Brij Singh's Random Musings

Enterprise Gaming Software Company

What do you get when you plan something, strategize, restrategize, acquire companies, can them, acquire some more and can some more, launch new initiatives and can some more. Credit must be given to Sun for trying too many things and being transparent about it.  Somehow the overall story keep getting more and more confusing.

Here is a smart company run by extremely bright guys but somehow two and two doesn't add up to 4.  In a warped world of strategy they run the risk of coming out as a  software game company. Not because they make gaming software but because they keep changing their game plan.

Culture of generosity

NYT (reg'd reqd) summarizing the user generated content based business models. Master of good sound bites has this to say -

"The really interesting thing about the network today is that individuals are starting to participate. The endpoints are starting to inform the center"

We will have something interesting down the road in this context.

Google Earth

I must admit I am blown away by this  Google Earth

Being a geography and atlas freak I enjoy physical topologies and all things related to maps. There is something magical to this software.  I will not be shy in saying that  this software ranks along with other category killers such as Netscape, Blogger, Flickr etc.

This will change the way people will think about the physical world. I can already imagine creative applications such as versioning piece of land to track environmental changes, real estate expansion, urbanization, urban design etc.  Hackers will keep Sunnyvale 1.0, 2.0,3.0 in some kind of source code control and will run diff on them to visualize urbanization !

This is way too  cool and I salute Google for giving this free  !

More on the bubble

For the sake of comparison:

Penn cited an article in The Economist and reported that the total value of residential property in developed countries had risen by more than $30 trillion over the past five years, to $70 trillion, an increase equivalent to 100 percent of those countries' combined GDPs.

Penn went on to say that such rapid growth dwarfed the global stock market bubble of the late 1990s which demonstrated an increase over five years at 80 percent of GDP, and the Wall Street crash (55 percent of GDP). Penn also observed that the stock market crash of 2000 triggered a 32 percent decline in the semiconductor market in 2001.

Cnet on India

Just when I was having my earful of big dollar chatter ( $50bn, $12bn, $1bn for IT firm)  on India, CNet comes out with an exclusive storython on emerging India. Wiki is a new trend in storython to capture all the real-time flames.

Rajesh has plenty of good points in this story. He is a big inspiration for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

This shouldn't have happened

Just when this country needed more innovation we have this decision.  This will affect the way technology companies market their wares:

"clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement"

So next time you use photo-copier, publisher can potentially take Xerox to the court. Well if Xerox marketing pitches like - "go ahead, remix your own book !".

Pitch doctors will have to go through legal blessings each time they put a new slogan or message. More cost and more conservative approach = bad business.

This shouldn't have happened. Grokster's loss is a big big loss to US innovation machine in the time when flat world is putting fire from the bottom.

Add some more legal cost to your business instead of putting money in the R&D. Thats a new ruling.

It's a GAS

Before we get ahead of ourselves here. Lets do quick fact check -

Politician claiming success (first doubt),  Tis the season of energy and oil (second doubt) and the amount is just too much (which makes me wonder at what cost drilling !).

I will be more than happy to be proven wrong here.

Lot of people need energy and in that part of the world people have all the right to go nuts on Hummer as well.

American concerns

How concerned are we ? NOP World survey shows disconnect between influentials and rest of the mortals -

                                                                                                                               

Concerns:	Influential Americans	General Population
Our Foreign Relations	52%	27%
Rising Cost of Healthcare	43%	43%
Terrorism	37%	41%
Breakdown of Family	36%	29%
Way Courts are Run	30%	21%
Quality of Public School Education	29%	24%
Getting into Another War	28%	20%
Recession/Rising Unemployment	26%	19%
Way Young People Act	24%	27%
Wrongdoing by Elected Govt. Officials	23%	23%

How about environment? $60 a barrel and global warming is not there in the list !

Learn Mandarin !

Getting Unocal in new global landscape :

And - to seal American paranoia - China is also a major holder of US debt. Put simply, the US is in hock to the Chinese to such an extent that if all the bills were called in at once, Uncle Sam would be bust. It's not in China's interests to destabilise the world economy at the moment, but circumstances change. Beijing might just like to keep that card - a financial nuclear option - up its sleeve for some future geopolitical crisis.

Corporate America will climb a traumatic learning curve over this bid, and be forced to confront the growing reality of Chinese economic power. For business people elsewhere, the lesson is far simpler: learn Mandarin - now

My guess is this is just the begining of a long drawn out China-phobia, which we are going to see in the media for next few years.
 

Simply Open Source !

Between SimplyHired test drive and checking open source jobs I bumped into this job post.

Job description is a study in how things are linked together in crazy ways. Is open source a security issue?