The Pinnacle Of PR Success

The pinnacle of success, as far as PR is concerned, is getting your marketing material into the NY Times, disguised as journalism.
- Owen Byrne

Owen Byrne is the guy who originally built Digg. Owen Byrne's comment is part of a Hacker News discussion thread about to an article N.Y.T piece "Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley". Paul Graham's essay about how PR works, 'The Submarine' , is also insightful.

All honourable men

Deccan Chronicle: You have, of course, resigned from Infosys. But have you had time to think about conflict of interest issues that might still arise?

Nandan Nilekani: The only time issues of conflict of interest will arise is during procurement. I will ensure that the UIDAI’s procurement is open and transparent. If need be, I will recluse myself from the decision-making process on procurements.

- From a Deccan Chronicle interview with Nandan Nilekani

The same day PTI reports that Infosys will bid for UID project:

Gopalakrishnan said Infosys would bid for projects under UIDAI like any other e-governance projects, but saw no conflict of interest though the authority would be headed by a former company top executive.

- From PTI report carried by rediff.com

Of course there is no conflict interest ! Why ? Because the MSM folks have told us repeatedly that Infosys executives are a bunch of demi-gods. Look at the amount of genuflection that's happening in Infy's neck of the woods. Yuck!

As the good old days of inflated head counts and billing rates comes to an end for Indian outsourcing companies, the big outsourcing companies will bid for, and push for huge local government projects. It's been happening for a while - the passport seva scheme of TCS is one such example.

Excessive 'Head Count' And 'Billing' Days Over For Indian Software Companies ?

I was chatting with a friend at a mid-sized software company in Bangalore; he said that foreign clients were increasingly insistent that they would pay a fixed amount (typically $20/hour) for the projects he had been working on in the last year or so, regardless of the project member being a developer, manager, or tester. We were joking that software billing rates in another year's time would fall to McDonald's hourly wage. Anecdotal evidence from friends and ex-colleagues working on software projects for foreign clients in India seem to indicate severe reduction in hourly rates and head counts due to client pressure in the last one year.

Well everybody knew that it was a scam - the software boom in the nineties meant easy money for most outsourcing companies. I remember a cousin of mine mentioning the case of a Japanese client who was charged $8000 for changing the text on a dialog box. Not a single project ever ran without being overstaffed and the client being fleeced. There is enough schadenfreude to go around. While computers and software are supposed to make us more efficient and reduce unnecessary man power, Indian companies ironically used the software boom to increase the number of people employed. A person's worth at an India software service company was typically measured by "How many people report to you ?". Incidentally Sloka Telecom founder Sujai Karampuri also wrote "Why do we have so many jobs in Bangalore ?", which explains the dynamics of outsourcing quite well, though it's not comprehensive. The less said about the daylight robbery that went on in the name of ERP, the better.

A recent issue of Forbes (Indian Ed) covered the changes the management at Indian IT services bellwether Infosys is considering in the face of falling revenues. There seems to general agreement among the top executives that revenues based on project head count are getting squeezed and the company needs to find alternate ways of generating revenue.

...

Some indications of the emerging, new Infosys are already coming in. Ask Dhar. His elevation to the EC came just a year before the worst downturn in living history hit the world. It has been baptism by fire. And the decisions he has been taking have been unlike any at Infosys of the past.

Dhar found himself in a rather awkward spot with one of Infosys’ oldest customers — a telecom giant in midland Europe. The client was under serious pressure to reduce costs and the Infosys contract was in peril. Dhar knew he had to act fast. He was aware that a host of rivals had already offered to cut their price by 25-30 percent. If Dhar did not respond on time, Infosys would be edged out of other juicy contracts that were on the table.

He then did what would have been once unthinkable inside Infosys. Rather than reduce his per hour billing rate (which would have hit revenues and profits), Dhar decided to change the way the client was billed.

For a third of the value of the contract, he promised the client an upfront cost saving. Infosys would now charge the client on the number of technical problems it would solve instead of charging for the number of hours it worked in doing that. In sum, he was proposing an outcome-based model.

Now, the risks were considerable. To ensure that they still earned a profit from the account, Dhar had to bet on far fewer engineers than usual to use their native intelligence to pull off the job. But there was no guarantee that they would be able to accurately predict the rhythm of the job. In fact, in the first six months, the company might even lose some money working this way. But in the long run, Dhar believed it was the best thing for both the client and his company. “It’s always been at the back of our mind to move to this model, but we never had the incentive to do it. This downturn has given us the reason,” says Dhar.

...

Gopalakrishnan has put together a five point plan for getting Infosys ready for the next stage. This includes increasing the share of higher value services like consulting, delinking revenue growth from staff addition, pursuing large deals of above $500 million, improving efficiency and finding new locations for talent.

Update (23'June 2009): Hacker News reader edw519 makes a great observation in a comment on this post:

“It’s always been at the back of our mind to move to this model, but we never had the incentive to do it..."

You may have the incentive, but do you have the capability?

Fixed or value based contracts not only require better expertise, they require different culture. Even your good people have become do indoctrinated with the concept of fleecing the bill that they may have actually forgotten how to compete by simply getting the work done efficiently and effectively.

Good luck. Better yet, good luck to your customers.

Statisticians

A couple of jokes about statisticians from Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly's TED talk.

Someone, one of my senior colleagues told me when I was a youngster in this profession rather proudly that statisticians were people who liked figures, but didn't have the personality skills to become accountants.

And there is another in-joke among statisticians, and that is, how do you tell the introverted statistician from the extroverted statistician ? To which the answer is, the extroverted statistician is the one who looks at the other person's shoes.

Techie Spin

It's always a shame when technologists, who have to answer precisely to the computer, use political spin when talking to users.
- Dave Winer

Rams' Law Of Enterprise Software Sales

Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by corruption.

Jim Coudal Interview (transcript)

Jim Coudal (JC) in his interview with Ryan Carson (RC) offers valuable insights especially on the importance of being able to write well. Since it's a very short interview, I made an attempt to transcribe it, but couldn't make out all of it. Here it is anyway with the gaps marked with two red dashes '--'; words that I am not too sure about are indicated with a question mark (?). You are welcome to use this on your site/blog. If you can help me fill in the gaps that would be great.

RC: We are here with Jim Coudal from coudal.com and nice to have you here Sir

JC: Thank you, how are you (? )

RC: So why don't you tell me just a little bit about what's inspiring you right now

JC: It's sort of interesting. I have three children and the youngest of them is Spencer, he is seven and he has a kind of voracious appetite for re-living my childhood with star wars and everything else. So I don't know, maybe it's just the nature of the beast . But I am sort of inspired by childish things lately -- Spencer and my two daughters . Other than that I have been sort of wrapped up in vintage American agricultural design artifacts from the thirties and forties.


RC: How did you come across that ?

JC: Well we've this project called field notes, we sell these note books called field notes which is sort of based on that and one thing led to another and I started getting really into these(?) odd -- seed companies.

(1:05)

RC: Are you obsessed?

JC: I am constantly obsessed -- you know that about me (?). But this too shall pass, it will be something else. Yeah then you know we are doing the layer of tennis thing at Coudal, stuff that artists are coming up within fifteen minutes blasts is beyond me. I try to keep ...Yeah I know what's inspired. On Tuesday night we hosted Gary Hustwit's Objectified. Gary made Helvetica.

RC: Oh, wow !

JC: This new movie is about industrial design.

JC: He's on a kind of world rock and roll tour , London is coming up soon ...

RC: How wicked !

JC: In Portland -- and then I don't don't know and then maybe ... I don't know where he is playing. It is playing here in London and it's a great movie - Johnnie Ive from Apple, Dieter Rams from Braun really great movie really inspiring. These guys working inside of the industrial-manufacturing profit process and are total artists dedicated to details. Really well received.

RC: That was Objectified ?

JC: Objectified, that's my latest --

(2:06)

RC: How do you make time for creativity ? I mean you are a father, you have a successful business When does that happen ?

JC: For me I have sort of farmer's hours.I don't exactly know why. I get up early and once I get up I can't go back to bed. So generally I go to work in very early. I am there a couple of hours, before anybody else gets there. I find that couple of hours when I just spend that time working on something designy or creative writing, I am happy. So I might be setting a headline, I might be doing the layout for our website, I might be writing an essay - whatever it is, it's quiet, phone is not ringing, I am not answering email and then the rest of the day is pretty much acting and reacting. You know how it is, you know that I have things to do but there are things that I don't know I have to do (?) So I try to do that and then building light goes out.

RC: Cool. So if you can give a sort of a tip or an idea to a -- emerging (?) web designers either for their career, or probably for their career what would you say that is important ?

(3:11)

JC: I will give a tip for web designers in general is that (?), you know we are in an era where everybody is talking about sustainability and using only what we need to use. So leave a little white space . Don't use all the -- For a career tip I will just say this. When we are interviewing two designers for two creative positions and they are equally talented in every way and they will cost us equally as much and they are both friendly and happy and smart. But one of them can write and the other one can't, I will always hire her.

RC: -- (Got it ?)

RC: Good writing is a sign of an organized mind. As digital as we become writing is even more key than ever whether it's email, for writing copy for the web we find that we have done much better with even purely visual designers who have some writing skills. And I think it is under appreciated by the visual ...

RC: Agreed ...

JC: There's a day in the UK and in the USA as well where a creative ad agency was an art director and a copy writer together. Those days are gone

RC: Yes --

(4:26)


RC: -- you've to have the personality (?)

JC: I think you have to have the skills -- But I think you have to have both of those skills .
Maybe There's a third skill too and that's being able to write a little bit of code.

RC: Yeah.

JC: It's a sort of interesting time.

RC: So our designer Mike he seems to be an -- wrote all the lyrics - and I find that he is very
good at copy -- because he basically can, he used to write lyrics - there's something about
that ...

JC: Right

RC: Right

JC: I could see that, especially lyrics is generally trying to be as succinct as possible, succinct
and dramatic as possible . So it's probably good direction from -- copy -- succinct and
dramatic -- to get to the point -- keep people interested --

RC: Thanks for talking, see you soon.

JC: Sure.