Blue Screen Of Duds

One of the toughest decisions any company has to revisit time and again is whether it should build a product internally or if it should buy out/from a vendor who has already done the same thing. In simple, practical terms, the choice is between buying a pre-built wheel and building one from scratch all by yourself.

The greatest example of a botched opportunity on the same lines is the story of Yahoo! and Google. Long time ago, Yahoo! had actually funded the growth of a little-known company called Google — a decision that they must regret every day now. They could, probably, have bought out the company then (and could have done a huge favour to Microsoft by doing that and effectively killing it) and never looked back. They did not, and are now struggling to catch up with them in both search and advertising, which are Google’s core competencies.

It is very easy to kick Yahoo!’s ass for not having bought Google, but the fact of the matter is that it is a very tough decision to make when you are dealing with wheels. There is not much else than instinct to guide you in making that decision and sometimes it works out well, other times it just does not. But in general, it is not the best of ideas to be dependent on an external vendor on whom your business’s core value proposition has a critical dependency.

There are workarounds to the problem, like investing in the long term in developing the technical expertise in-house and contractual clauses that protect you against sometimes unavoidable circumstances, but there is no real proven method to pull this off each and every time. That, of course, is the reason why there are only a limited and small number of smart people in the world who can get it right. You just have to make sure that you are either one of them or, for lesser mortals like us, you work for one of them.

Technorati tags: yahoo, google, software development, mergers

Only if you were to believe Scoble, Dave, Don and countless others have to say on the matter. The problem is not as simple as it is put across, especially in a country like India, where the trends are quite opposite to what it is in the west. The same is the case with the the solution, it is not as simple as retooling and retraining journalists. The scope actually is much wider than having media set ups that are finding it hard to survive in an online world, a lot of the failings of traditional media is also seen in the online sphere too. Just being an online journalist does not automatically guarantee you any chance to survive.

Yes, print is in a lot of trouble, but that’s basically due to latency. By the time most of us get the newspaper in hand, we already know what has happened, mostly through television and you get near-instant feedback and analysis (often much better than what the talking heads spew on-screen) through blogs, memetrackers and other tools. That essentially leaves you with the hotseat in the toilet or the long commute as the only places where you would require print, neither of which are safe bets to base any business model on.

That said, even newfangled online operations are not any safer these days. Once upon a time, I used to follow El Reg, CNet, Infoworld and The Inquirer on a daily basis to get my fix of tech-related news, today I unsubscribed from all those in my RSS reader. The problem really is not that they don’t publish interesting things. The problem is that they publish late, often way too late and the days of publications by themselves driving a reader’s association with itself, than being led by context and topics, is now long gone. Be it print or be it online, the problem remains the same.

What aggregators like Techmeme, Google News and Topix have done is to aggregate content around topics that are dynamic. A New York Times website or a Washington Post website does not have a fluid navigation set up. It does not change in terms of what users are reading the most and just doing tags is not a way around it. The more I see things, the more I am convinced that eventually all websites will have a primary navigation that will be topic driven, with the regular inflexible and staid navigation pushed back as a legacy application or a fallback.

Okay, I too have been hoodwinked into the Twitter hype, and Imified too for that matter. Add me if you want to find out how many times I yawn in a day and other similar nonsensical stuff.

It is weird to see PHP being run on IIS servers these days and it immediately gets my ears up regarding what’s going on. It is now the turn of Indiatimes to do the same, running PHP on IIS to support their new hosted CRM initiative, called Indiatimes SalesCRM. To be fair to them, they’ve credited the open source software that they have used to power it, Vtiger, in the ‘about’ page and that’s a refreshing change. I hope more companies do the same thing.

At a discounted rate of Rs 100 per month per user, it is considerably cheaper than the support that Vtiger is offering on its website. I am assuming that Indiatimes is getting into the reselling business than the development business, as it has done with its Meramail initiative, which sits on top of its outsourced email vendor framework. I am not sure about the positioning and pricing of the deal, it is way too cheap to be sustained in the long run. But as it is with Indiatimes, it is always quite difficult to know what they are getting at.

I can only wonder who on the desk came up with this headline in the Times of India today. It is so hilarious that I have not been able to stop laughing at it ever since I saw it first in the morning. Intended or not, that was a good one.