(The views expressed on this website are the author’s personal views and do not represent those of his past/current employers)
Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, and Sachin Tendulkar: the terrific trinity of the Indian cricket pantheon. They lorded over Indian cricket for many years and their exploits have enthralled fans. They seemed unstoppable and could do no wrong. However, of late, a few not-so-spectacular performances and more importantly the changing demands of the game, new formats, and newer players have raised questions about their continued dominance.
The other Indian big three - Infosys, TCS and Wipro too find themselves in a similar predicament. Till recently, these poster companies for Indian IT were the darlings of the bourses, delivering impressive returns year after year on the back of high growth and profitability. But of late, they have fallen out of favor with the markets – their market caps have fallen by a third in 2007 and they trade at/near 52 week lows. The general consensus is that their returns are likely to be subdued for the near future, and won’t definitely be like anything in the past.
Continue Reading January 1st, 2008
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The Offshoring Siren aka The CEO’s guide to increasing the stock price by 11%
Here is an attempt to quantify the cost savings that are potentially possible in an information technology offshoring scenario. I also try to quantify the impact such a cost-reduction can have on the firm profitability and consequently the share price of the company undertaking the offshoring initiative.
This is not an article that extols the virtues of offshoring and advocates that you pick up the phone to speak to an offshoring vendor right away or get on the plane to Bangalore, but just an effort to understand and explain why there is a clamor to offshore, why the offshore industry continues to grow at such a rapid clip.
Continue Reading February 1st, 2007
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Since the universe of stocks is very large, the performance of the stock markets is usually tracked through an index – which is composed of representative companies drawn from various industries. While a broad index covers the overall state of the economy, sector level indices track the performance of a particular industry in the economy. For example, a telecom index would track the fortunes of telecom companies while a semiconductor index keeps track of the how the semiconductor industry is faring.
Similarly, can we attempt to track the CM space through such a sector index?
I propose the Content Management (CoMa) Index: an index built from companies in the content management space, to help us figure out how happening or sleepy (no pun) the sector is.
Continue Reading May 11th, 2006
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What works in the world of computers does not work so well in the world of portable devices.They may have tolerated sub-optimal experience in computers, but users will not tolerate complex and cumbersome portable devices that ignore their needs.
The computer users operated using the “Mohammed goes to the Mountain” model. Using a computer involved some learning and you had to jump through many hoops to accomplish your tasks. But devices-to-go for users-on-the-move should be as easy as a-b-c.
In the user experience realm, what we need to focus on is very clear.
Human Device Interaction. You heard it here first.
Continue Reading January 17th, 2006
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A research study on customer satisfaction with online shopping has found that usability aspects (user friendly interface, interactivity, search capabilities) of the web site were only moderately important. The findings surprised the researchers themselves as previous research rated usability as critical for e-commerce sites.
The research was conducted among computer literate and net savvy under graduate students. The authors think this may be the cause for this rather contradictory finding.
The paper was published in the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research and can be found here (PDF)
Be warned though, academic papers are usually written for fellow academicians and do not make for easy reading by the general public. I shall soon post my take on this.
July 31st, 2005
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