Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Proctor & Gamble recently announced that it would shed more than half its brands. The tech world took this as a vindication of how they redefined the rules of how to run a business, any business . Marc Andreessen tweeted: “Steve Jobs legendarily used strategy of cutting brands & SKUs for Apple's turnaround.” The reasons can’t be that simple, right? Ben Thompson had a much better analysis of why P&G had to do what it did. He starts by defining the concept of one’s identity in the branded goods world: “The concept of identity is about a person’s own personal conception of who one is and one’s place in the world. It is this definition of identity that is at the root of effective branding.” Thus, he says Dove’s recent ads that show “regular” women (i.e., not stunningly models) are aimed at women who want “to reject society’s expectations and to embrace your identity as a woman”. Axe’s ads, on the other hand, he says are meant “to drown insecurity and affirm yo...

When my parents bought their iPad, they wondered where the manual was. There isn’t one. Today, the no-manual approach is standard for almost all our gadgets. But Steve Jobs saw that technique for the first time when he worked at Atari. Walter Isaacson, in his (official) biography of Jobs, describes it thus: “(Jobs) intuitively appreciated the simplicity of Atari’s games. They came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them out. The only instructions on Atari’s Star Trek game were: 1)       Insert quarter. 2)      Avoid Klingons.” It hit me only then: I never had any trouble learning any of the Atari games as a kid even though there were no instructions or manuals. They were that intuitive. But surely our gadgets are more complicated than video games, right? Like when we were setting up the Wi-fi on my parents’ iPad, they entered the wrong password. So it wouldn’t connect; but i...

Years back, I wrote a blog titled “United States of India” about how, despite the creation of new states and even the odd demand for outright secession, we should be proud in the single entity called India: “Each state in India is comparable to a country in Europe! Not just in size. Each state has a different language, culture, and cuisine! And yet we are one nation...however much some states may dislike others. America is an entity of fairly homogenous states. Yeah, yeah, the Yankees will say that the Bible belt states differ from New York and California. But c’mon, they still eat the same food, talk the same language, and celebrate the same festivals. India's states are hugely heterogeneous . No other country in the world is a unity of such heterogeneous entities. We should take pride in what we've achieved in terms of unity.” And as the just concluded Scotland referendum showed, the demands for secession are there even in the West. Quebec, the French speaking part,...

I remember reading this argument from Daniel Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School , as to whether or not memorizing anything is relevant to critical thinking in today’s world: “I defined thinking as combining information in new ways. The information can come from long-term memory – facts you’ve memorized – or from the environment…Critical thinking processes are tied to the background knowledge.” In other words, facts in memory are the starting point for your analysis; and hence memorizing is important even if everything is just a Google search away. I had agreed with Willingham when I read his argument. But now, after reading Clive Thompson’s take on the subject in his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better , I think there is a way to go with Willingham’s approach, but in a smarter way. After all, as Thompson says, we now “outsource our memory” to be held on the Internet and rely on Google to find what we want when we w...

How much is a company worth? For a company listed on the stock exchange, that’s easy. Multiply the total number of shares with the price of a single share and you get the value of the company (as seen by the market). But sometimes, the numbers just don’t add up. Like Matthew Klein showed about Yahoo! in March this year . Yahoo! was valued at $39 billion by the stock market. It owned 24% of Alibaba that in turn was valued at $153 billion. 24% of $153 billion is $37 billion. Did that mean Yahoo!’s own businesses were only worth $2 billion? But wait, it gets even more insane. Yahoo also has a 35% stake in Yahoo Japan, which was then valued at $32 billion. 35% of $32 billion is $11 billion. That meant Yahoo!’s intrinsic worth was…negative!! And you thought Wall Street guys were smart! Stock markets like to value companies in the same industry (somewhat) similarly. Like all steel companies. Or all airline companies. Then the tech companies complicated that system. Like Apple (both...

In Godfather , right before entering the mafia war, Michael Corleone fires his childhood friend, Tom Hagen. When asked why, Corleone tells Hagen he isn’t “a wartime consigliere” . I read this 2012 article by Kurt Eichenwald titled Microsoft’s Lost Decade that describes why Microsoft had devolved from being: “one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products” So much so that: “One Apple product (the iPhone), something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975.” You might say companies rise and die; so what’s new? Well, for one, Microsoft didn’t miss many of those opportunities. They spotted them, acted on them, even had prototypes ready and then never productized them! Why? Steve Stone, a founder of Microsoft’s technology group, sums it perfectly: “Windows was ...

As limelight on the number of rapes in India increased in recent times, some politicians responded with offensive lines like “It’s the woman’s fault to be out alone/dress ‘provocatively’/to be out with a guy”. The victim was partially to blame, if not entirely. And now we have similar “advice” going round the Internet in the West. But first, the background: Nude selfies stored by celebrities on Apple’s cloud recently got hacked; and then posted online. Note that these were private naked selfies they took and stored; not shoots they did for magazines or for publicity. One would assume that the criticism would have been directed at Apple for (possibly) having a not-so-secure cloud and at whoever posted them online. But no… Some blamed the victim(s), Indian politician style: Did you need to take nude selfies and store it on the cloud, asked some. A reader of Dish blew their top at this: ““Is your life going to suck if you can’t take nude pics on your telephone?” What the hell...

Private companies that become very large, influential, corrupt and “evil” are not all that uncommon. In the pre-Internet age, to become bigger beyond a point required government support (legally or illegally). Even in capitalistic nations. Just consider the coal scam and 2G scam to see the role of government in enabling private companies on their way to dominance. Or take the East India Company that even got military backing from the British government: it was so big that it accounted for “half of the world's trade” as per Wikipedia! But the Internet era companies, while equally big (and potentially evil), don't rely on government backing to become what they are, especially in capitalistic countries (did the government force you to join Facebook? To search using Google? To buy via Amazon? Conversely, did the government do anything to prevent others from competing with these companies?). And then there’s Apple. Apple had accumulated a cash hoard of $150 billion jus...

In his book, The Black Swan , Nassim Taleb classifies professions as scalable and non-scalable. Huh? Here’s what he calls the non-scalable: “Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time…In these professions, no matter how highly paid, your income is subject to gravity.” And the scalable ones? “Other professions allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income), if you do well, at little or no extra effort...If you are an idea person, you do not have to work hard, only think intensely. You do the same work whether you produce a hundred units or a thousand.” Software development was always one of the scalable professions. In recent times, it has become über-scalable. Sam Gerstenzang has a few examples : “WhatsApp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired (for $16 billion). Imgur scaled to over 40 bill...

Is there an absolute standard of ethics? About everything, not just many things? Obviously not, and no, the reason people don’t agree on issues of ethics isn’t always politics or religion or bigotry or one side being stronger than the other. I will cite a couple of instances. The first one is the miners scenario : “Imagine 100 miners who are stuck in a mine. They are divided in two groups. You can either rescue 50 (with certainty), but then the other 50 will be lost (this is strategy 1). Or you can try a different rescue strategy, which may potentially save all of them, but only at a 50% probability; there’s another 50% chance that all will die (strategy 2). Which strategy would you choose?” Many variants of this question exist. But here’s the key point: people have conflicting views on which is the more ethical choice and neither side can cite a reason to convince the other! The other instance I have in mind is about medical trials. Joanna Monti-Masel wrote a great artic...