Bright-yellow carrots are good for you!

Positive reinforcement and recognition to motivate movement in the right direction - is as old as life itself. Employees often say that the company needs to recognize their work more. Dolphins will jump with it. Whales will roll. The bigger the scope of recognition, the better it seems one has achieved in life. I also notice that sometimes even a single no-body's positive reinforcement can have a swelling effect on a well-achieved individual. However, this feeling is a very elusive one and it disappears as quickly as it appears. There are a lot of other feelings that come close but we never actually sit and observe them. Eating a nice hot meal after a rigorous mountain hike is very satisfying but hunger will strike again. Putting a Q-tip in your ear when its all ticklish. Finding a restroom on a long dreary highway with a full-bladder. Seeing a picturesque snow-capped mountain-range after a dull, arduous journey. Getting off a bus after 24 hours in it. Taking a shower after a sweaty day. Having sex after many weeks - feeling super happy and then noticing that the original feeling returns very quickly. It's the same single feeling that manifests in multiple forms. Basically, we are wired internally in a way to seek positive stroking of our egos from external sources. We like that fleeting glimpse into "feeling good" and we want it again and again and so we strive during the periods in-between. It's almost predictable and can work like a machine.

Corporate India cannot be much different. The business-gossip newspaper, Economic Times has year-end awards. Every year a high-profile jury (this year - Lakshmi Mittal, Deepak Parekh, Harish Manwani, Aditya Birla etc.) is formed to select the top winners in corporate India and awards are doled out. ET runs many photographs in its newspaper with the bigwigs and describes in painful detail the clothes they wore, what they ate and drank, where they sat and how they spoke (nothing of that is really business stuff!). The newspaper also pathetically tries to sell itself in its columns wherever possible. When I saw the pics and read all the juicy stuff much like I read the Bollywood Page 3 news, I wondered how it would be for Wall Street Journal to run WSJ Awards - we'd have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Dell, Waltons, Larry Ellisson, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and so on...get together for a cocktail party to receive the coveted WSJ Awards one evening and WSJ runs on its front-page photos of Buffett's jacket and articles describing what Larry Ellisson's girlfriend wore and what Bill Gates joked with one of the Walton lady's --- the thought itself is side-splitting funny!

Spin the globe a little more to the Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman and you'll find that not everyone needs this public acknowledgement. Perelman who lives outside of St. Petersburg was recently offered the Field's medal for solving a 100 year old mathematical problem called Poincare Conjecture and refused it. After he solved it, he simply posted his findings on the Internet (without his name) for the world to simply go-figure. On an earlier occasion when he rejected a European award, he felt the committee was incompetent. He reminds me vaguely of Paul Gaugin's story in Maugham's Moon and Sixpence. On the other hand, Shing-Tung Yau who put the finishing touches on the solution eagerly accepted the Field medal. Everytime I have an urge to google my own name, I find myself toggling from the Perelman-mode to ETAward-type mode and I find my behavior amusing. So until my mind converts to Paul Gaugin-mode fully, I need nicely decorated, bright-yellow carrots with my name etched on it.

"For-sure" death of software as we know it

As I write this blog using a Mozilla browser, I wonder why we're held ransom to Microsoft products. I'm also reminded of my days in Redmond as a vendor of the company - getting excited to sell desi-software services to Microsoft so that we play a role in some of their many products. My views are below but first here's a little compendium of much-much better alternatives to most commonly used Microsoft products (surely not Apple):

Type	Microsoft Product	Alternative
Email	Microsoft Outlook	Enough out there but try Zimbra for an exact replica
Calendar	Microsoft Outlook	CalendarHub, Kiko
Task List	Microsoft Tasks	Ta-da List, Voo2do
Project Management	Microsoft Sharepoint	Basecamp, CentralDesktop
Documentation	Microsoft Word	Writely (Google), Writeboard, Rallypoint, Zoho Writer
Spreadsheet	Microsoft Excel	Google Spreadsheet
Movie/ Song Player	Microsoft Windows Media Player	Enough out there

I got most of this list from here. But the list is seemingly endless - just google.

Recently my business partner opposed using one of the above tools for client-purposes citing security being a concern. May be it is or may be it's not. However, I'm sure these "service-providers" are also thinking about the same concern and will very shortly figure it out. Imagine this not-so-distant future that intermingles with the current present.

Ubiquitous and mostly-free internet. Most software that we are used to paying for - will be available for free or for nominal usage-based costs. No more one-size fit-all approach - possibility of endless customization (just try Voo2do - a one-person company that allows all the customization that I'll ever need). Intermingled global purchasing trends (for e.g. a company in India may want software products available in the US but may not want to pay dollar-prices - suddenly, the purchase doesn't make sense but the need still exists because their customer is global). Financial markets will increasingly recognize this globalized-customer (be it a company or an individual) - e.g. I spend good amounts of time in both US and India but my needs don't change based on geography - I want to buy what I get in the US in India and vice-versa - the future of banking assures me that I will be able to do so. Software resellers will be history - I will click-buy what I need when I need it. Software will be device-neutral - I don't like sync-ing my databases from laptop to desktop to mobile device - it has to be "synched" by itself. Individual-customization will result in uncluttered simplicity - the software will customize itself based on my need and usage - I don't want to click Advanced Options and check-uncheck mindless checkboxes - I don't understand it and find it silly. And I definitely will not pay for what I don't need.

I'm squinting my eyes and searching hard - but I just can't find a place for software products in this world. Ironically and for now, I'm waiting for an eluding sales call from a Microsoft salesguy to sell me their software products - my best buddy who is still in the cob-webbed products-era assured me to "stay tuned" many moons ago - the only respite is that I know I won't have to do that a few moons from now - I'll just click and use what I need.