Logic2Go

It’s still early morning, as I’m sitting for tea (and biscuits, of course) and the cook/cleaner is cleaning the house.

Thanks to being close to St. Josephs (Indians) and Cottons, we are within hearing distance of the morning assembly.
As usual, they start the music for the national anthem, and as usual, I stand up to sing it.
And then, from the corner of my eye, I see the cook standing at attention too and singing it.
No one asked him. No one asked me.

Democracy is a wonderful thing. Especially when we choose it out of our own free will.

I remember dozens of term papers, final essays and project reports I had to write and work on during high school and college.

They took up lots of hours, editing, formatting and re-proofing. Making sure you adhere to the prescribed formats (seriously, if it asked for double-spacing and you did it differently, you lost some valuable % marks)

Then, you had to ensure it was bound correctly (spiral for some professors, book-style for others).

All this, was usually done till late in the evening or till dawn of the morning it was due for submission.

Finally, of course, if it wasn’t submitted on-time, you ended up with having all this hardwork not being accepted at all.

Today, years after graduating, I still have my own version of this. And they are called TENDERS.

Unfrackingly similar in terms of requirements (each page has to be signed, with company seal AND full name and phone number handwritten- on a 170 page document)!!!

The same your-life-hangs-in-the-balance paper.
The college ones helped you graduate.
The tenders help you survive as a company.

The more things change, the more they remain the same (quoted/translated from Karr’s French original)

Airtel Marketing has some really cheap and nasty tricks up their sleeve …

Here are a few I have been targeted with recently:

1) They call you from an out-of-town landline number specifically when you are travelling and paying roaming charges per minute for incoming.

They make this call specifically to Airtel mobile customers only as they know when an Airtel mobile is “roaming”

2) They give you a missed call.
Thats it. A missed call from a generic landline number.

And, of course, etiquette demands that you return the call.
You get a marketing person at the other end of the call, that you are paying for!!!

3) A non-marketing issue, but an Airtel issue, none-the-less. Their “toll free” support number 121 only works fully from your hometown. Sure, you can call this number when travelling, but you cannot get help on lots of issues. For that, you need to call 121 when you are in your home calling area only.

Airtel marketing sucks big time!

For a very long time, many people complained about the lame-brained approach of Microsoft to reduce a full-sized desktop OS and squeeze it onto Pocket PC’s and call it, well, Pocket PC!

Apple now takes an OS designed for a phone and tries to magnify it to fit a larger tablet/desktop?

Seriously?!

So far, after reading the reviews on various websites, the only thing I see going for the iPad is the existing Apple AppStore and the ability to run existing iPhone applications.

Singlehandedly, that is the one ability of the iPad that will give it a chance to become the mass-market tablet device over the next few years.

Please give me a regular dose of the iPhone + Windows 7 laptop to take care of both sides of the equation (Work & Fun).

I wonder how long i will take for someone to port Android OS or Chrome OS onto the iPad and take things up a notch.

—————–

Also, while on the topic, I think the iPad is going to hurt Apple’s iPhone sales a lot and allow the competitors another chance.

Just like the Halo effect from one successful product helps push other products from the same company, the reverse effect from the iPad may affect sales of the iPhone.

Now, Apple is just another company that has many hits and atleast one miss.

There was a pleasant surprise when I started using Microsoft CRM 4.0 last month.

Indian companies can actually use the support for lakh and crore instead of millions and billions that they are forced to use with other software packages.

Indian style: 12,34,56,789
(That is 12 crores, 34 lakhs, 56 thousands and 7 hundreds…)

European style: 123,456,789
(That is 123 million, 456 thousands and 7 hundreds…)

This is very cool and shows Microsoft is working hard to ensure they get the localization right. Way to go, M$!!!

Are you seriously kidding me, Airtel?

Sorry. Some background to this outburst.
Indian mobile operators have only recently figured out how to give users access to technology that allows callers to leave a voicemail in-case the called-person is busy or unreachable. So far so good.

Lets see how this works in real-life?
If you ever call an Airtel mobile number and get the voicemail prompt, you are requested  “To leave a Voicemail, dial * followed by the 10 digit mobile number of the person you are trying to call”

Didn’t I just DIAL this number to make the call in the first place? Doesn’t Airtel know the number they just tried to connect me to? Are their systems so disjoined that during the same phone call, I need to enter the number again?! Do they want me to hold the call, dig through the phonebook, lookup the number, then type it in? All of this DURING the call to that very same number?

Airtel Mobile has a bad, sad, stupid and terrible sense of customer service.

So, I got back to BLR airport last evening, and the moment you get out of baggage collection, you are flooded with large banners advertising Tata’s new GSM service in partnership with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo.

The good:
I like Tata, they are decent to their clients.
I’ve heard good things about NTT for years.

The bad:
Tata’s mobile experience in India is limited to CDMA. Not GSM.
NTT’s entire business model is non-GSM.

The ugly:
I walk into a Tata Indicom “company owned store” to find out more.
They say Tata’s GSM service info. is only available at normal retail outlets. Non-Tata branded stores.

Seri-fracking-ously. So I am wrong in my assumption that Tata’s new GSM service will be available for purchase at a Tata Indicom store that already sells their CDMA service?

Now I’m scared. Maybe I should just goto an Airtel store and be safe!

I recently had to format my laptop because I was using a beta version of Windows 7, which expired.

And this happened on day 2 of a 11 day trip. Yes, bhagwan help me, I know.

However, the logic I follow with laptops or desktops is that I keep a separate partition on the hard drive with all my personal data, documents, device drivers, setup for basic utilities (anti-virus, firefox, SSH, etc) just in case of random formats and OS reinstalls and such. Being the genius that I am, I obviously thought about backing up my Outlook emails to this second drive also. However, somewhere, somehow, during the backup, I only asked Outlook to backup the main inbox. Not the sub-folders under it that I use to actually store my old mails (I am anally organised that way, ask anyone who’s Start Menu and Windows Desktop I’ve had the chance to clean up!!!)

However, I only found this out AFTER i had formatted my laptop (and reinstalled Windows (and reinstalled Outlook (and tried to restore the backed-up emails))).

So, basically, for the last two weeks, I’ve been running on emails from only the last two months, that I could download from the server again. It is a  bloody nightmare for someone like me who has to often refer emails months and quarters old.

Today, I get back to Bangalore, turn on my portable hard-drive and guess what I see? A completely functional backup from a day before flying out. I had forgotten that I habitually backup my laptop a day before leaving for any trip.

You know you are a fanatic back-upper when you remember to actually backup even when you forget that you had back-upped.
Muscle memory, boys. Muscle memory!
Total damage: 0 lost emails.

Jai ho!

Job cuts? Pink slips? Layoffs?

Firing an employee is never easy for the owner of a company. It doesn’t matter how the media portrays the evil business owners. What you read may be true very very few times. In cases where the business owner was backed into a corner where it was either fire a few and save the rest, or take a risk and gamble away every single employee.

Before you ask, no. I am not defending a GM, or even a Lehman. Definitely not an Enron.

I’m not talking of nameless, faceless, management types who know excel and little else. I’m defending the actual entrepreneurs. The men and women who have worked from the ground up and built a living, breathing, wonderful organisation.
A Company.
A Business.
A Store.
A Factory.
An Office.

A few weeks ago, I fired an employee.
Whatever be the reason.
Whoever be at fault.
It is not easy at all.

Maybe it’s not the best thing to do. No one has 20/20 hindsight. Maybe the person you fire tomorrow, given the right training, could have been employee of the year in a few years’ time. That is second guessing. That is being unfair to the person who had to make the decision.

When it comes down to it, the business owner has to decide. He doesn’t get points for putting it to vote.

It’s been a few weeks now. And I still think of what was done. What may have not been done. But thats not how businesses are run.

No turning back the clock.
Got to wake up tomorrow.
More customers to visit.
More sales to close.
A company to grow.

Destruction is so easy.
It takes balls to construct.

So I get to play with Surabhi’s new Sony eReader and the first thing I want to do it take it out of the protective casing and walk around the office running diagnostics on random systems and using the PADD in my hand as a portable display device.

Of course it’s all in my mind and the people in the office must have started looking for better jobs where the boss isn’t a half-retarded geek. But what the hell. There have GOT to be some benefits to being boss!