Management Musings

Recently, I was navigating a particularly pothole riddled road in Bangalore. We get many of those in the city, but this was new territory for me as the locality I was in was the first time that I was there. It being night time and the visibility being poor, I had to slow right down every few feet to ensure that the ride was not more jarring than it already was. While negotiating a particularly deep pot hole, I found that there was traffic overtaking me from the right and the left. The drivers seemed to be able to find a smooth patch of road where all I could find were ditches and speed bumps all along. They were experienced drivers - experienced in driving on this stretch of the road. I pride myself on being smart with finding these "good" stretches on roads that I am familiar with. For example, there is this stretch on one of the roads that I visit regularly - the lane closer to the divider is similar to the moon's surface from close range. The farther lane is like wh...

In the 60s and 70s, bell-bottom trousers were all the rage. I remember seeing pictures of my father wearing these trousers that were shaped oh so weirdly - they would balloon out towards the feet, like a bell. Hence the name bell-bottom. Another rage during the time were over sized sun glasses. Movies made during that era showcased the heroine, in particular, sporting huge eye wear. They would cover about 30-40% of the face and not just the eyes. They might as well have been face wear and not eye wear. While the bell bottom and parallel trousers have stayed away from the male fashion industry for a while now, the eye wear has definitely remained/ had a rebirth of sorts. Nowadays, it is common for women to sport big sized eye wear that covers the eyes and then some part of the face. I cannot claim to have lived in the era of computers that would occupy an entire room - that was the stuff of lore in text books. The technological industry has stayed away from that reverting to that e...

In the computer networking industry, the latest buzzwords are to do with Virtualization. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is the latest trend and every day, there is a lot written about and talked about on this front. At a high level, it deals with virtualizing the functions that are today being performed by dedicated hardware components. For example, if you have a Wifi router device in your house today, the idea is to move that functionality on to your PC or laptop so there is no need for a separate device that performs that function. Or in a typical use case, the equipment on the customer premises (CPE) now moves to the Service Provider domain in a virtualized form where they can deploy multiple such CPE's (in an apartment complex for example) in a single PC or laptop device.  Virtualization is probably known to all of us first-up, as Virtual reality. This link to Virtual Reality on HowStuffWorks probably explains it as well as any. While NFV does not have aspire to l...