Demographic and other data

From Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed He goes over a few stats about the death demographics in Canada, concluding it's investable. The last time I read something about trends, was how Entertainment, mixed in with cocooning was so important. My gut tells me that Sustainable development, another form of Cocooning - Security, the fact we live much longer and healthier are now the new black in this respect. They are not trends per say but facts and behaviours the North American society is adopting adjusting to, and facing respectively.

Server problems

Good evening - after a several days of server problems, it seems that my blog is back. It started with problems with Blogger itself, then it morphed into server issues at our end. I was talking to Pierre out IT dude at Macadamian today. After a few days of "not getting anywhere" I grew anxious by the hour at not being able to resolve my issue, fear not Pierre said I will look into it and he figured out. The moral of the story, there is no such thing as "it's just a machine switch!".

India moving up

Sadagopan's - moving up the food chain: "Look at a few cases that demonstrate this : Northeast Utilities in Hartford, Connecticut consolidated three customer information systems into one, and six call centers into two. Global firms and Indian headquartered firms competed for this opportunity. The usual providers of this kind of advice are firms such as IBM, Capgemini and Accenture , the well-known shops that sponsor golf tournaments and run ads during the Super Bowl. These firms bid on the aforementioned projects, but they lost. The winners came from Bangalore and Chennai, firms such as I-flex Solutions, Mphasis BFL Group, Infosys Technologies and SlashSupport. In the case of Northeast Utilities, Infosys got the strategic advice business while IBM got left with the scut work of moving the company's 2 million customer records from the old system to the new. Seven years ago GE Appliances entrusted Satyam to prepare only engineering drawings and blueprints for its home business. Four years later Satyam was doing tear-down analysis of all its products and its competitors' products. Now it's the only point of contact for GE Appliances' vendors and components suppliers, and it has also taken over the design of nearly all new product features. Multinationals are relying on Indian firms for fundamental missions." Yes this is only a few deals, it's still early to say it is now the norm. I don't think we can underestimate the adaptation capabilities of the incumbents. Yet sometimes I wonder if enough people have read the innovator's dilemma, I mean are they taking this threat seriously. India inc will have its own challenges going after that business, US based players can't deny it, even the high margin work is under threat.

From the fun-department - Buying a Wii

From Erik Sink a little and entertaining story about buying the coolest game console out there!

Value Creation in OPD

After reading this piece I agree with the idea that no body has a lock on rock bottom pricing. India wages are rising, and as such it is required to bring a new strategy into the picture. As mentioned before - Value must now be emphasized so that it can get out of selling on price alone. There is plenty of cheap supply in India still, and for the foreseeable future - you get what you pay for kind of service, buy it cheap, buy it twice, and then there is the real deal - to get quality services, just like anywhere else you need to pay, whether you're in India or Canada. Going into OPD, the level of skills required is such that understanding and depth of the technology/language/platforms is one very important thing. Such skills that will ultimately guarantee delivery are in short supply even in India. India companies are smart - and they sure don't seem blinded by their success, not that I can see anyway - here this guy is warning his Indian competitors they need to wake up and realize that jobs can move fairly quickly if you focus on price alone.

Rental car and GPS

I'm out west on business. We flew in last night, we get to Hertz rent a car, and the line up is huge, and it's moving very slowly. I usually rent a Hertz car because they have a very good GPS system in certain cars, and it's usually available. I ended up renting the car from Alamo, they sold me on the fact they also had a gps system. They didn't tell me it was through a cel phone they provided with a java application installed, called navigation system. That system really doesn't work, whoever thought this was a good way to go about it, put too much weight on the cost of the solution versus its usability. It's plain and simple unusable for me, I can't type using a cell phone, and typing addresses is long and painful. The search is not working, or I couldn't make it work would be more accurate. Bottom line this morning I was off to my meetings, and I quickly reverted to using a plain old map. I went to my first two meetings, then looked up a BestBuy driving on the 101 - I went out and bought myself a GPS system, it's day and night. It's even better than the solution that comes with Hertz. I'm all set for uneventful road trips and loading up the agenda with meetings, not getting lost! This is what the advertising says anyway.