Google


Friday, September 23, 2005

Picasa, A nifty photo organizer

Google rolls out Picasa,a nifty photo organizer from its seemingly endless line of new applications. Picase for uninitiated in photo organiser with a host of features. Apart from the usual set of features lik password protection, croping etc, for the photography aficionades it provides heavy artillery like RGB histogram and also promises to turn photos into a movie.While the market reaction is hard to judge (I am not a market analyst :) ) one wonders what Microsoft employees are doing in their Redmond campus.These are products which should have been developed by them ions ago.Instead, all their creative talent and intelligence is being used to churn out meaningless updates to windows and msoffice.No wonder they are leaving Microsoft in droves to Google.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon


The movie name aptly sums up the shadow boxing between India and China for Asian supremacy. Reams of newsprint and webprint have already been written comparing India and China. Some argue that India with democratic institutions would eventually win while some claim China would brush India aside.

Even I am not sure who would prevail. But what I would like to highlight is the story of
Huawei Technolgies, a chinese company with office in India.

1. India is supposed to be a low cost development center. Then how come, Huawei is rumoured to pay their Indian engineers twice the prevailing market rate?
2. If a product costs 100 rupees to sell, any company has to ensure that the development cost for that product is minimized so that profit is maximized. (simple economics). How come only Huawei is able to pay their engineer's more?
Well their gameplan is simple:
1. Use the Indian engineers to teach the Chinese engineers and then eventually boot them out.
2. Use the Indian engineers as Trojan horse to penetrate the Indian market.
An example: Recently Huawei bid for supplying Telecom equipment to India! All the communication between our Armed forces will be easily overheard by the chinese army! (The Chinese PLA would be laughing their heads off)
3. Who founded Huawei ? U won't believe this ! An ex- Chinese army officer!
4. Who are the major stock holders in Huawei ? A lot of chinese telecom companies. But who owns those companies? Chinese goverment!
5. What is the revenue and expenditure ? Where are the revenues routed to?
All this is very opaque.

In case u are skeptical , the same is mentioned in the Sept issue of Economist (US publication)
attached below.

Hopefully Indian engineers working in Huawei would be smart enough to program trap doors in the software they design and thus prevent Huawei from achieving their goal.