Day: July 9, 2004

India’s Budget

I watched the budget on TV. I normally don’t bother. But I figured the 90 minutes spent listening would give me a good overview of India and the government, and save me the time reading papers trying to figure out the various things the Finance Minister said.

As I watched scheme after scheme being unfolded for the poor and rural India with the politically correct phrases (food-for-work, drinking water for all, education for all, healthcare for all, electricity for all), I could not help but think that all we are doing is throwing some more money at the problem. While in some cases that may be a good idea, in the India that we live in, I don’t think it will make much of a difference except in some more already-filled pockets.

What rural India and the poor need are “disruptive innovations” in the way things are done (and I don’t mean technology here). Instead, we are giving them more of the same. Instead of Re 1, now we give them Re 1.20. But they will still get only 20% of this. What is needed in India is a radical overhaul of the way we execute on the ground and creating rural infrastructure like Atanu’s RISC ideas. But that requires some thinking and vision. It would take economists like our PM and FM an hour to read Atanu and Vinod Khosla’s paper. That is the New Deal, the Marshall Plan for India. They need to look no further. Even before we try and solve problems, we need to get to the root causes of the problem. That is something I have seen few people want to do. And until we do that, we are going to keep throwing more and more money every year. Education cess, increase in excise duty for playing cards (I’d have loved to eavesdrop on the group when they discussed this one), and so on.

So, I am disappointed. But why did I ever have expectations – I should have known better. I guess there is always hope that this year there will be something different, something magical. Anyways, there is always Budget 2005 to look forward to. Then, there is Budget 2006, Budget 2007, Budget 2008…

Success Factors in Business

Martin Tobias (in VentureBlog) has an excellent post on what it takes for entrepreneurs to succeed:

I believe a heightened sense of awareness is a critical sucess factor for a CEO (and the whole start-up team in fact). The CEO must be aware of and have thought through every major issue in the company and market. If, in a half hour presentation, I as a VC can stump the CEO with questions he has not considered yet, it is time to call ground control, we have a problem. If I can name competitors that the CEO doesn’t have intimate knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses, again a problem. The CEO also must be eminently aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. A CEO who tries to run every department of a company is a disaster. When I was a CEO, I knew I was great at the outside thing with investors, customers and partners. I knew I didn’t have the patience for internal operations. I hired a COO/President. The board didn’t tell me to do that. I didn’t think it was a threat. It was the right thing to do to maximize my strengths.

We have all heard about the importance of delegation, but I believe adequate awareness of ones’ self is necessary for effective delegation. Awareness of the capacity of the delegatee is also essential. In my early days as a CEO I made the mistake more than once of dumping alot of work on someone with a good resume without really drilling on their ability or following up adequately. This will always end up coming back to you. It is ok to ask people to stretch, but know who you are stretching and how much. Don’t let your people break.

Awareness is also related to engagement. An CEO who is truly engaged in her market will become aware of the major moving parts over time. An engaged CEO will worry about what he doesn’t know about his customers, partners, product development life cycle, even purchasing patterns and expense reports. When you have a conversation with someone who is truly engaged with you there is an noticable difference. You may be surprised by the number of start-up teams I see that are not engaged with their audience while presenting.

The last point I will make around awareness relates to a CEO’s ability to not drink too much of their own kool-aide. The CEO needs to lead the troops up the hill, but he has to be aware enough of the true state of the battle to make objective decisions. During the bubble, we saw many examples of CEOs being unaware that their market had disappeared underneath them. Many of these people hit the wall hard and fast.

Focus on being aware of every aspect of yourself and your business. Your market, company, and investors will thank you!

WSJ on Blogs

The Personal Technology column in WSJ discusses the basics of blogs and newsreaders:

If you’re an information junkie, you’ve probably discovered the appeal of reading weblogs, those online journals that mix commentary with links to related sites. Obsessive blog creators scour the Internet for interesting tidbits in news stories, announcements and even other blogs, culling the best and posting links. A good blog is like the friend who always points out the best stories in the newspaper.

Rather than forcing you to jump from one blog to another to keep up with new entries, newsreaders bring together the latest postings from your favorite blogs in a single place.

That’s possible because many blogs now publish their entries as news “feeds.” These are Web formats that make it easy for a newsreader program (or another Web site) to grab and manipulate individual postings. For a blog publisher, it’s like sending out entries on a news wire service. To tell whether a site offers a news feed, look for a small icon labeled “RSS” or “Atom.”

Unlicenced Wireless White Papers

Here. Perspectives from:

  • Clay Shirky, The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good
  • David Isenberg, Four Scenarios for the Future of the Network
  • Andrew Odlyzko, Telecom Dogmas and Spectrum Allocations
  • Kevin Werbach, Beyond Broadcast

    Clay Shikry discusses four possible futures:

    Scenario #1, Telcotopia. Telcotopia is the incumbent telcos’ official future.” That is, in this version of the future, the telcos will give us that fat middle pipe that they have promised. Notwithstanding, the telcos’ current primary product is still voice telephony. It is delivered via a vertically integrated stack of services by which wires, poles and switches are tied to — and subsidized by — the voice telephony application. As the telcos open the local distribution bottleneck, they risk losing their primary product, landline voice telephony, to end-to-end VOIP. (End-to-end VOIP is typified by Skype; it is simply a program, yet another application on a network-connected PC.)

    Scenario #2 — Utilityability. Utilities, such as the electric company or the gas company or the water company, would use their rights of way and ubiquitous access to premises to build more capable local access to the premises. Utilities are good at delivering bulk low-margin goods over rights of way, and they’re competent at rendering monthly bills. Further, unlike the telcos and cablecos, utilities do not face the daunting prospect of cannibalizing their main, incumbent cash-positive business or changing their existing business models.

    Scenario #3 — Customer-Owned Networks. Access networks are become simple, reliable and easy to operate, so that it becomes possible for customers to own and run their own advanced, high-speed access and local distribution networks. This trend is already beginning with large businesses (e.g. Boeing) and institutions such as universities (e.g. Dartmouth). If this scenario gains momentum, it would extend towards multi-dwelling units and individual residential end users. Topologically, the fat home network would grow out to meet the fat Internet backbone, ultimately eliminating any distinct “access” business sector.

    Scenario #4 — HeLLL with Three Ls. In HeLLL, the telcos have successfully Lobbied, Legislated and Litigated before every state PUC, legislature and court, before every federal agency in the executive and legislative branches, before every federal court that will hear them, and before the U.S. Congress, all with the goal of preserving their previous power and preventing customers, competitors, municipalities, utilities and everybody else from building the capable access networks that technology makes possible. The telcos have used the three Ls, their last strength and remaining core competence, to make high-speed end-to-end networks functionally illegal.

    • China’s Cordless Phones

    WSJ writes that the no-frills phones are a big hit:

    Like most people in this rapidly modernizing city, accountant Chen Ran is rarely caught without her mobile phone. She even bought a second one last November.

    But Ms. Chen didn’t trade up: Her new phone doesn’t boast a camera or a fast Internet connection. Service is spotty and she can’t even use it outside Beijing.

    For Ms. Chen, it’s worth it: The calling plan for the phone — part of a fast-growing Chinese service called “Xiaolingtong,” or “Little Smart” — cost a one-time 500 yuan, or about $61, and it took her more than six months to use up her allotted minutes (by contrast, her high-tech cellphone costs $38 per month). She doesn’t have to pay for incoming calls, so she instructs friends to call her on this low-tech phone. “Many of my friends are using it,” she says.

    There are already an astounding 50 million subscribers in China to Xiaolingtong, including many in big cities like Beijing. This wireless/fixed-line hybrid is little known outside of China and Japan, where it originated about a decade ago.

    Most Xiaolingtong phones offer no frills: Users can make local calls and send simple text messages, but they can’t “roam” from one city to another. The phones, as small and sleek as regular cellphones, are powered by rooftop-mounted base stations, which are specially equipped antennas that send signals a little more than a mile. That’s a lot farther than cordless phones that allow callers to roam as far as their backyards before losing reception.

    TECH TALK: Tech Trends: 5. Security

    If there is one single word that is uppermost in the minds of IT managers today, it is security. The proliferation of viruses, spam and spyware have caused headaches aplenty. In addition, the ability to connect various company locations via a virtual private network (VPN) over the Internet also means that data needs to be sent securely. Firewalls, Intrusion Detection, Encryption have all become part of the technology vocabulary. If anything, the emphasis on security will continue to increase in times to come. The recent purchase of Brightmail, an anti-spam services provider, by Symantec for $370 million highlights the growing focus by vendors to provide integrated solutions in this space.

    Business Week provides an overview: Software and services that deliver early warnings of trouble on the Net are the latest big advance for the $27 billion computer security industry. Unlike traditional antivirus or intrusion-detection software that builds walls around corporate networks, early-warning systems scan the Web for new viruses and alert companies to the danger. Instead of waiting for the virus to hit, they dispatch instructions on how to close network holes, patch faulty software programs, or, like IronMail, automatically erect defenses against new outbreaks. While early warnings can’t yet make corporate networks impervious to attacks, computer security experts predict they could eliminate as much as 50% of the damage from viruses over the next three years — when used in conjunction with traditional defenses.

    Symantec’s John Thompson elaborates in an interview with Business Week:

    What’s driving the desire by chief information officers around the world to invest in security is the change in the threat environment. Our Internet Security Threat report clearly identified three important trends: the rate of propagation in virus and worm activity is accelerating, the new number of [computer] vulnerabilities is also accelerating, and there’s a desire on the part of the malicious attackers to perpetuate this stuff more frequently then ever before. That’s driving not just large companies, but midsize firms and individuals to want to protect themselves from this newfound activity.

    What has changed is the relative proportion of [IT] budgets that companies are contemplating to allocate to security. Not too many years ago, it wasn’t unheard of for a company to allocate less than 2% of their IT spending to security. Today, that’s starting to creep up to the 4% to 5% range. And some of the enterprises that are more digitally oriented — financial services, insurance companies, and health care — are starting to push up into the 10% to 12% range. That’s an important trend for not just our business, but the [computer-security] industry in general.

    A glimpse of the future comes from Ciscos recent release of products which takes steps towards a self-defending network. A News.com report wrote:

    The release is the first phase Network Admission Control (NAC), a collaboration program between Cisco and antivirus companies. Through this program, Cisco has developed technology with three antivirus specialists–Network Associates, Symantec and Trend Micro–that will let Cisco’s networking products communicate with antivirus products. Devices running NAC technology will allow network access only to compliant and trusted endpoint devices, like PCs and PDAs (personal digital assistants). NAC can also restrict access of noncompliant equipment. This decision can be based on information about the endpoint device, such as its current antivirus state and operating-system patch level Extending security to these network elements helps Cisco fulfill its vision of protecting the entire network. Eventually, all Cisco routers and switches will be checking end devices connected to them for worms and viruses. And a remote user will not be able to connect to the corporate network unless his or her device is free of viruses and worms.

    Next Week: Tech Trends (continued)

    Continue reading TECH TALK: Tech Trends: 5. Security