indians-still-do-it-cheapest dept.



Recent figures published in the Economist shows India still is the most attractive outsourcing destination. Not surprisingly, it does well on all counts -- cost, skills and business environment.

rupee-shining dept.

The Indian rupee has quietly made its way into the 39s against the Dollar. I anticipated at the beginning of the year that it would get into and perhaps cross the 38s. That still remains to be seen. The rise of the Indian economy and the massive inflows of foreign investment into India make this inevitable. The implications for the software industry in India are interesting.

Cheap Labor?

Right now most of the industry located back home is based entirely on the labor cost differential and the Rupee-Dollar ratio. Indian programmers and software technologists are paid much, much less than their American counterparts *and* Indian software company executives :-) even accounting for purchasing power parity. Both these differentials were so high until recently (as recently as 2 years ago, the Rupee was still orbiting in the 47+ per dollar range), that companies had no motivation to change their business model, which was essentially a form of labor arbitrage. Companies made money in one of two ways:
1.) Hiring programmers in India and paying them a low salary, and earning more dollars per hour on their behalf from their customers.
2.) Hiring programmers, getting them H1Bs, and paying them a low salary in the US :-), and etc., etc., etc.

Cheap is not Cheap Anymore

However, two things are rapidly changing this scenario and threaten to change the industry as we know it. The first one is of course, the rise of the rupee. The second is the gradual entry of software multinationals into India. This is putting pressure on salary packages and increasing the attrition rate in Indian companies. There have always been engineers who looked down upon the 'Labor Arbitrage' way of doing business. The difference now is, these people don't have to work for these companies in India if they have the right skills. There are just too many better choices. Maybe these choices are available only to the top 5-10% of engineers right now, but over time, I can see it lead to a cascading series of attrition.

Its getting easier and easier for multi-national companies to set up base in India, and most are doing so. They are gradually cutting out the middle men and managing their own set ups, leveraging their existing Indian employees to manage their India operations. The days of the "Offshore Development Center" managed by an outsourcing company are definitely numbered.

This does not bode well for indigenous companies. They will now have to look at product development as a *real* and focussed business model. In most companies today, there is usually some "in-house product development", which is a euphemism for keeping people busy during lean times, and for maintaining some staff redundancy. The up-side is that the growth of the Indian economy means that soon, India in itself will be an attractive software market, and the companies that have products targeted for this market will reap rich dividends.

Some Crystal-Ball Gazing

The worst case scenario would be this nascent market for software products and services being gobbled up whole by muti-national software companies, who have the financial muscle to overwhelm Indian companies. This is a pie that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP could neatly divide among themselves.

We could draw a parallel to what happened to the Indian car industry after liberalization. The biggest names -- Hindustan Motors and Premier Automobiles -- all but disappeared. Some plucky companies that innovated and adapted to new market conditions (Tata, Bajaj, M&M) survived and even thrived in the era of globalization.

Its all going to be interesting to watch. Just make sure *you* aren't working for a 'Premier Automobiles' of the software industry, when the time comes :-).

one-man's-food dept.

Begin Rant.

I confess. My favorite hobby when I have nothing better to do is to desultorily surf random articles on Wikipedia.

But there is something deeply unsatisfying about wikipedia to me these days. It is the flat nature of the material, the lack of dimensionality. Dimensionality which is ubiquitous, so pervasive in real life. If I ask three students at my university about which courses to take, I get three different responses, all sometimes orthogonal, all equally rich and useful at the same time. One gets the feeling this is how information really is -- a dynamic, shifty, multi-colored and shape-shifting animal.

Wikipedia does not model information about the real world accurately enough, I feel, because the underlying assumption is that we all see the world in the same way. That's not true at all, the human model of the world is also highly modulated by experience -- subjective, in plain English.

Wikipedia has no room for subjectivity, in fact it marks it to be a bad thing. That's simply ridiculous because that means it consciously chooses to leave out a lot of useful information that could add more dimensionality about the data.

This is true of all information repositories -- they leave no room for annotations by people, showing the subjective dimension of that information.

I would like documents to evolve in the future to encapsulate subjectivity somehow, retain it, possess the ability to have annotations and notes, and the ability to still present a navigable interface to the reader.

In that sense sites like slashdot provide a much richer information view with comments on articles etc. But there's no site that allows a wiki-like model to the recording of subjective information.

End Rant.

from-the-cartography dept.

A Japanese website has come up with a trend map for Web2.0. Its modeled on, of all things, the Tokyo Metro System map. The various lines in the map are best described as content themes (insider blogs/political blogs/music sites) or specific technologies (search/social networking/p2p sharing). The 'stations' on the lines are the websites themselves. They've rated each website with the generation of technology used to build it (1.0/2.0/2.5? :-)) and the future prospects (sunny, cloudy, stormy?).

oms-the-man dept.

Thanks to Om Malik for the pownce invite.

I have 4 pownce invites for anyone else who's interested.

safely-anonymous dept.

A site that could do without some publicity -- The Hype Machine.

web-three-point-oh dept.

Here's a potentially high-profile site that claims to use Adobe AIR extensively: Pownce seems suspiciously like a web-based IM system. Does the world need another Instant Messenger, you might ask? So did I, but perhaps the delivery and usage model is novel, so I have queued up for an account.

Pownce, incidentally, was started by Kevin Rose (current age: 30 years), founder of digg, Internet tech celebrity podcaster and entrepreneur.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is an interesting piece of technology that should go head-to-head against Micro$oft's recently announced Silverlight technology. These 'integrated runtime' APIs are really the generation-next of AJAX, one step above the Google Web Toolkit and (not too sure about this) Google Gears. Essentially, they provide a language independent API for generating animation and other rich content objects that was the previous domain of Flash.

It seems that, in the coming years, all applications, in one form or the other, will be built as "webapps". That is, they could be either desktop or browser based, but they will have a significant Internet-based component. Naturally, webapp developers should be increasingly drawn towards these technologies that provide easier development models and hide the nittygritties of asynchronous application design for the Internet.

Both offerings differ a little in approach though. The AIR philosophy seems to be to let developers use existing web technology like Flash etc. to build browser-independent desktop web applications that can also provide offline storage capability. Silverlight, on the other hand, leverages .NET runtime technology to allow developers to build browser plugins that are more integrated with the host OS and that provide richer offline functionality.

sigh... dept.

11 Reasons Not to Buy an iPhone.

Sigh, the heart needs its consolations, sometimes.

and-the-future-is dept.

something-to-think-about dept.

"But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness."

- William Johnson Cory (1861)

Hmmm...

good-artists-borrow-great-artists-steal dept.

Hmmm...both Microsoft and Apple coming out with multi-touch technology in the same year???

The natural question, given the past history of these companies is: Whom did they steal this technology from? ;-)

Here's one possible answer:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65
http://www.perceptivepixel.com/
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/

These companies are really the "Anu Malik"s of the technology world :-).

this-week-on-the-web dept.

The Web 2.0 Social Networking revolution continues. Some new sites this week:

Roy Added me to this nice site, where I've been writing some (real) book reviews:

Goodreads - Write and view book reviews, share book lists.

I'd been reading about this site for some time, finally checked it out:

Twitter - A mini blog to put in all the little things you did during the day. This could be very addictive. And a privacy risk. But I think the notion of privacy and private v/s public content is just going through a complete paradigm shift.

Twitter's no relation to the TWiT podcast, but here are other links that I heard about on TWiT:

Tumblr - Similar to twitter, but you can also "tumbleblog" links to images and videos. I can now get a digital trail of where Leo Laporte has been on the web. Scary :-).

Audible.com - Audio books online. One free audio book download.

StumbleUpon - Pretty interesting site. Claims to "learn what you like and make better recommendations".

another-poor-indian-grad-student dept.

After putting down people with graduate study plans for years, I am preparing to join their ranks. I am glad I never really lost my way irretrievably in the maze of temptations that jobs can be. There is nothing more empowering that education. A job can provide this, but I had felt a bit stagnant, lost, mentorless for a few years now. I think a new environment is the only cure for this malaise, and no better place than a decent US graduate school.

I am putting these thoughts down as a personal amusement, really, to see how much I agree/disagree with them a few years down the line.

roots dept.

The human migration from Africa, illustrated:

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

from-the-firing-line dept.

In the Line of Fire is the sort of book that’s worth your money. For a book written by a President/Dictator still in power, its contents are truly unprecedented. For they may be inaccurate or colored to suit the author, but they do create a window into Pakistan and the mind of its leader, the irrepressible General Pervez Musharraf.

The book makes one thing crystal clear. Musharraf, when he was a baby, accidently fell into a cauldron of testosterone. If he didn’t, he sure wishes he had, and any statement, repeated oft enough, becomes true. So the book is an interesting documentation of the thinking process of an out-and-out alpha male.

It also serves a grim reminder, that it very easily could have been written by someone else. Musharraf has already survived two assassination attempts.

His description of the coup against Nawaz Sharif (or in his own words, the the counter coup) reads like something out of Forsyth or Ludlum (no, its not that bad actually). And here we see Musharraf preening his feathers and parading his plumage in all its smartness. When he describes how the coup was led by officers in command of various battalions around Pakistan, all appointed personally by him, from a pool of obseqious juniors and relatives, and all of this when he was incommunicado, in mid-air between Sri-Lanka and Pakistan, I couldn’t help visualizing a smirking Musharraf twirling his moustache and declaring triumphantly, “So who’s got the biggest one, eh?”

maximum-prejudice dept.

The book Maximum City by Suketu Mehta is a classic example of how amplified stereotypes and a healthy dose of prurience can sell like hot cakes. Suketu Mehta does a good job of caricaturing himself in the opening few pages. He is a non-resident Gujarati, returning to Mumbai to write a bestseller. He is surrounded by wealthy traders, who live in a ghetto-like apartment complex. For his subject matter, he targets either the grotesque, or the glamorous (sometimes, both at the same time). Right from the outset, his clear motive is to find the most senational, scandalous material and write a cheap paperback that’ll sell millions.

But here’s what really riled me up (apart form the fact that he’s a milllionare): Marathi to him, in his own words, is a language that sounds like beating a tin drum. Traditionally, this would get outfits like the Shiv-Sena and the Sambhaji Brigade to go on the rampage, attacking brokerage houses and over-turning Dhoklas and Gujarati Thalis. However, after I read about the Sena’s new approach, I decided to resort to a coherent, logical counter-argument to disprove Mr.Suketu’s** parochial notions about Maharashtrians and Marathi.

**(I thought of calling him Mr.Mehta, but that would just be a lot of noise to Google’s indexing engine. Besides, I didn’t want to confuse you into thinking this was an article on some stock-market scam. Also, I felt that ‘Mr.Suketu’ really brings out that sinister, diabolical, villainish aspect of him that I really want to highlight here)

The basis of my argument is this thesis: the sound of any language is best represented by its poetry. Here, at the poet’s disposal, lies the entire vocabulary of the language, and all the permutations within its complete syntactic, semantic and phonetic space. Clearly, conclusions we draw by reading some representative poems aloud would be based on a far more scientific base, than relying on the wholly unsubstantiated claims that Mr. Suketu makes .

So, here are a few lines from some Popular Modern*** Marathi poems. If you can read devanagri, just recite these lines aloud a few times, and don’t leave out the poets’ names either:

***(Popular Modern Marathi literature is anything published after 1857. Anything published after 1947 is Post-Modern. Beyond 1987, Marathi writing is rumored to exist but is possibly so avant-garde that it has not been published for the greater common good. The ‘Modern’ tag has to be applied selectively, though. For instance, any Marathi literature after 1857 that is actually read by Maharashtrians is just Popular Literature).

खादाड असे माझी भूक
चतकोराने मला न सूख
कूपांतील मी नच मंडूक
- कृष्णाजी केशव दामले (केशवसुत)

ऐल तटावर पैल तटावर हिरवाळी घेउन
निळासावळा झरा वाहतो बेटाबेटांतुन.
- त्र्यंबक बापूजी ठोंबरे (बालकवी)

पिपात मेले ओल्या उंदीर
माना पडल्या मुरगळल्याविण
- बाळ सिताराम मर्ढेकर

अंगणात गमले मजला, संपले बालपण माझे
खिडकीवर धुरकट तेंव्हा, कंदील एकटा होता
- माणिक गोडघाटे (ग्रेस)

झुक्-झुक्-झुक्-झुक् आगीन-गाडी, धुरांच्या रेषा हवेत काढी
पळती झाडे पाहुया, मामाच्या गावाला जाऊया…
- Unknown

Clearly, this sound is hardly anything as underwhelming as a tin drum. For me, its more evocative of the rolling thunder, an avalanche, Shivaji’s horsemen riding out of the Sahayadris or perhaps a fast local pulling out of Boribunder station. These judgments are subjective, of course, but surely no one will agree with Mr.Suketu’s wholly unsubstantiated claims.

This is another instance of outsiders getting the better of Maharashtrians, taking advantage of their generous and tolerant nature. Clearly the Marathi community has to up the ante a bit, and make its voice heard. Only then will other Indians take notice, and go: “Its a plane! Its a storm! Its a train! Naah, its just those Marathis talking…”

we-have-moved dept.

Not that you would care, but this blog has taken up new residence at:

http://l1w0lf.wordpress.com

Reason being mostly, Google's obdurate reluctance to add tag-based indexing to blogspot, and the general malaise that seems to afflict the blog search button at the top of the page. If I can't search what I have written myself, I can hardly expect the millions who hang on to my every word to do better.

karla dept.

Climb up on a hill, through winding narrow stone stairs
Feel the mingling of the sweat and the swearing
Under the breath, and the silence of a million thoughts
Overlaid by the thousand unsparing voices

Ashamed to add your own, out of place.

Fear the smell, foreign and unknown even in daylight
And the strange lingering expanse that preys on itself
You can hear the clamor and feel the gaudy lines
Stretching finitely before your eyes in ecstatic motion

That is not your destination.

Your destination is a hole in the wall behind it all.
Deserted by those who carved their souls into
heartless rock, Treaded by the curious soles of
those who feel lost, and yet find their way

Here, within these stone walls.

could've-been-verse dept.

This is a great poem I came across long ago while watching the Mel-Gibson-directed movie The Man Without A Face. The poem was written by a nineteen-year-old American Pilot named John Gillespie Magee, Jr. during World War II, only a few months before he died in a plane crash.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

.tded-nevaeh-ot-yawriats

And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all