Gas prices affecting SUV sales. Toyota sales down by 14%

We were discussing about threshold gas price which can tip behavior and force people to change their habits. I think anywhere near $5 pg should cause widespread introspection.
Blogged with MessageDance using iPhone

The Coming Death of Indian Outsourcing[?]

When I first read this article I thought - Wow India has build a $30 billion dollar IT/ITES industry without doing anykind of “THINKING”. That’s pretty impressive.
Headline is too strong I think. This article, written by one of my favorite blogger Sramana Mitra, is apparently too high-level. Looks like some editor did a hack [...]

Microsoft/Yahoo deal is all about Email

Now the Techmeme dust has settled. Time is right for serious discussion to start, on how Microsoft and Yahoo transaction impacts future technology trends. Tim Oreilly, in another brilliant post, is making a great point that Microsoft needs to redefine competition by owning the competitive agenda itself. In order to mount a successful [...]

Google OpenSocial - like Google Base?

Rumor machine is in full swing and techmeme lately showed more similarity with a script for Sex, Love & Secrets. Latest secret story is that Google is about to unleash facebook killer of gigantic API-proportion. They even managed to gather two big enterprise giants - Oracle and Salesforce. Social graph goes enterprise 2.0?
To me [...]

Valuation is a state of mind

I must say this must be the most positive statement I have heard in recent time:
“Companies always need to separate valuation from strategic and performance issues, and this is obviously a valuation we need to grow into and we hope we will, But we know it is an aggressive valuation.” - Jim Breyer.
[Hat tip [...]

Microsoft’s Patent Fud: Spring edition is playing now

Steve Ballmer is saying “What’s fair is fair” and dropping a not so subtle hint that Microsoft will be coming after those who are enjoying the fruits of open source without paying the patent toll (or troll) tax.
Timing and news coverage is bit fishy here.
Redhat launched RedHat exchange and further solidified their perceived [...]

How to raid offshore suppliers employee base

Interesting data point on Sadagopan’s blog:
The top 50 IT services vendors employed 1.7 million employees at the end of their most recent reported financial years. This is an almost an increase of 13% of the comparable total of 1.5 million from the previous year. Much of this growth has been driven by the major offshore [...]

Redhat’s data integration move and the steady march of pricing disruption

Redhat is by far the only big pure-play open source success story out there. They have perfected their subscription based revenue model and now it seems they are intent on putting more and more components to add incremental revenue. Complete SOA stack strategy is designed to shift enterprise budget from licensing model to the subscription model.

They [...]

Just tracking customer happiness

Interesting question and answer exachange between Anthony Noto, analyst at Goldman Sachs and Eric Schimdt:
The second question is, we tracked your revenue per employee on agross basis. Up until the fourth quarter of 2005, gross revenue peremployee had been growing in the single-digit range. Since then it hasbeen declining, in fact down 12% year-over-year this [...]

Figuring out the stack

Startups should worry about this statement:

Schmidt said that one of projects Google is engage in is figuring out
the underlying architecture for building Web applications. Perhaps that
is why Google bought JotSpot.
Atleast product managers now have to have a serious line item in their PRD. They should label it “connecting the Google dots”.
 If done correctly [...]