This trip, for some reason, I have been noticing a lot more obesity in India. From the just overweight to the can’t-get-out-of-their-airline-seat-themselves obese. Sedentary lifestyles have something to do with this, of course, but I sense that there is another major factor at work here – an Indian mother’s love.
Author Archives: Basab Pradhan
Mumbai Taxis
I am in India on a 2 week trip.
On the ride from the airport to Malad, I get to understand why the Mumbai taxis are the way they are, from my driver. For those of us who have had their bones rattled in a Mumbai taxi, this will tell you why. It won’t hurt less when your head bangs into the roof of the cab, but at least you can nod wisely because you know who to blame.
Open Letter to the Bollywood Music Industry
Dear Mr./Ms. Music Executive,
First of all, let me compliment you on your pricing strategy so far. You have aced the test on how to price information products. Information products like music are tricky – the content is all in digital form, the fixed costs are high and marginal costs approach zero. How do you price such a thing?
Your current strategy seems to be working well. You have segmented the market according to the listeners’ ability to pay. To each segment you offer a different product (or sometimes the same product) at vastly different prices. I checked prices at different places for the same album – Don. Here’s what I found:
Water, No Ice
Indians are known to waiters in restaurants as the “Water, No Ice” people. Most Indians that I know don’t like to order a drink at lunch since the water is free. And no one likes their water with ice cubes in it. Call it racial profiling, if you like, but the Indian position on how they like their water makes sense to me. Given that our ancestral state in the African savannah did not involve any water with ice cubes in restaurants, I suspect that our genes did not prepare us for this daily assault from ice and ice cold water.
On March 1, my wife, Vidya Pradhan and her friend Rohini Mohan started an “online magazine” for Bay Area Indians.
Apple and the Music Industry
Last week’s post on YouTube and Viacom got some great comments. If you get a moment go read them. Ram Medury brings up the case of VAS content providers in India, who get a small fraction of the revenues. The rest is kept by the Indian mobile service provider. Senthil says that it’s about the quality of the content. If the content is compelling it will pull in the dollars. Also, Robert Young at Gigaom has a very thought provoking post on the subject of Google and old media companies.
Onward ho! As promised, this week I take up another interesting space where the “Content vs. Distribution” battle is being played out – digital music.
YouTube vs Viacom: The Return of the King
The old adage “Content is king” doesn’t seem to be borne out by the post-bubble resurgence of new media. The three companies that have benefited by this resurgence the most are Google, Apple and YouTube, which is now part of Google. None of them create content.
Platform BPO
A few years ago, I wrote a piece on Rediff titled “Who Needs Software Products”. The Rediff business editor at that time added “…Services are Prime” to the title and totally took the punch out of it, but that’s a different matter (one of the reasons I decided to do my own blog!)
Anyway, in that article I posited the following:
The Fortress IPO
The IPO of Fortress (NYSE: FIG) on Friday closed at $31 or 70% above the IPO price on the first day of trading. It was the largest first day jump in a while. The fact that the forward P/E is now at 40x speaks to the frothiness of anything associated with hedge funds and private equity. But another interesting question that needs to be asked is – should a hedge fund be a public company?
A Tale of Two Techies
Taking up from where I left off last week. Based upon the analysis it appears that the dramatic growth in the IT Services industry in India is the primary force in shaping the Indian techie. The Indian techie is a bright person who did well in college, but even after a few years in the industry, is low on technical depth. Before he can really sink his teeth into something, he is pulled into project management. Not because Indians or Indian companies don’t care about technical depth, but because if they have to meet demand and grow, they have no choice. And to paraphrase Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street – Growth is good.
A study in contrasts is that other techie – the American techie.
Where are All the Senior Developers in India?
I hope you got a chance to play around with the spreadsheet that I posted last week. I finally got the embedded spreadsheet to work, so you can make changes and see the outcomes right there on the blog post. Isn’t that just a thing of beauty?
The model in the spreadsheet is quite simple, but it can explain a few things – for example, why in India ‘experienced developer’ has become an oxymoron. You simply don’t find developers with more than 5 years of experience. The Valley stands on the broad shoulders of seasoned developers who can weave magic with their keyboards and relish being individual contributors. Try finding these guys in Bangalore.
6 am pacific 