Building 92, Generations and Philosophy (perennius) of technology

This post owes its origin to my friend of 25 years – Pradipta – an IT veteran of India and also a student of Vedic Literature.

In my last post, I discussed the woes of Infosys and how time does not spare the titans or icons. Time is rather the most efficient iconoclast. 

Today, I paid a visit to Microsoft Museum in Building 92 – a short walk from my current habitat at Bellevue with my two sons – 9 years and 3+ years old. 

For me, the visit reminded me of final year of engineering in Malabar in 1995 when Deepak – a nerd  announced with a priest like solemn tone : Windows 95 is going to be released today. It was a moment of history and moment in history. Of technology and also of things outside technology.

The effect on my elder son has been very different. He looked around – even the time separated photo of the founders did not arouse his curiosity. Even the remnants of flower generation – the beard, the glasses and long hair all gone – Paul Allen who looked closer to a habitant of Greenwich Village looked a very efficient and crisp business magnate which he really is. 

The bad news for Microsoft – the young fellow did not seem very impressed by the array of devices in the ‘modern’ side of the room. Neither Kinect, nor Bing, nor Xbox seemed to have impressed him. The reason is very mysterious but significant.

Many analysts here I heard are of the opinion that the icon has ceased to delight generations – emerged and upcoming. Generation means nothing but biological devices separated in time. 

As I am now with my 9 year old son, he asks me questions and thinks that I have many interesting things to tell him. As a father figure, he has many such listening posts. He gets impressed now and then by the owners or distributors of these listening posts.

Twenty years hence, it is not uncommon for sons and daughters – dangerously close to an age of 25/26 calling those ‘father figures’ by dual objectives – one is correct grammatically but the second is heartbreaking, if consider correct semantically – old fools

There are some analysts here who consider the icon is not well aware as what the new generation wants. This, they reason lie at the root of the icon not able to delight them. They find Microsoft like an ancient mariner with the hallowed ship but the sea is different and so is the time. 

Nobody knows the answer and there are calls to change leadership. This call has materialized already for Infosys – another icon of a land where the following philosophy originated. 

The Perennial Business Strategy 

The trouble lies, fundamentally with time and the effects it brings. Consider (read this just as Tom Hagen, the consigliori tries to pacify the headstrong Sonny Coreleone in The Godfather) a technology product which works such a way in addition to doing its function, it modulates the ‘components’ in us by which we respond to time and change. Like we exert our choices. The brute method by which this is achieved is in monopolies or in those economies, where you have infinite choices as long as the colour of the car is black. In absence of such brute monopoly, the product has to ‘de-activate’ exertion of choice.

Do we have such products ? Or is there possibility of having such man-made products ? 

The Philosophy Perennius concludes that anything made of material stuff will sooner or later succumb to the onslaught of time. There is nothing material which can suppress or modulate choice and its exertion for an indefinite time. 

Variety, Choice and its exertion all of these are eternal and indestructible aspects of a Conscious Being. 

A conscious being cannot be created by material stuff anywhere in the universe. Nothing material can satisfy a conscious being for all the time. 

Even if that particular being (an individual – a die-hard fan, a fanatic regarding certain product), it is only a few decade that the all powerful time will sweep the individual from the manifested time – we call this death. 

The perennial business strategy teaches us that to search for a best business model and remaining permanently in a certain favourable position is an impossibility – not in the nature of things and so is the sadness in its passing.

The product, the maker, the beholder, the user, the critique and the visitor – all are in the conveyor belt of time.

 

 

 

Woes of Infosys and what a business owner / student can learn from it

Infosys, an iconic company of Indian origin is facing trouble. I shall like to define the company and its current situation in the following way :

1. A great name and a great history. This is an asset when times are favourable but becomes a dis-advantage when times are not so. Time is always changing.

2. It has $ 4 billion cash reserve and is not sure what to do with it. $ 4 billion reserve comes with a special kind of fear in decision making which only a $ 4 billion reserve owner knows. This reserve is not simple cash – it is the frozen, hardened and the tangible aspect of the glory, labour, profit, competence of bygone years. 

3. Analysts identify the catch 22 situation : if Infosys trades volume for profit, then it does not remain ‘Infosys’. If it remains ‘Infosys’, then there is a non-zero chance of ‘remains’ becoming ‘was’. 

4. The competitive advantage of previous years is no longer an advantage. When Chinese I-pad clones are brandished by villagers in rural Bengal and having facebook blues, aristocracy in technological activities is a different proposition for anyone, especially for a large company. 

Learning

•  Success and very heady success is to be feared more than great failures.
•  Technology means ‘evolving ways of doing things’ and hence it is revolutionary. Revolutions invariably follow with proletarianization. 
• Proletarianization process’ target is the most-visible and the tallest trees are most vulnerable to hi-speed wind. 
• Infosys major clients paid Infosys (and eventually making it what it is) not only because Infosys was great – they had a need to do so. 
• When they were paying Infosys, they were also thinking how to make a situation that they need not pay ( or at least not that much which they were forced to pay)
• At a certain optimal point, there were others who fulfilled – partially or not that excellently the needs but at a lesser cost and thus fulfilling one of the crucial needs
• Finally, Infosys’s many rivals (not the proletariats) who were elites were making ‘walled gardens’ – protected by intellectual property rights. Infosys did have not that much.

Infosys finds ‘barbarians’ at the gates. 

Every business owner finds barbarians at the gates.

Every business, once little more visible attracts attention.

This attention transforms into interest, then scrutiny, then imitation, then tweaking, then trial and error, then prototype and then the ultimo ratio : Why not us – we are 10% cheaper – everything remaining same. 

At this stage, when there are such million 10% less, self-interest overcomes respect to be paid to an icon. 

It is at this stage (real or staged), the ‘barbarian hordes’ tear the empire down.

 

Shillong via Seattle

I landed up, in the mind’s geography into my childhood Shillong via Seattle, crossing some 18 thousand miles. Strange are the ways of the world.

Prose is not able to convey this feeling and we have to order poetry. Poetry is the mode of communication in those cases where the communicator deals with something quasi-internal,  i.e. when the program runs, it impacts the program that runs the CPU. 

Dashboard of a bus in a winding road in a mountain road, pines breathing high.

The dashboard of the ancient bus does not have any date or time.

A young boy looks by the window and chilling air cools the eyes.

Eyes – needing no memory stick nor battery 

The Memory is the Battery.

Pines getting higher and then the pines fall down headlong into a lake.

**************************************************************************************

Twenty hours of sitting in an aluminium box that flies

This box has blinking dashboard, times of million cities ready

Thirty years of dashboard time.

Thirty years of memory dump 

Suddenly explodes in the Lake Washington.

Pines

Electric Poles

Houses

Sitting chairs

Fences

Roofs 

and then, the lakes which somehow hide their affair with the deep gorges of the Pacific

Eyes, now thirty years older – after many lakes, cities and confusion

An eight year old boy en route Shillong

Where lakes are lakes with no hidden affairs – domesticated

But the dashboard clock twists and the rotating earth confuses things.

A friend talks of residences here.

Immigrant workers try to look relaxed but the battery-less memory betrays excitement

The Battery is the Visa.

The hand that stamps the seal in some pine covered airport

Is the hand that is designing a new horoscope. 

In a bus, the boy sits now by another bus.

The bus goes inside a ship, the ship goes inside a lake

The Lake into an Ocean, the ocean into Sky

The Sky becomes colourless, a presence

The Womb of the Mind generates a blue fluid called Sky.

Through this Sky, the eight year old boy travels

 

 

 

 

Bulletin from Seattle

Two weeks passed in calm, badge-peopled and green Bellevue, Seattle. 

Many generations of Indians share memories of work, rest and career-building with this city in the South West of North America.

I came here as a visitor and also with plenty of time where time is also measured, in some buildings in terms of micro-seconds – that little faster computational edge. 

I met, talked, debated, dined, travelled with many immigrant badge-people / Nerd Herd or high-skilled professional (choose your adjective) and some tangential observations :

1. Of many concerns that we carry and nurture, immigrants here have one overwhelming concern – Will my visa be extended ? Will there be situation where I can stay the time I wish to ?

2. This extension or not extension is not decided by one’s own effort, work or qualification only. There are higher authorities who will decide this. 

3. This ext-event has profound significance on one’s life, work, family and so called future. 

Leaving these genuine concerns for time being, let us consider the following 

1. In this planet earth, we have somehow landed (may be from another galaxy and got implanted into a womb) and then  received a visa which is by default citizen by birth. 

2. The visa is same only without any specific stamp of expiry. The date of expiry varies.

3. This expiry is decided by higher authorities  or by authorities whom we don’t know. Whether I acknowledge these authorities or not, their command is supreme. No one has ever been able to extend this visa (expiry = death) by his own will, although the desire has been eternal – quite like many of the immigrants here.

4. For immigrants, visa-expiry means return to one’s own country or some other country which has granted visa. But for the visa-expiry we are now discussing, there is no idea. 

What will happen when the visa for this whole body expires ? 

Where is the company / institution that deal in this visa-expiry problem ?

 

 

The Business – Tiger and Bee

Both a tiger and bee have one business in common – to eat. Now both conduct their business but what a great difference while we look in detail.

1. A tiger has its empire and protects this ruthlessly. Nature has designed things in such a way that a tiger does not get the food everyday but has to wait and have the ‘kill’ eaten over days. If there were not so, the victims of tiger would have long vanished considering the highly skewed match between brute force of a tiger and that of a deer.

2. The place and mode of eating of a tiger are abominable. The tiger, although such a majestic and powerful animal is condemned to eat rotten flesh. 

3. A tiger is also anxious because there are always threat from human beings, elephants, byson and other tigers

Now look at the business of a bee. It does not eat a whole tree. It conducts its business so subtly and so nicely that it does not seem like business. Instead, the food providers (Flowers) welcome the bee because he takes less and gives more. 

More importantly, the bee does not need an empire to feed. The business is being done by a bee so subtly, almost imperceptibly that we may presume in our conditioned way of thinking business ( if trained to be conducting business like a ‘tiger’) that it does not have any business.

Our MBA schools – the best ones train young men in the way of tiger business and glorifies it. The glorification is of such level that people tend to forget that there are other – subtler, sophisticated ways of doing business. 

Let us learn from the bees ! 

One of the practical ways to implement is to have some final year project for MBA students is to cultivate some bees !

The Manual

I recently went to an aircraft factory and in a room, I found manuals and manuals – even the details of how to put a nut or a bolt with immaculate diagram, specification and position. 

I came out and looked at a clear blue sky with the sun shining. I was wondering, this whole material nature, this cosmic manifestation which is working at a such grand scope and scale  must be having some manual. To distinguish it from normal manual, I shall say The Manual.

I may not be aware of it or may not be competent enough to understand it but there has to have a Manual. If an aircraft with a range of 15,000 km and having 25 years working life has so many manuals and details, a single planet has a working life of some billions of years and such a high precision of being space-borne and moving. 

Manual there must be. The existential truth about the Manual is independent of our understanding, admission or acceptance of it.

Where is that Manual ?

But we are just at the door of the most-profound question : Who designed the Manual.

In Seattle, where I am now, in 1970s, an old Bengali Calcutta-born gentleman asked this question and explicitly referred to the Boeing factory here. 

If interested, follow the topic at http://wordsmithashram.wordpress.com 

The Tram Tattva

One of my duties is also to take my 2 year old son in tram rides. Trams are heritage thing in Calcutta now and it has some compelling advantages for a time-rich person like me. It goes slowly, it has very less passengers (because time-rich people are always much lesser than either  rich or poor men), very airy and most important – you can sit without being pushed or shoved without being rich (to afford a taxi or other better means of transport)

A young men entered around 5 pm with a very relaxed mood and shortly he announced that he likes this tram exactly for the reasons above. My 2 year old son had started a rudimentary sign language conversation with him. 

He told me that he does a cash poor job and is quite time rich. He had a glow in his face which you don’t find in the commuters of Calcutta at 5 pm. My curiosity grew.

I asked this 20 something young man as he seems to be a philosopher and he said yes, in a way and laughed. Then he told me the following and this makes this blog post – The Tram Tattva. The word tattva is a very loaded Sanskrit word and I shall devote another post for this. But for the time being, here is the young man’s summarized lecture as our tram moved past the streets towards a destination we both were not very interested. 

1. People of my age who work in large corporations and companies are only enjoying 20% of their labour’s output. As a matter of fact, for some, it may be 10%. Our current system takes 50% of a professional city-dwellers (whose father did not build a house in the city)  income of a city-dweller as debt for house, car and others. Another 30% is taken by the Government at source in the form of tax. And the person has only 20% for him. Out of the 50% on house and other things, he sleeps in the house and that means he enjoys his subtle body being subtle matter does not need a flat/condo/ or any gross thing like a flat. A king can be a beggar while sleeping in a 10 million flat and a beggar can be a king while sleeping in Sealdah footpath. And you cannot command your on-demand dream – neither by cash, nor by EMI. 

2. In an optimistic estimate,  of his labour’s output [ 30% tax + 25% unused for being asleep] completely gone to other entities and other bodies (sleeping body), he is left with 45% for himself. 

3. This 45% will now be shared by many – family, friends etc.. Let us keep this as 10%.

4. Now, indirect taxes by Government will take around 10% 

5. Since life is uncertain, insurance in various forms and format will take another 10% to the minimum

6. Since many spends were done which were not anticipated even 5 minutes ago (that impulsive purchase in the mall), there will be MAD (Minimum amount Due) and he will be serving at least 5% on the interest charges. 

Factoring all of these, the ready cash amount actually left for his own consumption will be 20% of the total CTC (= output of labour) 

The young man now asked me : Do you think, it is a matter of great intelligence to work so hard, like cats and dogs for getting only 20% for one’s own ? 

The young man told me, shattering my nerves and refreshing me 

1. I have no debt.

2. I pay no taxes, i.e… I choose such work which are below taxable income

3. I don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat outside, cook my own food, is a vegetarian and don’t have a TV, don’t have online friends and keep a mobile which I barely use to call.

4. I practice austerity and don’t need an AC 

5. I don’t get bored.

I asked him, finally, what is the objective of all this ?

To enjoy 100% of my labour.Nothing more, Nothing less.