The blog has been suffering from semi-neglect due to the usual refrains: work and life. While I will be pushing out a few drafts that have been in the deep freeze for a while, it will take a while longer to organise things so that I can start blogging again regularly.

It has been close to 6 months now since I quit smoking and I can’t tell you how good it feels. I sleep much better, the energy levels are consistently higher and better; and best of all, I have more money now to allocate to books, music and movies, which used to be wasted on giving my lungs a very hard time.

That said, there are side-effects that still linger on. Phlegm being the major culprit here. While things are considerably better on this front, it is far from being over and done with and after all, what has taken years to accumulate won’t disappear overnight.

There is no real huge struggle or heroic story associated with my giving up the smokes. Thankfully, I’ve not been addicted to it in all the years that I’ve smoked and given up (twice before this), it has been more of a habit to keep my mind off other things. Or, even worse, it has been a weird sort of act of rebellion that I’d do just to make a point, because nobody could control that part of my life.

What eventually did it for me was one of my usual trysts with a bad bout of bronchitis. I keep getting it every couple of months and over time it was costing me a good couple of days that I could have otherwise spent getting more work done. As far as wake up calls go, I did not really need one beyond that.

The difference it has made still leaves me reeling a bit. My lifestyle right now is not by any means the best I’ve ever had. In fact, it is lousy like hell. I don’t sleep right, eat right or exercise right, but the fact that I don’t smoke now keeps me more active and productive than ever.

Really, if you are a smoker, quit now and get richer!

Of late, how companies are run and how they manage their people has been grabbing more of my attention. It is a crazy world out there right now with most of the traditional benchmarks and rules being thrown out of the window.

There used to be a time when ten years meant not much in setting up and establishing a company and impacting the industry it belonged to in any significant manner. Cut to the present and you will see companies with billion dollar valuations being set up and turning the market upside down in time frames that are considerably shorter than that.

This is a blog entry that really is not out there to say much other than express a sense of wonder at how things have changed. Case in point is the outgoing Red Hat CEO’s message to the world about his impending departure. It was published on the company blog of all places.

The entry is written much on the lines of an informal blog post, reminiscing and ruminating on how the company has grown over the years and even reading in places like a 21st century version of Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire“.

For someone like me, who has spent most of his career doing the one-man-army thing, the past two years of running a decent sized team and dealing with issues related to it has been an educating experience that no fancy MBA or any amount of money can buy. And one of the wonderful things about the internet is to be able to read and cull from such a vast amount of personal experience from others like Szulik.

Sometimes, among all this talk of billion dollar valuations, turnovers and product lines that can change the world in less than five year cycles, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that even these amazing companies are also headed and run by people, just like any other set up.

If you were to look at it that way, there is a lot to be learned and even more to aspire to, for everyone, provided we are willing to go the whole hog and be systematic, disciplined and always keep the longer term perspective firmly in our sights.

The more they remain at the same place? At least, that’s been the case with me. The shorter version of the story (don’t want to get into the longer version since it involves discussing people and events who/that should remain in the private domain) is that unlike what I had written earlier. I did not, eventually, leave Network 18. So, for the time being, things remain the same. And that is all what I want to say about it now.

Update here.

The news is not exactly breaking or shocking for that matter and the hints were strewn all over the place for the past couple of weeks and this is how it goes: On the 10th of September I resigned from my post as Principal Architect with Web18, which is the online division of Network 18. It has been a very exciting and fruitful two plus years, but now it is time to move on. It was not the easiest of decisions for me to arrive at — there is a considerable amount of my effort that has gone into building of a lot of what is public now and it is a move that is pretty much against the turn of the tide — but one of the most important factors to acknowledge in such matters is dissonance and there has been a fair bit of that in my case.

Web18, of course, is headed for a new, vibrant and exciting future with a slew of amazing products that the proceeding days and months will get to see. Personally, I had to take a call to see if this is what I wanted and what turned the deal was the feeling that has been lingering within me for a while now: that my heart was no longer in it, this is not what I want to do and this is not how I want to do it. I have for most parts been a start up guy: putting systems, businesses and people in place to turn new products and organisations around and I have not felt that way for a while now.

The coming 2-5 years are going to be very critical in the internet space in India and a key factor that will determine someone’s contribution to it is to see where you place yourself in the market when the big wave hits us. In terms of products, innovation, access and scale, what we are seeing now are nothing more than the remnants from the first wave and a frenzied search for anything that will help investors realize that potential. In such a situation, being in a gargantuan company need not be the ideal positioning to ride the wave. In fact, from what I’ve seen, very few companies have the wherewithal to make that muscle work for them. In most cases the same strengths work against them as weaknesses depriving them of quick reaction times, nimbleness and other desirable features.

That leaves me with the part where I get to say where I am headed for. I will be hopping over to another media network, INX, to try my hand at building out an organisation all over again, as Head of Delivery for the online parts of the business. Of course, there are questions that will naturally arise from my choice of destination. I have the next couple of years to find answers to that, but for now, I need to give my considerably beaten up mind and body some R&R before I join the gig and that’s the only plan for the next couple of days.

Been away in the hills breathing in the fresh mountain air and hanging out with my lads on a long-promised break. Blog-neglect is a universal phenomenon that I won’t write about. There are posts lined up, but they need a bit of cleaning up and clarity. As soon as I am done with that normal services should resume.

 I received an email in my mailbox today that pretty much marks the end of the naive years of the internet. Excerpt:

It’s with a great amount of reluctance and sadness that after five years of providing high quality, advertisement free hosting to thousands of
people around the world, I’m announcing the end of freedom2operate. – Daniel J. Cody

F2o was one of those last free hosting service providers to outlast the recent post-boom years on the internet. They were different in the sense that it was a nicely supported and awesomely-featured hosting service (Chillisoft ASP too!) providers who did not take on anybody and everybody onboard. The idea was to have a community on the platform, consisting of tinkerers and web developers, who were provided with features that most paid hosting accounts would hesitate to provide. And as it came to be, the show could not go on forever, even with the addition of the paid hosting accounts.

I used to have an account on F2o, but I did not bother to ping DJC when they did a server migration that required existing users to opt to migrate to the new boxes. I think I was among the unfortunate few who did have problems with the migration, that needed to be manually fixed, but I decided to not opt for it and let the account die, mostly because I’d come to the conclusion that quality services need to be supported with money and bandwidth, rack space and the effort that goes into keeping something like this running is never free and should never be free.

I do not know who else is left in the space now. Evolt used to provide such a service, but I am no longer sure what exactly is going on there. I think most of this type of free hosting will remain a faint memory, other than fly-by-night operators who are looking to make a quick buck by injected all hosted pages with pop up and Google Ads.

playing Chinese whispers over a public address system.

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

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.