“The nature of a large company like Google is such that they reward consistent, focused performance in one area. This sounds good on the surface, but if you’re a hacker at heart like me, it’s really the death knell for your career. It means that staking out a territory and defending it is far more important than doing what it takes to get a project to its goal. It means that working on Search, APIs, UI, performance, scalability and getting each one of those pieces across the line by any means necessary is actually bad for your career.

Engineers who simply staked out one component in the codebase, and rejected patches so they could maintain complete control over design and implementation details had much greater rewards”

Goodbye to google

“If you pitch an idea or a project to Larry and Sergey, their feedback is quite easy to anticipate. They’ll tell you you have to solve the problem in a more generic way. I tried to sell them on data communities, a place where like minded people could collaborate on structured data around topics they’re interested in. The feedback was predictable: why restrict yourself to communities? And why to structured data? Come up with something that solves everything!

The problem with this for an individual engineer like me is that you can’t work with a small team on a medium sized idea, get users and expand from there anymore. You either have to pitch something as the third coming of Steve or your idea will be relegated to being a feature of something else.

Google’s mode of operation used to be best characterised as strictly opportunistic. There were certain principles and leading ideas, but any project that met those and where Google thought it could do better than what was out there, would be taken on.

No longer. Google now has strategies. Once you offer an online spreadsheet and an online word processor, strategy demands that you also offer an online solution for presentations, even if it isn’t actually much better. And you start seeing presentations with product road maps and competitive landscapes and unique selling points.

No doubt this approach suits a bigger company better. But the engineer in me wants to go back to that whiteboard; hire smart people that exploit new opportunities that become available as technology develops to build new products and services, which in turn leads to user happiness. Having a plan easily gets in the way of doing the right thing there.”

Douwe Osinga

“entrepreneurs have to be dogged and passionate. It’s like going into a bar filled with 100 beautiful women. You ask the first one, ‘Will you go out with me?’ And she says no. You ask the second one out, and she pours her drink on you. The third one slaps you. Well, most people would give up at beautiful woman No. 2 or No. 3. An entrepreneur is the one who gets all the way to No. 100. And marries her and lives happily ever after.”

Flipping with grilled cheese

By a system I mean that the diverse people actually work together to direct their specialized capabilities toward common goals for patients. They are coordinated by design. They are pit crews. To function this way, however, you must cultivate certain skills which are uncommon in practice and not often taught.

For one, you must acquire an ability to recognize when you’ve succeeded and when you’ve failed for patients. People in effective systems become interested in data. They put effort and resources into collecting them, refining them, understanding what they say about their performance.

Second, you must grow an ability to devise solutions for the system problems that data and experience uncover. When I was in medical school, for instance, one of the last ways I’d have imagined spending time in my future surgical career would have been working on things like checklists. Robots and surgical techniques, sure. Information technology, maybe. But checklists?

They turn out, however, to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction—in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains.

Which brings us to the third skill that you must have but haven’t been taught—the ability to implement at scale, the ability to get colleagues along the entire chain of care functioning like pit crews for patients. There is resistance, sometimes vehement resistance, to the efforts that make it possible. Partly, it is because the work is rooted in different values than the ones we’ve had. They include humility, an understanding that no matter who you are, how experienced or smart, you will fail. They include discipline, the belief that standardization, doing certain things the same way every time, can reduce your failures. And they include teamwork, the recognition that others can save you from failure, no matter who they are in the hierarchy.

These values are the opposite of autonomy, independency, self-sufficiency. Many doctors fear the future will end daring, creativity, and the joys of thinking that medicine has had. But nothing says teams cannot be daring or creative or that your work with others will not require hard thinking and wise judgment. Success under conditions of complexity still demands these qualities.

Source : Cow Boys and Pit Crews

If you are going to be doing a startup for an average of four years if you are unsuccessful and eight years if you are successful, it makes sense to devote six months to deciding what to do in the first place. If you go with whatever comes to you first, unless you are very lucky, you will likely waste far more than half a year before you can pivot to success. More often, you’ll run out of money and morale and end up in the dead pool.

being user driven is a tax. I’d estimate that we moved about half as quickly as if we’d just gone with our gut consistently. In return, we dramatically reduced the chance that we would make wildly wrong bets and have to double back, abandoning large periods of work. Ultimately, investors gave money as much for our process as for our team and concept. Being truly user-driven also created a much better environment for our engineers, who got to work on features that had been vetted prior to beginning development. Finally, our process let us avoid the tantalizing product concept ratholes that could have used up years of our collective energy and time to no avail.

Source: User driven design

Internet distractions evolve to become ever more “distracting” all the time — like a virus. Distractions now “seek you out.”
Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions?

Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be “following” these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When do IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything?

The need for “attention,” rather than “hard work,” as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we’ve gone from a total separation of “work” from “non-work” to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us.

Source: Attention Control

Regular readers of my blog know that the goal of my writing is to be interesting and nothing else. I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion, largely because I don’t believe humans can be influenced by exposure to better arguments, even if I had some. But I do think people benefit by exposure to ideas that are different from whatever they are hearing, even when the ideas are worse. That’s my niche: something different. That approach springs from my observation that brains are like investment portfolios, where diversification is generally a good strategy. I’m not trying to move you to my point of view; I’m trying to add diversity to your portfolio of thoughts. In the short term, I hope it’s stimulating enough to be entertaining. Long term, the best ideas probably come from people who have the broadest exposure to different views.

Scott Adams

Dear Airtel customer experience manager,

I am an internet  junkie since Rs 50 an hour for a 128kbps snail fast internet in a dingy cyber cafe days. One of the happiest day of  my life was when private telecom players like Airtel started broadband  services in India. I tried all of them and decided to stick with Airtel. For a hardcore internet junkie I still believe Airtel is the best. I am happy Airtel customer from past two years. Service is reliable and customer support is prompt and efficient. I do not remember regretting my choice and paying the premium for Airtel services  (remember BSNL is always cheaper ).

Though I am a satisfied Airtel customer I often  face some really silly issues which make me cringe. Good thing is that most of them are not  I-want-to-change-my-service-provider type but more of why-Airtel-why kind. They are not be related with performance and downtime but are definitely spoiling my overall customer experience.

For example take  internet  usage update service. One trigger this whenever one cross his download limits. Since I am using Youtube as my cable-tv substitute I trigger this more often. This  services is expected to update me on my usage and redirect me to whatever I was doing. The problem is redirection never works! Not even after refreshing the page.

Next is online bill payment service. It never works on my fav browser! In fact whole Airtel website is Crome agnostic. My question is again: why. Why it is so hard for a top telecom player to get a cross browser  payment gateway. Only reason I can think of is a lazy IT department. I assume  like other  infrastructure Airtel  must be outsourcing the whole damn site and developing a website that works across all browser is no rocket science. And even if it is they money to pay for it and its worth every penny.

Last but not the least your triff plans. They suck big time. Selecting a right triff plan from Airtel site is harder then solving a sudoku. If I ask my father to do it I am sure I will never have a broadband connection. Again a why. Why selecting of plan have to be so hard. Why can’t we just give every customer  connection for some trial period and  suggestion a planing  after gauging his usage?

The things I mentioned above may not make or break deal for me for now but they will when other providers will improve in their services. But they are surely  damaging the  perception  of Airtel as a brand  and my overall customer experience.  The good thing is that this damage  can be easy managed and repaired and it will do not cost Airtel a fortune. All you have to do is to manage your IT service provider well and ask them to design your site for laziest and dumbest of the users.

I am just wondering if you can look into these trivial issues and see if something can be done.

Expecting better customer experience in future.

Satpal Parmar                                                                                           An otherwise happy customer

BI: Some of the first reviews of the product have been pretty rough. I think that’s because there’s not a lot users and not a lot of data in there yet. Are you seeing a chicken and egg problem here?

BN: We tried our best — and we can always do better — but we tried to tell people “don’t use this alone, it’s not very fun.” If you download the app with someone else and they’re right next to you, you’re going to have an amazing experience because literally everything you see that they capture on their camera you’ll have on your camera. It’s a completely surreal experience.

Today when you and I go to an event and take pictures on our phone, we’re uploading to a service on the Web and people view them, but it’s as if we were never together at all, it’s a two uncorrelated events. With our application, when you launch that application with other people, it’s intimate, you’re part of a group of people.

But I think those reviews are all really accurate and great. We did a poor job of telling people “don’t use this alone, or it’s kind of pointless.”

BI: Do you expect that your ratings on iTunes will go up as more people download and test it out?

BN: Number one, more people will come on. Number two, once we do a better job explaining how it works.

We could have done a way better job of creating a tutorial. We did a lot of the UI things that will be the right paradigms early, but they’re a little bit challenging right now. Like not having labels — that’s because we want to be international from day one.

But it’s crazy, the usage has been insane. And the ratings on iTunes are really weird always, I look at the number of reviews and it’s not even one tenth of 1% of the number of downloads we’ve gotten

Read more

The New York Times paywall is like the French tax system: expensive, utterly complicated, disconnected from the reality and designed to be bypassed.

The New York Times’ pricing structure, the fact that it is also designed to protect the paper’s physical circulation, the paywall’s porosity all complicate projections. One thing is sure: $35 a month ($420/year — $455 year for 52wks) to view the online paper on three devices is ridiculous, not matter how elitist the target group is fantasized to be. You simply don’t charge such an amount in a (US) market where services like Hulu or Netflix cost $7.99 per month.

Source: NYtimes’ Fair Price

But what if they are testing the water? Selling digital subscription is fairly new media business for them. There are no fixed rules.  So they are starting with something that they can control better in future: high pricing. They can always reduce price if response do not meet expectations. Can you do that by starting with a lower price?