Category — Technology & Business

I am at the ChennaiBarcamp and its the second day today. The first day was great and the second day has started even better..keep you posted on this.

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Branding….segmenting….positioning…marketing mantras that you would usually associate with consumer goods & services companies, which rely on the power of their brands to carve out a unique place in the consumer’s mindspace. Often, the very existence of the company is defined in terms of its brand’s core values and how consumers perceive it.

The (Indian) IT/software industry has traditionally adopted a hands-off approach to branding as a philosophy. But this trend seems to be changing. The last few days have seen the emergence of the very first corporate branding & positioning campaign in the Indian IT/software industry. And the company bucking the trend is none other than HCL, which (though not considered in the same league as the holy troika of the Indian software industry i.e. Infosys, Wipro & TCS) was the original Indian ‘garage startup’ way back in the late 1970s.

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If you wish to catch a glimpse of what TiE events look like, check out these photographs of TiEcon2005 held at New Delhi in Dec. I had snapped them with my digital camera during the event. I have been wanting to blog this for a couple of weeks but could get myself to do this only now.

Better late than never !!

The Rediff site carried a very interesting article (Can Infosys do a Toyota?) a couple of days back – the article makes a comparison between Infosys and Toyota and tries to reckon whether Infosys can do to the Global IT services space, what Toyota did to the world of passenger cars in the 1970s.

The author argues that Japanese automobiles, which today set the default global standard in terms of quality, innovation and efficiency, were not always like that. The Japanese car industry boomed mainly due to exports - this was possible because Japanese labour rates in the 70s were about 60-70% lower than in the western economies and the fact that they had developed smaller, more fuel efficient cars which seemed to be the flavour of the market, after the oil shocks of 1973. This is analogous to the current IT industry scenario where manpower costs in India are much lower than in the developed economies.

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The announcement last week, that Adobe was buying out Macromedia, must surely have came as a rude surprise to customers and users of Macromedia’s products and services. Our company Uzanto operates in the domain of web services based on Rich Internet Applications, a space that so far has been dominated by Macromedia.This announcement, although not having much significance to us in the short run, will most certainly impact the future of web services in a very fundamental manner.

It was only last month, that I happened to attend the Macromedia Max 2005 Conference at New Delhi. Initially, the conference seemed to come across as some sort of an annual ritual, a once-a-year must have kind of sales pitch cum orientation workshop. However, what seemed to stand out during the event was a very concerted and focused effort by Macromedia’s trainers to go beyond their usual constituency of web designers and try to reach out to the developer community at large. One of Macromedia’s trainers recounted a personal incident where he happened to go to IBM’s office to meet somebody and introduced himself as coming from Macromedia–his host apparently was quite amused to meet somebody from Macromedia for the first time –a company, whose products ( he thought ) were best known for making “ those shocking websites where everything on the screen seemed to jump up and down with an astonishing regularity ”. Those early days of ridicule by the developer community, according to him, were now passé. The seriousness with which the world had started taking Macromedia could be gauged from the fact the Flash Player had now become a standard plug-in that shipped out with every copy of the Windows SP2 update.

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