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Jan Breman writes in the latest EPW on the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector that the Indian government has been busy ignoring for well over 4 years now. If you think the following is a disgrace, just look up some of the the statistics behind India’s jobless “economic miracle”.

While the crisis deepened, the ragpickers, survivors at the bottom of the informal sector economy, received for their daily harvest at best only half of what they used to get. A SEWA activist reported on the anguish she met in her round of visits to local members. One of them began to cry. ‘Who sent this recession? Why did they send it?’ I was speechless. Her situation is very bad, her husband is sick, she has five children, she stays in a rented house, she has to spend on the treatment of her husband and she is the sole earner in the family, how can she meet her ends? When she goes to collect scrap she takes along her little daughter, while her husband sits at home and makes wooden ice-cream spoons, from which he can earn not more than Rs 10 a day.

Yes, it’s a rising tide all right. One that drowns the vast majority.

OK, it’s official. Stanford offers free laundry and charges students 10 cents per page for printing. MIT, on the other hand, offers free unlimited printing & charges $1.5/load for laundry.

I am happy that somebody here got their priorities right

Today, Amazon announced sticky session support for their Elastic Load Balancer.

If you are one of those IT peeps who’s thinking “what do you mean, they never had it till now?” – weep my friend, such is the state of the much hyped cloud computing/on-demand revolution. I have immense respect for Amazon in terms of their core platform, but I was naive enough to think that their EC2 offerings are more than entry-level.  A quick look at Rackspace for load balancing also yielded something about mod_proxy & mod_proxy_balancer. At least, they are using a reliable and well documented solution instead of waiting to roll out their proprietary service offering.

At this rate, the Oracles, EMCs and Ciscos of the world can happily continue their rent extraction (or pound of flesh, depending on your perspective) for the foreseeable future. So, crank out those POs for hunky CSM switches and SLBs ; and better still, create your own secret-sauce for your business-critical IT infrastructure.

This is what happens when Engineering drives products and Product Management gets reduced to “marketing”.

Read more about Google Buzz and Google Wave as a Product Management failure here.  The one thing worse than a hammer that goes around looking for a nail, is a pro-grade power drill that spews ‘em out and injures people. And about that “it’s-coming-to-enterprises“, really?!

Groupthink, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing are all gaining acceptance as perfectly legitimate tools for co-ordination and organizing. There are excellent success stories in pretty much about every realm. This post is not about that. It’s about the dark side – how not to solicit collective intelligence when it comes to design decisions.

I just came across a real survey that was sent out to an entire organizational division in connection with the division’s “website redesign project”. Keep in mind that, this is a non-profit organization made up of highly accomplished engineers, designers and managers, which is in a rather competitive space. The website under question is external facing and arguably, the single biggest acquisition channel for new constituents.

The online survey reads something like this:

1. In your opinion, how well does the current website hold it’s own against peer websites, on a scale of 0 to 10? In this scale, a website like <foo> would get a 0 and a website like <foo>or <woo> would get close to a 10
   (To be rated on scale of 1 to 10)
2. What features do you like on the current website?
   (A list of 5 optional text areas follow)
3. What features do you not like on the current website?
   (A list of 5 optional text areas follow)
4. What features would you like to add to the current website?
   (A list of 5 optional text areas follow)
5. We’re going to show you some websites that will make you drool! Tell us whether you think that the following would be good templates to use for the website’s redesign.
   (A list of 7 competitor websites follow, each to be rated on a 1-5 scale)

I can’t possibly explain in a few sentences what’s wrong here. On first count, it violates basic tenets of 4 different areas – design thinking, competitive strategy, product management and use of survey as a research technique. I am sure that this particular survey was pulled off in a hurry and that not much thought has gone into it – but it’s clearly symptomatic of deeper issues. Good design or good management of design, is not easy or trivial – a lot of effort, aptitude and training has to go into it.

Sir Alec Issigonis: "A camel is a horse designed by a committee"

Sir Alexander Issigonis, the famous British car designer, is reported to have said: “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”. Design decisions that are crowdsourced like this may perhaps lead to giraffes. As Wired’s David Wolman notes in “10 worst evolutionary designs“,

“Mama giraffes stand up while giving birth, so baby’s entry into the world is a 5-foot drop. Wheeee! Crack.”

If you are interested in this topic, here are a couple of links: NYT article onThe Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused) and a more academic paper by Prof. Tom Malone et al. at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence: “Harnessing Collective Intelligence“.

It has become fashionable for Wall Street Journal and New York Times to cover “Chinese hacking”.

Whatever I have read so far is proof that WSJ and NYT reporters just don’t *get* technology, let alone hacking/cracking. There is really nothing different in the article from the characteristics of black hat hackers anywhere in the world, except that um, they are Chinese. Most do it for fun/fame, a few for money, they socialize online and offline, use each others works. Eventually they all get locked up. The better ones, reform themselves and work for the govt or turn into “white hat” consultants. Its the same story in US, Russia, India or China.

The NYT author almost seems to be disappointed that “Chinese hackers don’t fit the Hollywood stereotype of geeky loner-geniuses in American basements” . *lol*, Maybe he should have visited CSAIL or Media Lab and gotten a real introduction of the hacker sub-culture instead of watching lame hack3r movies! Oh btw, be sure to check out Maxim’s (the last word in reputed journalism) roundup on hacking hall of shame in Hollywood movies “The 13 Hackiest Hacking Movie Moments“. Maybe its time to create a mainstream press version of this.

I had tuned in to the live Google Buzz webcast yesterday and I must admit I was pretty intrigued about it. Especially the location-rich mobile experience and enterprise integration aspects. But within a few hours of use of the GMail version, I’ve ended up disabling it. Can’t remember a time I have done this to a piece of consumer technology, not even Google Wave!

Tim O’Reilly seems to like what he sees in Google Buzz. He says it adds “asymmetric following to email”. I agree on the asymmetric part, but I think Buzz has got it wrong on at least 3 fronts

• Trust in the network: All those auto-suggested followers is just a bad, bad idea. Google has attempted to take away control of what shows up on their screen from users – and no amount of look-its-so-cool-we-know-your-friends can make it  work well. Even without Buzz, Google was pretty poor with how they manage social relevance. Remember all those people who appear on your GTalk list – just because you have exchanged emails on a list-serv with them. It just got worse.

• Trust with cloud content/apps: Most consumers do not realize that putting stuff on the cloud is a big leap of faith. Enterprises understand that, and that’s why the cloud is a non-starter for most Fortune-500 shops. Buzz with its out-of-the box integration with Google Applications portfolio like Picasa, Reader and GTalk has exposed vulnerability of apps+content on the cloud. Why? It’s so easy to mix up the line between private and public/social. It’s a privacy backlash waiting to happen, or wait did it happen already?

• Messaging is not Publishing:  Email is a messaging application. Remember, it is *the* killer-app that grew the Internet. Mixing email’s messaging semantics with social web publishing is another bad idea. Twitter tries to do it by mixing up DMs, @replies and posts – but they did it in a way that didn’t make it conspicuous to users, and survived.

Facebook/Twitter-killer? No way. How about Sharepoint? Microsoft or any other CMS vendor should be *very* happy about this. Lots of consumers and businesses care about these things – and it’s a wonderful opportunity for them to profit from Google’s mistakes. For instance, there cannot possibly be a better selling point for non-cloud applications (like MS Office/Windows/Server apps like Sharepoint). The very mention of unknown “followers” +  one-click publishing of data is enough to convince people to hold on to their PC/data canter and all the content and apps on it. That’s easy money on the table. I’d imagine the same with services like webmail (Listen up Yahoo, are you willing to take this business?) or social network platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn who have a more non-threatening “at-an-arms-length” integration of content+apps+Social Web. Other enterprise cloud providers like SFDC, Intuit, Zoho also have a good opportunity on their hands to wean business users off their Google habit.

Even for consumers, the message is clear. Get on the cloud on your terms.  In 2010, I see myself dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows on a MacBook or Thinkpad – and happily retaining control over my computer, data and apps. No thanks, I’ll take my freedom over any ad-supported free beer. I’ll also retain my web hosting account and continue to use a fair amount of paid online services. In particular, I’ll cut back use of Google’s cloud applications – especially that pesky thing called GTalk. In fact during the webcast, the Product Manager who was demoing the app got so many “I want to add you as a friend” request after his GMail email id got revealed for 1 minute up on the screen. Big-time embarrassment. So yes, I’ll be on the social web for sure – blogging, tweeting, sharing, tagging, networking and even collaborating using Wave – but on my terms.

All in all, it looks like another social web opportunity that Google has missed. Even worse for them, they are compromising the viability of their original “apps+ads” cloud strategy. A key remaining piece of the puzzle is their mobile play – not only on Android but also on iPhone, Symbian and RIM.  I personally have a lot of respect for Google in this department – they seem to have the right mix of strategy and ever increasing execution capacity. And for that, I’ll have to wait for an S60 app to show up.

The other day I was catching up with Boling Jiang over lunch and that’’s when it struck me – the real-time experiential web has arrived. I kid you not! Bo is one of the co-founders of EventHive, a early stage MIT start-up with a solution for real-time feedback during conference presentations. They basically want to solve the problem – “how do I make my conference presentations engaging?”. Now, anyone who has sat through the typical death-by-powerpoint at a conference should get the idea by now. Eventhive basically offers the speaker(s), audience and organizers the opportunity to engage in a real-time conversation (polling, Q&A, feedback, etc.) using Twitter and mobile phones.

What is even more interesting about EventHive – apart from the obvious fact of saving asphyxiated souls from mic-happy presenters – is that, in my opinion, they are riding 2 huge rolling waves of change. Those waves are – a) the web is making real-time conversations in a scalable way; and, b) information goods are turning more experiential or “service-like”.

What’’s so experiential about a polling application? Well, look at how leading edge knowledge workers like musicians and authors are making more and more of their income these days not by selling the basic information goods (like a CD, book, etc.), rather by monetizing the experiential component (concert tours, speaking opportunities, etc.). Unlike economic transactions and business models based on “goods” – service transactions and businesses thrive on real-time feedback and a near-continuous course correction. The real-time web and the experiential economy thus end up reinforcing each other. That’’s how suddenly a tool like Eventhive, becomes not just a life-saver for presenters and the audience – but a really strong sign of shift in the way we lead our online and offline lives.

System Dynamics is arguably what MIT Sloan is famous for in social science and management circles. Let me just say I have mixed feelings about it! Case in point, here is a “simplified” SD model used to study staffing and Project Management.

What a mess! I am not saying it doesn”t have advantages – but hey, what happened to the idea of a model being a simple abstraction of a complex real world? As a management tool or even as a analytical tool, this can easily run up against basic cognitive limits. May be I should get a special spaghetti fork to twirl around with it

[Updated on] Slides for an in-class discussion are available. Comments and feedback are welcome!

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