EnjoyTech

These are the 10 business books published in 2010, that I would recommend you to read. Originally, I wrote this on Quora, in response to " What are must read business books of 2010? ". Yes, I have read all of them, and no, they are not in any specific order. 1) What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and his style. This is a compilation of his "The New Yorker" stories. Even though the articles are available on his website, this book makes it a great read. 2) Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky The next time someone asks you how come people have so much time to blog, answer questions on Quora, or contribute to Wikipedia, ask them to read this book. 3) The Big Short by Michael Lewis Want to know all about CDO and subprime mortgage and still be entertained? This is the book. Michael Lewis has great storytelling skills that makes serious and complex topics fun to read. I like this book as much as I liked Moneyball - http://amzn.to/b9YP...

Check out the Part 1 if you haven’t already read it to better understand the context and my disclaimer. This is the Part 2 covering the assertions from 6 to 10. Assertion 6: Appliances should be "software only." “In my 40 years of experience as a computer science professional in the DBMS field, I have yet to see a specialized hardware architecture—a so-called database machine—that wins.” This is a black swan effect ; just because someone hasn’t seen an event occur in his or her lifetime, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. This statement could also be re-written as “In my 40 years of experience, I have yet to see a social network that is used by 500 million people.” You get the point. I am the first one who would vote in favor of commodity hardware against a specialized hardware, but there are very specific reasons why the specialized hardware makes sense in some cases. “In other words, one can buy general purpose CPU cycles from the major chip vendors or specialized CPU c...

The two-third of world’s 4.6 billon mobile users live in the emerging markets. Millions of these users live below the poverty line and are part of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). Nokia is the market leader in these emerging markets, at least for now, with 34% market share. It’s clear from rapidly declining Nokia’s marketshare and an appointment of new CEO, Stephen Elop , that Nokia needs a second act. I believe the BOP is what could be the next big thing for Nokia. The recent NYTimes story highlights a Nokia’s service, to supply commodity data to the farmers in India, using a text message . So far, 6.3 million people have signed up for this service. Nokia is planning to roll out this service, Life tools, in Nigeria as well. This is part of their Ovi mobile business. I have written before on impact of cloud computing and mobile on the bottom of the pyramid and the importance of public policy innovation in emerging markets . The BOP is one of the biggest opportunities that Nokia curren...

I have tremendous respect for Michael Stonebraker. He is an apt visionary. What I like the most about him is his drive and passion to commercialize the academic concepts. ACM recently published his article “ My Top 10 Assertions About Data Warehouses ." If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to read it. I agree with some of his assertions and disagree with a few. I am grounded in reality, but I do have a progressive viewpoint on this topic. This is my attempt to bring an alternate perspective to the rapidly changing BI world that I am seeing. I hope the readers take it as constructive criticism. This post has been sitting in my draft folder for a while. I finally managed to publish it. This is Part 1 covering the assertions 1 to 5. The Part 2 with the rest of the assertions will follow in a few days. “Please note that I have a financial interest in several database companies, and may be biased in a number of different ways.” I appreciate Stonebraker’s disclaimer. I do belie...

Actual numbers vary based on whom you ask, but the general consensus is that the Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics in the cloud is a fast growing market. IDC expects a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013. This growth is primarily driven by two kinds of SaaS applications. The first kind is a purpose-specific analytics-driven application for business processes such as financial planning, cost optimization, inventory analysis etc. The second kind is a self-service horizontal analytics application/tool that allows the customers and ISVs to analyze data and create, embed, and share analysis and visualizations. The category that is still nascent and would require significant work is the traditional general-purpose BI on large data warehouses (DW) in the cloud. For the most enterprises, not only all the DW are on-premise, but the majority of the business systems that feed data into these DW are on-premise as well. If these enterprises were to adopt BI in the clou...

I am very passionate about the topic of design and design-thinking. When I saw this question on Quora, I decided to post my answer. Following is directly from my answer to this question on Quora : The answer is "Definitely not." It's not about the product design by itself, but it's about applying core and transferable product design skills to product management. Let's break it down: 1) Understanding users: Good product designers have great user research, observation, and listening skills to put themselves into the shoes of a user and understand the real, mostly unspoken and latent, needs of the end users. 2) Being self-critical: If you are a trained designer, you would stay away from self-referential design, which is a root cause for many failed products. Good product designers are self-critical about their approach and the deliverables and are always open to feedback to iterate on their design. 3) Working with designers: If you are a designer, you have great ...

Having worked on enterprise software product and go-to-market strategy for SMB (small and medium businesses), I can tell you that these are the most difficult customers to reach to, especially the S in SMB. It’s an asymmetric non-homogeneous market for which the cost of sales could go out of control if you don’t leverage the right channels. The competitive landscape varies from region to region and industry to industry. In many cases instead of competing against a company you would be competing against a human being with paper-based processes. Tomorrow I am speaking at the Razorsight annual conference on the topic of cloud computing. I am excited to meet their customers, the telcos. While I prepare for my keynote, I can’t stop thinking about the challenges that the telcos face and the opportunities that they are not pursuing. My keynote presentation is about how telcos can leverage the cloud, but this blog post is about how telcos can become successful enterprise software vendors and ...