Management Musings

In an interesting blog post by Paul Krugman this week, he lays into Amazon and the power that it wields in the books marketplace today. Amongst many other points he makes, he mentions that while Amazon is not a monopoly in trying to use its power as a dominant seller to increase prices but instead, is a monopsony - using its power to keep prices low for its customers. In the particular example of Amazon v/s the book publisher Hachette, Amazon was able to squeeze the publisher into giving a larger share of the book sales to Amazon by disrupting the sales of their books on its website. Books from Hachette would take longer to be delivered when compared to books from other publishers and such. Amazon used its power to influence the market place to benefit itself and also its customers. In the Indian landscape, Amazon has not yet achieved the kind of power that it ostensibly wields in the American market place. E-commerce websites such as Flipkart, Snapdeal and even Junglee were alre...

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...

Reading this article on the Economist recently got me thinking on the possibilities of the future. While movies such as the Fifth Element have thrown a glimpse at the future where cars operate in air without the need for roadways, a very feasible scenario is developing on the existing roadways. The connected car as described in the article is capable of understanding the distance between itself and other vehicles on the road, does not need a driver and creates a an accident-free on-road experience as the possibility of human error while driving is removed. It is another story that the possibility of human error now resides in the hands of the Engineers who design and develop these driverless cars but let's assume that we are able to achieve a degree of unparalleled safety via rigorous testing and years of prototyping. The scene depicted makes for compelling viewing - trucks would operate on their own criss-crossing the country as if on remote control. There would be a certain deg...

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...

Having recently been through the experience of choosing a name for my daughter, my thoughts went to the identity formed by a name. There have been careers built around the spelling to be used in name - ask the numerologists. In the traditional South Indian tradition, the sound or the syllable that the new born baby's name should start with, is decided by the way the stars align at the time of birth. It is not uncommon for parents in this part of the world to look for names that begin with "Re", "La", "Shi" or "Tha"after a baby is born. The English translation of some of these syllables is intriguing. As made popular in the movie "Chupke Chupke" about 30 years back, why are "go" and "to" pronounced so differently in English? An exact pronunciation of a Sanskrit word in English is not easy. Nowadays, more visible than ever before is the change in the spelling of the name that ostensibly makes a difference to the...