Tag: strategy

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Yahoo! gone Insane!

No Yahoo! hasn’t changed it’s name to Insane!. It’s just their behavior that has gone insane.

If you’ve been a member of some online group for quite some time, chances are that the group is on Yahoo! Groups. Same with me. This story is concerned with my college batch online egroup. Yahoo! groups has a very useful feature which let’s you specify ANY email address for your mails to be delivered (and receive mails from, obviously). I had configured it to my company mail id.

Now like a lot of people, I have two Yahoo! ids, NB and AS. The group is configured with NB. Today, I decided to change it to one of my other Yahoo! id AS, mostly because I use it as the primary id.

….but it won’t get changed. The error

  • Your email address “[email protected]” is in an invalid format.
  • Invalid Email Address.Your Email address of [email protected] belongs to yahoo.co.in which is restricted from use in Yahoo! registrations. Please choose a different email address.

yahoogoneinsane.jpg

I thought, they might be allowing only “yahoo.com” addresses. So I changed my input to “[email protected], hoping for an error message that the specified email address doesn’t exist… but what I get is:

  • Invalid Email Address.Your Email address of [email protected] belongs to yahoo.com which is restricted from use in Yahoo! registrations. Please choose a different email address.

yahoogoneinsane2.jpg

Now WHAT IN THE HELL are the Yahoo! developers thinking? They don’t think that it’ll stop people from creating more than one id… or do they?

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Bill Gates wins me!

I realized that the title of this post has a contrast with my previous post, only after I wrote the topic. Thus, I feel that it is obligatory to mention that I am still Anti-M$. I still do not support there business model. Phew!
…and yes. The contrast in the names is just a mere coincidence. I know it’s tough to believe, but then I don’t lie.

Now coming to the topic.
I have always appreciated the way Bill Gates (and, of course, his wife) has spent time and money on Melinda Foundation. I remember posting my views a few days ago on Arpit’s blog.

A few minutes ago, I read Bill Gates speech transcript that he delivered at Harvard.
He starts the speech on a light note and calls himself a “bad influence” by reminding that he made Steve Ballmer drop out of B-School (Oh! How I wish that Gates had failed in convincing Ballmer 😉 ).
He continues his speech by talking about how ignorant he was about the socio-economic and health problems of the developing nations, when he joined Harvard (and even later.)
The thing that blew me was that for the most part of his speech, he talked about how technology can and should be used for the help of these people.

I won’t mention the details. I’d pursue you to read it. I hate to say, but Bill seems to be a bright candidate for my future plans (after he drops out of M$, of course).

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An insight into Sun’s *crazy* strategy.

I have been reading a lot of discussion on Sun’s current market position/revenue versus their *mad* strategy. I have simultaneously been working on Java’s history for my book. I thought it might be interesting to post my views on the topic and see what others are thinking. To justify/criticize Sun’s current modus operandi, I will talk a little about their past strategies, and their respective outcomes.

The Past

Most of the people know James Gosling as the father of Java. Only a few know that he was also the lead engineer of Gosmacs (gmacs or Gosling Emacs) and NeWS. Now, I won’t be talking about Gosmacs (which according to some people is/was the reason of some conflict between RMS and Gosling. Phew!)
However, NeWS (Network extensible Window System) is of a little concern, mostly because it was arguably superior to X Window System… and because it FAILED. The most important reason for its failure (and X Window’s success) is that Sun kept it proprietary.
Later on when Sun developed Java, some people, especially the genius Eric Schmidt (then CTO-Sun, now CEO-Google), were aware that keeping Java within enclosed fences will lead to similar devastating results. Not to mention that *7 (for which Java was developed) had already failed and Java was still in search of a viable market.

So what did he do?
He focused on making it as open as possible and tried building a *Java Community*. (Google SoC, IMHO, is also a “win-the-community-and-you-win-everything-else” approach. But then that’s a different topic altogether. 😉 )

Where were we?
Yeah! So he focused on building a Java Community.
Apart from organizing developer conferences like JavaOne, Sun also encouraged user groups (JUGs), which reached over a number of 400 in year 2000 itself. In fact they went a step further with JCP (Java Community Process) to make the development of Java *as open as possible*.
The reality behind all this community building scene was the fact that the direct control remained with Sun (well mostly).

Everything, however, was running smooth; for Sun as well as the Java developers.

“I envy you. But such a thing is not meant to last.”

— Persephone, Matrix Reloaded

I guess the above statement is valid for every aspect of human existence.
In early 2004, Jonathan Schwartz, referenced Eric Steven Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and compared JCP to the “Bazaar”, stating that development of Linux was more like a “Cathedral”. I would not expand on it but this was enough to infuriate ESR 🙂

ESR wrote an open letter addressed to Scott McNealy, CEO-Sun, with a subject line “Let Java Go”. He accused Sun on several fronts (for which I’d pursue you to read the letter) and appealed to Open Source Java. A few weeks later RMS wrote an essay on Java Trap and appealed the developers to contribute and use open source projects like GCJ/Gnu Classpath etc. Several other appeals/open letters were published (Apache’s Geir Magnusson Jr., IBM, etc.)

A series of events followed before Sun announced that it will be open sourcing Java. There main concern was Microsoft forking Java and hence, destroying its cross platform compatibility (which shows that they really were clueless on how Open source model works/ can work).
They had no other option than to Open Source the *giant*, and they did it.

The Present

The past unarguably affects, if not defines, the present. Sun’s experience since the NFS days to (forced) Open Sourcing Java days taught/reminded them of their most important lesson.
The Community is fruitful!
Build a community and everything else will follow, sooner or later.

So here they are.
Open sourcing EVERYTHING.
Building Community, and making it mutually encashable. It’s obviously not so profitable for them today, but the future holds immense potential.

The way they have been endorsing and promoting stuff is simply adorable. Even NetBeans has its own *arena*.
Not to mention the, so called, developer conferences organized all over the world in a distributed fashion to reach the most number of developers. I, however, have several concerns regarding them. You may read some of them at Amit’s blog. I hope Sun listens to the plea of developers and improves the quality of these summits.

Another amazing strategy, IMHO, is the blogs that Sun employees post regularly. I have subscribed some of them and it’s really amazing to see that how important role these blogs are playing in binding people. They often link each other’s (Sun Employees, of course) blogs. You can have a look at the Sun-Blogging homepage to get a feel of the number of hits the folks out there are getting. Now even if I read only one of these, I’d get to know about latest developments. I am not sure whether it’s a part of their strategy, but it’s definitely working as a powerful advertising medium.
Yup! I know that employees of other firms write blogs too and probably get bigger number of hits, but I haven’t seen anyone of them making so much of a difference on an organizational level. (Please correct me if I am wrong)

The Future

I am no Nostradamus and I cannot predict future.
All I can say is the future is (mostly) Free & Open. IBM (previously referred Satan) secured its place (with a Halo on head) by contributing to the Apache httpd project and winning the FOSS community. Now it’s Sun’s turn and they are playing pretty well.
Yes, their revenue might be a concern today; but I don’t really see a reason why there future shouldn’t be bright. 🙂

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"COLUKABKI – AOL – MSN – YAHOO – RED CROSS"….. aaah Comm’n Gimme a break.

It’s really interesting that even enginieering students, who are supposed to have a very ANALYTIC are least bothered in verifying anything before believing it…… and that too when they have access to GOOGLE.

This blog of mine is in response to the hundreds and thousands of mails that are forwarded so that somewhere, somebody’s LIFE COULD BE SAVED BY FORWARDING THE BLOODY MAIL.
AOL, Yahoo, Red Cross, MSN etc. etc .etc. donated certain amount of money FOR EACH TIME THE MAIL IS FORWARDED (generally 1 cent).
Isn’t that interesting???? I mean what these sites could do generously (if they wished to), do it when some BIG HEARTED person forwards the mail.
And guess what??? They do it without attaching any kind of tracker in the mail… Not to mention that doing any thing even near to attaching a tracker would be a threat to an individuals privacy… 🙂

I cannot stop myself from sharing one other similar interesting mail. The mail said that an INDIAN BOY HAS CHALLENGED BILL GATES BY DEVELOPING AN O/S CALLED “O! YES”, which very Robust, Secure, blah blah blah… And HP has proposed to purchase it.
Now, the first thing… making such an O/S is no joke. This has nothing to do with the crappy nature of WINDOWS (hehehhe), it’s just means that it’s very difficult for a young child to do so.
Secondly, if someone succeeds in doing so, this news would be the hottest one around…. not one which has to be informed via email. 😛 And the most interesting part….. This mail has been doing rounds since 5 years (at least) :))

These mails are generally used for two reasons:

  1. For fun…. or to make mockery of someone.
  2. For stealing your mail id for spamming……. I know this is strange, but it’s true. If you have any such mail in your mail box, just try to count the number of email ids in it…. and then imagine what would you do with them if you were a spammer. These mails are infact sent by spammers so that they can have a reasonably beautiful number of such mail ids.

JUNTA, please don’t feel bad if you have been forwarding such mails.
Obviously, nobody knows everything… but you can be a little careful when you recieve such mails.

  1. Ignore such mails.
  2. If you really feel that the mail is genuine and need to be forwarded, GOOGLE some keywords contained in the mail,
  3. or forward it after removing all the previous email addresses.
  4. ALTERNATELY, YOU MAY ALSO DISTRIBUTE THE LINK OF THIS ARTICLE FOR SPREADING AWARENESS 🙂