Snapshots Across Time

Writing in the internet age — “calisthenics for the brain”

In the “10 Questions” section of the June 20, 2011 issue of Time Magazine, historian David McCullough shares his thoughts on the impact of the dying art of letter writing on the study of history. He’s concerned about “… the loss of the process of working out your thoughts on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had, if you weren’t [writing] being a handicap…. Writing is calisthenics for the brain.”

I found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read the article at the barber’s shop this morning. I have always noticed that writing forces me to put my ideas down — visible in black and white, warts and all. The process forces me to clarify my own thinking, getting to the heart of the matter. Helps me to communicate clearly, simply, and well.

However, unlike McCullough, I am less concerned that people have stopped writing. Just looking at the sheer number of blogs and tweets, I believe that people are writing — but in different media, using newer and different tools. What I am concerned about is the fact that writing today is both ill-focused (high volume, conversational, less thoughtful), short (140 characters), and ephemeral (where, oh where, are yesterday’s tweets?). The question in my mind is whether historians, a 100 years from now, can find, aggregate and interpret this mass of data, and build a “holistic” sense of what we are thinking about and attempting to communicate.

I will do my bit for posterity by continuing to write “complete” articles

Lady Gaga, the mythical Indian middle class, and the SMB (software) market

I’ll start off by admitting that I am a big fan of Lady Gaga’s — more for her market savvy, somewhat for her music (even if I am, sad to say, tone deaf), and less for her over-the-top clothes. So, it wasn’t a big surprise that an article entitled “Lady Gaga Romances India – Taps into local expertise to tweak her expertise in a Bollywood remix” in the June 2nd, 2011, The Wall Street Journal, caught my attention. The long and short of it the article was that Lady Gaga sees a large market in India (700 million people under 30), just as Brittney Spears (and, presumably, the Beatles) before her. While Lady Gaga spoke to her need to be the “Fame Monster” and her goal of bringing her music to these millions while expanding her base, her promoter in India said something that really got my attention – “The key is understanding what works in the US and in the UK. And, taking the extra steps to serve the South Asian market.”

Consumer India (aka, India’s Mythical Middle Class)
In parallel, Rajesh Kumar, my colleague who runs SAP’s India Marketing team gifted me an interesting book by Rama Bijapurkar, apparently one of India’s leading marketers. Entitled “We are like that only,” Ms. Bijapurkar uses reams of data and her decades of on the ground market experience in India to help others understand the Indian Consumer. Her central theses:

Every company has to identify its own “my India Strategy,” not try to craft a “One India” model – you need a “Made for India” strategy that you need to be willing to give time to succeed – something Lady Gaga and team appear to have groked!

This “Made for India” strategy needs to be built recognizing four key tenets:
• The nature of developing economies is fundamentally different (than developed economies). The socio-economics and associated purchasing power/patterns are very different – while the addressable market might be the same, it’s the product of a large number of consumers buying in smaller “bites”;
• Emerging markets are not virgin markets. More than likely, there already are Indian alternates priced and configured for different market segments (e.g., bicycles, motorcycles, 3 wheelers, small cars, cars)
• Emerging markets today aren’t what developed markets were in their infancy. So, something that worked 20 years ago in the west will likely not work in India;
• Countries change around their DNA. So, your products need to adapt – think of the woman, draped in her colorful sari, riding a scooter…

Rama shows that using traditional segmentation models is too restrictive and, potentially dangerous, in the Indian market. (e.g., Pepsi and Coke, shooting to quench the thirst of India’s consumption-ready middle class, haven’t quite seen the growth they expected to see.)

What does all of this have to do with the Small Businesses and Midsize Companies (SMB) Market?
All of this takes me back to Rajesh Kumar’s and my daily challenge: How do we grow an SMB business in India? Do the lessons from Bijapurkar’s work on the dynamics of the consumer market parallel those of the SMB market?

My belief (ok, hypothesis) is Absolutely, yes! I base this on my experience in 2007, where, as CodeGear/Borland’s India Country Manager, I sold developer tools and databases to IT companies like Infosys and Wipro, Public Sector firms like Hindusthan Petroleum, and to quasi-public firms like Mahindra & Mahindra. “One market” I thought when I first arrived. “Thousand markets” was my conclusion as we closed out the successful spin-off of CodeGear.

Which implies the need for a portfolio of solutions – available via different go-to-market approaches, using different channels, priced, packaged, marketed and delivered differently – for the firm to be truly successful. While the proverbial bicycle manufacturer is apparently in a similar business as the moped manufacturer, their needs and corporate/owner dynamics are so different that one size will not fit all. Selling to this market is a task that is daunting at best.

Back to where we started
So, here’s to Lady Gaga crooning “Mera Dil….,” a new Bollywood number composed by AR Rahman and accompanied by Anoushka Shankar on the sitar; delivered on the silver screen, via YouTube and on many of India’s numerous TV programs; and aimed at reaching the under-30, Liberation Generation among the Rich and Consuming classes. She’ll, hopefully, have figured by then that there aren’t 700M folks awaiting her! But, that there is a ton of money still to be made!

Aboard the Airbus 380 – the world’s largest passenger aircraft!

Somewhere over Nova Scotia, June 6th, 2011 – I write this as I ride on Lufthansa’s AB380 en route San Francisco – Frankfurt. I had to ride on this plane, ever since I saw it swing by, towering over us, while on an earlier trip to Orlando precisely 3 weeks ago. Ok, I’ll just admit it – I am just a child when it comes to these sorts of “engineering marvels!” I needed the “fix.” I’ve been in marketing for too long!

I so vividly remember to this day, the sheer excitement of flying Air India’s “Emperor Vikramaditya” (?) – a royal member of AI’s Jumbo jet fleet – back on December 2nd, 1980. (My brother, Srinivas, celebrated the longest birthday of his life.) The aircraft was gigantic, the lines to board were long, the plane was clearly “modern,” flying was a true treat, and Boeing ruled the commercial airwaves. We flew from Bombay to London’s Heathrow and then on to NYC’s John F Kennedy airport. We were served by generally gracious air hostesses (an “in” job in those days) using proper crockery, provided serious silverware, and, believe it or not, the food was good! (I can still describe the omelet I ate on that flight, some three decades later. In stark contrast, I can’t, for the life of me, recall what was served to me just 4 hours ago.)

So, has anything changed??
With the AB380 replacing the mighty Jumbo jet, has the “old order changeth, yielding place to new?”

Let’s start with some observations:

Status quo
• If you had blindfolded me and let me loose in the cabin, I would not have known I was on such a large aircraft – the 3-4-3 seat configuration is the norm in wide body jets…
• The upper deck is 100% reserved for business and first class passengers

Surprises
• How deceptively small the aircraft looks – its only when you compare it to the other aircraft in the area do you realize how big it is. (See picture with a 747 landing near us)
• How quickly (i.e., after a short run up on the runway) and effortlessly the plane took off
• How incredibly quiet the cabin is, once in the air
• The fact that there are only 8 First Class Seats (Add 98 Business Class seats and some 440 (44 rows of ~10 each) in Cattle Class and you get something like 556 passengers on board)

Changes for the better
• Technology is to be seen everywhere – from the white light LED’s through the personalized entertainment systems in every seat and the four gigantic engines to the winglets at the tips of the long, slender and flexible wings (that I estimate rose a good 10 feet between when the aircraft was on the ground and when we are in the air!)
• All 550+ people on the flight boarded painlessly in about 30 mins! (They had 3 jet ways – one for the upper deck, one for the front half of the lower deck and one for the rear half of the lower deck.)
• Storage space in the cabin seemed plentyful; despite a packed flight (Do we thank Bin Laden for this change?)

Changes for the worse
• The food is utterly mediocre. I have the sense of being on my own, rather than being pampered by the Royal Maharaja and his dedicated courtiers as we were back in 1980.
• Seating is certainly more cramped

Changes invisible to the untrained eye
• I am sure that the aircraft is fundamentally greener and burns a whole lot less fuel – both on an absolute scale and on a per capita basis. The hundreds of miles of wires have been dramatically reduced in length, all of the plastic has eliminated weight, and composite materials are everywhere in the structure (a fact that would have thoroughly gladdened my father’s heart, given the many years he spent studying the fatigue properties of composites and evangelizing the use in products ranging from aircraft to cooling tower and windmill blades)

My conclusion? Not a whole lot has (visibly) changed! While utterly disappointed, I guess that this isn’t that different than comparing the Pontiac station wagon my uncle picked us up in at JFK to even a Buick I might buy today… it is after all a body and an engine on four wheels steered by yet another wheel. Yes, so we have a stiffer unibody, a lot of electronics optimizing the engine and the power train, but, in the end, as Mr. Ed would have put it, “a car is a car is a car.” I wasn’t going from a bullock cart to a jet plane. Sadly, it’s all about incremental innovation, once in the category.

The gizmo I enjoyed the most?
The multiple on board cameras that let me (and, for that matter, anyone else on the plane who cared about it) look forward from the top of the tail, the bottom of the belly, and (I think) the nose of the aircraft throughout the flight.

The highlight of the flight?
A personal tour of the cockpit – large enough to house 3 pilots, bunk beds and all –once we touched down in Frankfurt!

Safe and happy flying!