There has been talk of Steve Jobs retiring before. There's even been talk of him dying, for heaven's sake. In 2008, Bloomberg shockingly went and published his obituary in error and Steve Jobs made light of it by using Mark Twain's famous line "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."Preceding practically every recent Apple event there have been days of speculation on whether Jobs will be there to make another of his famous presentations, and on his showing up, much commentary about his appearance and state of health. For everyone knows that Steve Jobs has been battling pancreatic cancer and has had a liver transplant.So, the announcement of Steve Jobs' resigning as CEO Apple should not have come as a surprise to anyone. But it did. It's a shock -- one that will continue to reverberate over most of the world for quite a while yet, because he has not only made Apple the second most important company globally, but anything because anything that Apple does today impacts the technology industry.All this is quite apart from all the individual lives that are changed because of Steve Jobs.That may sound dramatic, but if you use even one Apple product, you will know what I mean because of the very way that product fits into your life and alters the way you do things.In my early days as a technology writer, Apple was in a stubborn niche of its own, the anti-PC maker of powerful, expensive computers that didn't get along with anything else but were ever the ideal tool for designers, architects and creative types. Us tech journalists would often shake our heads in sorrow at Apple's strategies and wonder why a company that made such a beautiful machine would want to paint itself into a comer. Today, that same company has instead carpeted the world with brilliantly designed products. And all of it is thanks to the phenomenon that is Steve Jobs.Steve Jobs' Apple is not necessarily a great place to work. It's certainly not a great company to compete against. Apple doesn't play nice. It can go after a a kid who violates its copyrights just as it goes after its current competitor, Samsung. It's often also often accused of top-to-bottom arrogance. And mysteriousness. But no one argues with cult Apple.When a person becomes the company and the company becomes the person, it's, only natural to wonder at the separation of the two. But the one thing you cannot accuse Steve Jobs of is leaving Apple unprepared. With him setting up the company, in its Cupertino spaceship, well on the path to world dominance, Apple couldn't have asked for more as it faces a new future -- without Steve Jobs.And then again, remaining on the board of the company, he could well influence Apple -- and our lives -- for a long time to come.mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter
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Michael Saul Dell, 46, through his eponymous firm Dell Inc, defined the Personal Computer (PC) industry in 1984, by directly selling to customers from his University of Texas dormitory room, undercutting the middleman and in the process becoming a billionaire several times over. 27-years later, he has the chance to redefine the industry again, as it faces its biggest churn. While his biggest competitor Hewlett Packard (HP) Company has hung a 'for sale' sign on its PC business, signaling its intention to exit a high volume, low margin market, Dell is gung-ho about the prospects of the industry and his company. Dell who returned to the CEO role in 2007 to rescue a floundering company, after a brief flirtation with a Chariman's non-operational role, now seems keen on moving his firm away from being a low-cost, box pusher, to a solutions firm, which provides hardware, software, storage and services under one roof. In an in-depth chat with Businessworld's Venkatesh Babu from Dell's headquarters at Round Rock, Texas, he talked about the challenges facing the PC business in particular and the hardware industry in general, the rise of smartphones and tablets as well as the transformation journey to being a solutions company. Edited Excerpts :You were a pioneer in the PC industry. Is the PC industry dying or dead?Reports of death of the PC are greatly exaggerated. This year alone, globally around, 440 million PC's will be sold. Gartner for instance predicts that this year about 40 million tablets will be sold. I have been hearing these reports of the death of the PC at least since the mid 90's and even when the industry was selling a mere 100 million PC's. Some analysts project that by 2014, actually a billion PC's would be sold a year. Look, while nobody denies that the smartphones and tablets as a category have risen significantly in the recent past, fact is that the PC is not going to disappear anywhere. At least not in the near future. When a person buys a smartphone, it is not as a substitute to the PC. There is a continuous evolution of multiple form factors. Smartphones and Tablets are good at certain things like content consumption, while the PC would be good for content creation. In India and several other developing markets, I think the PC market is under-penetrated and there is significant room for growth. I think (the current market) can be described as PC plus rather than a Post-PC era. What do you make of HP's announcement which essentially means it is looking to sell its PC business?I personally think this is an incredible opportunity for Dell. We have a very good PC business. If HP or somebody else doesn't want to be in the business, it is just more opportunity for us. Customers of that company (HP) are concerned and confused. We have been talking to them and our channel partners. We will do all that is possible to help them to move over to Dell. We are the only player today that provides everything from the client (PC) to server, cloud and services. Every since you took charge of the company again in 2007, you have tried to move it away from a very efficient, low-cost, box pusher to a solutions company. How far do you think Dell has traversed along that path?I see this transformation as a kind of a continuum rather than changes (happening) in months and years. The key along the way has been that value has moved from hardware to software and now services. But that doesn't mean that hardware or software are going to go away. Dell has been adapting and leading some of these changes by investing and growing both organically and through acquisitions. In the last 18 months we have acquired 11 or so companies. Just in the last quarter our earnings per share grew by 71 per cent. Our offerings are open, scalable and affordable, and that is a message customers want to hear. I am happy with the progress we have made, though we have lots left to do.HP seems to be following the path of IBM in trying to strengthen its services offering and exiting low margin hardware businesses. Is that the path Dell would also eventually follow?Well, I have never been fond of stereotypes like that and won't comment on what others might or might not, be trying to do. What I can tell you about what Dell is doing, is that, unlike others, we are about open and not proprietary standards. We believe in the PC business even as we grow the smartphones and tablets space. I think you will see us approach (this transformation to be a solutions company) a little differently. Other companies might have legacy business built around proprietary standards and might not want to disrupt that. But we have no such issues and we will try and change the market in a way which is great for customers.Dell has had limited success in smartphones and tablets, at least till now. How do you plan to address this challenge?In the global $3-trillion IT industry, Dell has been very successful. Also what is worth thinking about is that each time somebody uses or accesses something on a smartphone or a tablet, they get on a network, they access servers and storage. Very high percentage of those (servers and storage) are powered by Dell. So whether it is somebody's else smartphones or tablets or ours, we still benefit. Of course we aspire to do more in the phones and tablets market. In phones we are excited about both Andorid and Windows Phone 7.In tablets, till now, only Apple has had success there. But it is very early days yet. We have certain exciting products and software in development, the results of which you will start seeing shortly.You have made several acquisitions in the recent past including Equal Logic, Compellant and Force 10, primarily to plug gaps in your portfolio. Perot at $3.9 billion was your largest acquisition. What is the strategy here.First of all if you look at the kind of acquisitions whether it is in, datacenter, storage, security or services, we have made there are a couple of common themes. Over 90 per cent of the engineers being acquired are in software. They fit into the overall theme of us being a solutions company. We have more than $16 billion in cash and depending on opportunities in the marketplace, we will use it appropriately.Recently you hired Suresh Vaswani. What is his mandate ?Suresh is a senior resource who wears two hats. One would be to grow our services business and the second as the Dell India, Chairman. India is an extremely important market for us. We have built a very good business in India where we have become No.1 (in the PC market). We are investing in the local market for the long haul. Our resources there are fantastic and key to our global success.
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Like many other scientific and industrial fields, technology-based industries have essentially been defined and dominated by men. Of course, women have played significant roles in the development of science and technology, but for the most part, they are some of history's best kept secrets, often even among women themselves. For example, how many of you knew that the very first real computer programmer was a woman? Ada Byron King, the Countess of Lovelace and daughter of poet Lord Byron, was a prominent mathematician in the mid-1800s. She worked along side her better-known male colleague, Charles Babbage, on the first mechanical computing machines. What's however not such a big secret is the dismal picture of women in the top echelons of the IT Industry. For example, even in India while women constitute almost 40 per cent of the IT Industry's workforce, the numbers thin down significantly to less than 5 per cent (Only 5.3 per cent of all directors on the BSE-100 being are women as per a Standard Chartered Bank Report: (Women on Corporate Boards In India 2010).I've now spent 30+ years in this Industry and worked in different parts of the globe from India and China to Hong Kong and the Silicon Valley, but over the years, one thing has remained constant - the speed of change around the world in this crucial area has been less than encouraging.However being a woman - "a gender of hope" as my grandmother used to say - I also believe that revolution is always around the corner… There is not a single problem in this world that has not been solved when humanity has decided to join hands to solve it. So let's begin by changing our mindset first from 'what hasn't been done' to 'what can we do' and approach this demographic dilemma with ideas of action.What Can We Do? While I'm sure there are many different ways to approach this path, I believe that three things are most important: 1) We must combat gender bias and discrimination in every situation and every way we can. Ideally, the representation of women in the power structure of a community or organisation should reflect their numbers in that community or organisation. Patronising behavior and assumptions that women are less qualified or committed than men, regardless of whether the assumptions are conscious or unconscious, must stop.Childhood influences should also be studied and remedied. For example, research has found that boys and girls have different ways of looking at technology and these patterns kick in at a very early age. In the US, boys and girls tend to be equally interested in computers until they are about 10 years old. At that point, boys' use rises significantly and girls' use drops. Looking behind the statistics, we see that most children are first introduced to computers in their homes and at school through games, and that the vast majority of games software is developed by men.The predominant themes of recreational computer games are war, battles, crimes, destruction, and traditionally male-oriented sports and hobbies. As girls tend to prefer nonlinear games, where there's more than one direction to take, where you can work in groups, and where no one "dies" on screen. These seemingly subconscious layers that surround our very homes need to be investigated and amended by every parent.2) We must address head-on the lack of mentoring programs for women and girls and make sure that role models are more numerous and highly visible.Mentors and role models play a crucial, though usually informal, role in personal growth, and in training for all professions, and it's clear that role models are important at all stages in personal and professional life. It is not unusual for female employees to seek mentors more frequently than their male counterparts. When mentors or mentoring programs are not available, the female technology professional often shifts her career to the applied technology fields.This lack of mentor resources is particularly acute in technology businesses and computer sciences where the number of available female mentors and role models shrinks as one progresses through the pipeline. While young women can benefit from mentors of either gender, it is desirable for women to be exposed to females in higher level positions. For example, we at HCL run a program called Feminspiration where we invite women achievers from various fields to mentor our women employees. A role model can serve as evidence that a successful career in computer science, for example, is not only a possibility, but a normal and even unremarkable option for women. Role models and mentors are perhaps even more important to younger women and girls. Without them, girls may lose interest or end studies in technology fields prematurely, and for the wrong reasons. 3) We must make sure that the difficulties in balancing career and family responsibilities are overcome. Concern with this problem has led some young women to abandon the possibility of such a career at a very early stage in their training. Women considering careers in computer science are not very different from women in a wide range of other careers... or, for that matter, from many men in those careers. A recent New York Times article noted that, "Fathers, too, are seeking a balance between their families and careers."It must be possible for both men and women to work hard and well at a career, without neglecting their personal lives. No one should have to choose one at the expense of the other. Both men and women should have the right, and often have the obligation, to have careers. There are a variety of ways to support this. As my colleague and friend at HCL Technologies, Vineet Nayar, wrote in his recent blog hosted on the Harvard Business School website — Companies must create organizations that are aligned, culturally and emotionally, with woman employees' priorities…(they) also need to change their expectations that employees should be available anywhere, anytime; find ways around women's reticence to advocate for themselves; and change the unwritten rules of workplace engagement favoring men.Yes, we must do all this and more for a lot hinges on increasing the number of women in the field. We must make sure that increased representation of women is not stalled, but rather accelerated, by the policies and practices of educators and employers, governments and corporations. The good news here is that this is a relatively new industry, and there's opportunity to change it before behaviors and expectations become too entrenched. The responsibility for this change lies in each one of our hands, and I am sure as a generation who has triggered more revolutions than any in the past, I am confident that we will.The author is a director on the board of HCL Technologies
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Mercedes-Benz and J P Sports International (JPSI) together have announced plans to set up a Performance Driving Academy in the country. India would be the 4th country to have such academy after US, China and Germany. The Performance Driving Academy will offer basic and advance programmes, cars, trainers and help train new talents on the racing track. The basic programme will focus on how to drive a sports car and the drivers will get a certificate after the successful completion of the course. The second level, on the other hand is the advance level, meant for those who want to pursue a career in motorsports. They will be trained by international racers and selected drivers will also be sent to Germany for training. The academy is scheduled to set up in 2012. "The exact timeline for the execution of the programmes has not been decided yet. But by November we should be able to come up with more details on the project. At the moment we are concentrating on the Formula One race scheduled in October end," says Sameer Gaur, CEO and MD, JPSI. "We have been always associated with motorsports globally and we are delighted to be associated with the JPSI for their sporting event in India," says Peter Honegg, managing director and CEO of Mercedes-Benz India.This announcement was made today at a conference held at the national capital to announce Mercedes-Benz India's association with the 2011 Indian Grand Prix, as the official automobile partner for the Buddh International Circuit, the inaugural venue of the event scheduled on 28th -30th October. According to this agreement, Mercedes-Benz will provide stand-by safety cars for the event. However, there will be other safety cars which would come from Europe for the racing event.10,000 tickets for the Grand Prix have already been sold in just five days. It was also announced that the Formula One merchandise and tickets of the race will be available at the Mercedes-Benz showrooms. The newly constructed Buddh International circuit is almost ready to host its first grand prix and 1 September is scheduled for the homologation of the track. 24 teams are expected to participate in the Grand Prix.
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Tata Teleservices Ltd on Wednesday brought in all technologies it uses to offer telecom services under one brand in a move that is expected to prop up the company's sagging fortunes in the telecom sector.The company will offer mobile, fixed line and broadband under Tata DOCOMO brand. The company with 90.1 million subscribers from all its telecom services is behind, major operators like Bharti with more than 180 million, Reliance Communications (about 150 million), Vodafone (110 million).Tata DOCOMO hopes that the new brand will be able to not only attract new customers but also improve its average revenues per user (ARPU). The strategy is to capture emerging telecom opportunities in broadband using an integrated technology-agnostic business approach.From Wednesday, all its Tata Indicom customers will migrate to Tata DOCOMO. But the migration of services to the unified Tata Docomo brand will happen in Delhi-NCR at a later date. This will not impact TTL's Indicom, Photon and Walky consumers in Delhi as they will continue to get the same quality of service as in the past.The company also paraded it network equipment supplier Huawei and handset partner, Samsung, to help position it as the fastest broadband supplier and voice operator, with zero tolerance for quality of service. "We have brought the brands that were not doing well under the number three brand in the country to leverage it," says Deepak Gulati, Executive President, Mobility Business, Tata Teleservices Limited.Gulati denied that this re-branding has anything to do with its Japanese partner hiking its stake from current 26 per cent. However, sources in the Government said, "You will hear something soon, they do not need an approval, but have informally indicated to us."DOCOMO is expected to hike its share in TTML to 50 per cent by before end of current financial year. While ‘Virgin' will remain as it is. "It does not belong to us," says Gulati.The company under this new brand will offer a host of new and innovative solutions and services. As part of the new strategy, TTL is integrating the many different market opportunities and empowering the customer—with a single-point brand interface for a seamless user experience.The company has consolidated all organizational assets—spectrum, retail touch-points, digital footprint and consumer franchises across technology platforms under a single brand, Tata DOCOMO.Gulati said, it will also make new investments to upgrade its CDMA network to deepen and widen the existing footprint. Along with this it will create a strong consumer-facing organization.The company also unveiled Photon Max on Tata DOCOMO, the latest addition to its Photon family of high-speed mobile broadband access products on the CDMA platform, which works on the REV.B platform and offers fast surfing speeds.
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Unlike the Infosys headquarters, which is a well manicured 80-acre campus, with elegant glass and chrome structures, the new office address is in Jayanagar, a quiet up-market part of Bangalore, barely 2 kilometers from his residence. The building, named Tatagatha, is a large, squarish, two-floor structure and houses N R Narayana Murthy's investment fund Catamaran. The building was named Tatagatha because it was one of the names of Gautam Buddha, and can be loosely translated to mean ‘somebody who is beyond transitory phenomena'. Saturday, August 20, is his 66th birthday. For the last time in an executive capacity at least, Nagawara Ramarao Narayana Murthy is wearing a light blue shirt with the Infosys name emblazoned on it.There is a gaggle of reporters, television, print and web, who are waiting for their ‘exclusive' meetings -- in reality 5-15 minutes face time, with mostly same questions framed in different ways -- with the man who did so much to put Indian IT on the global map. Boradcast vans of several channels are haphazardly parked on the quiet street. Journalists, camera men, editors, all wait downstairs and are shepherded, one at a time, for an audience with the man himself in the board room upstairs. When he meets BW, he confesses, that over the last week, as media interest in him has peaked (to coincide with his hanging up his boots, after steering Infosys over 3 decades), he has been in endless, rounds of meetings. Apart from media he has also been in various parties, events and get-togethers organised by his co-founders, friends, employees, investors and customers. Little wonder he looks tired and can't stop yawning. Son Rohan walks in to greet his father. A chip of the old block, no grandiose gestures here, just a perfunctory wish, equally accepted with a smile and a nod. There are guests waiting at home for today's special birthday lunch (mainly family members and a few friends I am later told). So Murthy is in a hurry to depart and promises BW that we will meet again later in the week for a more detailed chat. And anyway he has got scores of other media interactions waiting for him once he is back from his birthday lunch. Pandu, who is Murthy's majordomo for more than a decade and a half and who is the unobtrusive shadow, notes down the promise, so that it could be acted on.Infosys and its much-storied founders have always punched above their weight, because they essentially captured the zeitgeist of the Indian transformative journey post the 1991 economic reforms. A growing middle class with a high aspirational quotient, could readily identify with a company, whose success did not owe anything to the government, competed with the best across the globe and more importantly won, even as it shared wealth among its employees and shareholders, while setting benchmarks for corporate governance and disclosure norms. The fact that the promoters were first generation middle class entrepreneurs with no major industrial house backing them lent only additional sheen to their story. They were ‘people like us.'While the collective effort of the founders helped propel the company, its soul has always been Narayana Murthy or Murthy as he is internally called. He has been the driving force behind the company. Holding it together during times of crisis (when the IPO almost devolved, the decision to let go off GE as a client, steering the company post the dotcom crash) or making judgement calls in the larger interest of the company (letting go of his protégé Phaneesh Murthy due to a scandal, promoting Nandan ahead of Kris, or even earlier offering to buyout others if they wanted to exit), Murthy's extraordinary vision, tenacity, hard work has helped Infosys to become India's second largest IT services exporter with a market cap in excess of $27 billion.Murthy's calendar prepared months in advance usually features him being more than 200 days on the road, in a year. His wife, Sudha who in her own way has contributed extraordinarily to the success of her husband and the company he founded, once confessed to this writer that for a seven year period, even after he stepped down from the CEO and MD role, they could not go on a family holiday as the schedules never matched. With Murthy still being on the board of directors of several companies as well as international organizations, his travel while seeing some minor change, is unlikely to come down drastically, though he did say he would like to spend more time with his grandchildren (now that daughter Akshata has given a him a granddaughter in ‘Krishna'). Even his wish to teach the next generation (like his school master father) might be difficult given the demands on his time. There are already clamours from various admirers, for him to don a bigger role in public life (a la one of his co-founders Nandan Nilekani the UIDAI chairman), including mentions of either an ambassadorship to the US or the President's office. Great institutions are beyond even admittedly great individuals. Murthy has in the past asserted that true test of a leader is in the caliber of successors he is able to groom. Infosys retains strong growth and is a phenomenal profit engine, but is facing challenges on several fronts as the global technology industry morphs again. Even as the company and the leadership he groomed, grapples with the challenges, it would be in their interest to listen to the Chairman Emeritus who says he will still ‘provide' advice and guidance ‘if sought.' We are watching and listening.
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If one was in the audience of the 1200-odd delegates or among the 30-or-so speakers who addressed the gathering of the ad and marketing world at AdAsia 2011 in New Delhi, one could have noted a connecting thread. Call it an admission of guilt or an acceptance of reality, there was an overarching sense that the world of brands was being affected by excessive marketing to the consumer. This was resulting in excessive consumerism ending in an economic imbalance. So did the delegates make a renewed commitment to market responsibly to consumers? In words, yes. In deeds, one can only wait and watch.Another common thread that connected the debate of Day One to what was presented on Day Three was that the marketer needed to be a schizophrenic of sorts. Gone was the day when marketers used to have a single target audience for their products. Take the Indian market as a case in point. One set of consumers – 80 million of them – used the second and third screens (Internet and mobile more than the first, television), the other set – 250 million consumers – live in media dark areas, where only the mobile phone can claim to have a reach in some ways. Both consumers buy the same products, one in large format stores, the other in sachets from hole in the wall outlets. The story is not different across the globe. While there is a huge pressure, in categories like colas, to market to teens, there is also a big market among the 50 years and above that buys the same products.The economics of integrity also came up for discussion. The agreement was that, integrity and the wealth it creates, is limitless. The example that was showcased to the audience was the case of One, a brand that has linked social causes like providing clean drinking water to the underprivileged to create a bottled water brand that sells for a premium. The same cause has been extended to launch brand extensions in poultry, breads and so on. There was also the note of caution; who better to make it than CEO coach and consultant Ram Charan. The guru pointed out that in the guise of expanding abroad, companies should not indulge in flag planting. Go with a strong strategic purpose or else, failure is certain. We have heard that before, but statements like these get repeated only because there is no shortage of corporations who throw caution to the wind.
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Last week, Greece once again dominated the global financial market as fears of a new crisis emerged after the Greek Prime Minister called for a referendum on the bailout deal. Though there wasn't any major activity in the Indian stock market, it corrected itself to end the week lower by 1.4 per cent.With fund flows virtually coming to a standstill amid growing jitters over the fate of Greece and its fallout on the Euro-zone economy, the Indian markets now await the release of September IIP numbers that is expected to be unveiled on coming Friday, 11 November 2011. The market is eagerly waiting for the winter session of Parliament starting on 22 November 2011. Expectations are high on re-initiating the reforms process. "Affirmative action from the government on reforms and on investments will be the pre-requisite for the markets to move up sustainably," says Dipen Shah, head of fundamental research at Kotak Securities. He, however, believes that in the coming week the markets will continue to be influenced by the developments in Europe while at home, the inflation and the IIP numbers will be important. Meanwhile, last week the market remained volatile with the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Sensitive Index (Sensex) moving from positive to negative territory and back following global cues particularly on news from the Euro-zone. For the week ending 4 November 2011, the Sensex fell on low volumes to end at 17,562.61, down 1.4 per cent or 242 points. In the past five trading sessions, the sensex recorded an average daily turnover of Rs 2,248 crore, compared to last six months daily average turnover of Rs 2,615 crore. The mood among investors remained subdued as inflation continued to rise with food inflation jumping to a nine-month high crossing 12 per cent. Last week, petrol prices were also hiked by nearly Rs 2 per litre.Though the Indian market has discounted most of the bad news, global as well as domestic uncertainty continue to looms over it. Last week too, FII flows remained subdued to the tune of $129 million in the four trading sessions till 3 November 2011. Last week's rate cut by the European Central Bank by 25 basis points to 1.25 per cent and indication of another stimulus package after the Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said he was prepared to use monetary tools, may sound good for the markets. The fact is with global economy in a tailspin and indication of mild recession in Europe and slowdown in China, is likely to decrease the risk appetite among investors and flows into emerging markets like India.With India Inc expected to take another 2-3 quarters to deliver good performance, the next trigger could be an unexpected surprise from the government announcing reforms to boost investments in the country. Though it's a good time to build a portfolio for a long-term, but in the immediate short to medium term, Indian markets are expected to remain subdued and volatile and any bad news will see market drifting down.
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