Mozillas new concept browser .. time for new mouse design ?

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing the Concept Series; Call for Participation

Mozilla released a concept browser, which is pretty cool.

What does this mean ? The browser is taking over the role of operating system's role. If you observe, there is a lot of less clicks over everything. Time is redesign the mouse I guess which has less emphasis on clicks and more on drags and zooms.

Making your small dreams come true and make big money

They quit good jobs to mint millions!

Very decent article on making your dreams come true.

Book Review - Dealing with Darwin

This is a very good book if you are worried about innovating in a large company at multiple stages of a product life cycle, this is the book for you.

If you are worried about how to maintain a high but non-growth revenue product, this is book for you.

For the first few chapters, Moore goes through the types of innovation at each and every product life cycle. He uses Cisco primarily as the case study but gives other technology examples as well. The mid chapters talk about the "core" and "context" principles and last few chapters talks about how to move resources between context and core.

I would recommend the book for any company (especially large company) in the hi-tech industry.

Perils of Telepresence

The recent rise of fuel costs and even before the recent rise, "use telepresence instead of face to face meetings" has been the mantra of corporations. Telepresence is one of those video conferencing technologies which brings life like video through high bandwidth networks and high resolution plasma screens. This has gone to such an extent that the budget to the business units, espicially travel budget has been cut and were told, "because of telepresence".

I've used the telepresence around 20 times and let me tell you one thing, its amazing, its life like. Let me tell you another thing. Its not a substitute for an important or multiple important face-face calls.

Allied forces did not win world war 2 though telepresence. IMHO, they won the war because of the intimate relationship that WInston Churchill and FDR had. All those cigar and alchohol discussions in the night, all those paintings did make a drammatic difference in building up the trust bewtween the two great countries that exist to this day.

Face to face interactions and relationship building is the most important must have aspects of a successful business and it would be even "rude" to propose a video conference meeting to that all important customer meeting.

Right way to make good decisions

'Good decisions are made by gut feeling'

'Good decisions are made by thorough analysis of the problem and consequences of each decision made'

There has been war between the two thoughts. Both make sense. In the book 'Blink', Malcom Gladwell makes a compelling argument to make decisions through gut feeling; he proves that gut feeling is a decision actually made by inner mind which has processed all the data over the years. The first gut feeling is right, but once you try to rationalize your gut feeling, your inner mind cannot give you all the details that it used to make the decision.

Game theory argues otherwise, that you have to have a flow chart of the decision alternatives and their consequences.

Now there seems to be a consensus, at least for me. Usually you won't be pressed to take a decision through gut feeling or you would not have time to do a thorough analysis. Here is the right way to make decision - put the problem at the back of your mind for a couple of days. Do not conciously think about the problem, let your inner brain work on it. The best decision is what your gut/first feeling says after those two days.

Mini book review - how countries Compete

"How Countries Compete" (ISBN-13: 978-1422110355, Author: Richard Vietor) in a nut shell is about how globalization has mde countries compete with each other for a given amout of money ("compete for market share of investments") and what should governments of countries do to make themselves competetive.

A manager's view of Globalization has both internal and external perspective. Internal perspective deals with the analysing the reasons to globalize and putting the internal structures in place to globalize. For internal perspective, I like Pankaj Ghemawat's articles, including the latest (HBR March 2007) article, "Managing Differences: The Central Challenge of Global Strategy". Books such as world is flat and mirage of global markets are mostly about those internal perspectives. The how countries compete book gives the external perspective of tools that a managers can use to analyze which countries are the best to invest. Make no mistake (i hate that phrase, but have no time to think about a better one), this book talks about what a government can do to make itself more competitive but the same logic and tools can be used by managers to analyze what countries to invest in. This book basically expands the "Role of Government" section in Porter's Competetive Advantage of Nations article.

The book starts with the strategy a country should choose to compete. That strategy depends on the context, its resources, its policital structure, the clusters etc. etc. Then it talks about the tools that the government has at hand (fiscal, monetary, trade, wage, infrastructure, legal, regulatory etc etc) to use to execute on its strategy.

The book then talks about half a dozen countries (Japan, Sigapore, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Italy), their history of competitiveness and how they got to the present stage (good and bad) with (or without) using the tools mentioned above.

The most important tool that I got out of this book is something called "trajectory". Based on how the government is using the above mentioned tools now, the author says, the managers can predict the trajectory of how the country is going to shape atleast in the near future (ofcourse there are always wars and such which can displace the trajectory) and the managers should make investment decisions accordingly.

Book review - Blue ocean strategy

This is the book from 2005, I am cathing up :).

This book definetely goes into my strategy favorites. Blue ocean strategy is all about how to create products which make the competition irrelevant. There are many examples - starbucks made their fellow coffee retailers irrelevant when they launched (their competition is not relevant to coffee at all). SouthWest made competition irrelevant since it did not compete with airlines when it was launched.


I liked the book because of two reasons -

The first is its analytical tool kit. In every chapter the authors present an analytical tool to practically follow their advise. Their strategy map is much better than the position map, it just not show where you are with respect to competition, but it also shows what are the factors relevant in the industry and how you are doing with respect to your competitors along those factors. The beauty of the map is that you can just say whether your strategy is good or not by looking at the map. The authors present a tool for pricing models as well.

The second is the completeness. It starts right from the question of why/how to create a blue ocean strategy and ends with execution and sustaining the strategy. It talks about almost all facets of management, lauching, pricing, leadership etc.

A must read for all managers, hey who does not have competition and who does not want to get away from them ?. A must high tech entrepreneurs since they never set their foot into red oceans.