Fred's online thoughts. What you can expect: Opinions on the Outsourced Product Development Business, technology in general and from time to time food! I have lots opinions on our great Canadian politicians, but you will have to pay me a beer when we get to meet to hear about them!
Yesterday I watched Idiocracy. It's not the greatest film ever and far from it. It does touch on some important points in its own ways. Things like science enrollment problems and the need we seem to have to butcher our spoken language to be cool. After seeing this movie - I don't look at our politicians the same way - I'm sure you won't either.
When I'm on the road I tend to hang out where there is an internet connection. There is an indisputable fact now - those heads people are using plugged into their computers are not just for listening to music anymore. They are using their VoIP softclient to talk back home or the office. Why would i pay through the nose to make a roaming phone call across the world - when I have this mostly free internet connection right now. It just hit me how much the communication medium is changing. You're in the thick of it day in day out, but seeing it at work is another thing.
The human factor in gadget, News.com: "'Design is starting to change who succeeds and who fails,' said Alonso Vera, a senior research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center who's also a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. This is another great validation of the business model we're putting in place at Macadamian. Putting the product one is developing in the context of the user, is more than having developers thinking like users. More and more not only users will not tolerate mediocrity, but share holders of companies are impatient for return on their investment. Did you ever ask yourself how much money you would pay any kind of products if the company you're buying it from didn't fail so many times with its other R&D investments. It would just be much much cheaper believe me. This is where the concept of reducing the failure rate borrowed from the Pharma industry comes into play in other industries as well. Companies should not only companies be looking at reducing the cost of developing the products, but they should bet the resources to create new ones on the right products. How so? Companies should be aiming at creating successful products successfully. This is where companies, or Innovation partners like Macadamian, with strong User Experience practice will get the competition to bite the dust. Consumers of the products of such companies will know that they will have little ramp up before becoming productive, be effective using them, task oriented vs features oriented. Companies producing such products will reduce the customer adoption curve, they will reduce their support cost, and they will sell more.
IT Business: "Global sourcing will be the new delivery model, said Bob Welch, IDC group vice-president and general manager of worldwide services. He was speaking at a session called “The coming reversal of offshore delivery: Are the critics right?” at the National Association of Software and Services Companies conference, NASSCOM 2007. NASSCOM is the Indian counterpart to ITAC or CATA in Canada." This is the conference I was at last week. I find this article interesting because it goes right in the direction I think makes sense. It makes sense for Macadamian ofcourse, but it makes much more sense for the potential consumers of outsourced services. There is more to the IT supply chain or R&D supply chain in Macadamian's case than low level work, where the buyer strictly focus on the hourly rate. The supply chain requires an eco-system of vendors to address all the situations, and an offshore model only goes so far. We've been talking about Global Delivery at Macadamian for quite some time and to see a canadian publication picking up on it is very refreshing.
No it's not because I have started working at nights, or that my little one is keeping me awake that I'm posting at odd hours these days as some of people have suggested to me by e-mail. I've been in India at Nasscom conference, and sticking around to meet our team here as well over the weekend, then out in Delhi to meet more companies. India is the land of IT entrepreneurs, competition for differentiation here is very tough. On the other hand the rest of the world is so hungry for IT man power that at the end of the day - they can just resort to saying we do IT and people listen!
A sign that we haven't seen nothing yet and that the big companies established today, may not be the ones established tomorrow. For the last 100years we have been innovating for a population of 1B - now you have companies innovating for the other 5B market out there. Initial results out of this engineering 100$ computer, 15$ cel phone, 2500$ cars, the cost structure required to crank out such product requires to be elsewhere than NA. The moral of the story as the saying goes - whether you're the Gazelle or the jaguar if you want to make it - you have to turn on a dime and run very fast!
I read yesterday that Apple and Disney are looking at using Google Docs and Spreasheets to replace office. Is it me or this is never going to work? Even though I barely only use 20% of Excel's fcty, Google apps still don't cover the 20% I need. I would pay big money to see the finance dep of Apple pulling their hair out over Google Spreadsheet.
There are big differences between the two. To us it's about delivering a project to meet a market window for our customers, we're flexible, we adapt, we jump right in! To them it is about long term engagements where they are part of the team, or team extension, with the least amount of selling as possible. I think this is explained by geography - the further away one is the less churn one can deal with to be profitable, stability is key. The closer to the client one is the more open and flexible, adaptive the day to day reality imposes on us. So we are what we are because of geography, but in addition to that there is a big variable one needs to keep in mind - capacity. The reason why companies that are global can and will be more successful in the PDO business is they can look for larger engagements. They have the capacity to do so when they access the global talent pool - companies that are strictly North American based are caught with a diminishing, aging and more expensive engineering population. PDO companies strictly NA based are going to specialize and become marginalized, companies that are strictly India based will not be part of the Innovation cycle of a product, and cut themselves out of great opportunities - successful companies must be Global, and it means more than sales presence in NA, it also means strong several strong back ends in emerging markets.
There is this great panel on PDO, two companies in our space are talking about their challenges, and two companies using PDO companies are talking about their own challenges. I learned quite a bit. At one point I realized this whole discussion was focussing on India and China. In my mind there are other centers, other avenues to get PDO work done, so I ask the question what about other destinations? Then the Gordon Brooks - CEO of Symphony answers that he doesn't see anything on his radar than India and China, no other countries have the scale, and wraps up saying discarding nearshoring by saying that Canada we're 24M in population and we're all lumberjacks. Up until now he has been saying some pretty good stuff, that although I didn't agree with all of it, I could see where he was coming from. That crack about Canada was meant to be funny - anyhow this is how the audience took it. After the session I went and introduced myself as one of the 33M lumberjacks in canada, telling him I re-oriented early from lumberjack to computers to the great dismay of my father!
I use outlook day in day out - I setup meetings, and tasks all the time. One thing that was really annoying me was the due date field, I could never figure out until this morning how I could get by without using the mouse. It's probably due to number of years of programming - but the keyboard is always faster than the mouse. So this morning I finally clued in the due date field is free form, I don't have to use the mouse wouhoou! I feel pretty bad for not thinking of it earlier now.
I was reading that this year's superbowl is the first one to be declared carbon free. For the last 14years the NFL has had an environmental director, and this year, they bought enough CO2 credits to declare the event CO2 free. This is pretty impressive for an event of this size. I would like to understand more, but the credits bought cover 2weeks prior to the event - does this mean it includes an evaluation of all CO2 that such activity would put out- like taking ones SUV to go to the game etc... Also how much are CO2 credits anyway, is this a sizable investment they made or a pr coup. Anyhow I've always been conscious the environment, but never actively doing things to save, or minimizing my impact, aside from recycling, and printing double sided! With all the press going on about being Green I feel I need to do more. I will look more into it as to what it would mean for our company to be environment friendly, and what investments it would mean, then as a second step what could we do to improve the situation.
