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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: >

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 > > >

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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?

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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