Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

For long yes – but with much thinner margins, and requiring much higher levels 
of skill, and far, far lower levels of staffing.

They [as in a generic large IT company] will need to pare themselves to the 
bone (the middle management layer is one that is bloated beyond all reason, and 
ridden with politics) before they can get better at what needs to be done.

The other part is being too process driven for their own good.

IBM theoretically celebrates so called “wild ducks” – a concept that goes back 
to the TJ Watson days.  People who are independent, innovative, skunk works 
type engineers.

Those are what a large company needs, in key positions and seeded up and down 
their hierarchy.  Unfortunately by the time they grow to the size they are, all 
the “process” (and even more of the politics and inefficiencies and ..) 
eventually become a shotgun that decimates wild ducks wholesale, or at least 
sends them winging off to greener pastures regardless of the fact that they 
might have spent the last 20+ years in the organization. 

--srs

On 22/10/16, 7:39 PM, "silklist on behalf of Sriram Karra" 
 wrote:

It is not a law of nature that Infosys and its ilk will keep making PAT in
excess of 20%+. Even if profits halve in the next 2 years to 10% - does
that constitute a death of the industry? Pai's point is is that these are
high cash flow businesses, with enough margins and buffer to keep them
afloat and going for long. Further it's *my thesis* that these companies
have enough strengths they can leverage to turn it around. Yes, there's a
lot of pain in the short to medium term and many things will need to get
reinvited - such as change of hiring strategies that many have mentioned in
this thread, but this is just a bump in the larger scheme of things.

 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Sriram Karra]

It is not a law of nature that Infosys and its ilk will keep making PAT in
excess of 20%+. Even if profits halve in the next 2 years to 10% - does
that constitute a death of the industry? Pai's point is is that these are
high cash flow businesses, with enough margins and buffer to keep them
afloat and going for long. Further it's *my thesis* that these companies
have enough strengths they can leverage to turn it around. Yes, there's a
lot of pain in the short to medium term and many things will need to get
reinvited - such as change of hiring strategies that many have mentioned in
this thread, but this is just a bump in the larger scheme of things.

On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 1:20 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian 
wrote:

> As for Pai pointing at Infosys PAT .. they're in that moment where wile e
> coyote is perfectly safe, only he's stepped off a cliff, standing over thin
> air and just about to raise a sign that reads "help"
>
> I'm sure Deepak Shenoy can poke a few more holes than I can but .. Here
> are the rest of the numbers that blowhard / great financial genius missed
> out on
>
> http://www.indiainfoline.com/article/equity-earnings-
> result-commentary/infosys-q1fy17-consolidated-net-
> profit-declines-4-qoq-to-rs-3436-crore-in-line-with-
> estimates-116071500326_1.html
>
> --srs
>
> > On 22-Oct-2016, at 12:35 AM, Sriram Karra  wrote:
> >
> > So many thoughts on this topic... having spent 8 years in various roles
> in
> > this industry Just a few quick observations here (in no particular
> > order) on the specific challenges facing the Indian IT industry and some
> of
> > the comments in this thread:
> >
> >   - IT Services is not all about server maintenance or routine sysadmin
> >   work. Application Development & Maintenance (of bespoke systems),
> Product
> >   Engineering, Customisation and deployment of complex packages (like ERP
> >   systems), and so on cannot be automated with the current state of the
> art,
> >   nor are they dull or monotonous drudge work. I have myself worked as a
> >   contractor for Cisco, maintained critical parts of their embedded OS
> (the
> >   original IOS), developed thousands of lines of code, and new features,
> that
> >   have powered (in some ways quite literally) the Catalyst 6500, a cash
> cow
> >   for Cisco for nearly 15 years. It was a great experience to see
> engineers
> >   from humble backgrounds perform high quality engineering for Cisco
> even in
> >   its heyday.
> >
> >   - Innovation comes in all sizes and shapes. We romanticise the Google /
> >   Apple style of innovation at the expense of other forms. When my former
> >   boss, at age 34, convinced John Chambers and Cisco at its peak (mid
> 90s) to
> >   offshore product engineering work to Chennai, that was business
> innovation
> >   too. The situation now is the Indian model is so well understood that
> there
> >   are few levers left in negotiation, and the downward margin spiral that
> >   Sikka keeps lamenting about are defining the mood about the industry
> (more
> >   on the margins later). But this is not new either. Even way back in
> 2007/8
> >   it was clear to insiders that more innovation is required with the
> business
> >   models. We started talking the language of 'Fewer Better People' to
> change
> >   the customer mindset from hourly billing to more outcome based pricing
> >   models. Many companies have seen success in these endeavours. But no
> clear
> >   industry-level breakthrough has emerged, and that is a worry. Maybe it
> >   won't, but that does not mean the death of the industry.
> >
> >   - What is certainly lamentable is these companies have gotten left
> >   behind in the latest technology trends and by not paying enough
> attention
> >   to building scalable businesses. But the threat of automation and "AI"
> is
> >   somewhat exaggerated: the domestic IT demand is just warming up and
> you can
> >   be sure that journey is going to start at the bottom of the pricing
> >   hierarchy; in technology the next wave is always round the corner and
> they
> >   only need to survive till the next wave comes around;
> >
> >   - Mohandas Pai's response has some valid points. Infosys PAT was 21.9%
> >   in FY 2015-16, which is very respectable. For comparison: Google's PAT
> for
> >   FY 2015 was 21.8%. Accenture's was 12.5%. There is scope for players to
> >   change their cost structure, remove dead wood, and change the reward
> system
> >   to make them more competitive viz a viz the MNC biggies. But it is an
> open
> >   question on whether they can pull off the execution. Maybe most won't,
> but
> >   I do hope at least a few will, and we will all be better off for this
> >   shakeup.
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Comments?
> >>
> >>
> >> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-
> >> 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Sriram Karra]

Bhaskar, I can totally understand how these conversations would have gone
even a few years back. While these are the challenges, they also point to
the significant untapped strengths these companies have (knowledge of
customer's processes and levers for operational efficiencies etc.). In
these difficult times I am sure the savvy ones will figure out how to
leverage them better.

A tangential note on processes: most of IT work is related to business
processes, and that is one of the reasons I feel automation is not an
existential threat for the industry as a whole. It is just a bump.



On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 11:06 AM, Bhaskar Dasgupta 
wrote:

> one of the examples I had asked to be funded was to leverage their data.
> this company manages banking processes. what i wanted was to tie up with
> ISI (not that one) and hire a small skunk work of data scientists and a
> data design / visualisation centre. And then wanted to do what rolls royce
> have done with their trent engines - they make a stupendous amount of money
> by monitoring their engines on a real time basis in flight and saving
> airlines shed loads of dosh. So i would’ve provided a set of tools,
> constantly evolving, to the heads of operations on their process flows,
> heads of sales on sales analytics, heads of product design on competitive
> features, and so on and so forth. And once I have sufficient coverage, I
> can setup a banking product market place. World Domination! result? god no,
> we cant pay these phd’s that much! no? then you will lose them to american
> firms who can and will. but that will cause the pay scales to be fucked up
> internally. ok, lets spin off this firm. we don’t do spinoffs. why? 100%
> owned subsidiaries are good and actually you can IPO it as their multiples
> will be better. Oh! that decision is above my pay grade (this is the
> president of the division!) you can fuck off. /facepalm.
>
> forget about creating new products, buggers don’t even leverage what they
> have! they are sitting on a fucking gold mine of rivers of data (if you
> don’t mind me mangling metaphors) and are happy to sit there and fish for
> minnows or get paid lowly for tending the sodding river bank.
>
>
>
> > On 19 Oct 2016, at 06:06, Suresh Ramasubramanian 
> wrote:
> >
> > IT companies buying product companies in a desperate bid to innovate ..
> let us just say that I’ve seen a lot of that happen at a previous workplace.
> >
> > The usual end result is that the founders and key employees quit in
> disgust after a while and those that are left are gradually absorbed into
> the company doing something totally different than what they set out to do.
> >
> > And meanwhile the product itself is killed off immediately, or maybe
> dies a slow and lingering death with a few legacy customers left behind and
> practically zero further development.
> >
> > Big companies that don’t have DNA beyond being pushers of software that
> most if not all users have a visceral hatred for, and/or bloated services
> contracts, are absolutely not going to infuse any magical fresh DNA into
> them by acquiring successful product companies
> >
> > The prospect of such foreign DNA taking root in the company is far less
> than in the case of an organ transplant – the sort you get in mad scientist
> movies where a scientist transplants human dna / tissue / whatever into an
> ape and suddenly ends up with a super intelligent planet of the apes or
> Gorilla Grodd variety animal.
> >
> > Mohandas Pai is a smug and opinionated twit but he got one thing right
> though. The software industry didn’t die – it will survive and it will
> probably hang on, but the traditional indian (or even foreign) services
> model is long dead in favour of automation.  The only things that won’t be
> automated to a large extent are higher up the value chain than such
> companies generally play around at.   And the hanging on will be the way a
> really old and sick man keeps hanging on – perpetually in the chasm between
> Allopathy and Tirupathi.
> >
> > In other words, the days of 15% raises are dead and gone, companies
> outsourcing basic bargain basement sysadmin and datacentre work will
> outsource far less after automating the hell out of everything they can,
> testing will be automated.
> >
> > Of all the cash cows out there, telemarketing and support still needs
> humans to a larger extent and will hang on but higher up the value chain –
> because a lot of it has moved to social media, marketing rules in this
> space have tightened etc.
> >
> > And even that is going way down after all the tech support scams in
> India that flourish tarring even the legit players with the same brush,
> with at least some of the legit players looking wistfully at the “upsell”
> angle that, if pushed a few hairs farther down the line, becomes those
> scams where someone claims to be “tech support” for your OS or device
> manufacturer and cons you into paying for a 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

On 19/10/16 16:28, Heather Madrone wrote:

[snip]

[FX: Alaric adds Heather Madrone to list of awesome people]

>> 4) At that point, the idea of moving towards a universal basic income
>> becomes palatable. As a society, creating an environment where people
>> don't need to fight for ever scarcer jobs to survive starts to seem a
>> valid use of taxpayer's money. People can choose to just live, rather
>> than between "live to work or work to live".
> 
> Universal basic income is palatable now. We are holding so much creative
> energy down by insisting that everyone go out and hold miserable jobs in
> order to survive. Once freed of that need, people will find other
> worthwhile pursuits to fill their time.

It's palatable to me, and presumably you, and many others, but I doubt
it'd sit well with the current ruling party here in the UK or their
tabloid masters, who currently use "hard-working" as an adjective to
describe "people who deserve things" :-(

> Sure, some people will spin their wheels (at least for a time) and
> others will engage themselves in pursuits that other people don't
> approve of. Bringing a few really good ideas to fruition should more
> than pay for the ones who waste their time and the ideas that don't pan
> out.

Yes! And the savings in other areas of society would be huge. Crime,
healthcare, supporting people who can't work, housewives/househusbands
no longer being financially dependent on the worker (creating potential
for abuse), ...

> 
> --hmm
> 

ABS

-- 
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

As for Pai pointing at Infosys PAT .. they're in that moment where wile e 
coyote is perfectly safe, only he's stepped off a cliff, standing over thin air 
and just about to raise a sign that reads "help"

I'm sure Deepak Shenoy can poke a few more holes than I can but .. Here are the 
rest of the numbers that blowhard / great financial genius missed out on

http://www.indiainfoline.com/article/equity-earnings-result-commentary/infosys-q1fy17-consolidated-net-profit-declines-4-qoq-to-rs-3436-crore-in-line-with-estimates-116071500326_1.html

--srs

> On 22-Oct-2016, at 12:35 AM, Sriram Karra  wrote:
> 
> So many thoughts on this topic... having spent 8 years in various roles in
> this industry Just a few quick observations here (in no particular
> order) on the specific challenges facing the Indian IT industry and some of
> the comments in this thread:
> 
>   - IT Services is not all about server maintenance or routine sysadmin
>   work. Application Development & Maintenance (of bespoke systems), Product
>   Engineering, Customisation and deployment of complex packages (like ERP
>   systems), and so on cannot be automated with the current state of the art,
>   nor are they dull or monotonous drudge work. I have myself worked as a
>   contractor for Cisco, maintained critical parts of their embedded OS (the
>   original IOS), developed thousands of lines of code, and new features, that
>   have powered (in some ways quite literally) the Catalyst 6500, a cash cow
>   for Cisco for nearly 15 years. It was a great experience to see engineers
>   from humble backgrounds perform high quality engineering for Cisco even in
>   its heyday.
> 
>   - Innovation comes in all sizes and shapes. We romanticise the Google /
>   Apple style of innovation at the expense of other forms. When my former
>   boss, at age 34, convinced John Chambers and Cisco at its peak (mid 90s) to
>   offshore product engineering work to Chennai, that was business innovation
>   too. The situation now is the Indian model is so well understood that there
>   are few levers left in negotiation, and the downward margin spiral that
>   Sikka keeps lamenting about are defining the mood about the industry (more
>   on the margins later). But this is not new either. Even way back in 2007/8
>   it was clear to insiders that more innovation is required with the business
>   models. We started talking the language of 'Fewer Better People' to change
>   the customer mindset from hourly billing to more outcome based pricing
>   models. Many companies have seen success in these endeavours. But no clear
>   industry-level breakthrough has emerged, and that is a worry. Maybe it
>   won't, but that does not mean the death of the industry.
> 
>   - What is certainly lamentable is these companies have gotten left
>   behind in the latest technology trends and by not paying enough attention
>   to building scalable businesses. But the threat of automation and "AI" is
>   somewhat exaggerated: the domestic IT demand is just warming up and you can
>   be sure that journey is going to start at the bottom of the pricing
>   hierarchy; in technology the next wave is always round the corner and they
>   only need to survive till the next wave comes around;
> 
>   - Mohandas Pai's response has some valid points. Infosys PAT was 21.9%
>   in FY 2015-16, which is very respectable. For comparison: Google's PAT for
>   FY 2015 was 21.8%. Accenture's was 12.5%. There is scope for players to
>   change their cost structure, remove dead wood, and change the reward system
>   to make them more competitive viz a viz the MNC biggies. But it is an open
>   question on whether they can pull off the execution. Maybe most won't, but
>   I do hope at least a few will, and we will all be better off for this
>   shakeup.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
> wrote:
> 
>> Comments?
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-
>> software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html
>> 
>> 
>> Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
>> The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
>> battle with newer digital technologies
>> 
>> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
>> been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
>> cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
>> 
>> Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
>> the technology departments of global corporations with a doomsday
>> story many times more puffed up than the luxuriant crop of hair he
>> sported.
>> The latter was a wig, and the former was just bad science fiction
>> packaged by consultants as a $600 billion hair-raiser. But Dewang
>> Mehta, the chief lobbyist for India’s fledgling software services
>> industry, carried off both with aplomb, convincing businesses that at
>> the stroke of midnight of the new 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

The situation changes when you move up the value chain as you so clearly 
demonstrate.

But when a company builds its business model on hiring huge numbers of warm 
bodies to throw at drudgery that is rapidly being automated now even in the 
enterprise .. nobody at all in enterprise IT dreamed even five or six years 
back that a group of say ten people could single handedly provision a data 
center worth of servers, os and software installs, networks etc using puppet, 
chef, software driven networking and all that.

And several of them kept hiring manual testers long long after other companies 
switched wholesale to test automation.

And entry level tech support kids where a lot of that went over to more 
intelligent context sensitive help, chatbots and such.

Try to lay the lot off and they even face litigation and demands for trade 
unions - something that pampered industry least expected though entry level 
employees earn about as much as a driver does.

--srs

> On 22-Oct-2016, at 12:35 AM, Sriram Karra  wrote:
> 
> So many thoughts on this topic... having spent 8 years in various roles in
> this industry Just a few quick observations here (in no particular
> order) on the specific challenges facing the Indian IT industry and some of
> the comments in this thread:
> 
>   - IT Services is not all about server maintenance or routine sysadmin
>   work. Application Development & Maintenance (of bespoke systems), Product
>   Engineering, Customisation and deployment of complex packages (like ERP
>   systems), and so on cannot be automated with the current state of the art,
>   nor are they dull or monotonous drudge work. I have myself worked as a
>   contractor for Cisco, maintained critical parts of their embedded OS (the
>   original IOS), developed thousands of lines of code, and new features, that
>   have powered (in some ways quite literally) the Catalyst 6500, a cash cow
>   for Cisco for nearly 15 years. It was a great experience to see engineers
>   from humble backgrounds perform high quality engineering for Cisco even in
>   its heyday.
> 
>   - Innovation comes in all sizes and shapes. We romanticise the Google /
>   Apple style of innovation at the expense of other forms. When my former
>   boss, at age 34, convinced John Chambers and Cisco at its peak (mid 90s) to
>   offshore product engineering work to Chennai, that was business innovation
>   too. The situation now is the Indian model is so well understood that there
>   are few levers left in negotiation, and the downward margin spiral that
>   Sikka keeps lamenting about are defining the mood about the industry (more
>   on the margins later). But this is not new either. Even way back in 2007/8
>   it was clear to insiders that more innovation is required with the business
>   models. We started talking the language of 'Fewer Better People' to change
>   the customer mindset from hourly billing to more outcome based pricing
>   models. Many companies have seen success in these endeavours. But no clear
>   industry-level breakthrough has emerged, and that is a worry. Maybe it
>   won't, but that does not mean the death of the industry.
> 
>   - What is certainly lamentable is these companies have gotten left
>   behind in the latest technology trends and by not paying enough attention
>   to building scalable businesses. But the threat of automation and "AI" is
>   somewhat exaggerated: the domestic IT demand is just warming up and you can
>   be sure that journey is going to start at the bottom of the pricing
>   hierarchy; in technology the next wave is always round the corner and they
>   only need to survive till the next wave comes around;
> 
>   - Mohandas Pai's response has some valid points. Infosys PAT was 21.9%
>   in FY 2015-16, which is very respectable. For comparison: Google's PAT for
>   FY 2015 was 21.8%. Accenture's was 12.5%. There is scope for players to
>   change their cost structure, remove dead wood, and change the reward system
>   to make them more competitive viz a viz the MNC biggies. But it is an open
>   question on whether they can pull off the execution. Maybe most won't, but
>   I do hope at least a few will, and we will all be better off for this
>   shakeup.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
> wrote:
> 
>> Comments?
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-
>> software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html
>> 
>> 
>> Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
>> The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
>> battle with newer digital technologies
>> 
>> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
>> been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
>> cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
>> 
>> Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
>> the technology departments of global 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Sriram Karra]

So many thoughts on this topic... having spent 8 years in various roles in
this industry Just a few quick observations here (in no particular
order) on the specific challenges facing the Indian IT industry and some of
the comments in this thread:

   - IT Services is not all about server maintenance or routine sysadmin
   work. Application Development & Maintenance (of bespoke systems), Product
   Engineering, Customisation and deployment of complex packages (like ERP
   systems), and so on cannot be automated with the current state of the art,
   nor are they dull or monotonous drudge work. I have myself worked as a
   contractor for Cisco, maintained critical parts of their embedded OS (the
   original IOS), developed thousands of lines of code, and new features, that
   have powered (in some ways quite literally) the Catalyst 6500, a cash cow
   for Cisco for nearly 15 years. It was a great experience to see engineers
   from humble backgrounds perform high quality engineering for Cisco even in
   its heyday.

   - Innovation comes in all sizes and shapes. We romanticise the Google /
   Apple style of innovation at the expense of other forms. When my former
   boss, at age 34, convinced John Chambers and Cisco at its peak (mid 90s) to
   offshore product engineering work to Chennai, that was business innovation
   too. The situation now is the Indian model is so well understood that there
   are few levers left in negotiation, and the downward margin spiral that
   Sikka keeps lamenting about are defining the mood about the industry (more
   on the margins later). But this is not new either. Even way back in 2007/8
   it was clear to insiders that more innovation is required with the business
   models. We started talking the language of 'Fewer Better People' to change
   the customer mindset from hourly billing to more outcome based pricing
   models. Many companies have seen success in these endeavours. But no clear
   industry-level breakthrough has emerged, and that is a worry. Maybe it
   won't, but that does not mean the death of the industry.

   - What is certainly lamentable is these companies have gotten left
   behind in the latest technology trends and by not paying enough attention
   to building scalable businesses. But the threat of automation and "AI" is
   somewhat exaggerated: the domestic IT demand is just warming up and you can
   be sure that journey is going to start at the bottom of the pricing
   hierarchy; in technology the next wave is always round the corner and they
   only need to survive till the next wave comes around;

   - Mohandas Pai's response has some valid points. Infosys PAT was 21.9%
   in FY 2015-16, which is very respectable. For comparison: Google's PAT for
   FY 2015 was 21.8%. Accenture's was 12.5%. There is scope for players to
   change their cost structure, remove dead wood, and change the reward system
   to make them more competitive viz a viz the MNC biggies. But it is an open
   question on whether they can pull off the execution. Maybe most won't, but
   I do hope at least a few will, and we will all be better off for this
   shakeup.


On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
wrote:

> Comments?
>
>
> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-
> software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html
>
>
> Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
> The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
> battle with newer digital technologies
> 
> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
> been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
> cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
>
> Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
> the technology departments of global corporations with a doomsday
> story many times more puffed up than the luxuriant crop of hair he
> sported.
> The latter was a wig, and the former was just bad science fiction
> packaged by consultants as a $600 billion hair-raiser. But Dewang
> Mehta, the chief lobbyist for India’s fledgling software services
> industry, carried off both with aplomb, convincing businesses that at
> the stroke of midnight of the new millennium, their computer systems
> would crash because old programs measured years in two digits instead
> of four. The solution, he persuaded them, was to let a horde of
> techies from Bangalore and Hyderabad go through each line of code and
> fix the Y2K bug.
>
> That was the birth of India’s massively successful software services
> industry, which died on Friday after a short battle with newer digital
> technologies. At the time of its demise, the business was worth $110
> billion in annual export revenue.
> The first hint that the end was near came on Thursday when Tata
> Consultancy Services, the biggest Indian software vendor by market
> value, announced a virtual stalling of its business in the September
> 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Yes that’s the ticket.  The one thing is – if you use the same scripts / 
software etc that you develop to analyse this client’s data to do anything 
similar for another client (or then proceed to sell such software as a product) 
– well, there be dragons.

--srs

On 19/10/16, 11:50 PM, "silklist on behalf of Bhaskar Dasgupta" 
 wrote:

Happy to be corrected but I've used client data quite happily to provide 
additional services back to them. 

If I aggregate the data and flog it to others then I need permission 

 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Bhaskar Dasgupta]

Happy to be corrected but I've used client data quite happily to provide 
additional services back to them. 

If I aggregate the data and flog it to others then I need permission 

> On 19 Oct 2016, at 13:39, Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
> 
> My bet is that any IP the company derives by making use of client data – even 
> for testing purposes – will very likely meet with a successful claim from the 
> customer’s IP / copyright attorneys.
> 
> Operational metrics are what the approval extends to.  NOT new product 
> development based on those metrics.
> 
> I think you’ll find a standard clause in most such contracts which state that 
> any tools, scripts or similar that the vendor develops for work / processing 
> of the customer data have IP assigned to the customer.
> 
> Gaining control of ALL the deliverables of any such outsourcing assignment is 
> generally standard best practice in the industry.
> 
> I am sure we have enough corporate / IP attorneys here who can comment.  
> Every other silk member seems to be an NLS alumnus or friends with one. ☺
> 
> --srs
> 
> On 19/10/16, 5:04 PM, "silklist on behalf of Bhaskar Dasgupta" 
>  bdasgu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>The data belongs to the customer but the supplier has approval to use that 
> data. For operational metrics. 
> 
>What I suggested was to make that into a product instead of just a stupid 
> sla operational report. 
> 
>Jai ho
> 
> 
> 
> 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Heather Madrone]

Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:

On 19/10/16 06:50, Bhaskar Dasgupta wrote:

only issue is, how much will you get paid to just walk around? If we
want to take an example, see the wages of waiters…without minimum
wage floors, its impossible to survive. flip side, who will pay for
it? the average joe or mango man will have very little discretionary
funds to spend on stuff like this. even micro-payments wouldnt help,
you need a bare minimum to get some basics in place and the capacity
or desire to pay for this has gone. Look at our smart phones. besides
the phone itself, pretty much all the value add via the apps are
free. If I look at my app and i look at my interactions, extremely
little is actually being paid for to the creator. very very little.
and that also goes to large corporates who can scale up.


Well, hopefully, this will happen:

1) The cost of living will decrease. Technology should make food,
clothing, and healthcare cheap - and everything else is a luxury apart
from housing, which is a trickier issue. There's a housing bubble in the
UK, and rising population won't help. I feel the problem is human (how
we pay for housing) rather than physical (the actual cost of housing
everyone), however.


Housing costs in Japan are quite reasonable, even in Tokyo. The Japanese 
are able to do this by increasing housing stocks in parallel with the 
population. Other governments might take a tip from the Japanese and 
start planning for the population they have (and are likely to have) 
rather than one they wished they had.



2) Fewer people will need to work to do the "important stuff" (eg,
provide the essentials of living), thanks to automation. More and more
jobs will be in providing things we like, rather than things we need.


Also, things that we need but don't believe we can have. As a species, 
we have a lot of work to do in terms of figuring out how to live well on 
this planet. We could work to solve wars, riots, sexual assault, 
domestic violence, and acts of terrorism. We could work hard to figure 
out how to live on this planet sustainably. We could work on learning 
how to maintain our optimal physical, mental, social, emotional and 
spiritual health, and how to engineer society so that we can all easily 
and joyfully live wonderful lives.



3) This will cause a change in ideology. Until now, we've had a dominant
notion that we need people to work. But with more and more work being,
basically, just for fun (be it somebody else's fun or your own), this
idea should erode.


When we humans developed tools to help with housework, our standards for 
cleanliness rose. As automation takes over more tasks, human attention 
will turn to all the things we currently neglect in order to take care 
of our basic needs. Lather, rinse, repeat.



4) At that point, the idea of moving towards a universal basic income
becomes palatable. As a society, creating an environment where people
don't need to fight for ever scarcer jobs to survive starts to seem a
valid use of taxpayer's money. People can choose to just live, rather
than between "live to work or work to live".


Universal basic income is palatable now. We are holding so much creative 
energy down by insisting that everyone go out and hold miserable jobs in 
order to survive. Once freed of that need, people will find other 
worthwhile pursuits to fill their time.


Sure, some people will spin their wheels (at least for a time) and 
others will engage themselves in pursuits that other people don't 
approve of. Bringing a few really good ideas to fruition should more 
than pay for the ones who waste their time and the ideas that don't pan out.


We have some serious distribution problems.

--hmm

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

My bet is that any IP the company derives by making use of client data – even 
for testing purposes – will very likely meet with a successful claim from the 
customer’s IP / copyright attorneys.

Operational metrics are what the approval extends to.  NOT new product 
development based on those metrics.

I think you’ll find a standard clause in most such contracts which state that 
any tools, scripts or similar that the vendor develops for work / processing of 
the customer data have IP assigned to the customer.

Gaining control of ALL the deliverables of any such outsourcing assignment is 
generally standard best practice in the industry.

I am sure we have enough corporate / IP attorneys here who can comment.  Every 
other silk member seems to be an NLS alumnus or friends with one. ☺

--srs

On 19/10/16, 5:04 PM, "silklist on behalf of Bhaskar Dasgupta" 
 wrote:

The data belongs to the customer but the supplier has approval to use that 
data. For operational metrics. 

What I suggested was to make that into a product instead of just a stupid 
sla operational report. 

Jai ho
 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Bhaskar Dasgupta]

The data belongs to the customer but the supplier has approval to use that 
data. For operational metrics. 

What I suggested was to make that into a product instead of just a stupid sla 
operational report. 

Jai ho

> On 19 Oct 2016, at 06:51, Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
> 
> If that data is their customers’ – it is NOT theirs to play with.
> 
> And any improvements and automation in such data can only be delivered right 
> back to their customer and nobody else, there’s enough NDAs around for that 
> plus serious penalties for when they try to leverage a resource they have 
> available in one team for another team.  TCS found that out the hard way in 
> that Kaiser Permanente case where a former member on their team for that 
> client continued to use his (still active and not shut down as their famed 
> process orientedness should have made them do) kp.com login credentials to 
> access tech support manuals on behalf of another client that he was not 
> licensed for.  And then shared that credential across several other teams, 
> including those that developed a competitor to that very software.  [add 
> “allegedly” to taste for all this, these are the allegations made by the 
> plaintiff against TCS anyway].
> 
> If there’s some software they make that they sell to customers, they would 
> have to be dumb indeed not to leverage the hilt out of any and every bit of 
> analytics and telemetry they get their hands on, but I’m the last person to 
> accuse more than one player in the Indian software industry of intelligence.
> 
> --srs
> 
> On 19/10/16, 11:06 AM, "silklist on behalf of Bhaskar Dasgupta" 
>  bdasgu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>one of the examples I had asked to be funded was to leverage their data. 
> this company manages banking processes. what i wanted was to tie up with ISI 
> (not that one) and hire a small skunk work of data scientists and a data 
> design / visualisation centre. And then wanted to do what rolls royce have 
> done with their trent engines - they make a stupendous amount of money by 
> monitoring their engines on a real time basis in flight and saving airlines 
> shed loads of dosh. So i would’ve provided a set of tools, constantly 
> evolving, to the heads of operations on their process flows, heads of sales 
> on sales analytics, heads of product design on competitive features, and so 
> on and so forth. And once I have sufficient coverage, I can setup a banking 
> product market place. World Domination! result? god no, we cant pay these 
> phd’s that much! no? then you will lose them to american firms who can and 
> will. but that will cause the pay scales to be fucked up internally. ok, lets 
> spin off this firm. we don’t do spinoffs. why? 100% owned subsidiaries are 
> good and actually you can IPO it as their multiples will be better. Oh! that 
> decision is above my pay grade (this is the president of the division!) you 
> can fuck off. /facepalm. 
> 
>forget about creating new products, buggers don’t even leverage what they 
> have! they are sitting on a fucking gold mine of rivers of data (if you don’t 
> mind me mangling metaphors) and are happy to sit there and fish for minnows 
> or get paid lowly for tending the sodding river bank. 
> 
> 
> 
>> On 19 Oct 2016, at 06:06, Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
>> 
>> IT companies buying product companies in a desperate bid to innovate .. let 
>> us just say that I’ve seen a lot of that happen at a previous workplace.
>> 
>> The usual end result is that the founders and key employees quit in disgust 
>> after a while and those that are left are gradually absorbed into the 
>> company doing something totally different than what they set out to do.  
>> 
>> And meanwhile the product itself is killed off immediately, or maybe dies a 
>> slow and lingering death with a few legacy customers left behind and 
>> practically zero further development.
>> 
>> Big companies that don’t have DNA beyond being pushers of software that most 
>> if not all users have a visceral hatred for, and/or bloated services 
>> contracts, are absolutely not going to infuse any magical fresh DNA into 
>> them by acquiring successful product companies
>> 
>> The prospect of such foreign DNA taking root in the company is far less than 
>> in the case of an organ transplant – the sort you get in mad scientist 
>> movies where a scientist transplants human dna / tissue / whatever into an 
>> ape and suddenly ends up with a super intelligent planet of the apes or 
>> Gorilla Grodd variety animal.
>> 
>> Mohandas Pai is a smug and opinionated twit but he got one thing right 
>> though. The software industry didn’t die – it will survive and it will 
>> probably hang on, but the traditional indian (or even foreign) services 
>> model is long dead in favour of automation.  The only things that won’t be 
>> automated to a large extent are 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Depends on price points.

Out in the middle east, fewer people needed to work period – all the important 
stuff, right from building houses and hauling away trash to keeping the banks 
running were done by people falling on the scale between immigrant (labourer), 
skilled immigrant (person of color with suit and tie and qualifications) and 
expat (white dude with much the same skills as a skilled immigrant).

That didn’t get too far at all – despite impressive levels of automation and 
computerization.

On 19/10/16, 11:54 AM, "silklist on behalf of Alaric Snell-Pym" 
 wrote:

On 19/10/16 06:50, Bhaskar Dasgupta wrote:
> only issue is, how much will you get paid to just walk around? If we
> want to take an example, see the wages of waiters…without minimum
> wage floors, its impossible to survive. flip side, who will pay for
> it? the average joe or mango man will have very little discretionary
> funds to spend on stuff like this. even micro-payments wouldnt help,
> you need a bare minimum to get some basics in place and the capacity
> or desire to pay for this has gone. Look at our smart phones. besides
> the phone itself, pretty much all the value add via the apps are
> free. If I look at my app and i look at my interactions, extremely
> little is actually being paid for to the creator. very very little.
> and that also goes to large corporates who can scale up.

Well, hopefully, this will happen:

1) The cost of living will decrease. Technology should make food,
clothing, and healthcare cheap - and everything else is a luxury apart
from housing, which is a trickier issue. There's a housing bubble in the
UK, and rising population won't help. I feel the problem is human (how
we pay for housing) rather than physical (the actual cost of housing
everyone), however.

2) Fewer people will need to work to do the "important stuff" (eg,
provide the essentials of living), thanks to automation. More and more
jobs will be in providing things we like, rather than things we need.

3) This will cause a change in ideology. Until now, we've had a dominant
notion that we need people to work. But with more and more work being,
basically, just for fun (be it somebody else's fun or your own), this
idea should erode.

4) At that point, the idea of moving towards a universal basic income
becomes palatable. As a society, creating an environment where people
don't need to fight for ever scarcer jobs to survive starts to seem a
valid use of taxpayer's money. People can choose to just live, rather
than between "live to work or work to live".

ABS

-- 
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

On 19/10/16 06:50, Bhaskar Dasgupta wrote:
> only issue is, how much will you get paid to just walk around? If we
> want to take an example, see the wages of waiters…without minimum
> wage floors, its impossible to survive. flip side, who will pay for
> it? the average joe or mango man will have very little discretionary
> funds to spend on stuff like this. even micro-payments wouldnt help,
> you need a bare minimum to get some basics in place and the capacity
> or desire to pay for this has gone. Look at our smart phones. besides
> the phone itself, pretty much all the value add via the apps are
> free. If I look at my app and i look at my interactions, extremely
> little is actually being paid for to the creator. very very little.
> and that also goes to large corporates who can scale up.

Well, hopefully, this will happen:

1) The cost of living will decrease. Technology should make food,
clothing, and healthcare cheap - and everything else is a luxury apart
from housing, which is a trickier issue. There's a housing bubble in the
UK, and rising population won't help. I feel the problem is human (how
we pay for housing) rather than physical (the actual cost of housing
everyone), however.

2) Fewer people will need to work to do the "important stuff" (eg,
provide the essentials of living), thanks to automation. More and more
jobs will be in providing things we like, rather than things we need.

3) This will cause a change in ideology. Until now, we've had a dominant
notion that we need people to work. But with more and more work being,
basically, just for fun (be it somebody else's fun or your own), this
idea should erode.

4) At that point, the idea of moving towards a universal basic income
becomes palatable. As a society, creating an environment where people
don't need to fight for ever scarcer jobs to survive starts to seem a
valid use of taxpayer's money. People can choose to just live, rather
than between "live to work or work to live".

ABS

-- 
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Higher order skills in walking around maybe?

I think he was talking about, for example marketers, who will still be around 
regardless of how much SMAC the industry leverages to sell whatever rubbish it 
is focused on selling.

--srs

On 19/10/16, 11:20 AM, "silklist on behalf of Bhaskar Dasgupta" 
 wrote:

only issue is, how much will you get paid to just walk around? If we want 
to take an example, see the wages of waiters…without minimum wage floors, its 
impossible to survive. flip side, who will pay for it? the average joe or mango 
man will have very little discretionary funds to spend on stuff like this. even 
micro-payments wouldnt help, you need a bare minimum to get some basics in 
place and the capacity or desire to pay for this has gone. Look at our smart 
phones. besides the phone itself, pretty much all the value add via the apps 
are free. If I look at my app and i look at my interactions, extremely little 
is actually being paid for to the creator. very very little. and that also goes 
to large corporates who can scale up. 

 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

If that data is their customers’ – it is NOT theirs to play with.

And any improvements and automation in such data can only be delivered right 
back to their customer and nobody else, there’s enough NDAs around for that 
plus serious penalties for when they try to leverage a resource they have 
available in one team for another team.  TCS found that out the hard way in 
that Kaiser Permanente case where a former member on their team for that client 
continued to use his (still active and not shut down as their famed process 
orientedness should have made them do) kp.com login credentials to access tech 
support manuals on behalf of another client that he was not licensed for.  And 
then shared that credential across several other teams, including those that 
developed a competitor to that very software.  [add “allegedly” to taste for 
all this, these are the allegations made by the plaintiff against TCS anyway].

If there’s some software they make that they sell to customers, they would have 
to be dumb indeed not to leverage the hilt out of any and every bit of 
analytics and telemetry they get their hands on, but I’m the last person to 
accuse more than one player in the Indian software industry of intelligence.

--srs

On 19/10/16, 11:06 AM, "silklist on behalf of Bhaskar Dasgupta" 
 wrote:

one of the examples I had asked to be funded was to leverage their data. 
this company manages banking processes. what i wanted was to tie up with ISI 
(not that one) and hire a small skunk work of data scientists and a data design 
/ visualisation centre. And then wanted to do what rolls royce have done with 
their trent engines - they make a stupendous amount of money by monitoring 
their engines on a real time basis in flight and saving airlines shed loads of 
dosh. So i would’ve provided a set of tools, constantly evolving, to the heads 
of operations on their process flows, heads of sales on sales analytics, heads 
of product design on competitive features, and so on and so forth. And once I 
have sufficient coverage, I can setup a banking product market place. World 
Domination! result? god no, we cant pay these phd’s that much! no? then you 
will lose them to american firms who can and will. but that will cause the pay 
scales to be fucked up internally. ok, lets spin off this firm. we don’t do 
spinoffs. why? 100% owned subsidiaries are good and actually you can IPO it as 
their multiples will be better. Oh! that decision is above my pay grade (this 
is the president of the division!) you can fuck off. /facepalm. 

forget about creating new products, buggers don’t even leverage what they 
have! they are sitting on a fucking gold mine of rivers of data (if you don’t 
mind me mangling metaphors) and are happy to sit there and fish for minnows or 
get paid lowly for tending the sodding river bank. 



> On 19 Oct 2016, at 06:06, Suresh Ramasubramanian  
wrote:
> 
> IT companies buying product companies in a desperate bid to innovate .. 
let us just say that I’ve seen a lot of that happen at a previous workplace.
> 
> The usual end result is that the founders and key employees quit in 
disgust after a while and those that are left are gradually absorbed into the 
company doing something totally different than what they set out to do.  
> 
> And meanwhile the product itself is killed off immediately, or maybe dies 
a slow and lingering death with a few legacy customers left behind and 
practically zero further development.
> 
> Big companies that don’t have DNA beyond being pushers of software that 
most if not all users have a visceral hatred for, and/or bloated services 
contracts, are absolutely not going to infuse any magical fresh DNA into them 
by acquiring successful product companies
> 
> The prospect of such foreign DNA taking root in the company is far less 
than in the case of an organ transplant – the sort you get in mad scientist 
movies where a scientist transplants human dna / tissue / whatever into an ape 
and suddenly ends up with a super intelligent planet of the apes or Gorilla 
Grodd variety animal.
> 
> Mohandas Pai is a smug and opinionated twit but he got one thing right 
though. The software industry didn’t die – it will survive and it will probably 
hang on, but the traditional indian (or even foreign) services model is long 
dead in favour of automation.  The only things that won’t be automated to a 
large extent are higher up the value chain than such companies generally play 
around at.   And the hanging on will be the way a really old and sick man keeps 
hanging on – perpetually in the chasm between Allopathy and Tirupathi.
> 
> In other words, the days of 15% raises are dead and gone, companies 
outsourcing basic bargain basement sysadmin and datacentre work will outsource 
far less after 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Bhaskar Dasgupta]

only issue is, how much will you get paid to just walk around? If we want to 
take an example, see the wages of waiters…without minimum wage floors, its 
impossible to survive. flip side, who will pay for it? the average joe or mango 
man will have very little discretionary funds to spend on stuff like this. even 
micro-payments wouldnt help, you need a bare minimum to get some basics in 
place and the capacity or desire to pay for this has gone. Look at our smart 
phones. besides the phone itself, pretty much all the value add via the apps 
are free. If I look at my app and i look at my interactions, extremely little 
is actually being paid for to the creator. very very little. and that also goes 
to large corporates who can scale up. 


> On 19 Oct 2016, at 06:45, Alaric Snell-Pym  wrote:
> 
> On 18/10/16 15:42, Bruce A. Metcalf wrote:
> 
>> The challenge to an economic utopia isn't building it or even
>> maintaining it. The challenge is to provide something for the
>> lumpenproletariat to do with their free time that is not more
>> destructive than what the creatives produce.
> 
> Oh, I think you underestimate humanity. You don't need an above-average
> IQ to be useful. There will still be sports, and there will still be
> jobs that focus around talking to people rather than doing "brain work".
> There is social utility in a person who is warm and caring.
> 
> ABS
> 
> -- 
> Alaric Snell-Pym
> http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric
> 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

On 18/10/16 15:42, Bruce A. Metcalf wrote:

> The challenge to an economic utopia isn't building it or even
> maintaining it. The challenge is to provide something for the
> lumpenproletariat to do with their free time that is not more
> destructive than what the creatives produce.

Oh, I think you underestimate humanity. You don't need an above-average
IQ to be useful. There will still be sports, and there will still be
jobs that focus around talking to people rather than doing "brain work".
There is social utility in a person who is warm and caring.

ABS

-- 
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Bhaskar Dasgupta]

one of the examples I had asked to be funded was to leverage their data. this 
company manages banking processes. what i wanted was to tie up with ISI (not 
that one) and hire a small skunk work of data scientists and a data design / 
visualisation centre. And then wanted to do what rolls royce have done with 
their trent engines - they make a stupendous amount of money by monitoring 
their engines on a real time basis in flight and saving airlines shed loads of 
dosh. So i would’ve provided a set of tools, constantly evolving, to the heads 
of operations on their process flows, heads of sales on sales analytics, heads 
of product design on competitive features, and so on and so forth. And once I 
have sufficient coverage, I can setup a banking product market place. World 
Domination! result? god no, we cant pay these phd’s that much! no? then you 
will lose them to american firms who can and will. but that will cause the pay 
scales to be fucked up internally. ok, lets spin off this firm. we don’t do 
spinoffs. why? 100% owned subsidiaries are good and actually you can IPO it as 
their multiples will be better. Oh! that decision is above my pay grade (this 
is the president of the division!) you can fuck off. /facepalm. 

forget about creating new products, buggers don’t even leverage what they have! 
they are sitting on a fucking gold mine of rivers of data (if you don’t mind me 
mangling metaphors) and are happy to sit there and fish for minnows or get paid 
lowly for tending the sodding river bank. 



> On 19 Oct 2016, at 06:06, Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
> 
> IT companies buying product companies in a desperate bid to innovate .. let 
> us just say that I’ve seen a lot of that happen at a previous workplace.
> 
> The usual end result is that the founders and key employees quit in disgust 
> after a while and those that are left are gradually absorbed into the company 
> doing something totally different than what they set out to do.  
> 
> And meanwhile the product itself is killed off immediately, or maybe dies a 
> slow and lingering death with a few legacy customers left behind and 
> practically zero further development.
> 
> Big companies that don’t have DNA beyond being pushers of software that most 
> if not all users have a visceral hatred for, and/or bloated services 
> contracts, are absolutely not going to infuse any magical fresh DNA into them 
> by acquiring successful product companies
> 
> The prospect of such foreign DNA taking root in the company is far less than 
> in the case of an organ transplant – the sort you get in mad scientist movies 
> where a scientist transplants human dna / tissue / whatever into an ape and 
> suddenly ends up with a super intelligent planet of the apes or Gorilla Grodd 
> variety animal.
> 
> Mohandas Pai is a smug and opinionated twit but he got one thing right 
> though. The software industry didn’t die – it will survive and it will 
> probably hang on, but the traditional indian (or even foreign) services model 
> is long dead in favour of automation.  The only things that won’t be 
> automated to a large extent are higher up the value chain than such companies 
> generally play around at.   And the hanging on will be the way a really old 
> and sick man keeps hanging on – perpetually in the chasm between Allopathy 
> and Tirupathi.
> 
> In other words, the days of 15% raises are dead and gone, companies 
> outsourcing basic bargain basement sysadmin and datacentre work will 
> outsource far less after automating the hell out of everything they can, 
> testing will be automated.
> 
> Of all the cash cows out there, telemarketing and support still needs humans 
> to a larger extent and will hang on but higher up the value chain – because a 
> lot of it has moved to social media, marketing rules in this space have 
> tightened etc.  
> 
> And even that is going way down after all the tech support scams in India 
> that flourish tarring even the legit players with the same brush, with at 
> least some of the legit players looking wistfully at the “upsell” angle that, 
> if pushed a few hairs farther down the line, becomes those scams where 
> someone claims to be “tech support” for your OS or device manufacturer and 
> cons you into paying for a $50 a month perpetual contract.
> 
> --srs
> 
> On 19/10/16, 10:15 AM, "silklist on behalf of Deepak Shenoy" 
>  deepakshe...@capitalmind.in> wrote:
> 
>Apologies for the plug but I wrote a piece a year back:
>http://capitalmind.in/2015/01/the-inflexion-point-
>for-the-it-service-industry-long/
> 
>So my point is that the problem isn't with IT companies - they will survive
>as IBM and HP etc have, and perhaps grow in single digit percentages and
>generally get a lot lower price to earnings multiples. They do stuff no one
>currently wants to do and overhauling a system to use stuff that other
>  

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

IT companies buying product companies in a desperate bid to innovate .. let us 
just say that I’ve seen a lot of that happen at a previous workplace.

The usual end result is that the founders and key employees quit in disgust 
after a while and those that are left are gradually absorbed into the company 
doing something totally different than what they set out to do.  

And meanwhile the product itself is killed off immediately, or maybe dies a 
slow and lingering death with a few legacy customers left behind and 
practically zero further development.

Big companies that don’t have DNA beyond being pushers of software that most if 
not all users have a visceral hatred for, and/or bloated services contracts, 
are absolutely not going to infuse any magical fresh DNA into them by acquiring 
successful product companies

The prospect of such foreign DNA taking root in the company is far less than in 
the case of an organ transplant – the sort you get in mad scientist movies 
where a scientist transplants human dna / tissue / whatever into an ape and 
suddenly ends up with a super intelligent planet of the apes or Gorilla Grodd 
variety animal.

Mohandas Pai is a smug and opinionated twit but he got one thing right though. 
The software industry didn’t die – it will survive and it will probably hang 
on, but the traditional indian (or even foreign) services model is long dead in 
favour of automation.  The only things that won’t be automated to a large 
extent are higher up the value chain than such companies generally play around 
at.   And the hanging on will be the way a really old and sick man keeps 
hanging on – perpetually in the chasm between Allopathy and Tirupathi.

In other words, the days of 15% raises are dead and gone, companies outsourcing 
basic bargain basement sysadmin and datacentre work will outsource far less 
after automating the hell out of everything they can, testing will be automated.

Of all the cash cows out there, telemarketing and support still needs humans to 
a larger extent and will hang on but higher up the value chain – because a lot 
of it has moved to social media, marketing rules in this space have tightened 
etc.  

And even that is going way down after all the tech support scams in India that 
flourish tarring even the legit players with the same brush, with at least some 
of the legit players looking wistfully at the “upsell” angle that, if pushed a 
few hairs farther down the line, becomes those scams where someone claims to be 
“tech support” for your OS or device manufacturer and cons you into paying for 
a $50 a month perpetual contract.

--srs

On 19/10/16, 10:15 AM, "silklist on behalf of Deepak Shenoy" 
 wrote:

Apologies for the plug but I wrote a piece a year back:
http://capitalmind.in/2015/01/the-inflexion-point-
for-the-it-service-industry-long/

So my point is that the problem isn't with IT companies - they will survive
as IBM and HP etc have, and perhaps grow in single digit percentages and
generally get a lot lower price to earnings multiples. They do stuff no one
currently wants to do and overhauling a system to use stuff that other
smart people want to use is too expensive. (Like COBOL - it may be outdated
and all that but it still forms the basis for an irrationally large part of
banking) This work will continue until you have removed the very need for
the basis that the older software has been required, so there will always
be business for the Infy/TCS/Cognizant types from this kind of maintenance
work.

But things can change very fast. 10 years ago I couldn't imagine that BigCo
would be able to manage something like 5000 servers using less than 5
people including bringing more up when required, at run time, with complete
reporting/control available even on a mobile phone app. It's possible now.
It's routine now. And as more companies are discovering it is, the on-site
and off-site infrastructure work that was handled by the IT cos has seen
dwindling business. SAP now offers a cloud based pre-setup solution, where
you need none of the server infrastructure - only the initialization pieces
which the IT cos still do; but at some point SAP will create modules that
are one-click installs for the kind of industry you are in.

Automation isn't robotics - you don't need machine learning or AI for most
of the work required. For instance much of the testing work that is done
tends to be checklist driven, and some of that has already been automated
at multiple levels using tools. What these IT cos should have been doing is
buying the product companies that build these tools, but they simply don't
have the DNA. (I would even say buy minority stakes in them with a board
seat) Their own products are absolutely crap; see the quality of the 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Thaths]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 12:03 PM Udhay Shankar N  wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 3:45 AM, Thaths  wrote:
>
> > But occupying the time of the vast hordes of bored and restive
> > > non-creatives will be a challenge, and it's a challenge I have not yet
> > > seen addressed anywhere this side of Orwell.
> > >
> >
> > I am surprised reading this from you, Bruce. I'd have thought Uncle Walt
> > had figured this out in his resorts.
>
> ​But will this scale to ~90% of humanity?​
>

Fair point.

Judging by the number of people I see during my daily commute that are
staring into their phones, I suspect Uncle Zuck has figured out scaling.

So all we need to do is to figure out a way to meld entertainment for the
hordes with a scalable platform.

Thaths

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Deepak Shenoy]

Apologies for the plug but I wrote a piece a year back:
http://capitalmind.in/2015/01/the-inflexion-point-
for-the-it-service-industry-long/

So my point is that the problem isn't with IT companies - they will survive
as IBM and HP etc have, and perhaps grow in single digit percentages and
generally get a lot lower price to earnings multiples. They do stuff no one
currently wants to do and overhauling a system to use stuff that other
smart people want to use is too expensive. (Like COBOL - it may be outdated
and all that but it still forms the basis for an irrationally large part of
banking) This work will continue until you have removed the very need for
the basis that the older software has been required, so there will always
be business for the Infy/TCS/Cognizant types from this kind of maintenance
work.

But things can change very fast. 10 years ago I couldn't imagine that BigCo
would be able to manage something like 5000 servers using less than 5
people including bringing more up when required, at run time, with complete
reporting/control available even on a mobile phone app. It's possible now.
It's routine now. And as more companies are discovering it is, the on-site
and off-site infrastructure work that was handled by the IT cos has seen
dwindling business. SAP now offers a cloud based pre-setup solution, where
you need none of the server infrastructure - only the initialization pieces
which the IT cos still do; but at some point SAP will create modules that
are one-click installs for the kind of industry you are in.

Automation isn't robotics - you don't need machine learning or AI for most
of the work required. For instance much of the testing work that is done
tends to be checklist driven, and some of that has already been automated
at multiple levels using tools. What these IT cos should have been doing is
buying the product companies that build these tools, but they simply don't
have the DNA. (I would even say buy minority stakes in them with a board
seat) Their own products are absolutely crap; see the quality of the stuff
TCS and Infy have built for say the MCA, versus teh quality of design that
seems to be in teh new Modi camp (vidyutpravah.in for instance or such).

I heard of a bigco - a friend works there - where an insurance company was
being pitched by various vendors for a certain solution. The big Indian
names went in with the powerpoint smoke and mirrors thing and offered
things like 6 months to a year to finish with X headcount etc. A russian
company with the founders as programmers pitched a working prototype that
they said would take a couple more weeks to finalize and they'd get it live
in amonth at a cost that was not even in the same area code forget the
ballpark. They actually won the project and BigCo guys had multiple
meetings to "create risk mitigation techniques" and such things. It's kinda
funny.

I think if IT cos react, they will get lean. If they get lean, many many
people - and I'm speaking thousands in bangalore alone - will find out that
their skills are drastically short of the real world requirement of jobs.
This is the problem - not that the IT cos won't survive. IMHO.

Deepak Shenoy
Capital Mind: Financial Macro and Market Analytics
http://capitalmind.in
Twitter: @deepakshenoy

On 16 October 2016 at 15:34, Bhaskar Dasgupta  wrote:

> i was interviewing for one of the IT corporates some time back for their
> COO position and once i managed to dig a bit into their financials, i
> backed out. the majority of their revenue streams are from processing in
> advanced stuff, processing code, processing transactions, processing
> quality control. They do this very well. Very very well. standardise the
> process, six sigma the shit out of it, hire the great unwashed herd of
> graduates pouring out of the universities - retrain them to be great
> processors and great business model. But this kind of model is very
> susceptible to dis-intermediation from further advances in technology. When
> I asked if can have some serious seed funding to develop products rather
> than just provide services, there was a bit of a hoo ha. I think a product
> plus service model is the best option, create great products and then have
> a long tail in services and maintenance contracts. we have some of these
> products but not enough. not easy to develop products - the eco-system
> isn’t there yet.
>
> so whilst i don’t think its the end of the road, but for example, every 2
> months I am in a conference where vendors pitch up talking about robotic
> process improvement or AI and how they are showing 20–50% reduction in warm
> bodies in agency/outsourced/offshored units. Where will these 20-50% of
> highly trained processors go when the infosys or TCS lets them go?
> Thankfully the economy is ginormous and we are well accustomed to poverty
> and pain and still have the joint / extended family to fall back upon. But
> for the IT industry? pain...
>
> i agree with Srini, 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 8:12 PM, Bruce A. Metcalf 
wrote:

> But occupying the time of the vast hordes of bored and restive
> non-creatives will be a challenge, and it's a challenge I have not yet seen
> addressed anywhere this side of Orwell.



A good and stable society offers something for all to do.

There's a pyramidal shape to the psyche of most humans and to most
societies, starting with the vast base which is in survival mode (At least
80% of humanity still lives on less than $10 a day.) It doesn't matter what
the current tribal game is, monarchy, communism, anarchy, econo-narcissism
aka capitalism, this base will be primarily occupied with the meat and
potatoes of life, with little hint of flavor of the prevailing tribal game.

A smaller tier will focus on maximizing sexual desirability and social
status within the structure of the current game. Which usually means
growing up the ranks in a party structure in a dictatorial  game, or
growing rich and handsome in an econo-narcissistic game.

Stagnant lotus eaters can exist anywhere in these levels, but it is a very
temporary phase, they will either get pushed up or down eventually.

A still smaller tier will seek personal fulfillment through the exertion of
will - by bettering themselves through mental and physical exertion - not
for economic or social reward, but for the sake of the activity itself.
Typically such people might accumulate advanced academic degrees, or, run
marathons or climb mountains when they don't have to, to name a few
examples.

There are tiers above this to do with being selflessly loving, kind,
generous, inward looking, intuitive, wise, creative, holy, saintly -
however, society historically usually ignores these populations as being
too small to be of consequence.

Trying to plan a new social order is like trying to dig up a safe passage
for a river in flood. No one wields enough power to shape the landscape or
wisdom to predict a safe route.

Left unimpeded the river flows through the easiest route with the least
obstructions, which means it avoids tall mountains and favors the low
lands. In the case of the human psyche this means a partiality towards
survival, sex and power and an avoidance of tall peaks like creativity,
wisdom, kindness and unity.

A creative and wise society can only evolve when the low lands are
completely inaccessible. For this reason a largely creative or wise society
is impossible as long as there's bottomless consumption and consumerism for
example.

All Governments (somewhat benevolent dictatorial opiate structures) are
like check dams, they eventually break down, but as long as they exist they
are useful in lessening the trauma of the flood. Everyone knows a dammed
river grows turbid and stale, and can't remain dammed for too long anyway -
hence Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street, anti-beef riots, Pepe the Frog etc.
and its opposition, secret prisons, NSA panopticons, legal marijuana,
caliphate, libertarian and hindutva dreams and social media echo chambers.

Ideally societies would invest in making the low lands unattractive and the
tall peaks accessible. Which would obviously mean eradicating poverty,
globally a cost of $5 trillion or so, roughly the bill for the American led
War on terror so far. The bill is far lesser to eradicate poverty in a
single country, like the USA. Far easier and worthy than an NSA Panopticon
or a manned mission to Mars. However it is not in the interest of
government structures anywhere to completely eradicate poverty, one of the
primary levers of social control. Some poverty eradication can be attempted
from time to time, but with the awareness that none of the structures of
social control would work well without poverty.

Meanwhile, when a large number of people used to being successful in the
game are suddenly sitting on the benches, not actively participating in
economic success, universal basic income or affordable healthcare will do
little to calm them. It's natural they will turn to a change agent, a
revolutionary demagogue who unleashes them on the check dams of the game
only to build new check dams down river.

Since nobody is making the low lands unattractive, this is the cycle of
imprisonment of society since nearly the beginning of time with a few
isolated golden ages.

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Udhay Shankar N]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 3:45 AM, Thaths  wrote:

> But occupying the time of the vast hordes of bored and restive
> > non-creatives will be a challenge, and it's a challenge I have not yet
> > seen addressed anywhere this side of Orwell.
> >
>
> I am surprised reading this from you, Bruce. I'd have thought Uncle Walt
> had figured this out in his resorts.


​But will this scale to ~90% of humanity?​

​Udhay​
-- 

((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Thaths]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 1:42 AM Bruce A. Metcalf 
wrote:

> But occupying the time of the vast hordes of bored and restive
> non-creatives will be a challenge, and it's a challenge I have not yet
> seen addressed anywhere this side of Orwell.
>

I am surprised reading this from you, Bruce. I'd have thought Uncle Walt
had figured this out in his resorts.

Thaths

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Bruce A. Metcalf]

"Charles Haynes"  wrote:


It's certainly possible that we will automate ourselves out of the
need for "jobs" but that's only a problem if you believe that
existing structures of wealth accumulation and distribution are
appropriate for such a world. It seems obvious that they are not. It
could be unrest, or it could be an unparalleled opportunity to
provide basic needs universally and allow for unprecedented
creativity.


I think the expectation of "unprecedented creativity" is not merely 
unfounded, but dangerous.


Yes, the sort of folk on this list would certainly become more creative 
and constructive if let free of economic concerns. And the voluntary 
"work" of such creatives may well be of immense benefit to our species 
and planet.


But recall please that fully half the population has below average IQ 
(by definition). There is also a half of humanity with below average 
understanding, aspiration, and ability to do creative work.


The challenge to an economic utopia isn't building it or even 
maintaining it. The challenge is to provide something for the 
lumpenproletariat to do with their free time that is not more 
destructive than what the creatives produce.


Even the ambitious who fight to obtain control of this utopia can be 
handled (at least I hope so, the upcoming US election will be a test 
case). But occupying the time of the vast hordes of bored and restive 
non-creatives will be a challenge, and it's a challenge I have not yet 
seen addressed anywhere this side of Orwell.


But perhaps that unprecedented creativity will include a solution; we 
must hope it will provide one in time.


Cheers,
/ Bruce /

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Kiran K Karthikeyan]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2016, 8:53 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

> Comments?
>

Response from Mohandas Pai

http://m.ndtv.com/opinion/no-obit-needed-our-software-industry-is-alive-and-kicking-1474789

Kiran
-- 
Regards,
Kiran

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Oct 18, 2016 06:59, "Charles Haynes"  wrote:
>
> "any task that can be well defined is inherently capable of being
automated"
>
> Why do you believe this? Math is littered with well defined unsolved
> problems. Just because you can define it doesn't mean it's even possible,
> much less automatable.

For sure there are going to be edge cases, but I think the scale of
automation will be significant enough for this assumption to be a good
working hypothesis.

>
> It's certainly possible that we will automate ourselves out of the need
for
> "jobs" but that's only a problem if you believe that existing structures
of
> wealth accumulation and distribution are appropriate for such a world. It
> seems obvious that they are not. It could be unrest, or it could be an
> unparalleled opportunity to provide basic needs universally and allow for
> unprecedented creativity.

The world currently exhibits a very unforgiving social dynamic of mandatory
economic growth. Nations and individuals feel incredibly insecure if they
don't have year on year growth to justify their existence. The West has put
forward a culture of planned obsolescence and bottom less consumption that
the rest of the world is just getting a taste for.

If we are able to change this mentality then we may quite well enter a new
golden age of cultural and inner development. In my opinion, for such
radical common sense to prevail we'll need a horror on the scale of a world
war to bring the world to its senses. The EU and the UN couldn't have come
about without the horrors of WW2.

Right now I see all the makings of an epic tantrum as politicians pit
racial/religious/ethnic/linguistic/political identities against each other.

Some of us will not need a knock to the head, but most of the world isn't
aware of a change in course even if it is feeling the consequences.

That an idle mind is the devil's workshop is an old maxim, but I'd like to
add, an empty mind is God's workshop. To come to realize this as a society
is not going to be easy, but I pray it comes to pass soon.

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Charles Haynes]

"any task that can be well defined is inherently capable of being automated"

Why do you believe this? Math is littered with well defined unsolved
problems. Just because you can define it doesn't mean it's even possible,
much less automatable.

It's certainly possible that we will automate ourselves out of the need for
"jobs" but that's only a problem if you believe that existing structures of
wealth accumulation and distribution are appropriate for such a world. It
seems obvious that they are not. It could be unrest, or it could be an
unparalleled opportunity to provide basic needs universally and allow for
unprecedented creativity.

-- Charles

On Tue, 18 Oct 2016 at 12:21 Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

> The benediction and curse of the age of automation is that any task that
> can be well defined is inherently capable of being automated.
>
> There's no sugar coating this, a vast majority of middle class jobs across
> industries are going to disappear in the next decade or two. The
> aftershocks of this are getting noticeable with more frequent calls for
> universal basic income (UBI) and the rise of demagogues on the back of
> social unrest.
>
> Silicon valley start ups, and Wall Street are gold rush cultures - by
> design they are chaotic, wild, ill defined and risky. Though they will
> remain fertile in opportunity, it's not everyone's cup of tea.
>
> Gig economies and service industries will thrive in the near term, but they
> don't make a career.
>
> We are entering a phase of social unrest and adjustment like never before.
> This is a far scarier conclusion than the end of IT.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Bhaskar Dasgupta 
> wrote:
>
> > i was interviewing for one of the IT corporates some time back for their
> > COO position and once i managed to dig a bit into their financials, i
> > backed out. the majority of their revenue streams are from processing in
> > advanced stuff, processing code, processing transactions, processing
> > quality control. They do this very well. Very very well. standardise the
> > process, six sigma the shit out of it, hire the great unwashed herd of
> > graduates pouring out of the universities - retrain them to be great
> > processors and great business model. But this kind of model is very
> > susceptible to dis-intermediation from further advances in technology.
> When
> > I asked if can have some serious seed funding to develop products rather
> > than just provide services, there was a bit of a hoo ha. I think a
> product
> > plus service model is the best option, create great products and then
> have
> > a long tail in services and maintenance contracts. we have some of these
> > products but not enough. not easy to develop products - the eco-system
> > isn’t there yet.
> >
> > so whilst i don’t think its the end of the road, but for example, every 2
> > months I am in a conference where vendors pitch up talking about robotic
> > process improvement or AI and how they are showing 20–50% reduction in
> warm
> > bodies in agency/outsourced/offshored units. Where will these 20-50% of
> > highly trained processors go when the infosys or TCS lets them go?
> > Thankfully the economy is ginormous and we are well accustomed to poverty
> > and pain and still have the joint / extended family to fall back upon.
> But
> > for the IT industry? pain...
> >
> > i agree with Srini, changing careers is not easy for us desi’s….(says the
> > man who has made a career of changing careers, heh).
> >
>

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

The benediction and curse of the age of automation is that any task that
can be well defined is inherently capable of being automated.

There's no sugar coating this, a vast majority of middle class jobs across
industries are going to disappear in the next decade or two. The
aftershocks of this are getting noticeable with more frequent calls for
universal basic income (UBI) and the rise of demagogues on the back of
social unrest.

Silicon valley start ups, and Wall Street are gold rush cultures - by
design they are chaotic, wild, ill defined and risky. Though they will
remain fertile in opportunity, it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Gig economies and service industries will thrive in the near term, but they
don't make a career.

We are entering a phase of social unrest and adjustment like never before.
This is a far scarier conclusion than the end of IT.



On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Bhaskar Dasgupta 
wrote:

> i was interviewing for one of the IT corporates some time back for their
> COO position and once i managed to dig a bit into their financials, i
> backed out. the majority of their revenue streams are from processing in
> advanced stuff, processing code, processing transactions, processing
> quality control. They do this very well. Very very well. standardise the
> process, six sigma the shit out of it, hire the great unwashed herd of
> graduates pouring out of the universities - retrain them to be great
> processors and great business model. But this kind of model is very
> susceptible to dis-intermediation from further advances in technology. When
> I asked if can have some serious seed funding to develop products rather
> than just provide services, there was a bit of a hoo ha. I think a product
> plus service model is the best option, create great products and then have
> a long tail in services and maintenance contracts. we have some of these
> products but not enough. not easy to develop products - the eco-system
> isn’t there yet.
>
> so whilst i don’t think its the end of the road, but for example, every 2
> months I am in a conference where vendors pitch up talking about robotic
> process improvement or AI and how they are showing 20–50% reduction in warm
> bodies in agency/outsourced/offshored units. Where will these 20-50% of
> highly trained processors go when the infosys or TCS lets them go?
> Thankfully the economy is ginormous and we are well accustomed to poverty
> and pain and still have the joint / extended family to fall back upon. But
> for the IT industry? pain...
>
> i agree with Srini, changing careers is not easy for us desi’s….(says the
> man who has made a career of changing careers, heh).
>

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Bhaskar Dasgupta]

i was interviewing for one of the IT corporates some time back for their COO 
position and once i managed to dig a bit into their financials, i backed out. 
the majority of their revenue streams are from processing in advanced stuff, 
processing code, processing transactions, processing quality control. They do 
this very well. Very very well. standardise the process, six sigma the shit out 
of it, hire the great unwashed herd of graduates pouring out of the 
universities - retrain them to be great processors and great business model. 
But this kind of model is very susceptible to dis-intermediation from further 
advances in technology. When I asked if can have some serious seed funding to 
develop products rather than just provide services, there was a bit of a hoo 
ha. I think a product plus service model is the best option, create great 
products and then have a long tail in services and maintenance contracts. we 
have some of these products but not enough. not easy to develop products - the 
eco-system isn’t there yet. 

so whilst i don’t think its the end of the road, but for example, every 2 
months I am in a conference where vendors pitch up talking about robotic 
process improvement or AI and how they are showing 20–50% reduction in warm 
bodies in agency/outsourced/offshored units. Where will these 20-50% of highly 
trained processors go when the infosys or TCS lets them go? Thankfully the 
economy is ginormous and we are well accustomed to poverty and pain and still 
have the joint / extended family to fall back upon. But for the IT industry? 
pain...

i agree with Srini, changing careers is not easy for us desi’s….(says the man 
who has made a career of changing careers, heh). 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
wrote:

> Comments?


I was too tired to write down my comments last night, so here they are.

Given the exceptional milk and honey run of thirty odd years that Indian IT
has enjoyed, any news of a decline is going to skip heartbeats, Though it's
not a non-event there's no reason to panic. Though this article picks up on
the right data points, in my opinion, it does a bad job of drawing
conclusions. Exceptional claims require exceptional proof.

Everything changes with time, and so in that sense, the face of Indian IT
too has changed, there's no doubt about that. Infosys, TCS & co are no
longer the best places to find work at. Instead, Indian companies like
Flipkart, Freshdesk, Zoho, as well as many multi-nationals are the
preferred destinations for Indian IT professionals. This happens in Silicon
valley too, and with much more rapidity. IBM is no longer the Goliath it
once was, and very likely Google and Apple will go the same way in a couple
of decades. That doesn't mean they just disappear, but they will no longer
employ as many nor be as attractive.

There's a qualitative difference in the hiring criteria of the new crop of
companies that have emerged, but India has an adaptive talent pool that is
rapidly evolving to the demands of the market. In the '80s and '90s the low
skill grunt work that Indian IT majors undertook was well suited to the
limitations of the engineering talent churned out by Indian engineering
colleges which had impoverished libraries and under-educated professors.

Indians today learn software skills much the same way as anywhere in the
world, with most of the learning being done online on youtube and coding
portals for free. Given nearly everyone in India has access to a computing
device and the internet at affordable prices, they are very nearly on an
even playing field with the rest of the world, which is a huge improvement
from the '80s and '90s when the Indian IT industry grew its legs.

The global software industry as a whole though has managed to automate a
lot of the low skilled operations that used to be done manually, and such
jobs are in danger anywhere in the world. Indians do currently do a lot of
this work, and this will reverberate in the social fabric.

Besides, not everyone can remain forever in an industry where the average
employee is less than 35 years old. It's not uncommon in the US to find
someone in his/her 50s who was a software professional thirty years ago now
working in a field completely unrelated to engineering, perhaps even a blue
collar occupation.

Indians on the other hand, have a very strong mental divide between blue
and white collar occupations, and are not used to having to entirely
rethink their careers at 40+. This will take some getting used to.

Overall, I think the Indian software market is maturing with the rest of
the world, nothing more. Tectonic shifts overall, yes; Economic earthquake:
not really; Social earthquake: mild.

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Thaths]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 2:38 AM Suresh Ramasubramanian 
wrote:

> Social media analytics and cloud is the latest of so many flavours of the
> month.  That a large corporation with hidebound rules and a process driven
> nature sucks at it all and is occasionally too slow to jump onto a trend -
> and even there tries to use stuff made by their existing enterprise vendors
> .. that doesn't surprise me.
>

Was the Indian software industry ever really trendy?

There were pockets of innovation here and there (for example, the messaging
start-up that Udhay used to be with (can't recall it's name at the moment)
was working on something that the WhatsApps and the WeChats were only able
to catch on 15 years later).

But the majority of the Indian IT industry in the 90's was working on
software from the 70's.

IMO, there will always be 20-30-year-old software to maintain. It is not a
sexy thing, but it is steady.

Thaths

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Social media analytics and cloud is the latest of so many flavours of the 
month.  That a large corporation with hidebound rules and a process driven 
nature sucks at it all and is occasionally too slow to jump onto a trend - and 
even there tries to use stuff made by their existing enterprise vendors .. that 
doesn't surprise me. 

All this is till the next bus pulls in - all the previous buses that depended 
on huge and ill paid relatively junior resources  billed as top experts in rfps 
and h1b paperwork have long left the terminus, and aren't likely to return.

TCS seems to be a minor exception to that rule given their effort to find 
social media and online related talent within their company, and tapping people 
like Krish Ashok for a company wide, high level effort.

But every Indian company just needs to anticipate the next bus coming down the 
pike and be ready to jump on it.  What that bus is, when it will come and how 
fast it will be moving is an open question.

--srs

> On 15-Oct-2016, at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
> 
> Comments?
> 
> 
> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html
> 
> 
> Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
> The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
> battle with newer digital technologies
> 
> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
> been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
> cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
> 
> Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
> the technology departments of global corporations with a doomsday
> story many times more puffed up than the luxuriant crop of hair he
> sported.
> The latter was a wig, and the former was just bad science fiction
> packaged by consultants as a $600 billion hair-raiser. But Dewang
> Mehta, the chief lobbyist for India’s fledgling software services
> industry, carried off both with aplomb, convincing businesses that at
> the stroke of midnight of the new millennium, their computer systems
> would crash because old programs measured years in two digits instead
> of four. The solution, he persuaded them, was to let a horde of
> techies from Bangalore and Hyderabad go through each line of code and
> fix the Y2K bug.
> 
> That was the birth of India’s massively successful software services
> industry, which died on Friday after a short battle with newer digital
> technologies. At the time of its demise, the business was worth $110
> billion in annual export revenue.
> The first hint that the end was near came on Thursday when Tata
> Consultancy Services, the biggest Indian software vendor by market
> value, announced a virtual stalling of its business in the September
> quarter from the previous three months. After Infosys followed up by
> slashing its full-year revenue guidance for the second time in three
> months, it was time to turn off the ventilator.
> 
> 
> #Infosys revenue growth pre-Lehman
> 
> A coroner’s inquiry unearthed three signs of decay, the first of which
> shows how Indian companies’ cheap-talent-fueled growth ran out of
> breath. In the four quarters before the collapse of Lehman Brothers,
> Infosys saw revenue increase an average 29% in constant-currency
> terms. Back then, Dublin-based Accenture’s growth was just half as
> high. But there’s nothing exceptional about Indian companies’
> expansion anymore. All that investors have heard from managements this
> year is gloomy commentary on how challenging it’s become to get
> clients to open their wallets. When the companies do make news
> nowadays, it’s more often for dodgy business practices, regulatory
> slaps on the wrist, and senior-level exits.
> 
> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
> been able to embrace “smac,” or social, mobile, analytics and
> cloud-based technologies. But the vendors wasted so much time
> defending their legacy business of writing code for and maintaining
> purpose-built enterprise applications that they failed to make a mark
> in the new digital world.
> 
> As an analysis from Mint shows, the dominant trio of Tata Consultancy,
> Infosys and Wipro between them had 1.5 times more workers doing
> digital stuff last year than Accenture. But the revenue they garnered
> was 40% less than what the latter chalked up from newer technologies.
> That makes the typical digital-tech employee of an Indian vendor 25%
> as efficient as his counterpart at the global consultant. This gap
> sets the clock back on Indian companies, which have taken years to
> narrow the productivity differential:
> Maybe it’s just banking clients and their inability to pay like they
> once did. Or perhaps it’s a combination of weak global growth, Brexit,
> protectionism and Donald Trump’s vacillating stance on US visas for
> Indian technology workers. Hoping that turbulence is temporary,
> 

[silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

Comments?


http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html


Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
battle with newer digital technologies

A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
the technology departments of global corporations with a doomsday
story many times more puffed up than the luxuriant crop of hair he
sported.
The latter was a wig, and the former was just bad science fiction
packaged by consultants as a $600 billion hair-raiser. But Dewang
Mehta, the chief lobbyist for India’s fledgling software services
industry, carried off both with aplomb, convincing businesses that at
the stroke of midnight of the new millennium, their computer systems
would crash because old programs measured years in two digits instead
of four. The solution, he persuaded them, was to let a horde of
techies from Bangalore and Hyderabad go through each line of code and
fix the Y2K bug.

That was the birth of India’s massively successful software services
industry, which died on Friday after a short battle with newer digital
technologies. At the time of its demise, the business was worth $110
billion in annual export revenue.
The first hint that the end was near came on Thursday when Tata
Consultancy Services, the biggest Indian software vendor by market
value, announced a virtual stalling of its business in the September
quarter from the previous three months. After Infosys followed up by
slashing its full-year revenue guidance for the second time in three
months, it was time to turn off the ventilator.


#Infosys revenue growth pre-Lehman

A coroner’s inquiry unearthed three signs of decay, the first of which
shows how Indian companies’ cheap-talent-fueled growth ran out of
breath. In the four quarters before the collapse of Lehman Brothers,
Infosys saw revenue increase an average 29% in constant-currency
terms. Back then, Dublin-based Accenture’s growth was just half as
high. But there’s nothing exceptional about Indian companies’
expansion anymore. All that investors have heard from managements this
year is gloomy commentary on how challenging it’s become to get
clients to open their wallets. When the companies do make news
nowadays, it’s more often for dodgy business practices, regulatory
slaps on the wrist, and senior-level exits.

A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
been able to embrace “smac,” or social, mobile, analytics and
cloud-based technologies. But the vendors wasted so much time
defending their legacy business of writing code for and maintaining
purpose-built enterprise applications that they failed to make a mark
in the new digital world.

As an analysis from Mint shows, the dominant trio of Tata Consultancy,
Infosys and Wipro between them had 1.5 times more workers doing
digital stuff last year than Accenture. But the revenue they garnered
was 40% less than what the latter chalked up from newer technologies.
That makes the typical digital-tech employee of an Indian vendor 25%
as efficient as his counterpart at the global consultant. This gap
sets the clock back on Indian companies, which have taken years to
narrow the productivity differential:
Maybe it’s just banking clients and their inability to pay like they
once did. Or perhaps it’s a combination of weak global growth, Brexit,
protectionism and Donald Trump’s vacillating stance on US visas for
Indian technology workers. Hoping that turbulence is temporary,
investors are still paying a hefty premium for future growth. They may
get lucky for a while. Still, a dead-cat bounce from delayed orders
coming through would hardly count as proof of life.

The millennium scare got Indian software a foot in the door at global
corporations. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Robotics and
artificial intelligence are putting the vendors’ labour-intensive
business at risk of obsolescence. Even if the concern is as puffed up
as Y2K, with plenty of growth candidates in the Indian start-up world,
at least for some investors it may be time to back new horses rather
than flog dead ones.