Open Sesame - That damn good.

Ever since I can remember I've always wanted to learn text-book psychology and be more aware of cognitive sciences. Why? Just like that - simply for the sheer pleasure of knowing. Of course, I'd be as excited about how art is valued, why female tarantulas get attracted to hairy-kneed males, when we can sell stuff in space and what's new in Bollywood -- wikipedia and of the like supply more info than I'll ever need. Sometimes when I sit down to read my doctor-uncle's dusty-old Gray's Anatomy so I can draw analogies with what lies outside with the good stuff inside, I wonder why I never did all this in school when I was supposed to. But enough of that - here's the reason for my current high:

I chanced upon the OpenCourseware Consortium...what is it? It's a digital shareware of high quality courses from over a 100 global universities. I downloaded a course called management psychology - it didn't ask me to fill my name and stuff - it needed nothing - I just clicked and downloaded - quite simply. There's another called Introduction to Psychology where you can download the audio files of each lecture. Stickiness is created based on the quality of the product and nothing else - and that's superb!

Now imagine the future of what's possible when this becomes all pervasive - when someone sitting in remote rural India gets access to the same notes as someone sitting in MIT. Kudos to William and Flora Hewlett Foundation - this is just brilliant!

Office is dead. Long live Office!

With all due respects to MSFT, I decided to write this blog using IE! :-) I just had a high registering and creating one of our websites in little over 2 hours and having the ability to modify almost anything. Welcome to OfficeLive - Microsoft's new (almost) beta avatar. It let's you register your domain, design your website, have 50 email accounts, get website traffic reports, optimize your website -- all for....well...FREE! It was just nice to pick certain templates, modify what I wanted, change colors, type the content and just get going - especially when I didn't want a too complicated website. One obvious bummer is you can't use OfficeLive on a Mozilla browser (of course). It again brings to question the company's game plan in balancing between canibalizing its Office sales and not missing the boat on software-as-a-service models. As I hear from behind the corporate walls, the company expects small and medium business to quite simply shift gears to a hosted-model and the biggies to continue buying them pricey products.