Management Musings

One of my favorite essays during school days used to be about Television. I still remember writing about the TV in Hindi. Invented by John L. Baird, if my memory serves me correctly. Looking back in the last 30-40 years, we have moved from no TVs, to TV being a novelty, to CRT TV sets being the norm (who can forget Dyanora?) and nowadays, to LED TVs. What next? Of course, 4K Ultra HD TVs are already here. We will move away from the cable TV or even the need for a satellite Dish enabled TV set in the future. It may sound alarming, but it is going to be the reality sooner or later. No more TV shows, a dime to the dozen, repeated in multiple languages and broadcast over an untold number of channels. Early age TVs used to have 12 channels and a remote control was unheard of. Within a few years now, we have hundreds of these channels all vying for viewership and advertisement revenue. Almost every channel has programs running 24/7. For how long, I wonder? Video can be, after all, transmi...

Over the past couple of decades, the Computer networking industry has seen many trends come and go. Looking at how things stand today, the core skill sets of Routing and Switching look likely to become dated as the number of experts proliferate the market and the task of routing the packets through the Internet has become a commodity for so many deployments. Fundamentally, the core job of routing remains the same, from the perspective of a device. For it, a packet (or data) comes in and it needs to make a decision on where to send it out to. The USP for any device resides in the speed with which it can make this decision and the speed with which the packet can be forwarded out another interface, towards its ultimate destination. As with so many other technology industries that reaped the benefits of Moore's law, it was the same with the High Performance Networking industry. Shrinking space for the transistors used for switching meant that so many more operations could be performed...

The recent FCC ruling in favor of Net Neutrality is an interesting decision. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States passed a rule that the Internet Service Providers should always act in "public interest" - similar to telephone lines. What this means is that the Service Providers such as AT&T can not enter into an agreement with Content Providers such as Netflix, Google, etc. where their content is given preference over other Internet sites. This ultimately translates to a single pricing structure for all end users irrespective of the content that they are accessing over the Internet. The ruling has been touted as a victory for end users and a rap on the knuckles for Service Providers who want to impose a variable pricing scheme for Content Providers. I don't see it the same way necessarily. I think it makes sense to make end users pay for the service that they are receiving. Although we do not have Netflix here in India, we do have som...

Continuing from my previous blog post on connected cars, the allure of the networked cars is too strong to resist for the Computer Networking engineer in me. Once the driverless cars are connected to the grid and are able to decide on an optimal route to take to reach a destination, the problem of getting the cars there becomes one that has been solved in the Internet Protocol (IP) routing world a few decades ago. While the Internet itself functions on the ability of the data to be split into "packets" that are transported from a source to a destination via routers that decide on the shortest path to take to reach the destination, it is a very real possibility to apply this thought to the world of traveling. The road networks that exist today offer a ready made infrastructure for travel without drivers and with a reduced incidence of accidents. Smart cars, which would be connected to a GPS system and to the Internet could decide on the most optimal route to take to reach t...

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...