Simply Shankar

Hillary, please spare us the theatrics. We don’t buy the crocodile tears and sudden love for young people. And to the people of New Hampshire that actually fell for the theatrics and voted for Hillary - shame on you!

Maureen Dowd’s excellent piece in today’s NY Times sums Hillary’s little stunt in New Hampshire very nicely.

People, we have a very unique opportunity to make history in America. We have a presidential candidate Barack Obama who truly reflects today’s America - a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic melting pot where everyone is free to pursue their own dreams. By electing Obama to the presidency, we can send a strong message to the world and in one fell swoop regain our rightful standing and respect in the global community.

Obama is intelligent and articulate. He inspires and energizes like a true leader should. I have no doubt he will continue to attract the best minds in our nation to come together and solve the many problems that confront us. Nobody else in the current crop of candidates on either side comes even close to offering the sort of promise Obama does. They are all a bunch of veterans that are entrenched in the status quo.

My vote is definitely for Obama.

Bill, if you’re reading this, you know who you really want to vote for

Sometime back, I had written about how Web 2.0 was really about a fundamental shift in business models. It seems like a shift is underway in the Music business. This post on Warner Music’s woes highlights the symptoms of what is really taking place.

Historically, there have been four actors involved in the Music business - the artist, the studio, the distributor and the customer. Clearly, the artist and the customer are indispensable. However, the studio and the distributor are increasingly threatened - the former more than the latter.
Studios used to play an important role in the pre-web/immature web world because their employees actively sought out artists with good talent, cultivated and promoted these artists and ensured the success of these artists. They were really adding value - it was simply not feasible for either the customers or the artists to easily find each other. Of course, over time this gate keeping role translated to a lot of power for the Studios - they were able to promote artists irrespective of the level of talent, leading to poor choices for customers and poor deals for artists.

With the rising maturity of the web, there is really no need for any of the function Studios play. Artists can easily get exposure and the quality of their talent can be vetted by the web community at large. Once established, artists can even directly hawk their wares to their customers (like the Radiohead example in the blog post I cited above). The music industry now operates purely on meritocratic principles.

The mature web also brings a whole new distribution model to music - digital downloads. Outlets like iTunes and Amazon have displaced distributors relying on selling physical media.

Ultimately, I see the emergence of a few large music marketplaces that bring artists (especially those trying to establish themselves) and customers together. These marketplaces would be very efficient in bringing the best music at the best prices to customers and ensuring just rewards for talent.

Over the next few years we should witness a tussle between Studios and Distributors to establish themselves as one of these marketplaces. On the one hand, Studios have relationships with artists (not sure if these are very strong relationships) and on the other Distributors have relationships with customers. I would myself bet good money on the distributors winning this one - they seem to have a much stronger hand …

Well, it’s no surprise to those of us that have recently switched to the Mac that Apple blew past its forecasts yesterday. Sales of the Mac have nearly doubled in the last year. Pundits appear mystified by this phenomenon and are trying to come up with all sorts of convoluted explanations like in this post on CNET.

To me, it’s plain and simple - frustration with Windows has reached the proverbial tipping point and the best alternative on the market is the Mac …

About three months ago, after going through yet another uphill battle with Windows on my laptop - I finally decided to call it quits and switch to a Mac with OS X. Since then, I have been surprised to hear I am not alone. Several people have told me they have switched to the Mac recently because of increasing flakiness with Windows.

It seems like the very reasons which have made Windows and the PC platform such a runaway success are now haunting them. The vast ecosystem that exists around them have clearly led to a lot of innovative stuff being developed, but there is a huge combinatorial explosion that causes pretty much every machine to have its own unique configuration of software and hardware similar to an individual’s fingerprint or DNA. The trouble is that most of these configurations have never been tested and are therefore highly fragile and failure prone.

It seems like Linux on the desktop will likely suffer the same fate.

At least in the short term, the Mac being a somewhat closed system seems to help. In the three months I’ve owned mine, I’ve had to do one update and subsequent reboot which is pretty amazing given I was at about two reboots a day with Windows!

I hope for my own sake that the Mac does not become too successful - shhhh, don’t tell anyone you saw this

I thought I liked John Edwards until I just read this story on CNN. Here he is, talking about Americans being 4% of the population and generating 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases; advocating we not drive SUVs and so on. Turns out the dude lives in a 28,000 sq ft home! Talk about over consumption by any stretch of the imagination for a family of 5 people. When someone asked him about this - his defense is basically that he earned it - what a bloody hypocrite!

That does it for me - definitely not someone I’m wasting my time listening to …

If you’re a programmer type like me and have tried your hand at CSS, it’s very likely you’ve struggled like I have to understand how CSS really works. As I programmer, I’m used to writing code while visualizing in my head what the outcome of running the code is going to be (ignoring all those nasty bugs of course ). However, with CSS, I was never able to get the feeling that I knew exactly what was going to happen when a page rendered. All the books I read until recently did not really help me - it seemed like the authors of the books were also as confused as I was as to how things exactly worked. The tone of the books was - “if you are looking for X, here is the CSS that does it”; well if you are not looking for X, tough luck

All in all, CSS was a bit of a dark art until I recently read CSS : The Missing Manual.

This is an outstanding CSS book! It really explains how things really work with CSS. After reading the book, I’ve actually been able to write CSS and have the page turn out as I visualized in my head. The book is well worth the money just for the chapter on page layouts - very well explained. Now if only I could pick some decent colors and fonts to go with all those cool layouts …

Been missing from action the past couple of months due to increased responsibilities at work and my dysfunctional organization skills

Hopefully I’ve gotten my act together now and can spend more time on my blog …

I’m just back from spending over a month in Bangalore, India working with my colleagues based there. It has been a very long time since I spent this much time in India and it was a wonderful opportunity for me to really observe and understand what is going on with the Indian economy. I will try to capture some of my key observations in posts over the next few weeks.

Overall, I must say that I am totally amazed at the level of activity and energy I saw - India is definitely a happenin’ place. Very different from the India I left over 16 years ago.

Indians in their twenties who have either recently graduated or are about to graduate from college are the most confident bunch of people I have seen in a long time. They really feel like the world is theirs for the taking and are not shy of putting in the effort to take it. What is very interesting to observe is that some of the older folks in the work force - those that have been working for over a decade in the Indian industry and are doing extremely well economically are also the least risk taking. On the other hand,  folks fresh out of college are jumping straight into launching their own ventures!!

All is not quite so rosy - the infrastructure in India is pretty poor. The roads in all major cities are totally clogged, there are issues with the water supply and frequent power cuts. Pretty much anyone who can afford it spends the money to insulate themselves from these problems. It may take time and energy to navigate the crowded streets, but one’s personal chauffeur takes on the stress while they kickback and chill in their air conditioned car. Clean water may be a un-affordable luxury for common folks but for those who can pay, it can be delivered home in sterile bottles.  Sultry days and nights without power are only for those who cannot afford a generator or an UPS system to ride out the power cuts. Of course, lot of these workarounds add more problems like pollution, smog and traffic - but not many people are thinking about these long term consequences - they’re just enjoying their newfound wealth and status …

If you’re like me and most other technology/professional workers, you’ve been using some version of Microsoft Windows for some time now. And it is also likely you’ve experienced countless blue screens, freezes and reboots courtesy Microsoft through this period.

Last night, while waiting for a reboot to complete after my screen froze for the millionth time, I decided to do some calculations on the economic loss being caused by Microsoft. Here is what I came up with:

• 4 crashes/week @ 15 minutes lost/crash (reboot, recovery of context, lost data) = 1 hour lost/week
• 12 years of using Windows results in 624 hours lost (I was fortunately in grad school using Unix before then)
• Using an average wage of $60 per hour results in $37,440 lost

I’m purposely being very conservative above with all the numbers - besides the system crashes, there are the umpteen update related reboots and instabilities - security patch du jour, network on the blink, program suddenly stops working, etc.. Furthermore, I have suffered through 3-4 major system crashes (registry corrupted, etc.) over this period. Let’s say all this contributed another 125 hours or $7,500 lost. This gives us a grand total of about $45,000 lost over 12 years or about $4,000 per year. Wow!

Of course, some people will likely make the argument that Windows has enabled a plethora of technology over the years that have all greatly enhanced productivity; however, I will not buy this argument for even one second, these new technologies would have been created anyway and if anything, Microsoft has probably slowed down the rate and pace of innovation with its monopolistic and predatory practices.

I wonder if corporations have done this type of math - a large corporation with tens of thousands of employees is looking at tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity. If one sums up the effect across global corporations, it probably adds up to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars - a size-able chunk of the global economy.

Amazing what an effect having a stable alternative to Windows could have on the global economy. Desktop Linux - where art thou ?

Spent the morning and part of the afternoon at Google Developer Day.

Google sure knows how to throw a party! Plenty of free food and drinks, a pool table, bean bags - you get the picture

On a more serious note, they made several new product announcements - Google Gears, Google Mashup Editor and a new version of Google Web Toolkit.

Gears is an open source project (BSD license) done in partnership with Adobe’s Apollo. Gears has three components to it - a database (SQLite)  for offline data storage/access, a local server for storing and serving pages/scripts while offline and a utility to create worker thread pools (for any heavy computes on the client - not sure a lot of people are going to need this unless they are doing serious analytics - I’m sure Google is planning some use for it). Google Reader is the first Google app to be Gears enabled - the guy demoing the app wanted to show how it works when disconnected and had a lot of trouble getting off the network! (he unplugged his network cable and his wireless came on). I think this is really a sign of things to come. I personally believe that putting a lot of effort in to support disconnected access is a temporary thing and a likely waste of resources. I believe that thinking of interesting possibilities in a continuously connected world is more worthwhile …

Google Mashup Editor was not so impressive - at least with the short demo I saw. To be fair, I should check it out before spouting, but hey, that hasn’t stopped me before :-)  Seemed like a bunch of HTML/XML hacking required - lots of sleight of hand involved in the demo to make it look easy - the guy clicked on links titled step 1/2/3 and voila! more HTML/XML appeared in the editor pane …

I’ve never been a real fan of Google Web Toolkit. I tried it sometime last year and it sucked! There was a lot of stupidity with carefully naming interfaces/classes/methods a certain way to make sure everything linedup right. The programming model mimicked the classic GUI development model which is pretty outdated - I like using markup for describing UIs - to me its the single best thing about XML. Looks like a million people checked it out over the past year -  no mention of actual uses …

In the afternoon, there was a very interesting talk about Google’s compute infrastructure. Google apparently uses the cheapest hardware it can lay its hands on and uses lots and lots of it. They have several layers of abstraction to make it easy for their programmers to create applications over this massive hardware infrastructure. They seem to have optimized for a class of computing problems - very large scale query/analysis on entities that are essentially bags of attributes. GFS is their lowest level distributed storage engine. BigTable provides a SQL-like abstraction over GFS. MapReduce allows programmers to collect attributes of interest from a collection of entities in the first phase (Map) and then do analysis on the values of the attributes in a second phase (Reduce).

Attendance was quite heavy - 1500 at the San Jose Convention Center venue and 5000 worldwide. I bailed early, the event was scheduled to go on until late in the evening, ending with a dinner at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. I’m sure the event will be bigger next year with invited talks as well (this year was Google only). Looking forward to it …

The other day, I was ordering some diapers from Amazon for my son and I was asked if I wanted to “subscribe and save”. Found out if I set up a repeating schedule for the delivery of diapers, I get a 15% discount. Seemed like a really good deal - besides a price cut, I don’t have to deal with remembering to order every ever so often and Amazon gets all my diaper business.

When talking to my brother about it, he brought up a really good point - what Amazon has done here is to extend the supply chain all the way to me, the end-customer. They’ve gotten to the ultimate level in efficiency! I guess we will be seeing more and more of this type of personalized supply chain in a Web 2.0 world. Be pretty cool if this happened with other aspects of our household consumption - especially with groceries like Milk, Bread and stuff - I definitely do not enjoy making those late night trips to the store …