Hardik Patel : He is fighting for reservations or aginst reservations?

Reservations in any form is incorrect. It promotes mediocrity. Our politicians have played it well by covering more then 50% of the population under 50% reservations limit. Disgusting, last govt, Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, trying to force reservation into private companies. These power hungry mongers, they will go any limit. Vote bank politics... without retrospecting the benefits this has brought in last 60 years.

Look around yourself. You will not realize but many people around you, from IITs, from very good colleges are from the reserved category. They are every where, in your neighborhood, in offices, doctors, enggs, in important positions in private, govt, in colleges, in media, in parliament EVERYWHERE. These more then 50% of India will never raise voice against reservation as they enjoy these benefits. Hence majority of people in India enjoy reservation benefits. 

What about people like you and me? First of all, why there are no debates on benefits of reservations? Milky layer, scope of reservations, etc. Reservations is a curse. Yadavs and Meena's rule Uttar Pradesh politics and bureaucracy and what is the state of affiars here!!! 

Hardik Patel is right... eventually this will become a bigger debate ....about reservations, the curse of India. I support Hardik. The shame called reservations, needs to be retrospected. Two wrongs does not make a right!

Who Needs Miscrosoft!

Few days back, I got an intimation from MS that they will conduct a SAM (Software Assessment Management) where as they will asses and check the compliance of MS products at out company. I was amused and more funny was that some where it was mentioned, that this exercise shall have no direct cost implication on us. This is crap. The while idea is to find out pirated licenses and ask for buying these licenses!!!

Bill Gates was a technical Genius combined with a strong business acumen. But I would not hold the same respect for recent MS decisions. I started working on MS in 1990, when they created PC-DOS for IBM PCs. PC-DOS was built by MS for IBM for the first real desktop computer. MS had the copyright and they started to sell PC-DOS as MS-DOS to every possible vendor. The rest is history. MS-DOS was everywhere as small businesses could afford cheap desktops with a small operating system. Computers moved from large offices to small business and homes.

The story of MS goes on of business acumen rather then innovation. MS-DOS and later MS-Windows thrived as it was easily pirated, cheap licenses and simplicity (compared to Unix) and soon it found its way in every house and small business. MS then built windows hinging on X-Windows, Excel was copied from Lotus-123, Word from Wordstar and so on. Though windows kept crashing, it's price and piracy and simplicity... let many third party application being developed to make it really rule the world. I was personally devastated when giants like Digital VAX VMS was devoured by a PC maker called Compaq. This is not goliath vs david story! This was a real pittance. Digital was a legend on which Unix was invented and which now people have forgotten. What followed was worse. I remember working on Silicon Graphics Terminal (SGI), Sun, HP, IBM servers. Some of them survived but some of them collapsed. Legends like SGI, Siemens and Sun collapsed.

MS came with its own servers to compete with Unix servers and actually people started to use them for high end applications. MS has in late 1990's become so big that they wanted to control everything. Explorer was made part of the OS. EU and US at that time considered braking MS into smaller companies. That was the heights of MS. Around this time, Bill decides to leave the top decision making in MS and pursue his philanthropic interests. Things start to change.

Java came around this time which offered interoprablity and platform independence. More and more application became web based thus needing to do away with a client side of platform. Only a browser was needed which was HTML standards complaint. Around this time a revolution started to happen in open source technologies. More and more companies started to offer hosted, cloud based and pay per use products. Ubuntu and more Linux clones came into existence which were GUI based and offered full range of applications which were mostly open source and free.

What is going to happen to MS? Who needs MS? Only if you use legacy windows based application like India's popular Tally software, you would need MS. Else shifting to Ubuntu is fun. It has much more variety, themes and customization then Windows would ever have. Google, Facebook and others generate their revenues from pay per use whereas MS still drives it revenues from perpetual licenses. Windows 10 is their last release... Office... there are enough options on Linux... their servers... like IIS, LDAP.... why would people pay for these unstable proprietary technologies... Who uses IIS when WAMP or LAMP is open-source and wonderful... Once we had a great product in VB, VC about 20 years back and I loved VS. Now they brought in .NET to rival Java/SOAP. .NET is cumbersome and again very platform dependent. So eventually, Visual Studio lost its charm. MS bought Nokia, killed Symbain with their OS. This is not a bad move although MS itself has written off this investment. I think, one product which is still popular from MS is skype. Things like Bing will not survive as Google moves at a very fast pace.

The stock of Google doubled this year whereas MS stocks fell by 50%. These markets are smart and can sense the wind much more then we technical folks.

MS is now hiring external companies like Deloitte for audit of small (actually very small companies with 2-3 users). I think it will be double whammy for MS. First they will pay throguth their nose to companies like Deliote, secondly they will only loose users who in first place made Windows popular. More and more apps will be Web based and than who will need MS?

About Myself : Ajay Garg, spend over 25 years working for companies like Siemens, Erricsson, BMC, Syntel, Globallogic, AVL leading very large enterprise delivery teams in US, Germany, Switzerland, Greece and across all continents.

The rise and fall of Genband @ GlobalLogic

I always say that momentum will keep the ship running for some time and than the changes will start to show effect. Same is true for a leadership change. A new leader comes and it takes some time... some time even a year before the impact of the change start to show. I joined GlobalLogic in 2010 to head a very precarious and a strategic account. It was Genband.

Leaders are born. Shashi Choudhary is one of them. People can love him or loath him... but he is a great leader. Someone who has power and he knows how to yield it. A leader is who entrust his team and this is what he does best. He entrusted me this account and fully backed me. Many people will remember the day (any also the way), I was introduced to my team. I would not have done it this way. This was not my way. However, it was very effective as most of the existing leadership left the team and I had all the field for myself.

Boris Schnayder, who was the global head of Telecom BU, fully supported the move and the journey began. Genband was a Goliath who devoured the cash rich business of Nortel. SBC was their sunshine product. A product that was part of the strategic IMS roadmap. Unfortunately, SBC (session border controller) had a legacy which GLobalLogic had to handle. It had serious quality issues. Sally Graves, then R&D head at Genband, was troubled with GlobalLogic's handling of this product. There was too much of back and forth between GL and Genband and the relationship was getting worse. SBC was a bad decision by Genband which was good for GL. A codebase which was 12 years old at that time should have been moved to sustaining. Genband should have either developed or acquired another SBC. They kept on increasing the features and capacity of SBC all the time.

If there is challenge, take it, face it and enjoy it. However, It was fun. The aggression of Sally combined with Steve was a killer. We did all the work and also a lot of talking and a lot of presentations to keep them cool. Another bad thing at Genband was frequent leadership changes. BG came as the boss of Sally and first thing he did was to fire Sally and bring on DJ. DJ was a technical genius and a great manager. He did not show but he had lot of aggression. His strength showed in his actions which he voiced against the mess. DJ was let go and Randy Rutherford took his place. Randy was soon let go... the leadership heads kept on rolling.

My relationship with Sally was professional and I was very attentive to her. With DJ and Randy I enjoyed a cordial and warm relationship. It was just too good. Around this time we made some tough decisions to restructure our team. It was a smooth ship for around three years. Then some changes were made by Sunil Singh, our India MD at that time and these changes impacted me. I will write about these changes soon. :)

One thing, that was best at GL days was my team. Manish, Ashish, Anil.. these people are gems. I think there was almost no attrition in my direct report during my entire time... We grew to 170+ and we did team events all the time. It was fun and I miss this team. There were committees (!thanks to Sanju) just like the Japanese Quality Circles... independent, self executing... just create them once and they will run for you forever...

Good things came to an end. I moved on and Sanjay Singh came over. During my handover discussions, he asked me why I am leaving and I told him the fact. I think, one can only report to someone he or she respects. If the management forces such decisions, they will eventually backfire.

Folks... so watch out... I want to write about Peter Harrison and Bob Beauchamp, two best CEOs that I have worked for. I have worked at BMC, at Syntel, at Aricent, at Siemens, at Erricsson.... I will write more about my experiences with great leaders...