Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Heard of Amazon Dash ? It’s supposed to work like this: you are walking around the house, notice you are running out of cereal or whatever, point the Dash at the carton and bingo! The item just got added to your shopping list. Of course, some items don’t have bar codes or maybe you threw away the carton, in which case, you speak to the Dash to add the item. Right now, it’s a (very) limited edition gadget only available in 2 or 3 American cities. I remember reading this article that said: “Amazon doesn’t innovate by crafting new product categories, like Apple does. It also doesn’t make much money selling its hardware. Instead, it takes all the data it gathers as the world’s biggest online retailer, breaks down exactly what’s available and what consumers want, then produces a piece of hardware that it can sell cheaply in order to bring consumers into its ecosystem.” That’s Big Data in action! Google too has a huge amount of information about us and uses it to make money vi

When Microsoft released its Office suite for the iPad (and Android phones), the comments on the Net were scathing: - Ben Evans titled the event, “Hell freezes over”! After all, that's what Microsoft software on an Apple device sounds like. - Others said it was too little, too late. That the world has moved onto other editors on their phones and tablets and nobody even wants Office anymore. And it is fashionable to call Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's ex-CEO, an idiot. But when it came to coming up with a mobile OS, Microsoft didn't really miss the opportunity (Windows Mobile came up in 2000); rather, as Ben Thompson wrote , they just got “out-executed” by Apple first and then by Google. Then again, Ballmer is (in)famous for having laughed at the iPhone when it was launched saying a phone without a physical keyboard would never succeed. He could not have been more wrong about anything in his life. By 2012, as Forbes said : “One Apple product (iPhone), something th