So Long, King Gates

FINALLY, THE IT TZAR TAKES THE BACK SEAT. And as Mr. Bill Gates completes his last full working day by the EOD today – June 27, 2008 – at his Richmond, WA office in the US, an era of Biggest, Richest, and Fastest draws towards a change. Call him Innovator, Software Evangelist, Chief Software Architect, or by any other name, above all, Mr. Gates is a successful businessman, Zero-to-billions kind. And that is how I would want to reckon him, for Mr. Gates is not perhaps a mesmerising orator, neither a charismatic leader, nor a magnanimous personality. Even if he is all of these, they rather remain secondary, for the bottomline is, Mr. Gates knows business, does business and means business. Period.

Arguably the world’s most famous dropout – and thus perhaps the tallest example that education and money may not have a direct corelation – wrote the first BASIC compiler 17 years ago, and left the legacy as the world’s richest man with such words: “There is nobody getting rich writing software that I know of…”.

[Left: Bill Gates, CEO, about 27, in his Microsoft office in 1982. Source: time.com. Do you also feel that the DOS screen in front of him reads something very similar to “Bad Command or File name?”]

Mr. Gates indeed has been the biggest catalyst for last two decades for the IT industry and for the global economy at large – Windows OS still runs more than 90% of personal computers in the world, and Microsoft Office artefacts are the de-facto standard for offline information and data transaction. This has made Mr. Gates the richest man on earth; reaching there in the fastest possible manner – at the speed of thought, if you like…

On my part, it was a wonderful experience to listen to him from a mere few feet away in Sep 2002 while he was delivering a lecture and providing with his vision (such as, “XML is the future…”) at the time of the launch of Windows XP. It being my first encounter with a global leader at close proximity left me with a lasting impression.

Competition has not been kind to Mr. Gates, and visa-versa is probably equally true. Sort of a reminder of the old saying that Friends come and go, enemies accumulate…

The success of Microsoft Corporation undoubtedly has contributions from many more than Mr. Gates and his “Big Picture” memos alone, but in the world-wide (Globalization?) game of business where media and economy are increasingly tying up, and where winner takes it all, the credit nonetheless has almost always been attributed to Mr. Gates as the poster-boy face of Microsoft. At the same token, the discredit of bad designs, security flaws and sloppy software performance is also to the discredit of Mr. Gates.

[Right: Culturing Innovation; Sponsoring ImagineCup. Bill Gates in Korea for the event in 2007.]

It would be an interesting experience for Bill Gates to become a user from the owner of Microsoft products. His displeasure towards many thing Microsoft, especially the usability and user-friendliness, has been known. (Here is the full text of a rather interesting and lambasting email supposedly from Gates himself.)

BillG, as they call him, has never faced any job interviews, and in that respect he would perhaps always remain inexperienced! Unless of course any of the prospective next career moves (as in the following video) click for him 🙂

Mr. Gates opened his keynote of TechEd 2008 last month with the following video. This is where Mr. Gates tries various career changes now that he is to move out of Microsoft. It has been making rounds on YouTube since Jan this year, and it’s honest, well choreographed, very humorous and well entertaining. Not worth missing at all!

[Above: Bill Gates, Last Day at Microsoft. Simply Brilliant! Go here for the YouTube link.]

Bill Gates is going to be just fine whatever new avtar he may adorn next. But the industry observers seem to be divided over what would happen to Microsoft in absence of its poster-boy. I recall a media interview a few years ago where the reporter indirectly inquired about the “Google threat”.

Mr. Gates replied and I quote, “Every couple of years a new company comes up and people say that it would put us [Microsoft] out of business. And every time I say, ‘No, not this time’…”

If monopoly and monarchy have anything in common, we should shortly hear, “The King is dead… Long live the King!”

Let’s see who would stand up and say “No, not this time…” for Microsoft next.

[Go here at time.com for the Photo-essays on Bill Gates’ early days.]

 

"The Beautiful Mind" Turns 80

“The special commodity or medium that we call money has a long and interesting history. And since we are so dependent on our use of it and so much controlled and motivated by the wish to have more of it or not to lose what we have we may become irrational in thinking about it and fail to be able to reason about it as if about a technology, such as radio, to be used more or less efficiently…” — John F. Nash, lecture at CII in Mumbai, Feb 2007

IF THE WORLD IS CONSIDERED A “CLOSED SYSTEM”, deeming it a Zero-sum game, Nash Equilibrium could certainly offer a different meaning to the notion of money, and thus, to the word ‘richness‘ or net-worth and the world economy.

[Today, June 13, John F. Nash, Jr. turns 80. A humble tribute to the 1994 Nobel Laureate legend. Go here for Nash’s personal home page at Princeton.]

Arguably, the Nash equilibrium is the single game theoretic solution concept that is most frequently applied in economics. (See also: Investopedia) In terms of strategy and planning, the equilibrium could be simplified as:

“For any finite, non-cooperative game of two players or more, no player can improve his/her pay-off by unilaterally changing the strategy…”

[Above: Actor Russell Crowe in his Oscar winning portrayal of John Nash in the 2001 Hollywood film “A Beautiful Mind“. Photo courtesy: Prof. Lynne Butler.]

 

Ken Harvey, the "Richest" CIO

KENNETH M. HARVEY AT HSBC HAS HAD A LASTING impression of an IT leader for me. And I believe in the capacity of a corporate executive, ‘richness’ (see: Money) has more to do with quality of role, thought leadership and budget at disposal. In all of these terms, one might wager, Ken Harvey indeed must be a very rich man, for him being the group CIO of the world’s largest organisation, and then having a whopping USD 5bn in terms of his annual spending budget.

It always felt great to conclude my induction sessions for the newly joined Business Analysts in my team by saying, “While certain organizations (vendors) aspire to make millions every year, Ken plans to spend in billions…” It rather gave everyone, me included, a sense if you like, of having a bundle or two of “cash” from Ken’s kitty into our pockets.

Especially and rather fondly I recall Mr. Harvey’s discussion with the Gartner members where one of the panellists posed him with the question of the challenge of keeping motivated the global workforce of nearly 125000 IT professionals. What Mr. Harvey replied is pretty interesting. Mr. Harvey suggested that the workforce worldwide is like a huge diversified but united team where:

“The out-of-box ideas come from my California office, for planning I give it to my London office, and for execution, it is my Asia (HK/India) office…”

While the lion’s share of the budget goes towards the 2 tbps dedicated worldwide network that the bank privately maintains under “run-the-bank”, the “change-the-bank” quadrant still attains a hugely sizeable amount for the change-agents (like myself!). And then, spare a thought for the contribution this 5 bn makes annually towards the IT economy worldwide, and also to the net-worth of individuals… For the record, I am quoting Mr. Harvey here that he would want to maintain a list of no more than a dozen suppliers and vendors… Statistically, the sum of 5bn in itself is more than the annual GDP of many countries worldwide (and could perhaps make for an outright buyout of a few islands in the Pacific). On the other hand, we are talking about only a handful of IT service providers splitting the billions among themselves. And this spending is sustained whilst the market is feeling the sub-prime heat.

But then, Mr. Harvey never said it would be easy: the bank commands some of the lowest billing rates from IT providers in the industry, the roles are stretched to the limit of imaginations, and requirements happen and change as dramatically as the Hang Seng index of Hong Kong stock exchange which practically runs on Mr. Harvey’s servers.

[Right: HSBC corporate HQ building at Canary Wharf, London when viewed from Narrow Street besides Limehouse Basin. Source: self]

Here is some indication as to how Mr. Harvey planned about spending USD 5bn. And here is a Reuters report suggesting how it finally paid off.

 

The Bard’s Birth Day

April 23 – TODAY BEING ST. GEORGE’S DAY is also considered to be the Birth Day of William Shakespeare. (Nobody knows for sure of the bard’s exact date of birth.)

Just wondering if the alchemists of that era would have got a couple of ‘immortality’ pills of which one was taken by Shakespeare such that he would still be alive at this time, what kind of blogs would he be maintaining..?

Perhaps a blog with the highest hits on the net!

Footnote: Sampling only Technorati may perhaps be a rather narrow view, but looking at their popular index stats available of top 100, the most popular blog as of this moment is – The Huffington Post, closely followed by (my personal preference) TechCrunch. (Well, by including weblinks here, I just contributed one more point to the ‘authority’ count on Technorati for both.)

 

"Fred the Shred" under the weather?

THEY CALL HIM “FRED THE SHRED…”. If you count “few good men” who took the lead in the “rationalisation” of workforce in the conservative European banking and Financial services, Fred has to be in the front row.

Sir Frederick Anderson Goodwin, remained in the news in Europe, mainly Britain, for his often visionary yet unorthodox methods of running Britain’s second largest Banking group. After he assumed control, the RBS groups, perhaps for the first time, saw a rather American-styled cost-cutting, or Shredding as the Britons prefer to call it.

Managing nearly 1000 people worldwide at the age of 32, the acumen more than the aggression made Fred the CEO of the Clydesdale Bank at the age of 36. He has been quoted as famously saying, “I have no time for cynics, spectators or dead wood”. And as we speak, being with the RBS group, he is the longest serving CEO in the FTSE-100 index. (That precisely makes me wonder if the pool underneath is in a pull-down mode…)

Knighted at the age of 46 for his services in Banking in 2004, the RBS group saw its highest ever rapid inorganic growth since Fred was brought in by another Scot and the then Chairman of RBS Group, Sir George Mathewson. Whilst being at a couple of bids of hostile acquisitions, he has been quoted saying, “There may be some possible mercy killings”.

Chosen as the “Businessman of the Year – 2002” by Forbes, Fred began with the humongous acquisition of NatWest in 2000 with unusual amount of due diligence of nearly 500 man-days, and the latest is acquiring of ABN AMRO for about Euro 70bn by the consortium let by RBS Group. All in all, in last nine years that Fred has been with the BRS group, their ‘shopping list’ lists 26 buy-outs at the value of GBP 33bn (about USD 66bn). (See also: The “Richest” CIO)

[Above: (L-to-R) Maurice Lippens, Executive Chairman of Fortis, Jean-Paul Votron, CEO of Fortis, Fred Goodwin, CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and Emilio Botin, Chairman of Spanish banking group Santander Central Hispano (SCH) in Edinburgh, Scotland, 10 August 2007, at the time of acquisition of ABN AMRO by the BRS-led consortium.]

“I have no time for cynics, spectators or dead wood…”

It is that time in the turning wheels of world economy that the Citigroup reports a loss of USD 5.1 bn, and the chairman of UBS already fallen on his own sward, Fred is equally under fire for (yet undisclosed) rights issue coming from RBS for nearly GBP 9bn.

It is perfectly all right, I suppose, that there are other, younger, aspiring ‘leaders’ waiting in the wings to take command, the aegis of Fred and the likes has to be honoured nonetheless; for what it is – the aegis; though you may also count those rather “dodgy deals” that Fred supported for the sake of “business” at “huge” environmental costs in the Oil & Gas sector… (See also: The Green wall of China)

Though it remains to be seen what the final outcome in Fred’s chair would be, personally I feel would hold on…

 

Oil money powering windmills

WINDMILLS WERE A THING fascination, especially in the farmland of picturesque Europe, more so perhaps because they spoke of a bygone era that I felt I just missed. To much delight, the winds continued to blow in their directions, as it were, and the windmills kept going around. With time, however, as the water-table got deeper and deeper, the Netherlanders found other ways and means to keep them spinning, namely, Electricity generated by turbines spinning by the winds. And I would say, this is a niche electro-mechanical engineering field – building a very energy efficient and ‘light’ turbine, such that the winds can spin at, and at the same time it gives sufficient torque to the dynamo to create electromagnetic charge that could be refined as usable domestic electricity. And along with all that technical things, the ROI turns profitable within reasonable metrics (and also, that we don’t end up having a dog catching its own tail).

Now, so far there was no direct conflict of interest, if you like, between oil-burning (read: automobiles) energy devices verses electricity generation using water-spun, coal burning or nuclear turbines. And while saying that, I am choosing to ignore that portion of energy consumption where European and American homes prefer to use gas instead of electricity for domestic heating in the winter. I appreciate that this percentage might be big enough to ignore, but let’s keep it simple here for the sake of argument.

The Oil-man announced at Georgetown Uni to pump USD 10bn to create world’s largest wind-farm…

As Al Gore would love to tell you in a dark room with a huge LCD projector – both of these ‘consume’ natural resources, which are not renewable. And (to some degree) he is right. Unfortunately, the Earth could host only as many dinosaurs as few million years ago to turn them in oil today that could go on and on.

The interesting part begins when the ROI (return on investment: time to turn profitable) for the oil companies starts stretching with every oil well getting deeper, water-source running dry, coal-mines hitting hard-rocks, and atomic energy falling hostage to missile-making men. For them, ‘going green’ proposes the logical next ‘green field’.

The news as it is reported by Reuters today says that Mr. T. Boone Pickens, the legendary Texas Oil Billionaire it ‘going green’. The Oil-man has plans to pump in USD 10bn into Wind-energy, and the proposal, which would start acquiring land next month, is to create the world’s biggest wind farm. The estimates have it that when those 2,700 wind turbines would eventually generate 4,000 megawatts of electricity – the equivalent of building two commercial scale nuclear power plants – enough power for about 1 million homes.

Mr. Pickens would also want to take the ‘pressure off’ the automobile sector by freeing up gas by not using it for energy production, but to let it go to those (billion dollar) refineries to pump out gasoline and diesel for the cars. At the same time, also take the pressure off from the American auto manufacturers to be energy efficient (and shake Toyota and Honda off?).

I have come to admire the old Oil-man, not simply for him shrewdly planning for another ‘windfall’ (no pun intended) of billions, but also contributing to the geographical landscape of North America: Windmills look pretty… Anywhere.

[Related post: Who Pockets The Money You Pay Extra For Gas?]
[For the complete Reuters story, go here.]

 

The Gillette ‘trap’

[A little background: It had been a few months that I was searching for twin-blade cartridges for the Gillette SensorExcel safety razor that I prefer. I had almost given up on it by now, and was looking towards this seemingly inevitable upgrade to Mach3 or something when I suddenly hit a jackpot – I found a supermarket selling the make and model that I was looking for. I could finally purchase a year worth of supply.

In other words, another year that I would effectively dodge Gillette Mach3 upgrade ‘threat’.]

The history goes that some hundred years ago, Mr. King Gillette was a wealthy but frustrated failure of an innovator at 40. He had written a book called “The Human Drift“, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by the Niagara Falls.

His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

One day while shaving with a rather blunt straight razor, the idea struck to him that perhaps this reusable razor could be replaced by a ‘consumable’ razor having the blade made of thin metal strips. Somewhere around 1870, Kampfe Brothers had developed a forged razor of a similar kind, which Mr. Gillette gladly improvised upon, registered the patent for the new design in his name, and the world got it’s first safety razor with name ‘Gillette’.

This same successful Business model was the weakness of the Gillette product in the initial years…

The really unique and path-breaking piece about this safety razor was not the product itself so much so was the marketing model it assumed, and which I called – the Gillette ‘trap’. Known as “Freebie Marketing“, the business model was to give away free safety razors and make profit by selling corresponding blades for them afterwards. In the initial days, however, this marketing model was the product’s weakness for the industrial facilities were not advanced enough to manufacture cheap blades with thin metal strips as mass-production. Mr. Gillette had to struggle almost for a couple of decades more to turn his model truly profitable. That past, the inventor is reaping benefits since than, and the company was valued at nearly USD 60bn in 2005 when P&G acquired it to create world’s largest personal care and household products company.

The year of 2005 is important for this post also because, after acquiring my new supply of cartridges, I thought of using the one cartridge first that I had been saving for a rainy day for quite some time now. The manufacturing date on this old one is May 2005. But interestingly the retail price is exactly the same as the one I bought today in 2008.

This really got me thinking as to how a product could sustain its retail price for almost three years while inflation is nearly 7% yoy, and the input costs for the cartridges, mainly steel, have jumped (e.g. price-rise in automotive sector). Even a 1-2% difference in prising would have killed the motive of this post, but here we are, with three probabilities:

• Gillette products were over-priced in 2005, and hence no price-revision took place in last three years. OR
• Gillette is under price-pressure today, and so is unable to hike prices (and thus making less profit). OR
• There is a twist in the tail for the “Freebie marketing” model now that there is a new owner P&G is running the show (Also, as critiques say, innovation has already taken a hit at Gillette under P&G – could they simply stop adding more blades to the cartridge and try something really innovative?)

If you come up with a better possibility, do let me know! 🙂 I would gladly appreciate it if it helps me dodging the threat for upgrade to Mach3 yet again…

 

The genius of Jeff Dunham

(Statutory warning: Contents of this post are Highly Addictive!)

The versatile, genius, immensely talented and intelligent, life-time achievement award winner, and winner of stand-up comedian of the year 1998, Jeff Dunham who made me roll over the floor laughing…

Simply brilliant.. Your overtaxed mind needs a 10 minute break.. Go for it!

To meet with Peanut, the one above: go here.

For a list of the gang on YouTube: go here.

If you are wondering what ventriloquist and puppetry or a stand-up comic is, go here.

If you would want to learn how to (legitimately) download YouTube videos to your desktop, don’t go anywhere, just email me… 🙂