Per Captia Innovation Output

Nokia spent about 4 $billion in R@D in 2010. Apple spent about 1 $ billion. If you were to measure innovation as a metric ( may be in terms of the no of successful products per 100 employees?, sounds very crude but i will stick to this for lack of an alternative ) , the per capita output of Apple is about 10 times that of Nokia.  What is behind this phenomenal ‘innovation productivity’?

More detailed breakup of Nokias R & D is here

 http://blog.gsmarena.com/nokia-is-top-spender-in-rd-has-little-to-show-for-it-says-berstein-research/

A Disciplined approach to innovation is probably what i would say is behind Apples phenomenal success. But that is just summarizing half the story without going into details. The real reasons for Apple success would be

• A fanatical devotion to innovation at all levels of the Company, they try to ingest innovation into the very companys DNA
• Engender innovation into the employees psyche as if it is a a cult 
• Willingness to throw away any product , except the best. Steve Jobs puts it as “get rid of the crappy stuff” ( this means saying ‘no’ to  1000s of things

Of course there a few Apple-specific  ways of working, that are also behind the companys success. Design-centric products, and focusing on entire ecosystems/portfolios rather than disconnected products and extremely focused and unique branding of the company both to its employees and consumers. I would call these as very specific to Apple and may or maynot be relevant to other companies.

No doubt,  lot of  process and ways of thinking at Apple have been shaped by Steve Jobs. Some companies attribute the success to Stevge Jobs along, quipping Apple has “Steve Jobs”!. The great products from Apple owe their success to not just Steve, it would have been possible only with a large no of designers, coders and marketeers. I bet, a large no of Apple employees probably also share Steves way of thinking, and have played a very critical role in the product successes.

Coming to Nokia, as an example, where did all the 4 billion R @ D budget go. And why did not the $ 4 billion prevent HTC eating into Nokias market share? Personally, my answer is ery blunt, the money drained down the mouths of several highly paid execs at Nokia who were supposed to be in charge. These executives suck a lot, and they dont know by how much they suck. And continue to think , factors beyond their control were responsibvle for Nokias slide.

And  this is just underlinining  one of the common truths about all big and successful companies. They ( usually ) become slothful and complacent and do not want to rock the boat!. There are exceptions of course, but this is generally true. This is not just true for Nokia, Microsoft is in the same league too ( they spent about $ 9 billion dollars on R @ D last year ! ) .

Universal food security

I think for the first time in history of mankind, universal food security has become a technical ,if not a political,possibility. We have come a long way from our days as hunter gatherers. There is enough food, to go around for all inhabitants of earth provided , government policy makers across the world know how to manage food stocks and prices.

Can governments across the world sit together and enact laws that make it mandatory in their countries for their governments to ensure all citizens get access to cheap food – it may be rice or wheat or lentils or vegetables.  I am not referring to expensive basmati rice or premium wheat or fancy vegetables, more of basic food items at the bottom of the food price pyramid that are edible.

This will probably ensure that for the first time in the history of mankind,  man is freed from the necessity of having to look for food, and his efforts are spent elsewhere in ensuring better education, healthcare and housing for his family.

In the context of food security, food subsidies, i believe have a central role to play. Food subsidies, to some extent ensure that the poorest of the poor in our country,  do not have to pay through their nose for a days meal. Rice at Rs 2, ensures that a poor family can spend the money saved elsewhere – on things like education, healthcare etc. That also ensures, that there is a psychological assurance to BPL families, that food is only 5 or 10 Rs away, not an expensive dream.Atleast in developing countries, like India, while market capitalism plays this role in western countries.

Another item that comes to mind is the free noon meals scheme in place in some states like TamilNadu and Andhra in India. While this scheme has been criticised for being a drain on the state exchequer and populist, there is no doubt about its role in lifting an entire generation of kids out of poverty in these states.

Parents who otherwise send their children to work so everyone in the family can be fed, no longer have to worry about their childrens meals ( and clothes etc. )  and this has helped many children to focus on completing their schooling. This has broken the vicious cycle of having to work to feed and come out poverty which in turn made them abandon their schooling , and took away the chance to complete a schooling and get a high paying  job requiring a college degree.

While, giving away food for cheap in a developed country sounds like cheap populism , it is probably a strong necessity in a poor country like ours and should be encourage and looked at. As per captia starts rising and a country become wealthy , food subsidies can be brought down gradually.

Getting organised and taking care of oneself – a positive personal experience

Since the time my first baby was born, one and half years ago,  more and more demands have been placed on my  and my wifes time. During the days before my marriage a few years ago, I had few distractions other than my job. And then after my marriage, there was little bit of demand on my time at home. But the birth of my baby girl changed all that. I now literally have to ration all my available time – distribute it , so that i spend enough of quality time on each of the important aspects of my life – My job , taking care of my baby, spending time with Suji, and taking care of all the routine home related work.

The first casuality of the reduced time availability was my health. My weight shot up to 88 kilos in early 2009. Since then i have reduced it to a manageable 79, but not still close to the 73 kilos i was in 2006.

I realised that , to save time and improve the quality of my and my familys life, i need to get organised and take care of myself and my family – both the psychological and physical health.

As a first step, i got a neat filing cabinet and got all documents into a system of numbered files. I have around 40 of those files and all my families documents – anything from hospital records, certificates to bank statements end up there. And looking for documents had become easier since then. I also managed to catalog all the books i have. The next step is to catalog and inventory every other item in the house. And then do all household cleaning and chores by sticking to a schedule. This includes servicing the various gadgets  have at home at regular intervals, cleaning the house etc. The idea is to run the house like a efficient factory and spend the least amount of effort and mental space worrying about these.

The second aspect i realised was that i needed to take care of my body, just the way we would take care of our car or any machine. Good quality fuel, regular checkups, scheduled maintenances and enough rest. I embarked on a running and cycling program since early 2010 and has been fairly successful. I have managed to reduce 9 kilos since early 2009 , a tall achievement for someone with a busy lifestyle. I plan to reduce my weight to a respectable 73 kilos in the next 6 months.

In addition to the physical exercise part, i decided to rest my mind for atleast a day in a week, mostly on Sundays. Resting the mind of Saturday would be a bonus, not always possible, but highly encouraged. Other than reading books, i do not indulge in any other mind heavy activity. Watching movies or browsing internet and reading up on heavy technical reading material is strictly off. While watching movies might appear relaxing, it actually bombards the mind with a lot of sensory information that the mind gets loaded with all that.

The end result has been nothing less than phenomenal. Increased time spent with my family, better control over time and an increased sense of well being.

Darwinian Evolution and Product Design

Having been involved in SW Product Development process over the last few years , on several ocassions i could not help noticing the uncanny similarities between Software Product Design and Evolution.   And this similarity probably holds true even for general product design in any domain, not just software.

The first version of any piece of Software ( and Electronics Hardware ) always sucks. There is never an instance of the first version of any great products we know today, being user friendly or good ( in the sense that the product had most of the features that the user wished or wanted ) when they first hit the market. True, there have been extraordinary products like the first version of the iPod or even the Mac , but they were invariably bettered by the subsequent versions.

The first versions of many life forms were probably not the mos successful in the environment. For instance the earliest ancestors of todays mammals had many odd body parts and features which eventually disappeared over millions of years.  There were lizard like creatures with wings. There were several creatures which were mammals but suckled their young all of which disappeared ( except duck billed platypus )

In most cases, the product improves over several versions, and the refinement and the feature set both evolve incrementally in each version. The incremental improvement in design and useability come from user feedback from the previous version.   And when the new version hits the market, the consumer responds by buying the  product with the best design, features and useability that is affordable to him.

In the animal kingdom, the same feedback loop comes into play.  The tail bone in  humans ( also known as coccyx ) is an example, is a remnant of vestigial tail , being an evolutionary throw back to primate origins of humans. The tail  since then has become mostly redundant, being eliminated in the feedback process of human evolution in the last million years or so, as primates migrated from trees to plains, eliminating the need for tails.

The market punishes the sloppily designed product and rewards the best product with more market share. And then this feedback cycle continues, as competing products improve their design in incremental steps based on the feedback from the previous version.  Of course, when i say good product design here, i am referring to the sum total of the user experience of a given product, so that obviously includes  the market price  of a product.

A great but very expensive product will probably not be popular, as it is very unaffordable to majority of consumers. The contrary holds true as well, a very cheap but badly designed product will not find takers as well, as the nominal cost is offset by the products lack of useability.

A bad animal design or a very energy inefficient body part will disppear gradually ( or sometimes sudden as in the case of dinosaurs) in any species. A very useful body part , that gives competitive advantage to an animal ( or plant ) and enables it to reproduce will survive. The tail is an example, being useful to a variety of animals, from big cats to primates.

When this cycle of incremental improvement, based on user feedback, when applied to the spectrum of products across several domains,  leads to a gradual emergence of  a class of few highly efficient and engineered products in each domain, that dominate  in the  market niches they operate. There is no dearth of such products,  examples iPod, iMac, Oracle, zthe Windows OS and Linux OS, Firefox browser etc.

This is very similar to the emergence of  several species and sub-species that  dominate several ecological niches in which they live.  We have cockroaches, foxes, cats, dogs, tigers, lions and crows that thrive in the niches that they occupy.

This resemblance in a way is not surprising as product design is  sort of like an extension to human brain and in way, humans are evolving by proxy by their tools and good product development is all about better tools atleast tools that are better than their previous versions.  Perhaps at a broader level , product managers can learn from evolution , from the numerous success stories of complex organisms and body parts like the eye to the several evolutionary dead end stories , like the death of the Dinosaur.

In fact, if the intelligent theory of evolution is to be believed, then the creator or God is perhaps the most capable and able handed Product Manager the world has ever seen and there should be  no harm in learning from the creator.

( Of course with the explosion of human population in the last few hundred years, many  animals are being eclipsed by humans and we are slowly enroaching on their space. That is a disaster in progress, unless some drastic action is taken. And that is a topic for another blog post! )

Is Living becoming cheaper?

I remember reading somewhere that a middle class modern family now has more luxuries than what was available to the Roman Emperor 2000 thousand years ago. This is probably true, and for those of us even with limited means, all the luxuries of modern life are available.

Today a middle class family, anywhere in the world, can get almost all spices that it wants, has access to most of  the medical facilities ( available in the market ) and can cure most illnesses, can afford some automobile, and live in a permanent dwelling, and basic water , sewage, electricity are mostly taken care of for most of us. The income is fairly regular and there are virtually no food shortages. Agree, that many poor in developing countries across Africa and Asia probably do not get the above luxuries, but for middle class families the above list holds true.

Clearly over the last 2000 years, human life style and standard of living have continuously improved. We do not see plagues or famines where 1000′s die

This set me into thinking about  the cost of living over a period of around 10o years in the past and how the cost of living might play out in the immediate future.

Everytime my parents go out to have dinner at a restaurant they crib about how cheap food was back then. It was the same with my uncle. I used to remind them that the wages also have gone up and we make much more money than back then.

I checked the historical prices of several items. Gold, land, crude oil, electronics, apparel, shoes etc for the last 30-40 years and what i found is  a bit surprising.

While electronics especially TV has fallen almost by 80 %, and computers like 90 %. Clothing and shoes have also fallen by 10-20 % in real value, all thanks to cheap imports from China. Gold has on the other hand sort of doubled in inflation adjusted real  value between 1970 and 2005.

Land has definitely inched ahead of inflation as it is a fixed commodity.  Food has gotten cheaper the last few decades. But i suspect it may start to get expensive as its production is closely linked to the available land, which is itself becoming scarce and expensive and also crude oil which is used in food production. So here is my quick list of things likely to get cheaper and expensive in the next 10-20 years:

Getting cheaper:

• Consumer Electronics
• Personal Computers
• Plastics
• Apparel
• Shoes
• Automobiles
• Medicines

Getting expensive:

• Land
• Food
• Wood, Plant related products like paper , pulp )
• Energy ( Crude Oil , Electricity )

Of course  prices of some resources like Crude Oil, some metals like copper or aluminium  or gold can follow a cyclical pattern.  And sometimes price disruptions happen due to discoveries of oil or ore deposits. Overall, i see a shortage of these resources and a gradual increase in the demand for these in the future.

One resource that could just make everything else cheaper is energy. If mankind were to every find a source of energy that is cheap and abundant,  that could make everything else cheaper. As of now, there is no energy source that comes close, but Nuclear Fusion energy and Solar power are two contenders. But it could be very long before energy, if ever, becomes cheaper.

The “10000 hour to become an expert” premise

It has been a while since i read the book “The outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.  In this  book he makes an interesting supposition that all one needs to become an expert in a chosen field is focused practice and hardwork for a certain amount of time, he gives the exact amount of time as 10000 hours.

10000 hours of practice can be done in  about 12 years if one works part time for 3 hours a day during working days.

If someone is willing to put in about 10 hours a day in a chosen field and works on even saturdays and does not take much vacation, then 10000 hours can be achieved in  just under 5 years. And if you really throw yourself at your job, perhaps the 10000 hours can be hit in just about 3 years.

At first , the nice rounded figure of 10000 hours sounds nice, a sort of like a quick rule that can be written on a stick it notes and stuck on the edge of my computer monitor. However, there are several oversimplifications that have been done before arriving at this 10000.

Malcolm seems to assume every individual on this planet has the same propensity to learn any skill. In other words, he seems to think that all of us are hardwired in mostly the same way, so all it takes is enough practice ( software for learning ) to fill this hardware with enough data ( that we otherwise call experience ) to become an expert.

I strongly disagree with this premise. Every individual is different in this world, their brains are different and i think every individual is hard wired differently, in a way that depends on many factors , the most important being the inherited talent from his parents. The others are the inherited wealth, the persons environment, the cultural environment in which the person was born,  and even random events like war etc.

If someone like Bill Gates is cloned and dropped off in India ( obviously a browner version of Gates )  I doubt if he would have blossomed that way he did in USA. The same goes for Steve Jobs.

For someone who has a natural flair for maths and no aptitude for say, language,  it probably would be hard to  ( it would be cruel to force them to ) become an expert in literature after practicing for 10000 hours .  And what about physical sports, do they also require 10000 hours rule?

There are several examples of prodigies that discovered new theories or contributed significantly in a given field after practicing in a relatively short time. Srinivasa Ramanujam was one of them, before he was 12, he had mastered a Trignometry book by Loney and had already written sophisticated theoroms on his own. I doubt, when he was 12, he had put in 10000 hours of practice by then.

I would generally agree with Gladwell that putting in enough practice in a field is what makes one an expert, but how long one takes to master it solely depends on ones talent, natural mental ( and physical abilities ) , a supportive environment and most of all single minded passion and motivation. Beyond these, it would be hard to make a guess on what factors make one become an  expert in a field, as this is a very open ended and difficult question to answer!.

Market Fragmentation – Is it a good thing?

The other day, i was talking to my wife about which version of Linux to install in our home computer. She wanted Fedora whereas i liked Ubuntut. To resolve the issue, i decided to research a bit on the available variants of Linux.  What i found really surprised ( and confused ) me .

There were atleast a dozen major variants of Linux and several more variants if you include some of the lesser known variants.  Linux was started as a free alternative to windows and quickly became popular, but i think its full potential as a viable competitor to Windows has been affected by its fragmentation. In contrast Windows has only a few handful versions, all strictly controlled by Microsoft.

I see the unchecked market fragmentation in several other domains. Cars, Clothes, Food, Cigarettes etc, you name it.  Back in the early 1900s there were only a handful of car manufacturers and models, now there are hundreds, same goes for food brands or cigarettes.

At a broader level, market fragmentation is a response by companies producing goods and services to the presence of several market niches ( from micro niches to strong preferences )  in a given population . These niches in turn reflect the fundamental premise behind human preferences that it is as varied and complex as the human beings themselves.

But extreme market fragmentation is inherently difficult for companies to deal with, makes nice  products  vulnerable to competition,  makes it hard for companies to maintain brand loyality and mass marketing techniques become ineffective. Too many choices could confuse the end user of a product,  and in some technology sectors, too much market fragmentation can harm innovation ( Linux for e.g. ) .

Though,  the  fragmentation has different implications for technology sector compared to say the food industry the basic issues are the same. I am not sure i need to choose between 5 different brands of Tomato Ketchup. Nor am i sure if a 4 MP smarphone is very different from another one that is only 3.5 Mega Pixels.

Of  course, there does not seem to be any way to reduce market fragmentation, atleast not in a free market economy.  A free market by its very nature, seems to encourage product fragmentation and that seems like a normal evolution. And companies have dealt with a fragmented market by investing in niche marketing and using technology to reach out to the customer.

I would say only the manufactures of the goods and providers of  services can check market fragmentation and not any regulatory control.

Anyway, it would be interesting to guess where the market would be say 50 years now,  will there be more fragmentation or less .  Perhaps some new technology would make it easier for consumers to deal with market fragmentation or perhaps consumers would become tired of all the choices out there.

The story of Pixar and Computer Animation

I just completed reading the book “The Pixar Touch” by David Price. The book talks about the story behind Pixar Animation studios which forever changed the movie industry and how Steve Jobs and Lesseter turned it around. While the book gives a well written insight into the story of Pixar and the people behind it like Steve Jobs, and Lesseter, it also gives an indepth idea about the very foundations of Computer Animation in the US, and how innovation, personal determination , passion and grit of a few gave shape to a entirely new medium that came into existence.

Animation  as we know today was invented first by Walt Disney, with which he built a very successful company. Animation using human labor is very labor intensive and time consuming not to mention the inflexibility to correct mistakes or redo shots. Around the time animation movies were becoming popular, computing technologies and processing power were also parallely improving. And a few individuals across the USA were attempting to marry computers with animation to produce computer animation for the numerous advantages it had over the traditional hand crafted animation.

Catmull and Lesseter are two of the few individuals that shaped the course of computer animation in the USA. While these two had the technical expertise and the passion to produce computer animation,  what they lacked was funding, resources, computing power and infrastructure.  They pitch their ideas to a few rich investors, one of whom, driven by some of the same  goals as Catmull and Lesseter, funds the team.

But they , following their dream, find themselves with Lucas Film division and then finally end up with Steve Jobs after Jobs buys Pixar Animation for 5 million $.   Pixar Animation looses money for another few years before the making of Toy Story, which was a huge success. Shortly after Toy Story, Pixar goes public making Steve Jobs a billionaire. And every subsequent movie after Toy Story was better than it predecessor.

A few things that stand out here are, the willingness of a few investors, to fund and nurture the dreams of  those dedicated few that were willing to bet their careers on this. The investors were willing to underwrite the team amid recurring losses, keeping the company afloat so that their dreams can come true. The small team of a few including Catmull  and Lesseter were almost responsible for many of the computer algorithms used in animation.

This phenomenon of innovation based on the funding of ideas by investors is what has been driving innovation in the USA for the past century or so, atleast in many areas including  computer graphics and animation.

While, there were a few instances of funding of ideas by rich individuals in India in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a rare phenomenon. It is however common now in India, for startups to be funded by individuals  and corporations and firms in pursuit of an idea. But the effect of this nurturing of ideas and their execution will only be felt downstream after a decade or so perhaps.

I firmly believe that the opening up of the purses by the rich and the financially established entities to fund ideas and dreams of the future is one sure way  to  accelerate innovation and bring new technologies to the market. But since the money is private, this altruism can only probably  come about through a cultural change of  heart and not through any policy changes .  Of course there are other means as well.

The slow death of the desktop application

When one grows up with an idea in mind ( or a movement ) for almost a couple of decades since childhood, it becomes so entrenched in ones mind that that it is hard to imagine any idea contrary to it as better or higher quality. ( In fact i believe the so called generation gap could be due to this entrenchment of old ideas on minds ).

The world of Microsoft Windows OS  ( and all the technologies and tools associated with it ) is one such idea, that I grew up with. My first experiences with computers, starting with early 90′s , was on computers running DOS and then on the first versions of Windows.  And almost all the applications i have been using ( and developed and coded for ) have also been for Windows. And for this reason, the idea of Windows has become so entrenched in mind that i almost believed that Windows is the best way of doing things and handling information , atleast in the programming and technology world.

But since sometime in the mid 2000, i am seeing the preponderance of web based applications  and with Web 2.0 , i am seeing very very powerful, GUI rich  and fast web applications.  While this is obvious, what is not obvious is the slow and sure death of desktop / Windows based applications.  There is rarely an application that does not have a web based version and invariably the web version is more populare and more often used than desktop version ( with the exception of Outlook ) .

One very obvious example of the kind of power web 2.0 applications have today is Google maps.  Until Google maps came along, mapping applications were mostly desktop based and the web based applications were mostly slow add-ons. Google maps changed all that, it was very fast , taking only a few seconds to load and very easy to use. The surprising part is that whole of Google Maps is a an AJAX application,  mostly using Javascript and HTML. The competing product from Microsoft , Streets and Trips, is nowhere near Google Maps when it comes to speed or features.

It appears desktop software is evolving much slower than web applications, the Web applications are really on an evolutionary fastrack, with a rich variety of tools, technologies, (  Javascript, AJAX, Web 2.0 , Ruby etc come to mind  )  to build web applications, not to even speak of the main advantage of the browser based applications in terms of platform neutrality.

Another parallely trend that seems to emerge is the increasing use of scripting and dynamic languages like Javascript and Ruby to build complex web applications, instead of advanced high level languages like Java or C#.  Java or C# were good for desktop applications, in a world where there was plenty of memory, no bandwidth issues, and bloatedness and the bells and whistles  that these languages provided,  is a virtue. And then there is hassles of installing and uninstalling a desktop application.

It seems C# or Java need not be held in such high esteem as high level languages, and one sees Ruby and Javascript being used to build complex apps.  I remember Microsoft trying to kill Javascript a few years ago and trying to tout proprietary and Windows specific protocols like COM/DCOM  as the holy grail of programming ( and fail miserably! )

True desktop applications are probably the way to go for some UI rich applications like some Games, 3D Modelling software or Office productivity software. But , i am sure these areas too will migrate to web based apps , as Web 2.0 evolves. And there are concerns about security in Web Apps, but , i am sure that too will be eventually addressed effectively.

Eventually,  i predict ( No claim to originality here! – I am not the first, i just join the hordes of others who predicted the same ) that the Windows OS is going to become a relic, with Web 2.0 and similar technologies probably becoming the standard way of writing applications, and the Web browser will be the space, where the fastest evolution of technological changes will take place. And who knows Javascript might become most popular application development language in the future.

Or else, Windows might be given away for free by Microsoft , just like Linux is today.

The Startup immigrant Visa proposal in the US senate

I recently read about the startup Visa proposal put forward by John Kerry and Richard Luger in the US Senate.

The Visa act is as follows as mentioned in Tech Review Magazine: “The StartUp Visa Act of 2010 will allow an immigrant entrepreneur to receive a two year visa if he or she can show that a qualified U.S. investor is willing to dedicate a significant sum – a minimum of $250,000 – to the immigrant’s startup venture”

There is a detailed analysis of this Visa by Bred Feld in Tech Review Magazine here:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=358&bpid=24854&nlid=2774

If the visa proposal is ever passed, I think it will be a truly revolutionary way to attract talent and it is only one more way that the US is attracting the best and most talented entrepreneurs from the world in addition to the all the policies that the US government has implemented to attract talent. This is has ensured, the US has been a magnet for worlds best scientists and technologists.

While it appears that this visa is like any other visa, the importance of this visa is not very obvious and the far reaching effect this might have on the competitiveness of US is not apparent at first glance.  For any country, to maintains its position at the cutting edge of science and technology, it is important to encourage its brightest and most talented scientists and technologists. A system that encourages and rewards high quality research will produce cutting edge technology. This system I refer to here, is the sum total of the entire setup of Universities, Research Labs and Foundations that are driven by a clear and coherent vision of scientific and technological advancements. Sadly and needless to say, India has a long way to go, before it can boast of a system that is comparable. We do have our CSIR labs, the DRDO, the HAL and some central research institutions, but they are not result oriented, except for a few surprises.

The many patents that are being filed in India are mostly from the captive R & D units of MNC’s who do contract research employing Indian engineers. While this clearly shows Indian engineers are talented, it also exposes the sad fact that we Indians are still contract researchers and engineers, happy to let the MNCs grab the patent ownership.

Against the back drop of all these measures to attract talent worldwide, what is sad is the parochial attitude of some parties , across the country to ask Indians from other parts of India to leave. MNS in Mumbai is one example. And there are other lesser known several outfits in South India , Bengal , Punjab that are also espouse this son of the soil theory.

Big Cities in India like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata  and Chennai have been built by the collective talent and entrepreneurship of people from entire India. Asking some sections to leave is only to make those place lose their vitality and commercial leadership to other locations.