Porter anyone?

Anyone who has been to B-School will know how much 'strategic insight' is pulled off using the classic Porter's 5 forces framework. When in doubt invoke the 5 forces has been the mantra of many a b school graduate sitting in front of PowerPoint presentation and is clueless what to add in the next slide. Thankfully the man has now spoken and has written an update to the classic 30 year old theory. In an article in the HBR other than reaffirming the theory he also derides how the model is taught to students in b-schools.His key point is that analyzing using the framework is not equivalent to collecting a bullet point list of facts which is what most do.It is more of number crunching and financial statement analysis to get some concrete data..
The link is a good read . And here is a video below on an interview with Porter.




Hope less BS is passed of in the name of Porter by MBA grads.

Farewell

I had expressed my doubts on the viability of their business model here
Now my misgivings about the food delivery business are not just doubts..The first victim folds operations today

Dear Customer,
We are writing to inform you that, regretfully, OrderMonger.com will cease all operations from October 1, 2008. This decision has been taken predominantly due to non-viability of the business while maintaining the high Service Standards we intended to provide. However, we will honour all of the existing orders which have already been placed in our system.
On behalf of OrderMonger, we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued loyalty in choosing us as your preferred service provider for the past two years. Without your support, our success would not have been possible but under the current business climate, we have been left with no option but to close down. A lot of you have been calling us over the past few weeks to tell us about how much you value our services and offering to support us. We sincerely appreciate that support and feel good that we were able to make a small difference - so we are just as sorry that we are forced to close down. If you have any questions, concerns or comments about this decision, please send them to feedback@ordermonger.com.
Thank you once again for the loyal and continuous support you have shown us over the years we have been operating.
Yours sincerely,
The OrderMonger Team

Unfortunately utility of a service does not always translate into cash flows.. I wish the team good luck in their future endeavors.

#2 - These ads grow on you!

Video: New Family

#1

This will be interesting

Finally! In response to those pesky getamac ads Microsoft will soon respond. From the news at WSJ, Microsoft will be hiring Jerry Seinfeld for the campaign. The campaign - a closely guarded secret until now and with a $300 million budget, will have Seinfeld and Gates appearing in the ads..Despite what realdan(formerly fakesteve) says on his blog about hiring a 54 year old semi-retired comedian,I think it is a great idea.True Seinfeld fans will notice that Jerry's room had a computer - presumably a Mac. Apple also released a one time "Think different" ad with a small tribute to Seinfeld.Clearly if Seinfeld were to endorse a brand it seems like it should be Apple. How then did Microsoft decide to hire Jerry Seinfeld?What seems to be a blunder according to many may be a brilliant move. I can see ads like this similar to the PC guy - mac guy ads like this

Gates : How are you Jerry? I see you are working on your computer.Busy eh?
Seinfeld : Busy ?Me?Haven't worked since 1998 :-) Well I am not actually working, just editing a movie
Gates: (sigh) On a mac?Guess I must really get going
Seinfeld:No, actually I switched to Vista after I just ran out of options to get new hardware on the Mac and guess what I can now use the Windows Movie Maker on Vista to make movies.
Gates:That must have been tough, for someone using a Mac for .. 20 years?
Seinfeld: hmm, actually no, contrary to what others said - come over, let me show you..Even a 54 old guy like me can get it to work easily

.....


I can see how this can get really interesting if done right..Can't wait to see the ads

Is the begining of the end of Orkut in India?

Can someone explain the precipitous fall in the Alexa statistic for Orkut here? And compare that with rise in Facebook usage.Now I agree Alexa is far from perfect, but I still think it is interesting.
I think there may be a lesson here for all those sites that want to get around the cold-start or chicken-and-egg problem associated with platforms with high network effects.The graph is a worldwide usage graph but given that India has a significant (18% and second highest) share of Orkut users,this may be attributed in some ways to change in Indian users' behavior patterns as well.

A few months ago,I was reluctantly introduced to Facebook when a small but significant and growing percentage of my friends dumped Orkut for Facebook. I initially rejected the idea with a yawn - Indians are already hooked on to Orkut, Do need another social network? A lot of also-rans came and died ( yaari, WAYN, and few others which now reside in my spam mail folder) and I wondered if another 'me too' social network would ever work. I was wrong.

I increasingly find myself more on Facebook and less on Orkut and I think in a few months I may have to invoke the "forgot password" option on my Orkut account.

I think the initial reason for the migration was due to the Facebook apps.There was a lot more to do than just see photos and updates from friends,and I think its an important reason why people come back to the site. Orkut was and is a lot more static and by early 2008 Indian users of Orkut had got past the initial novelty factor and were beginning to get bored of logging in again to see the same page with just a re arranged grid of friends.Thats when I Facebook provided something that was missed - a more dynamic page with more updates from friends.Facebook apps-although many apps are not very useful - are a clever way to increase the number of friend updates and help maintain a more dynamic page.Users will login more often to see what changed. And that is again a self feeding cycle with network effects - the less often users login the less number of updates friends will see and even fewer people will login. Network effects in reverse direction!

I think the graph explains very well what happened. Facebook is gaining a foothold in India and Google better do something about maintaining Orkut's popularity in India. The OpenSocial Apps and friend updates strategy doesn't seem to have worked too well. The UI needs a big face lift and probably a better way to show updates must be worked out. Still, if things stay the way they are , I think it is beginning of the decline of Orkut in India.

Whats up with Sulekha.com??

If you want a lesson on how to screw up a perfectly useful service go to www.sulekha.com . If you have been there a few months back then you are in for a rude shock now. Sulekha is the first name that comes , (rather came ) to my mind when I want to look for a business or listing in any metro in India. They were good,fast and had a really useful feature of sending a listing by SMS. All that was on the landing page of sulekha.com. Now its a mess..They have morphed themselves into a portal which delivers news and the classic classified page requires about 3 links to go to and all I can see is ads. Still can't find a doctor nearby. And whats with the NRI focus?

I am not sure if they now make more money but surely the party won't last long enough because users will dump it for something else.

Does someone know of any other equivalent service?

What can I say?

Domain squatting is now a business ? and that too a web2.0 start up.They seem to post on start up jobs and other web 2.0 portals and design their site like a web 2.0 company.If that O Reilly chap had trademarked on "web 2.0" term when he came up with it first he would have made more money than any web 2.0 company ever made

This time hope they get it right

Anyone who has been through the dot com boom and bust cycle of the early 2000s or was old enough at that time knows that grocery delivery and pet accessories were among the top categories of companies that went bust.Yet a relatively new player has bravely forayed into this space. I have used Ordermonger quite a few times.Their service is good. They immediately call back to confirm your order and it is at your doorstep in within 1 hour. They have since expanded to groceries,flowers,cakes and into other cities after Hyderabad. No doubt they are useful, most web 2.0 start-ups are,but do they make any money? I was curious since online groceries and food delivery business has been beaten to death - many dot.com era companies did something of this kind and struggled to see any profits.Yet ordermonger.com seeks to turn a profit in a historically unprofitable sector.


I tried doing some basic calculations. In Hyderabad they have tie ups with around 40 restaurants and 6 sweet vendors serving around 50 localities. For groceries and flowers however they seem to have a tie up with 1 vendor and serve a lot many localities (around 300).So I thought a reasonable way to guess the orders is to assume a fixed number of orders per restaurant per day for food and sweets and an estimate on the number of orders per locality per day for flowers and groceries for example the revenue per day for restaurants is number of restaurants * number of orders per restaurant * order size * margin% .Similarly for flowers it is number of localities serviced * order size * margin % .One can then get total revenues per day across all categories and all cities.

In other cities they have much lesser presence.Bangalore they seem to have tie ups with around 5-10 restaurants (from what I see on their site) and flower delivery is available in all cities they operate in

I assume margins of 10% for food delivery and 5% for others. I dont have much of an idea though but this seems reasonable. Groceries are not a very high margin business for sure and the assumption of 5% doesn't seem way off limits. The basic calculations are here


Doing some sensitivity analysis yields revenues in the range of INR 4,000,000 - 6,500,000 per annum.The company is started by ex software professionals so the revenues are hardly enough to employ 3 software engineers. Add to this cost of maintaining a fleet of delivery staff which has to be replicated in every city,no scaling advantages here. It is going to be interesting to see how they manage to grow and yet be profitable. The biggest mistake such companies sometimes make is that they think they are a software company (one look at the website confirms that there is at least one employee trying to impress everyone with his or her web development skills) but in reality they are a logistics and operations company.(Dell, anyone?) Having that perspective will help decide the right strategy early on for the fledgling start up.

Hope the newbies take a few lessons from there.Good luck to them

Viva La Vida - Coldplay's new web site

Has anyone noticed the new design on Colplay's website after the launch of Viva La Vida...The site simply rocks.. Nice design and it doesnt play coldplay music automatically when you load the page which is good for opening in office:)

The pages have the latest album covers and other wallpapers as backgrounds. All UI controls -scroll bar, links,buttons are hand drawn.Very neat!!!

The future belongs to us

"Derivatives are the financial weapons of mass destruction" - Warren Buffett

I cannot think of anything else to say on readin this about speculators playing havoc with oil futures and other exotic instruments to cause oil and other commodities prices to rise. See this excerpt from the article.

Last August, the price of oil was $70 (€45) a barrel, in early March it surpassed the $100 (€64) mark, and then the new record high on June 6. What's next?
Ernst Tanner is asking himself the same question, but he is thinking about cocoa, not oil. Tanner is the CEO of Swiss fine chocolate maker Lindt & Sprüngli. He has had to look on as the price of cocoa beans jumped by 40 percent since early 2007, despite abundant supply. "It hardly has anything to do with supply and demand anymore," says Tanner.

Come to think of it,futures and forwards were created to protect producers from the vagaries of price movements and be able to sell their produce at a fixd price thus insulating them from risk.
A far cry from how it is used today by Wall street and hedge funds to speculate prices.

Regardless of whether prices go up or down, speculation results in preposterous exaggerations, with real consequences for the economy.Once again, it is the excesses of modern financial markets that are sending the world economy into convulsions. Indeed, German President Horst Köhler may have been right when he recently said, in an interview with the German magazine Stern, that the financial markets have developed into a "monster" that needs to be tamed.

Is this a new form of imperialism? Cash rich pension funds and other pools of money in the developing countries are finding their ways into commodity futures driving up prices.Inflation affects the poor much more than the rich.

Globalization, a success story for many until now, has stalled. After initially helping hundreds of millions of people escape from poverty, it is now showing its ugly side. As profits grow on one side of the world, hunger is on the rise once again on the other.

It's a completely different story on the computer screens of Wall Street analysts, where commodities are the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. Vast sums of money are being invested in the markets for food commodities and energy

Help!

One of my friends is suffering from a rare form of leukemia.Treatment costs are heavy and he seeks help.
Go to http://helpmishra.blogspot.com/ .
Any ideas on how this can be promoted to seek more donations are welcome(No, don't suggest I spam on orkut!)

Update

Update on the previous post. http://tv.burrp.com/ is quite useful, I no longer have to look for the newspaper to see whats on the tube..May be http://movies.burrp.com or http://events.burrp.com/ will be coming next on this site.Atleast I would love to have the events microsite and an RSS feed for it.

Do you want to discuss this topic?

Anyone who reads blogs and has even the slightest technology orientation will discover in a short while how many web 2.0 companies are starting up each day. Therefore there are websites that track new web2.0 start ups.I think off late even that number is growing out of bounds.I already have 10 of them in my feed reader.

Most of the new start ups have something to do with social networking - new way of intruding into friends' lives,share videos with them, create social profiles,chat with them on IM from your socially powered blog, share music with friends of similar interests, inform them about mind numbing boring activities you did via text messages.. and the list goes on.. How about a site which takes your email and just disconnects you from all your friends on various networks an anti social app where you can make foes and not friends!! Does it sound boring?If yes it is because I am bored of seeing how my friends throw paris hilton at each other or super poke themselves or pimp their pictures..give me a break.Where are the real companies, which help me get things done faster.The last one I know came more than 10 years ago. Yeah OK this here and this one have made life more fun but am hoping for more.

Meanwhile I have added one more 'useful' social web2.0 gadget to this blog. Its called disqus, you can now freak out on my blog's comment section with full blown discussions based on my rants.

Finally..

After months of adding small and barely noticeable features,Orkut the social networking site from Google has finally added  third party Apps,like Facebook. Apps are based on the Open Social platform.I tried iLike - I  couldn't get to add favourite songs or artists and yes if you are in office, be careful before starting the game.For me, it started a loud rock song much to others' surprise. May be I will try later.

In general it is a good development. Orkut is the most popular social networking site in India and for almost a year Indian users of social networking have been deprived of the state of the art in social networking- i.e a Facebook like experience. At some point of time one gets pretty much bored of seeing his/her friends' faces on the profile or their pictures from a vacation.Sometimes you just want to throw a strawberry cake or poke then or smash a bottle of beer on their heads and then tickle them.

And for all those desperate single guys who think Orkut is a dating site just because women put up their profiles,there might be light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a dating app.The much (ab)used scrapbook  pickup line "Wanna be friends?" may see decline in usage. Although given the opinion women have of strange guys on Orkut I am not sure how successful it will be.

The way they have promoted the apps interesting. No friend invites for apps so far.Just a link to announce the Apps with the hope that it will catch the attention of Orkut fans. Overall the apps have a long way to go before they match the  Facebook application platform but a good start  and it was about time.Over the last few months more and more Indians have been experimenting with Facebook, and if left unchecked, there could have been an en mass defection from Orkut. Hopefully the apps will make life in Orkut more interesting and worth sticking around.

The young and the senseless

 

Whatever appreciation I had for the lead actor in TZP greatly diminished when I heard he had refused the best child actor award. He may be a great actor but nevertheless a child actor. It is tough to imagine if it is this 10 year old who really has an ego of a 30 year old or it is his parents making him do such things.Still,for the benefit of doubt I  ignored his tantrums,be it his parents speaking through his mouth or may be it is his childish immaturity. But not for long. Yet again the kid has surpassed himself. Whatever he lacks in age, he makes it up with  his larger than life actions. According to recent reports the  boy who has no doubt been flooded with offers,wants nothing to do with directors or actors who he hasn't heard of in his lifetime of 12 years. So he will not hear anything until the movie has Shah Rukh  or Hrithik or Akshay and of course not to forget a sum of about 1 crore as compensation!!

Now, I am all for talent and recognizing it early, but at this age kids must not try to grow faster and bigger than what their age allows. It is harmful and I wouldn't be surprised if attitude causes the actor in question to burn out too quickly after a few 'big budget' films. With due respects to the neo liberal ideas of child upbringing and pedagogy sometimes the good old smack on the buttocks is what is needed to put astray kids back on line.

He is not the first kid to have tasted success in films. There have been others before him and insisting on big budget films and big money is not what made them fine actors later in their careers.Success has gotten into his head unfortunately  and its known to mess people up in strange ways.

Incentives

 

Marc Andreessen has a good post  on  incentives. Based on Poor Charlie's Almanac, it goes to explain how RSU's and stock options can make a difference to incentives. If an employee gets an option to buy a stock of the company at INR 100 there  is absolutely  no pay off as long as the stock is valued at 100. The employees have a pay off only if the value of the company increases - i.e the options motivate employees to add value to the company. Whereas stock grants, don't motivate employees the same way as options. They employees sure gain more if the stock rises to 200 but are going to make money anyway even if it stays at 100. That surely does not motivate employees well enough to increase firm value.  RSU's in my opinion are just bonuses for past performance. Neither should the employees nor employers perceive it as an incentive future performance.  In the short run employees who receive grants may work harder out of sheer momentum from the pat they received on their backs but that will not last long. Eventually employees just do enough to preserve value.And when that happens for long enough,  especially in an industry like technology, it ultimately hurts the company. When everyone works towards preserving value , its certain that soon this culture will diminish value.

Marc has a blurb on how Microsoft decided to give RSU's as against options which eventually led to the stock being flat since 2000.

Surely, options are better suited at startups where each employee has a clear idea of how his or her actions will impact company value. For larger companies however it is difficult to justify doling out options to lower rung employees. Most of the rank and file employees cannot impact firm value solely on their actions. Stock grants are a better way to compensate employees.However executives and senior management who oversee a business unit should be compensated only in stocks. I hope that is the case with Microsoft, if not then definitely Marc is right.  One should never underestimate the power of incentives and neither should one overestimate the power of bonuses. Bonuses are not incentives.

No switching cost - no monopoly?

Google surely loses no opportunity to drum the message that they are the leading search company primarily because of their genius engineers  solving hard computer science problems.

No doubt this propaganda is great for their hiring engine. Which computer science undergraduate wouldn't want to solve 'hard problems' and get paid a lot doing it while getting fat on the gourmet snacks?.I have to commend them on this marketing stunt. And they promptly justify why they need to continue doing  this for the foreseeable future - because search has practically zero switching costs for the user, therefore Google has to remain significantly better off than competitors if it wants to be the leader in search.The argument is also used to potentially ward off antitrust  allegations. Competition is only a click away. 

 

Recently Google's chief economist Hal Varian tried to explain on his NY times column and a post on the official Google blog on why Google was successful .He talks about  kaizen -  the Japanese product development methodology of continuous improvement. Google's billion queries a month give it ample data to improve the algorithm. Sure all this helps Google  stay ahead and the messaging certainly does help win with antitrust regulators.But why doesn't anyone care to point out that their dominant share in  search is not as easy to out perform as they claim it is - build a better search engine and users will come flocking to you because search is a 1 click switching cost business.No!There is something called Network effect  and Google benefits from many network effects to the extent that breaking their monopoly is not as simple as doing a better search engine. Looks like their internal propaganda got Hal too.

Network effect or demand side economies of scale happens when the product's utility improves as more people use it. Lot of products to name which have benefited from the network effect - the telephone, fax machine, Windows, social networking and search.

Google's network effect? Here is how

A better search engine - more users - better trained algorithm.

A better search engine - more users - more advertisers - more tools and SEO -> more advertisers -> more users because of better targeted ads.

10 years ago when 2 PhD students came up with a great search engine they were at the right place at the right time. Network effects compounded from then on to make them the leader in search.

When demand side economies of scale work in your favour it is good enough to be only marginally better off than the rest of the pack.The 'low switching cost'  actually works in Google's favour here. After all why would the end user switch to another search engine even if it is just 0.05% worse off than Google, when Google is just a click away and the users have all the network effects accruing to them.

 

So is Google's market share solely because it out executes everyone else on sheer engineering brilliance? You got to be kidding yourself. Network effects  of the search economics and the serendipity to hitch a ride on it at the appropriate time have played a bigger role than Google would have you believe.  How do you think Microsoft got what it has with Windows today?

Chance discovery

There are phases when I get immersed by a television show for months and hunt down all episodes and watch them.First it was Curb Your Enthusiasm,then Seinfeld and then The Office and currently Prison Break . Curb has just finished season  6 so I decided to try searching for it on torrents. Before I continue with the next sentence, let me state that I cannot wait to get my hands on a DVD.I am a true fan of Larry David and would support his comedy by buying original stuff whenever I can. I bought first 3 seasons and now am looking for season 6. But until then long live torrents. So while looking for reviews and fan mails I found this site

http://larrydavidfan.com/ 

Finally someone decided to put all things related to the comic genius in one place. The thing I like about his comedy (both Seinfeld and Curb) is the twists he lends to everyday events which make it really funny. The Christ nail or the dropping a Junior mint into the patient in the operating theatre.. His mind is still fertile for 3 more seasons of Curb I hear. Bring it on!!

Race or mother

Sometimes I have to admit that Indians are more liberal when it comes to dealing with race and caste , the latter which is sometimes passionately held and protected by its members. With so many castes/sub-castes and sub sects in India, its a miracle that we live as one country.A certain Australian cricketer  raises a hue and cry about being called a 'monkey'  which he claims is a racist abuse. Aren't we all descendants of that mammal family irrespective of colour?  The irony is that the Australians are pacified when they come to learn that he actually heard it wrong and the actual abuse was a common Hindi expletive  referring to his mother's ---- No, I am not putting blanks because I do not want to offend the readers of the blog by mentioning something profane.It is actually a literal translation. Fill the blanks yourself  Mr   'Abusee'. On of the creative expletives which gives a choice to the receiver of the abuse. Strangely the Australians were relieved that its only a reference to the cricketer's mother and not the entire race. So let there be peace. 

I hear on FM radio that the two protagonists in the incident will soon be  seen together in a television commercial  . Is it going to be an ad for Tata Indicom? Kajol would probably step in and ask Bhajji ,who is getting frustrated yelling the Hindi expletive at the Australian, to throw the existing connection  and get a Tata Indicom connection so that the person at the other can can clearly hear the abuse and be convinced its not racist.   

The right byte

I used to love this nutritious and tasty chocolate bar. Unfortunately it is no longer available in my office cafe..Looks like I need to hunt for it outside. I wonder why I never saw any ads for this one. Its exactly the kind of snack for those people  who warm the seats of many a cubicle and sit in front of a monitor all day