Shot: here’s how my post titled Laloo School of Business is shown in google and yahoo search result pages.

The ‘After’ Shot: [...]]]> got my hands on search monkey preview for developers, thanks to an old acquaintance from verity days. looking at the ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots, the results are quite stunning.

The ‘Before’ Shot: here’s how my post titled Laloo School of Business is shown in google and yahoo search result pages.

The ‘After’ Shot: here’s how the same page can appear after being customized by search monkey on yahoo! search

this, after a hapless product manager with half-baked programming skills hacked at the tool for a couple of hours. imagine what a PHP stud could do?! some some of my quick take-aways:

• the long toil to generate better automated summaries of pages is blown to bits
• yahoo is essentially handing the serp real-estate over to the content owners. a stark contrast to big brother mentality of the past
• the serp is essentially a listings display page, a la ebay, and each page is no different from a listing
• ability to show the image is good, but when would video be playable? why wait?
• will SEO’s now stop griding their noses and focus more on a more deterministic messaging for each of their pages?
• not sure where microsoft kicked yahoo, but it sure restarted blood circulation over there

very nice product indeed.

msft withdraws the bid. i guess (a) msft will come back again (b) yhoo probably has one more quarter to blow open the growth in sales (c) and for employees, a bit longer view of what they’ll be working on.

yahoo ego has been wounded by this whole saga, and there [...]]]> Posted by mobile phone:

msft withdraws the bid. i guess (a) msft will come back again (b) yhoo probably has one more quarter to blow open the growth in sales (c) and for employees, a bit longer view of what they’ll be working on.

yahoo ego has been wounded by this whole saga, and there are still many folks in the company that can kick some serious butt. pual kedrosky has a good post on it, including very good comment stream.

until then, i guess it’d be google’ lapdog than msft’s bitch.