Everyday in corporate meetings we have to sit through “mindless”, “unintelligible”, and gibberish-laden presentations. Most of the times, it’s only after first 10-15 slides the actual “meat” of the presentation comes out — if not it’s covered with buzz words, marketing-speak and what not to sift through.
Genentech, a company which symbolizes itself as a “beater” of corporate bureaucracy and CYA (“cover-your-ass”) culture, has a game called gBuzz Bingo. To play:
1. An employee downloads a bingo card from the intranet. The bingo card features terms like “actionable”, “traction”, “value-added”, “win-win”, “strategy”, etc
2. The card is then taken to a meeting where a not so positive outcome is expected.
3. The boxes next to the words are checked as these words are uttered.
4. First to complete these words win — The player shouts out “gBuzz!” and is declared the winner, effectively silencing the bull-shit being discoursed.
On the side, sometimes I attend meetings where a lot of swearing and finger pointing happens — Here are my favorite phrases to be checked off a) “Where are the dates?” b) “Are you sure?” (1 point for every 3 utterances) c) “Is the project on track?” (1 point for every 3 utterances) d) “I don’t think you got it covered.” etc. etc. There are more. Shout it out and for repeat cases, gift a box of detergent soap to the person next Christmas.
Keeping a meaning in daily meetings: How Genentech does it everyday
February 12th, 2006Look Ma Delete Buttons!
January 27th, 2006Google finally ships the supply of delete buttons for GMail.
Though, I had the button unoffically for a long time, thanks to the greasemonkey script, it was a brash move in the first place to not have a delete button — I mean it does not make sense to archive that expired 10% discount coupon.
What’s next? Read receipts for web e-mails? Guess, why nobody is doing that feature…
Single character email addresses at Google: The new status symbol?
January 1st, 2006a@google.com, b@google.com, … How cool? I haven’t seen any company giving out such short e-mail address to their employees. It’s nothing less than a prized possession of a 2-character domain name.
Who is getting these e-mail addresses at Google? You have to be an inventor of some programming language or a computer science theorist to get one; Robert Pike has one. (Rob has a famous Unix Programming text book to his credit, one of the computer engineering bibles)
So far, b, c, e, f, g, h, i, j, k and r have been confirmed to be taken; at least, that’s what my puny little investigation has inferred, for others, I’m waiting for my new year greetings to be reciprocated.
How did I get here? Well, I was looking for some UTF-8 conversion routines when I landed onto Ken Thompson‘s page, and somehow got pushed around onto Rob’s page.
Investigative journalism? Not a bad bullet item for new year’s resolution.
Cannibalize your Consumer Software Business before Google cannibalizes it
December 7th, 2005Google is righteously attacking Microsoft on it’s own turf with ‘Software as a Service’. Today, it’s Desktop Search, Google Base, etc. Tomorrow it’s going to be Excel on the Web, PowerPoint, Word, etc. The “standalone” consumer software esp. productivity applications between the boxed retail price ranges of $100-$300 are a solid target.
Office apps are prone to attack because a normal user of Microsoft Office does not use more than 80% of the features (which furthermore justifies a price-point of $20-$40 per year for all you can eat productivity apps. buffet). It’s a serious challenge for Microsoft. The onslaught is internal vs. external — on one side Google is spreading the “FUD” (a la Microsoft’s yesteryears tactics against ISVs) and on the other the steady stream of Microsoft Office’s revenue which is just shy of $11 billion. A bulk of this money comes from the enterprise licenses and MSDN subscriptions.
The survival strategy for Microsoft should be a combination of one or more of the following:
1. Offer a single user Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) license for $50 bucks or less.
2. Have a supplanted offline/online version which allows users to install components on demand — it must be easy to segregate the components used by power users and average users.
3. Make the basic Microsoft Office applications an integral part of the Operating System (remember WordPad vs. Notepad?)
4. Have more than just the basic templates for Word, Excel, PowerPoint — Deliver things like spreadsheets which helps small businesses with their finances, taxes and day-to-day accounting (Small business data predominantly lives in Excel). Charge them a small fee for support on using these spreadsheets.
5. Charge money for support and not for software. Remember, smart web-hosting companies won the “commoditization” war by focusing on support and nothing else.
However hard Google or anybody tries (Google just signed a contract with Sun regarding OpenOffice); cracking the Enterprise market would be difficult. Microsoft must keep delivering there. Very few are going to use a free service, however fantastic it might be. E-mail as a free service is a different beast — it’s used for personal stuff. And yeah, nothing needs to be done now — Only if the “FUD” becomes a threatening reality.
Not just MS Office, the same stragey applies to pretty much all the consumer software applications which fall in that range and have an attractive revenue stream.
Happily, I work for none of these two companies!
13 Good Reasons to Switch to FireFox
November 20th, 2005This Web site is on a crusade to destroy the prowess of Internet Explorer. This guy needs to “beta” IE7 to make a fair assumption — The upcoming release of new IE browser has the necessary ingredients to challenge FireFox, viz. Tabbed Browsing, Security enhancements, RSS reader, built-in pop-up blocker, etc. etc. I like Firefox ‘coz of Greasemonkey, Javascript Shell, DOM Inspector, Platypus and plethora of other handy development tools. Top most is Firefox’s DOM Level 2 & CSS compatibility matrix, on which IE has mostly sucked so far. The worse is IE’s event handling model, which probably is getting a facelift with IE7. The IE7 development team has also promised to ease the pain of managing browser compatibility with IE7 (What about IE 5.5/6.0!?!)
It’s truly amazing that the IE7 team has been listening to all the feedback the blogging community is feeding them. They are even working on a Firefox plugin for Windows Vista! Microsoft has realized that there is a much better way to win.
… But, then there is Flock to challenge both IE 7 and Firefox.
This entry composed on Firefox/1.0.4
It
November 6th, 2005Joe Kraus continues to write about his experience at JotSpot. According to him — to get from idea to launch and up and running is 30X cheaper than what it was 10 years ago.
Why?
* Hardware is 100X cheaper
* Infrastructure software is free:LAMP stack, stable Linux distros, tools, Java app. servers, etc.
* Access to cheap on-demand labor markets
More people would be jumping on the bandwagon, trying to boot strap on their own, which would lead to better valuations in front of investors, VCs.
On a different note, it would be easier to try out an idea for less than $10,000. Doesn’t work? Get the soap box and move-on to the next one.
Where’s my cauldron? Need to continue stirrin’ the ingredients.
It
November 6th, 2005Joe Kraus continues to write about his experience at JotSpot. According to him — to get from idea to launch and up and running is 30X cheaper than what it was 10 years ago.
Why?
* Hardware is 100X cheaper
* Infrastructure software is free:LAMP stack, stable Linux distros, tools, Java app. servers, etc.
* Access to cheap on-demand labor markets
More people would be jumping on the bandwagon, trying to boot strap on their own, which would lead to better valuations in front of investors, VCs.
On a different note, it would be easier to try out an idea for less than $10,000. Doesn’t work? Get the soap box and move-on to the next one.
Where’s my cauldron? Need to continue stirrin’ the ingredients.
Diwali at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. : Will the President attend this time?
October 31st, 2005The press is speculating whether President Bush will snub the Indian-American community again by avoding the Diwali celebrations at the White House. Last year, he was at the White House but did not attend the festival. Looks like it will be the same this year. In a White House press briefing on Oct. 25th (among other pressing issues like Scooter Libbey, Karl Rove, and an ABC reporter’s scathing remarks against the reputation of the White House PR podium), somebody asked about whether the President is going to attend the Diwali celebrations:
Q Second question is on the — now again, most of Indian-American community thankful to the President for initiating — or did initiate the Diwali Festival of Lights at the White House. Now it will be next Wednesday, November 1st, when millions across India and America will — Indians will be celebrating the festival around the globe, including at the White House here. What they are saying in the Indian American community, really, just like President initiates prayers with other groups here in the White House, like Muslims and Jews, and all that, that they are requesting him, please, to the President, this time, that if he can take a few moments and be there at part of the White House Festival of Lights on Wednesday, November 1st.
MR. McCLELLAN: On Wednesday, November 1st? Well, we’ll update you on the President’s schedule later this week.
Obviously, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary was not aware. Looks like it will be a miss again. President Bush initiated the first ever Diwali in the White House in 2003. He did not attend in person, but Karl Rove lighted the lamp and sought blessings from Goddess Laxmi.
Wanna know more about Diwali, check out the Wikipedia entry.
Diwali at the Golden temple in Amritsar, India
The New Software Model
October 28th, 2005Adam Bosworth presented at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user conference. Here’s what he proposes as the new software model:
- Run like mad
- Try things out, watch, learn
- Iterate
- Learn from the customers in real-time
- Focus on Intelligent reaction and not intelligent design
- Real apps, API’s follow
In simple English — Run like mad (a la Andy Grove’s “Only The Paranoid Survives”?), do Beta products; iterate/fix bugs/get feedback. Launch it if people like it, otherwise move on. Product is successful? Release APIs and let people invent their own products on top of it.
Adam’s post is here.
Google Numbers Trivia as compiled by John Batelle
October 27th, 2005| Average revenue per search (any kind of search, not just paid) | 12 cents. It was around a dime in late 04 |
| Avg. revenue per searcher | $7 |
| Avg. revenue per sponsored click | 62 cents |
| Estimated profits for Google in 06 | Roughly $4 billion (Bear Stearns) (which is about the same as their forecasted annual revenues this year) |
| Revenue growth of Google year to year | 96% Of Yahoo: 42% |
| Estimated revenue growth for next year for Google (Bear) | 61% For the average of eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon: 29% |
| Price target for GOOG (Piper) | $445 |
| Also: Number of employees added in the past year | Nearly 2000 |
| Amount spent on capex, 05 (estimate) | $800 million. Amount MSFT is estimated to spend: $810 million |