Category: Uncategorized

Marvellous article by Tim himself. Excerpts:

At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isn’t just a collection of software tools, it’s a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable. Software licensing and control over APIs–the lever of power in the previous era–is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage the data, the software is of little use. In fact, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

Google’s service is not a server–though it is delivered by a massive collection of internet servers–nor a browser–though it is experienced by the user within the browser. Nor does its flagship search service even host the content that it enables users to find. Much like a phone call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call, but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.

…

As a result, DoubleClick proudly cites on its website “over 2000 successful implementations” of its software. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdSense, by contrast, already serve hundreds of thousands of advertisers apiece.

Overture and Google’s success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as “the long tail,” the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content.

…

BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it … There’s an implicit “architecture of participation”, a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.

In other news, InformationWeek is featuring “The Future of the Web“, a collection of short writeups on “the fundamental changes playing out on the World Wide Web”. Includes the Google-Sun agreement, the Web 2.0 conference, and Yahoo’s role. The last one is particularly interesting. With so much of the focus on Google and its supposed plan for “world domination”, Yahoo’s plans are being somehow overlooked. I’ll probably have more on this shortly.

Well, an article that my colleague Pallavi and I wrote, has been published on IBM’s developerWorks website! It’s titled “A comparison of security subsystems on AIX, Linux, and Solaris”. And it’s even the lead story on dW’s eServer page!

If you develop applications which use PAM or NSS (or even LAM on AIX, for that matter), do read it.

We already live in a world where, thanks to Google, all the information we’ll ever need is available in seconds. The next stage is going to be about answering this question: Now that we have all this information, how do we best leverage it to make a difference to our daily lives? You see, today, all of Google’s magic has been confined to the web browser, to static Web pages. Google’s now trying to drive its expertise to revolutionize every aspect of our communication. The building blocks are already in place, and Google’s already begun the effort of trying to put these together, with potentially astounding results. This essay is a hypothesis of how Google, in the next three to five years, could leverage all the applications and services it offers today, and offer unprecedented integration to get users to live “The Google Lifestyle”: where Google is an omnipresent tool that we will all use.

Why is it Google’s lifestyle that we’ll be leading?
Right. So what makes this company so hard to beat? First, like all great companies, Google happens to be the right idea in the right place at the right time. Today, as it expands beyond its bastion of web search, it’s more likely to succeed than the also-rans, most significantly Netscape. The technology that Google needs to implement all its futuristic ideas, is already there, or will be ready in the very near future. Second, just as Microsoft’s broad strategy is all based upon the personal desktop – which is yesterday’s platform – and all that connects to it, Google, a generation later than Microsoft, is all about the Internet – tomorrow’s platform – and anything that connects to it. And the Internet, based on open standards since its inception, does not care about the platform that a user is running. That is what spells doom for Third-Generation companies, which attempted to tie users down to their own respective platforms. We live in a world of unprecedented advances in communications technology, and the Internet has been the driving force behind this. A company, whose strategy is based solely upon gaining control of this medium, has a pretty serious shot at being able to dictate the future lifestyle.

Google is also using “free” as its mantra for beating the competition, to “devalue Microsoft’s assets”, according to Robert Young. Since Google’s revenue stream is targeted advertising, which seems to be bringing them ample revenue, all of its services will be free offerings. Given the plummeting price and staggering performance increases in compute power, it costs Google a very little to provide the massive amounts of storage and processing power that these services need. The computer, then, becomes just a terminal for viewing and manipulating data. All your data resides away from your computer, on Google’s servers. Already, your email, your buddy list, your pictures, and increasingly your movies, and finally, your documents, will reside on Google’s servers.

Personal communication:
How will Google enhance our communication on the web? Well, Google’s already made forays into the email, messaging, VOIP, blogging and social networking markets. Its personal communications strategy is based on the assumption that if a whole lot of people begin using its products, a bunch of very interesting things are possible:

Email is the centerpiece of our online communication. (For all of those who doubt that, what’s the first piece of e-information that you give to anyone you interact with? Your website/blog address? Your instant messaging ID? Nope, it’s your email address!) So to begin with, Google wants your Gmail address to become your online identity. In fact, Google’s even begun calling your Gmail address as your “Google account”. And you need this account to use a lot of Google’s services. Anyone with a Google account can now use Google’s instant messaging service – bare-bones, no-nonsense service named Google Talk. Also, an account holder can put up a profile on Google’s excellent social networking service, named Orkut. There are other similar social networking services too, but Google’s got this one sewn up – the interface and feature list are just great! Finally, you can start your own blog with Blogger. Blogs are now universally acknowledged as an important factor in shaping the future of journalism.

Now put all of this together. Imagine you receive an email from your friend, notifying you about the date for your high school reunion. You think – well, that’s a very good opportunity for me to hook up with my buddies, and a bit of business networking too. So you’d like to be well prepared for this event. Since everyone who’s invited is on the cc: list in the email, you use Gmail’s integration with Google Talk to see if the sender of the email (who is presumably the organizer) is online. If he/she is, simply call him/her up, (Henceforth, for sake of convenience, “he” is to be read as “he or she”) via Google Talk. Use Gmail’s integration with Orkut to check out the profiles of each of your former schoolmates. Use Google’s advanced search capabilities to search for the kind of people you want to hook up with – for purely personal or business reasons. Catch up with them, using Google Talk. When you meet, you don’t have to spend a lot of awkward moments breaking the ice – you’ve already been in touch! And right from your desk – and all instantaneously – and all for free! That’s the kind of integration we’re talking about! And recall Google Desktop (currently Version 2)? That will be your receptacle to access all of Google’s services – the one-stop Google stop – on your desktop!

In the entertainment industry, Google could start up a service akin to iTunes, perhaps by hooking up with Nokia (or another smartphone provider), and record companies. I expect that single-functionality devices such as the iPod and other MP3 players will eventually die out, to be replaced by mobile phones which have the same kind of audio and storage capability (for instance, the Nokia N91). There would be no need to download music, as it’s done today. You ‘buy’ unlimited rights to listen to a song, but the song itself resides on Google’s servers. You could use Google’s advanced search functionality to quickly find the song you want.

I predict a similar phenomenon with TV. Google could push for a standard that involves plugging “Television” into the internet – via TCP/IP, instead of via the current bunch of satellites, which would enable the company to provide never-before features like customizable program/channel listings, pause/fast forward/rewind for scheduled movies (TiVo, only far better). Video will no longer be simply a one-way streaming medium, but an amazingly creative and vibrant publishing platform. Again, none of this requires data to be stored on your devices – only the applications to use Google’s services.

The Mobile space:
It is now inevitable that the mobile phone will be the computing platform of the future. According to Rajesh Jain, one of India’s most famous technology entrepreneurs, we are now at the threshold of convergence of the “three screens” of our lives – the Television, the computer monitor, and the mobile phone. Nokia’s director of strategic marketing, Olli-Pekka Lintula, recently stated to the Wall Street Journal that “All future phones for enterprises from Nokia will also be Wi-Fi equipped “. Once that happens, mobile phones will truly become part of the Internet – and that could present Google with the opportunity for becoming the world’s largest mobile service provider!

It’d be straightforward to have a small version of Google Desktop’s sidebar for mobile phones. That would be the mobile user’s starting point for all his interactions with the online world. He wouldn’t need to maintain a local “Contacts” list, because his Gmail address book already provides him with that. There’s no need to send an SMS. Since Google Talk is integrated into your phone, you can carry your online “presence” or “status” out into the real world. You can simply verify that the recipie
nt
is not busy currently, and either call him straightaway using Google Talk for mobile, or the offline messaging feature of Google Talk.

Google in May this year bought a company named Dodgeball. Dodgeball is a mix of social networking tools (very similar to Orkut, but much simpler), that use mobile messaging and location awareness to “hook” people physically near each other. Elegant, but tremendously useful. Now, there are two observations here: 1.) the mobile phone actually is the link between the online world and the real world. Carrying all of our online communications paradigms into the real world opens up so many possibilities! 2.) Google could link Dodgeball’s tools, Orkut profiles and its own search capabilities, so that a user could now actually type in a query like – “list all those people in a radius of three blocks, who have an interest in philately”! That is SO neat! Or you could hook it up to your Gmail address book and Google Talk’s presence feature for queries like “list all of my friends who’re no more than a kilometre away, and have nothing to do all evening!”

Imagine – this is possible, and with tools and services that are available today! We live in exciting times!

I end with a quote from a recent article in Time Magazine. If the prospect of such a day – where Search meets the Internet meets the Mobile space – does not thrill you, nothing will!

“You land late in the evening in a city where you know nobody. You did not have time to book a hotel, your luggage has not turned up on the carousel–and the plane’s air conditioning gave you a sore throat. What to do?

With your cell phone, you first Google your suitcase–it has a small implanted chip that responds to radio waves with a GPS locator–and it turns out that your luggage has been deposited 200 yards away in the next terminal. As you walk over, you search for a hotel room; the screen of your cell shows you pictures of several hotels in your price bracket, with views from individual room windows. Your search engine gives you a list of pharmacies that are still open at this hour, and tells you that your favorite blues band will be playing at a festival in the city’s park over the weekend. The engine can search your desktop back home, and it reminds you that a college friend e-mailed you a year ago to say he and his wife were moving to this city (you had forgotten). You decide to invite them to the festival.

What you have just tasted is the future of search. It will change the way humans interface with computers and make today’s methods seem as outmoded as telex machines and brick-size mobile phones.”

Onwards, to the Google Lifestyle!

BusinessWeek has a “Best of the Web” Special Report on what is now commonly termed “Web 2.0“. It does a pretty good job at outlining the exciting “two-way” nature of the coming web. Here are a couple of quotes from the article to give you a good idea of what the future holds:

By the millions, they’re gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They’re producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo’s Flickr.

For a vivid illustration of what can be done,

Some enterprising folks are playing Web deejay. HousingMaps.com injects housing listings from Craigslist into Google Maps, so people can visualize a rental’s location.

And in summary,

Says Siva Kumar, president of the shopping search engine FatLens: “Where one site starts and another ends will increasingly be seamless.”

An important point about Web 2.0 that Rajesh Jain makes:

The Web finally breaks free from the browser. (See Widgets, Web-enabled desktop-like applications, Mobile applications, etc.)

To type in this blog post from my 6670, and i must say that this is a pretty well-constructed application. However, since Blogger introduced the “email to blog” feature, using any other interface to post is becoming kind of redundant.

From my mobile phone! I’ve composed this on the email client on my 6670, then emailed it to my blogger email address. This is simply amazing! Connectivity at its best!

Here it is!

What can I say? This thing has *everything* in it! Except for an FM Radio, that is

Here’s the Nokia India product page. Here’s an extremely detailed review of the 6670 on MobileReview (for God’s sake, they’ve even taken it apart!) The Indian model, though, comes with a 64MB RS-MMC card as opposed to the 32MB that the site mentions.

The Nokia 7610 is the “lifestyle” version of the 6670. It costs a full Rs. 5000 more, and doesn’t offer a single extra feature other than (admittedly) very cool looks. MobileReview has noticed an interesting point about Nokia’s marketing strategy:

Nokia has manufactured similar products not once and that is due to the use of the same platform. Most often the differences concerned one or two functions and design. Nokia 7210 may be considered one of the first experiences, the model is extremely fashionable and then the release of business phone Nokia 6610. Except for the design the devices were as like as two peas in a pod. But the price for Nokia 7210 was always on a high level while 6610 got cheaper dynamically. They accounted on the fact that users who need functionality will choose the business model and those who like the design will pay extra for it. In principle the scheme was right and the company even applied it again for smartphones.

Will have more to say about this phone in future posts – for sure!

A colleague and I were talking about books yesterday when the topic veered to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. She had read the book as part of her school syllabus, but couldn’t quite remember the story. While digging up information about Pygmalion, we came across a description of The Self-fulfilling prophecy, or the Pygmalion Effect. I’ve reproduced part of that writeup here. The part in italics is particularly insightful.

As it is known and taught today in management and education circles, the notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy was conceptualized by Robert Merton a professor of sociology at Columbia University. In a 1957 work called ‘Social Theory and Social Structure‘, Merton said the phenomenon occurs when “a false definition of the situation evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.”
In other words, once an expectation is set, even if it isn’t accurate, we tend to act in ways that are consistent with that expectation. Surprisingly often, the result is that the expectation, as if by magic, comes true.

An ancient myth
Magic certainly was involved in the ancient myth from which the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy takes its other common name. As Ovid told the story in the tenth book of Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion, a prince of Cyprus, sought to create an ivory statue of the ideal woman.
The result which he named Galatea, was so beautiful that Pygmalion fell desperately in love with his own creation. He prayed to the goddess Venus to bring Galatea to life. Venus granted his prayer and the couple lived happily ever after.

A modern update
That’s where the name originated but a better illustration of the “Pygmalion Effect” is George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which Professor Henry Higgins insists that he can take a Cockney flower girl and, with some vigorous training, pass her off as a duchess. He succeeds. But a key point lies in a comment by the trainee, Eliza Doolittle, to Higgins’ friend Pickering:
“You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

The bottom line?
Consciously or not we tip people off as to what our expectations are. We exhibit thousands of cues, some as subtle as the tilting of heads, the raising of eye brows or the dilation of nostrils, but most are much more obvious. And people pick up on those cues.

I was rummaging about my old drafts, when I happened to see this entry dated 14th June 2005. I have no intention of completing this, but it’s amusing to see how I was feeling back then!

Summer in Mumbai

Mumbai’s weather sucks big time. If we were to have a “Sucky Weather” exposition in India, I suspect we’d come in second, beaten to this ignomious title only by the Madrasis. Poor folks. I’ve heard the water situation there is so bad that the only guaranteed supply of water is your own sweat. As an aside, because of this, baths in Chennai are most economical. Start by simply applying soap to your already soaked body. And wait for fresh sweat to wash away the lather. Excellent, I say!

Back to Mumbai. The air is viscous as tar. My skin glistens with a perennial sheath of sweat all over. (That’s another reason why we Mumbaikars out”shine” everyone else). Rivulets of sweat compete with each other on my back in a furious race to my waist.

How do we deal with this? Well, we don’t. You see, ceiling fans on full speed simply whir ineffectively, cutting through the thick air like butter cuts through a knife. Perhaps those with air-conditioning might be slightly better off – but then they probably feel worse whenever they step out! In places where the heat is severe but dry, say Nagpur, you can always soak sheets in water and hang them up to cool things down (and that works a lot better than air-conditioning, by the way) Would that work in Mumbai? Of course not! The air is is so humid; you could hang dry sheets up and find them soaked in water. The average Mumbaikar changes his clothes six times a day since damp, sweaty clothes are no fun to wear. This is most unfortunate since clothes take longer to dry too. The urge to discard clothing altogether and roam about stark naked is strong. Scary. I am tempted several times to take a nice cold bath, but the tragedy is that the moment you step out of the bathroom, you’re drenched in sweat – again – before you can say “fresh as a daisy”!

Well, I’ve made it to the print medium!

My article titled “Winning where Netscape failed”, on Google’s intermediate-term product strategy, is a Guest Column in the September 26th issue of Businessworld!

If you’d like to read it online, the URL is http://www.businessworldindia.com/SEP2605/column01.asp (Free registration required).

Feedback’ll be appreciated!