Month: November 2006

Often you enter without having a vaguest clue of what you want or what should be the best or appropriate. You talk to the store reception, go around the display shelves and pick something up.

Online retail stores work on the assumption that you know what you want and they will get you the best price on that purchase. They work more as a stockist rather than a retailer. The only USP they have is the best bargain. (and price war is never a good business strategy)

Take a simple Scenario:
1) I want to take my girl out for a wonderful evening (movie/food/shopping etc.) I want something nice, different and new. But I am looking for suggestions.
2) Thanks to Hallmark, there is a gifting occasion every fortnight. I want to buy for my sister/ aunt/ father etc. and I am clueless what I should get.

All I want is that there should be phone number (not online yellow pages) which keeps track of a database of the latest fashion trends. You just dial them and feed all the data. They will work with you and try to list out options you can have.

You give customer clarity and make him happy. After he makes up his mind you offer him:
“If you want, we can pick it up from the store. Wrap it and dispatch it to the specified address.”
“We can reserve a wonderful table for you”

Now who can refuse this offer?

Messengers/chat-rooms are the most widely used web-applications. But I often wonder why:
1. You have no idea who the other person is.
a. He could be a pedophile romancing with a teenage from a prison cell.
b. A loser impersonating as someone rich and famous.
c. Or a next door neighbor messing with you.
d. Or a necromancer/cannibal who believes in sacrifices and trying different kinds of exotic meats.

2. It is a complete waste of time. You can spend 5 minutes just to say hi
3. The most important aspect of communication is the Tone of the Voice, facial expressions and body language. Whenever someone asks you “how do you do?” there is a standard reply. But it the enthusiasm which tells the real story.
4. Meeting people whom you meet online is often a disaster. In a chat-room you can be very close friends and communicate endlessly. But in real life you are just 2 strangers. And also the probability of meeting someone who stays across the globe is next to zero.

Then my friend gave me a wonderful reply

“Therapeutic anonymity”.

Essentially we have tons of emotions bottled up. The only we can get our mind cleared up is by communicating.
Physical world is a very small place. You tell it to one person and everybody knows (even those you do not want to know) But online world is a lot more secure.

It is like a modern day confession box. You do not know who is hearing your rants and the other person never asks your name an identity. Hence the inhibitions and barriers are lowered. Hence online friends communicate at a very deep level and understand each other much better. Guys who never talk about their personal life and their fears to even their closest friends gossip like sisies online.

Do not believe me:
Next time you see your office boy, security guard or a waiter, just ask him his Name. He will immediately get defensive and start blurting out explanations and apologies. (Even though nothing happened)
You know the guy by face; you know his workplace. So what has he to lose?
Still as long as you do not know the other person by name /identity you communicate better.

Most of the self-development books say the person’s name is the most beautiful and sweetest sounding noise known to mankind. Yet many of the writers have a pen-name which is nowhere similar to their real-life name. That is why they are able to express deeper emotions and more vivid thoughts. Similarly most people hide behind their an online name/alias to reveal themselves better.

I came across this interesting “piece”, thought I’ll share with you all. It goes like this…….

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university lecturer. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the lecturer went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic, glass, some plain-looking and some expensive and exquisite, telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the lecturer said:

“If you noticed, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the better cups and are eyeing each other’s cups.”

“Now, if Life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn’t change.”

“Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it.”

So folks, don’t let the cups drive you…enjoy the coffee instead.
—-
BTW I was recently very pissed of at RapidShare. They seem to be putting in all the sorts of wait counters, download limits, and deleted the files after 20-30 days. Plus if simultaneously 2 or more persons used to access the same file… they used to introduce a cool of period. Hence I moved to 4shared

In a international world how are the profits and revenue distributed among the various subsidiaries of an MNC? Usually all the offices are dedicated in manufacturing some component or the other of the same product-line. Hence it is impossible to account for the Value addition of each activity.
eg: Take the case of this hypothetical cell-phone giant.
1. The board and circuitry are designed in England.
2. The stylish casing is designed in Paris
3. The LCD display and GUI in Silicon Valley
4. The software is written by coolies in Bangalore
5. The chips are designed by Scandinavian office
6. They are manufactured in the Fab-lab of Taiwan, tested and assembled in Korea.
7. The assembly is done China
8. Sales are in America.
9. Promoter/Head quarters are in a separate country.

The phone costs 40$ and sells for 100$. So how is the 60$ profit and revenue distributed? To my surprise each of the 9 offices got a small percentage of the profit. While most of the profit (around 50$ per phone) was attributed to an office (which exists only on paper) at Bermudas. Just because it provided the company with a tax-holiday.

Which every country gives a tax-holiday seems to get all the profits and revenue. The company is not cooking any books; it has a legitimately registered investment company at Bermudas. By underreporting the profits of high tax centers, it maximizes the overall profits.

So next time a report says profitability of MNC is dipping etc., take it with a pinch of salt. Companies are in the business of making money. If their international arms were making as much losses as they are reporting they would have closed it down long ago.

Most international arms of Coke/Pepsi make losses. Simply because the overpriced syrup and royalty costs. Similarly some car manufacturer actually under-report revenue of their international arms so that their US factories have extra margins. Extra Margins is a advertising gimmick to demonstrate better manufacturing capabilities of USA and riding high on the patronage waves.

Has anybody visited a poultry farm? It is a stack of cube shaped cages in which the chicken can barely fit itself.
I always believe that offices/cube-farms are also similar containments for the workforce.
The world is never equal. Then why are offices standardized and equal?

The zeal to achieve standardization is so high that they kill all possible possibilities of enhancements.
1) Towards the periphery there are external windows which are a source of daylight (which improves productivity). But the cubicles next to it will have the standard partition. And Facilities will yell at you if you remove this partition.
2) In the center of a cube farm, there are usually pillars supporting the roof. Since they cannot fit an entire cube in it, conveniently they leave it blank and wasted. Can’t the designers make the neighboring cubicles bigger by one panel so that this extra space could be utilized? NOoooo! That is blasphemy.

If hotels can design rooms such that each room has a balcony facing outside, then why can’t offices?