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Tablets – New Wine In Your Old Bottle

“Well Apple fans needs a new device every few years like an addict who needs a new high with a larger dose or different weed” This was what I thought when Apple announced iPad back in January 2010.

For the last six months, many electronics consumers are excited about the arrival of the new(?) category devices – tablets. Though the concept is nothing new, the latest avatar use best of the breed technologies – touchscreens, longer battery life, more power and memory and a strong ecosystem of applications and content. All forms of media is going agog over the Apple’s announcement – some excited, some disappointed but mostly talking about this. Instead of going deep into the technology details, I wanted to touch upon few things like social aspects, economics and media impact of such devices.

There is certain group we call early adapters/ Apple fanboys/ Kool Aid-geeks who will but anything that starts with an ‘i’ and sold by Apple’. Let us keep them aside and talk about regular consumers. What would they look for in a tablet and how will they use it? One thing that occurs to me whenever I use iPhone either at my office or my couch is – screen size. Many times I find that the full browser in the iPhone is underutilized due to the smaller size. It has great form factor, usually responsive though I might like a little more processing power and longer battery life, and importantly literally unlimited choice of applications.  But to read any thing using Safari or mail apps, is a royal pain. Now ipad is literally 3 times the diagonal width of iPhone. Will that be good enough for our needs? We will see.

Extensibility – As we all know, with iphone 3G,  Apple showed the world, that hardware and OS are only so much. It is the applications that matter.  With at least 150K potential applications  that can be readily used, the ipad is truly powerful.  I think we can easily replace, many special devices from POS terminals to FedEx delivery guys terminals with special apps. The sky is the limit I think.

Economics – Today we have to spend $300 (in US) for any decent net book.  If we consider a typical net book buyer and their primary reason to buy such a computer, it is usually to check email (web based probably) , browse Internet,  chat, view photos and social media. May be watch few movies though the integrated video cards are usually sloppy.  All these can be done in an ipad elegantly but more. In my opinion, spending that extra $200 (some say Apple tax) may be worth it, particularly, if the plan is to buy now. If we can wait for 8 more months, I expect to see tablets from HP, HTC and Motorola (and Nokia) with more power and battery life, better built in accessories like webcam for less than $300. Buy it or wait, still worth it than Net book. For enterprises, the low cost barrier and high usability should be a very good deal.

The TCO for a typical laptop (say from Lenova), costs enterprises anywhere from 2K to 3k with 2 years warranty, plus high cost software. My guesstimate the same for a tablet will be 60% of that or laptops. Plus less shoulder pains for the workers carrying them.

Social Impact – Amazon, in a way, paved way for these sub 10″ tablets with it’s best selling Kindle. I did not use it much, but it says something if it is the best selling item on their site.  Apple added multi-touch, and I am sure Android will polish it and perhaps make it better as well as open source it.  I will not be surprised if tablets replace typical laptops people carry around. For example, at my work I use Outlook 70% of the time, and remaining 30% all other apps including browsers, skype etc. All these and more can be done with a tablet. With such a potential for becoming ubiquitous, will the laptops become extinct? For example I did not see more than 20 CRT consoles in my entire work place. They got replaced by laptops or laptops with port replicators connected to keyboard, mouse and LCD consoles. Well we can get these for tablets like ipad now. And it is only beginning. Will school children just take one tablet instead of their entire bag of books? What about Doctors, sales people, executives? Why not?  Suddenly useful computing power. It doesn’t matter if I have a computer with 3 GHz processor in my home. And if it has only few free and purchased applications. With these tablets, and their apps price dynamics, we have very high utilization of mobile computing power.

Ergonomics Let us give it to Apple. They craft beautiful hardware. It is like an art and design philosophy.  But others are not far behind. I am very impressed by HTC, Samsung and Nokia.

What do readers think about tablets? Quick poll.

• What is your typical usage of personal computer?
• What are your thoughts on the tablets?
• Do you plan to purchase one?
• How do you want to use tablets, if you purchase one?
• Do you agree to what I wrote above
• Are there any other additional aspects we can cover around the tablets?

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Can positive experiences be life changing?

I will soon be embarking on a trip to Nigeria as part of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps program (https://www-146.ibm.com/corporateservicecorps/). Lots of folks who have been through the program have blogged about their experience as life changing. And this got me thinking – Will my trip be life altering too? My guess – probably not. And here is why – I cannot think of one event in my life where my perspective and principles (if I had any :)) has changed dramatically. Yes, there might have been tweaks here and there, but not diametrically opposite view.

When my daughter was born, I was obviously elated, but I did not have that ‘aha’ moment where I looked at my daughter’s eyes for the first time and everything changed. When people say things change for them in such a moment, I cannot grasp what that change could be.  I love my daughter to death and yes certain things changed in my life when she was born (like it does with marriage etc.), but my outlook towards life and for the most part perspectives remained mostly the same.

Recently, my classmate lost his wife and son to a tragic accident and it got me thinking more about my own family and daughter. Is it that for some people it is only negative experiences that can be life altering.  You do not realize what you have unless it is gone and only then does it have an impact?

Or is that I am just a cold hearted person and wired differently?

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Just an opinion on “Indian Culture”

What I want to share is just a personal opinion, hoping to know what others think about it.

I was travelling in the U.S recently and had a chance to interact to few of my close friends from college.When we were discussing about our kids and how they have grown are interacting with us, this thought came across to me.

Is Indian culture about the way we talk, behave, dress or arts etc? I felt maybe it is something a little different.

There are two traits which is strong in the environment which makes the Indian culture Hierarchy and Resource Constraints.

 Hierarchy

Whether we like it hierarchy exists everywhere, but it is transforming. In my house even today I take permission( to be honest at least FYI my dad if I am going to be late in coming back). 🙂 One thing this helps me in work it is much easier for me handle hierarchies than my counterparts in U.S. Interestingly they grew here but have spent close to 20 years there that their thinking has transformed. I am not judging that it is good or bad here. It is an observation. They find it difficult to comprehend this rules of hierarchy in functioning of systems at work or outside. I find U.S returned colleagues struggling to adapt this culture over here.

Resource Constraints

There are resource constraints every where in India. From roads to housing to things at work. Being in I.T I can comment on a few things. Product guys in U.S take RAM on computers for granted.In India it is a struggle to get 2GB machines but newer products expect 8GB to be a decent system requirement.The fact is this is a huge constraint. When I walk into our offices in U.S I find desktops with dual monitors that too 19 inch ones and individual rooms for developers to help them work productively.It is cool and nice. I love dual monitors and I ratify it does improve productivity. But in India dual monitors is unimaginable. Recently I saw LCD monitors fixed on the walls of developers and the developer’s desktop reduced to a foot in breadth. Gosh it causes a serious pain in the neck ( pun intended ). There is no way adjust the angle of those monitors also. Hey screw ergonomics, space matters and real estate is expensive.

But the beauty of Indian culture is to accept these attributes as a natural occurrencea and work with it. Imagine a society where all are equal, life will be quite boring actually. If all are intelligent then the word intelligent becomes “just about average”. In physics if there is now high/low how will the electricity flow. There will be have and have-nots. The challenge in life is to accept and work with it. But it is an interesting game we try to equalize it only to realise, we tipped the scale in another direction. Think about the U.S supporting the mujaheddin to balance out Russia, they ended up creating a different kind of imbalance. We will have resource constraints at all levels and in different contexts. Constraints helps us innovate, invent. This introduces newer constraints. Read this “Parable of Horseshit”  interestingly cars( fuel guzzlers and CO2 emitters) where a solution climatic problem at some point in history now we have it and that is a problem. 🙂  I think the nice thing about Indian culture helps you embrace these constraints in a positive manner and work with it. It helps us look at constraints with a more positive attitude at least for me. This culture helps accept a constraints without too much frustration. In India you always expect to have constraints and there is a dearth for resources. The environment helps us build this culture – “there are constraints and challenges learn to work with it to succeed.”. Sometimes I feel the western culture does not have as their environment does have a need for it. Which I think works in that environment.

Would love to hear other thoughts/views on this. 🙂

P.S : I have assumed readers are in India when I started writing this post, I realise that there are readers from outside India also. Please read it in this perspective.

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Was the Indus Valley Civilization Illiterate?

Prolog

As mentioned in my previous post , I am pleased to announce that my first paper jointly authored with Priya Raju and NK Sreedhar got published by the International Institute of Tamil Studies.

Background

In 2004, Farmer, Sproat & Witzel released their controversial paper titled [PDF] “The Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization” . The paper made the claim that the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was illiterate in a forceful and strident manner.

Since then, a number of attempts have been made to disprove this paper. Most of the attempts have tried to use interesting methods – [PDF] statistical techniques, [PDF]conditional entropy , [PDF 7.7MB] markov chain model etc to prove that the Indus inscriptions encode speech.  We had previously covered Asko Parpola’s effort to counter FSW.  Parpola’s efforts were not accepted by FSW.

We found that, to our surprise, many years after FSW, no one actually had published a comprehensive analysis of all the points made by FSW.  We decided to do just that in our paper.

Illiterate Indus?

As a newbie researcher, i found the FSW paper very useful to understand the state of the Indus research. As we researched every point FSW makes, we learnt even more about the IVC.

It was a long grind to get the paper published after several iterations. We are grateful to the International Institute of Tamil Studies for publishing our paper.

Special thanks to Michel Danino, Iravatham Mahadevan, Bryan Wells, M Meenakshisankar, PK Karthik and some reviewers who want to be anonymous  for their painstaking reviews. Iravatham Mahadevan, my guide at the Indus Research Center, went through the paper line by line 3 or 4 times to make it into an academic quality paper.  Special mention goes to Priya Raju for making the paper readable after Michel Danino’s critical review, not to speak of her contribution to the actual research which is quite significant. NK Sreedhar has made several contributions to the paper including the key one on the Singletons.

Thanks to JK at Varnam blog for introducing me to Michel Danino.

Epilog

With all due respect to FSW, we reached the conclusion that most of their arguments can be refuted. The paper can be downloaded at Response_to_FSW2_Paper_v3.1-Final .  If you are really interested in the IVC research, i strongly recommend that you read the FSW paper as well as our response to it. Please chime in with your comments.

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If a template is all you can offer…

I tweeted sometime ago that “if a template is all you offer, you really don’t have much to offer”

Let me explain.

For the purpose of this post, the term “customer” can mean anybody you interact with – not just money-paying person seeking products/services.

Too many times, we get locked into this mode of supplying a template somebody comes to us for an answer. This could be in a business transaction or employee motivation or anything for that matter. No emotions, no empathy, no niche, no expression of desire to help. “Here, please fill up this template and send it back!” And by the way, templates don’t always come in spreadsheets. They take many forms, but usually have a rigid set of solutions around the “if-then-else” logic. But life and business hardly present us problems that can be resolved with templates or templatized mindsets.

Why is this gesture bad?

Whether it is a person-to-person transaction or a multi-million dollar deal, all of us have the need to be heard and understood. By giving somebody a template, we are basically telling them we’ve empowered ourselves to not spend any time thinking about your problem, instead try to fit it into a set of rules.

Are templates evil?

Templates are not bad. In fact, they are great. Templates are a checklist for the person providing the answers. A solution provider is supposed to be an intelligent and human, with the checklist serving the purpose of making sure s/he has covered everything, to which there is a hitherto chance of erring. Templates help standardize, maintain consistency and completeness. But standardization also means repeatable, industrialized and most importantly, emotion-less. Especially when template is not accompanied by a human emotion.

Besides, what is your role anyways?

Just think about this. If all you do is provide templates, exactly why are you required? The job of providing templates is rather mechanical and could potentially be done by another person (in the flat world, I must say – another cheaper person)

What can you do?

Take this from me. People don’t really need an expert, when all the expert does is supply templates. And even if they don’t tell on face, here is the truth: they do not value him. What can you do? You can be remarkable; you can be human by remembering a simple rule. The template is for you, try not sending the template (email is another evil, but that’s off-topic). Instead pick up the phone and ask them the same questions as if you genuinely meant to ask them. Call it value add or niche. I tend to call this emotional labor. Of course, emotional labor is not everything, rather a humble start.