Linux at 20, and My Personal Experience

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Linux has turned twenty, though there might be more than one known "birthday".  
A few months back, I moved my whole office progressively to Linux. 84% have Ubuntu and the rest have Fedora. Since then, I have moved almost everything to Linux and OpenOffice, StarOffice or LibreOffice (I have all three whose files are perfectly interchangeable. 
Recently I read with pleasure the following paragraph: 
Linux runs everything from air traffic control systems to infotainment systems to nuclear submarines. Linux also powers the $10-billion CERN super collider, the special effects in Avatar. Zemlin also pointed out that Linux-powered stock markets now trade “72% of the world’s equity trades in 2010.” This, I might add, was before the London Stock Exchange went to Linux earlier this year. And of course, there’s been a “complete inversion” in supercomputing. In ten years, the top 500 supercomputers have switched from 96% Unix to 96% Linux. (taken from here). 
Looking back, I think I made the right decision. I had hardly any teething troubles,  got my assembled OS free machines much cheaper, and now my employees actually prefer Linux because of its speed and its cool graphics. They also regularly raid the Ubuntu software store and use nifty little and large applications for a variety of purposes. We have a script that automatically backs up contents of each machine in the office, including the Windows partition on 2 hard disks, onto a 2TB hard disk every day between 10 am and 12 noon.
Large part of the thanks for this transition are due to Nandan Bhat who runs Linux-based certification training courses from Novell and Red Hat in my city. My only gripe is that our heavy-duty printer, a scanner-cum-printer from Canon, has a Linux driver that for some reason does not work. So occasionally, for long print jobs, I need to switch one machine to Windows.
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Google out-googled - and that too by an Indian company!

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Google features quite often in this blog for all the interesting things it does. However, here is an offering that out-googles Google - and that too, on GMail and Google Apps! What's more, this quiet, really useful product (you will really be missing out on something if you don't check this out) has been developed by an Indian company, headquartered, where else, but in Bangalore!  More ...

Are Web Apps the Next Big Thing?

Nowadays, everyone and his dog seems to be extolling the virtues of web apps. Examples:

• iPod first created the concept of an “ecosystem” built around a product, with integration with iTunes. They followed it up with iPad and a huge App Store to go with it.
• MS Office 2010 buyers get free online applications of Office that run under most browsers. This is a significant “webification” of MS Office 2007 which transitioned from creating binary objects to XML objects for the first time.
• Google's Chrome browser has created a Web Store and several of the apps available on it (I have only checked some of the Free ones) are stunning. The browser now reads PDF files natively without need for a PDF reader plug-in.
• The Chrome browser will eventually become the OS itself – where you directly boot up and go online. The browser is the OS.
• Splashtop offers a Linux OS of that kind, with a difference – it is is installable like any Windows app, from within Windows (indeed, that is the only way you can install it), and offers a quick boot option that actually boots and goes online in 10 seconds on many machines.
• Much electronic ink is being expended on whether Firefox will survive or not, revolving around the preesence or absence of its App strategy.
• The CEO of Nokia, in his now famous “burning platform” email to Nokia employees, says that Nokia failed to see the “ecosystem” concept that Apple, Android and others were building around mobile handsets, and lamented that Nokia tried to replicate feature after feature, but not the ecosystem. It's Ovi Store is an attempt to catch up.

Tablet PCs were touted as the rage a few years back (Gates demo-ed a device running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition at Comdex in 2001), but flopped. So did e-book reading hand-held devices like Treo, Palm, et al, that were PDAs and e-book readers but not phones. Both these concepts were a little ahead of their times, so today, e-book readers like Kindle and Nook and hand-held tablet PCs have become the rage. Smartphones like Blackberry and iPhone have e-book reading apps pre-loaded, or downloadable free.

For some time, now, Google has been evangelising the idea of storing and depending more and more on “the cloud”, but it will be some time before people learn to depend completely on the cloud, to the exclusion of local access and storage. The same way that news reports that the Nano caught fire has deterred many potential Tata Nano buyers, I am also a little cagey on reading recently that some 150 users of Gmail had the entire content on their Gmail account deleted. What if I was among those 150? A simple hard disk crash is something we have learnt to take in our stride, using the redundancy in the form of cloud storage plus regular local backups and redundant copies. But what is the alternative in the cloud? Is there redundancy ? How can it be affordable? Now it is free, but for how long? These are concerns everyone has, and until these are taken care of and seen to be taken care of, web apps will not become universal.

So, while I think the concept of web apps will take off finally, currently, the apps are curiosities that early adopters are adopting; to accelerate that into a burgeoning “movement” where all will migrate to web apps will take many many more adopters. I can see it happening in 3-4 years from now, but not now. Now, many will begin co-opting “the cloud” into their redundancy plans, for non-secure data.

What do you think?

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Product Development is fun!

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My first attempt at product development resulted in a great software product (a copiously hyperlinked textual database of the tax laws) ahead of its time (before computers had CD-ROM Drives, and before people knew about the Internet (I had to explain what hypertext was!), but I failed miserably at marketing it. However, I had a clear idea of what the customers liked. And when I went out to sell, I sold successfully. But if I did that, continued product development suffered.  I just could not manage both. Even now, I think managing both is very, very difficult. But what I learnt was that you need not be a big moneybag with thousands of employees to bring out a great product.  That was between 1993 and 1995.


Later, my second product was not really MY product. I was on the board of a co-operative bank as non-executive, honorary Director and during the three years there, my single big contribution was to make them believe that they could develop their own software. A small team of two staff and one consultant driven by me alone from the Board, developed a branch-level banking software (everything on liabilities side, and quite a few aids on the asset side) that had built-in linkages for centralization of data. This got implemented in 6 branches on a shoe-string budget. Then I left the Bank's Board to go on to other things.  Till this day, that Bank remains one of the few banks anywhere in India (or probably the world)  to run on its own software. Today, with RBI approval, they are selling the software and their implementation services to other Banks and this has become a profit-centre. Now, of course, the IT Dept has become as big as a small software company. This is something I had envisaged when this product was originally developed. I suspect that my Board colleagues okayed the project because, with the minimal resources I demanded, it was worth allowing me to fail - less than the cost of  software for one branch - they never expected me to succeed, and when I did, I learnt that success needs many fathers, else, the real father gets swept away in the first flush of success. (I know I am stretching the metaphor, but I think it conveys what I want to!) This was from 1995 to 1998.


Then, from 2000 to 2003, I joined a KPO (that acronym wasn't invented then) with responsibilities that covered the "D" in R&D. I developed processes that increased throughput, accuracy and allowed scaleability and replicability. I thoroughly enjoyed the daily technical challenges -- of designing services that allowed us to create more employment here in services acknowledged by our most demanding customers. 


Now, I am back on my own, and am developing a few exciting products. This time, again, I am on a shoe-string budget, but I am harnessing the sheer enthusiasm of young people by taking up projects that allow them to learn and that they are passionate about. And creating wonderful products that those working on surprise themselves. 

I also benefit from knowing up close a friend in Chennai who is successfully running multiple businesses and yet loves bringing out new products, services and technologies all the time.

What I read a few days back inspires me to improve the aesthetics of these products. It also encourages me because Jobs too has discovered that great products can be made by young people passionate about what they do. While not everyone can be a Jobs, anyone can benefit from his "methodology" and crazy attention to detail.


Watch this space for knowing what these products are!
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Another Great Feature from Google Labs

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The guys at Google are really something.

Now, it is an app still in the Labs stage (i.e., pre-beta) that I noticed today. It is called Google Public Data explorer. What it does is that it brings Economics and Macro-economic indicators alive.Way, way beyond what any spreadsheet applications have done. This feature currently works on specific datasets that Google has compiled. I am sure that the next step will be to allow you to upload your own datasets and use the same engine to animate the stuff.
Take for example this picture.  It clearly shows how hypocritical the developed countries are, when they refuse to talk about sharp reduction in emissions, and expect countries like India and China to commit to emission reduction. See their per capita profligacy over the last few decades by clicking on button below the graph. The underlying data is from the World Bank.
Take this picture, that shows how the preparation for the Olympics and the huge increase in steel manufacturing in China made for a sudden acceleration of China's absolute CO2 emissions.
Macro-economics and statistics will never be the same again.
I salute Google. This would be a godsend for researchers and for number-crunchers in companies, once it graduates to allowing us to upload and analyse our own datasets. No more huge money to be spent on data mining and analysis software. 


PS: Those of you who read this and some of the other entries on my blog are invited to comment  on the entries they have a thought to share, and to subscribe to the blog feed. I promise interesting posts, and not too many of them. Nice to know that someone is reading all this!

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