Product Barcamp

It’s been quite a long time since I posted. This is latest new event I am planning to attend.

It is the first product barcamp in the country (I think!) cuz I have not heard of anything similar before. The aim of this barcamp is to bring all the product companies in hyderabad out into the open so that we can learn from their experiences.

Here is a brief about the event:

March 28^th, 4:30pm @ IIIT, Gachibowli, Hyderabad

Event: Hyderabad Software Products Showcase

Showcase producs from Hyderabad,  demo recent new products/startups, established products from Hyderabad, successful entrepreneurs sharing perspective, discuss the eco-system and support network available

Target: Product companies, Startups, Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Objective: To highlight the strong product traction, successes, opportunities and eco-system available.

:30	Tea
5:00	Anil Jampala, President Hysea, Welcome address
5:05	Ramanathan, CEO, Cordys India- Journey of a Product company- the Business perspective
5:30	Products landscape- Ramesh Loganathan (MD, Progress Software India)
6:00	Case study- internal innovation- Microsoft (Rich Web on mobiles)- Sudeep Bharati, Director, Mobile Developer group, Microsoft
6:15	CEO Speak
	Suheim Sheikh- Founder CEO, SDG Software
	Jay Pullur, Founder/CEO, Pramati
	CK Shastri, Founder/ CEO, Intense Technologies
	Azhar Farhan, Serial tech Entrepreneur
	Mahesh Murthy, Founder CEO Pinstorm & Founder CEO Seedfund Sandeep Bhandarkar CEO and Founder of Fineng
7:15	Panel discussion - CEOs, Academia, Support system & VCs
	CEOs, Prof.Sangal (IIIT), Sateesh Andra (DFJ), Hemir Doshi (IDG Ventures), Unnikrishnan (Sun)
8:00	Eco system- Sateesh Andra;  Hemir Doshi (IDG Ventures), Unnikrishnan (Sun)
8:25	Announce IIIT Innovation lab- Rajeev sangal
8:30	Dinner

See you there! For those who can not make it, wait for the update after!

 

Comapring FOSS.in with TIE ISB Connect

Yes, I attended both this year. Incidentally I was there at TIE ISB Connect last year as well. It’s amazing how there is always a really pretty girl dressed very chic, who is the student coordinator for services

There are a myriad differences. Let’s start with the basics:

TIE ISB has lots more suits, better food, more deserts, more people in general and definitely a much higher net worth per head on average, not to mention age.

The event is purely for profit and reeks of it. It is a very honest, straight forward event. The speakers who come in are top notch in their fields. Most speeches/presentations deserve ovations. It’s professional.

The event has lots of people looking for a few VCs, to corner, and talk about their company and things they do. It is purely networking oriented.

The technology talks involve no code but rather a recount of what has happened in the recent past and a few people playing Nostradamus about the field. More often than not, since they are the guys who are putting money where their mouth is (either as VCs or entrepreneurs), it’s true.

I thought FOSS guys were determined, but I have met certain entrepreneurs with such grit and determination, it’s almost insane. There are people who are working without funding for the last 4 years! From what I hear, the VCs are chasing them now.

FOSS.in that way, for a non-programmer was not all that great. Since I have a tech background, I could understand a few things they said, but that’s about it. I could engage in conversations with the contributors of Mozilla and Openoffice but it was more at a level that looked at what is happening and what will happen to the usage, user-friendliness and such of the products.

Very honestly, it seemed that the event had double standards - one of playing the do-good, open-source promoting kind and the other where large and small corporates promote themselves shamelessly. I will not even spare the open source communities who promote themselves shamelessly. While there was an air of contribution going around everywhere, there definitely was an air of marketing going around too! It’s almost like they were hot and cold currents that kept the system going and the people rotating from one place to another!

Some of the talks were fantastic. Some speakers were phenomenal, but on the whole it was a little too dry for me and I definitely could not contribute anything there!

It was an event where I believe every open source product/project was being shamelessly promoted to attract scores of programmers/users to flock to it and contribute. It’s no different from services marketing except these are free services (obviously numbers matter to them too… their funding is linked to it!).

At the TIE ISB connect, people really did want to connect, meet each other. Entrepreneurs wanted to share ideas, build on each others thoughts. At FOSS.in, I really did not find too many people engaged in thought exchange as such. There was more discourse on other general things rather than idea generation and such. Unless the primary contributors of the project (i.e. employees) asked for and were patient enough to listen to feedback and suggestions, there were barely any exchanged. Several talks were more like reports of what had been happening for the past 6 months than anything else.

 

A customer touch point!

I was speaking to my friend the other day about customer service and and service design. I even gave him a little book to read. Since then I suppose even I have been passively observing customer service and service design.  Here are a few glaring examples of what I call absolutely idiotic service design/practice:

1)  Sabse Saste Din - yes it is a great idea from a great group. Unfortunately the implementation and I believe a lack of thought (service design) ends up in huge hassle for the customers. I happened to visit the Ameerpet Big Bazaar on the last day (Jan 27th). One of the first things a customer needs is either a shopping cart or a basket. Neither of these were near the entrance. Instead, they were all outside the exit (where once the shopper went, was not allowed in through there!) So finding a shopping cart was essentially a harrowing task which took me literally 45 minutes! I shopped for 30 minutes to get everything I wanted. Then I wanted to get billed. Out of the 5 cash counters only 2 were functional. Obviously, there was no queue - the scene was like a typical late 80s movie scene of the women at the water pipe. Whosoever pushed the most and shouted the loudest got to go first in line. (Strangely or not so strangely, it was the women above 40 years who were involved in this!). After standing for almost 45 minutes and literally pushing myself to the front of the queue, I managed to get out unscathed!

The shopping experience was 45 minutes - search for a shopping cart, 30 minutes shop, 45 minutes - stand at a billing counter - out of a total 2 hours only 25% was productive! That’s insane by any measure and even the most naive person can tell u that it is ridiculous. I saw people standing in line for 45 minutes who had bought just 1 item ( a bucket - with which u got another free!) I can not fathom their productivity numbers!

I will not even begin to talk about the lack of customer representative at high traffic locations, not to mention the absolute lack of knowledge about how much discount each product carried (we had to find that out at the billing counter!). Just imagine standing in line with 10 people pushing u, only to realize that u are not actually getting a 50% discount on the product, it’s only when u purchase 6 of them that u do!

Well, that is an Indian shop, we can assume that they are still learning, their technology is not all that great, their thought process for service design, touch points etc. is not all that mature.

2) Today I had dinner at Subway. Yes, the world leader in sandwiches - that Subway. We are a regular at that place. In fact my friend is so regular, I think they’d miss him direly if he din’t go for a week. If they have a good CRM practice in place, I wouldn’t be surprised if they called up to say, “There is some unusual activity on your credit card!” ( A line I borrowed from the conversation between the credit card company and Rachel from Friends, when she stops using her dad’s credit cards!).

They have a redeemable coupon system… give 8 coupons and when u order ur next sandwich and a large drink, another sandwich/salad is free.  Note: The large drink has to be an aereated one and not iced tea, which I usually drink. Although it was common practice for other Subway outlets in the city to allow people to take Iced Teas instead of aereated drinks, here they began to complain. Not cuz they couldn’t give it, but cuz the billing system wouldn’t accept it! A large iced tea actually costs INR 5 more than a large aereated drink. For the system not to allow it is ridiculous! Of course, we being the resourceful, rule bending Indians that we are, manage to go around anything. So, their service was exactly the way i wanted it to be… but the issue is that their existing system did not allow it to begin with.

It suprises me that the place where the customers interact most and most importantly with any company is their Billing system and it happens to be the shittiest written software. Probably cuz it is legacy and that’s why we have literally thousands of Indian programmers making a living from writing billing software and maintaining billing software. I know of atleast 7-8 large companies that have billing software teams the size of small companies.  It’s great for these companies and individuals, but it sucks for the billions of customers who have to face crappy billing systems on a daily basis!

Seems like there is ample business opportunity here for new entrepreneurs to take up the challenge to build systems that can work well with the companies’ marketing strategies.

 

Our visit to FOSS.in

Prasad was speaker at FOSS.in in Bangalore. He took a tutorial on how to build applications on the Mozilla platform. It was received very well. In fact there were several people who appreciated it’s simplicity. Anant - in his blog says, “The calculator example complete with it’s own add-on manager ( for adding scientific support ) was a great way of giving the basics of Mozilla application development as was the highlight of the tutorial.”

As if that wasn’t praise enough, Chris Hofmann, one of the creators of javascript and one of senior most members at the Mozilla Foundation said - “Of all the presentations I have seen (world over) for a primer to developing applications on Mozilla platform, this was the best.” Myk, who gave two talks at the event, also liked it. Now that is indeed great testimony.

If you are looking for the slides, they can be found here!

FOSS.in was a great place to meet the Mozilla folks and we got to really know them at a human level. I suppose all FOSS users like me tend to deify the original creators of great products we use (esp in the open source domain). I got to meet and have dinner (twice) with the Mozilla developers. We got an opportunity to educate them a little bit about India, the cuisine, the culture and so forth. They seemed to enjoy our company (which is why I think they invited us to dinner twice, a party and we even went out to try chat, pani puri etc.). Mary, the event manager at Mozilla, supposedly ate half a kilo of sweets like we eat a pair of gulab jamun. She said she liked sweets, little did we knew it was so much. Perhaps we would have sent a kilo!

I think our relationship with Mozilla is just about to begin! Let’s hope it is a long, friendly one.

 

Biz models: Open source hybrid vs. Traditional enterprise software

Recently I have been reading up a lot about the hybrid open source business model. It is something quite different from the traditional model used by enterprise software companies. As the model is different, so are the pitches to customers. I am going to try and delve into the major differences but primarily from a marketing angle.

Traditional enterprise software is a little over 35 years old and stands a towering USD 60 billion. The advent of FOSS has changed how software companies run their own show and most of the enterprise biggies have taken to quite well (after all it is reducing their developmental costs).

Traditional enterprise software businesses have pitched the “one throat to throttle” concept. If anything went wrong with the software, there would be one company to blame for it, who is responsible for it. During the initial days of open source, this is precisely what was missing. With the hybrid model, it is addressed partially in that the community version is supported by the community and the enterprise version is supported for a fee (thereby providing a neck to catch hold of!).

I have a fundamental question at this juncture. If something about the software is unusable (for that business), which is it better to have - a blackbox binary or open source freedom which lets you change what you want to. Being able to craft a product to suit your enterprise ends is perhaps the largest advantage open source software provides.

Traditional software companies have focussed on licenses for usage ( not upgradation but just usage) of the software. Which is like buying a shirt with a one week limit or a movie with a 30 day expiry. If you want to wear the shirt after that one week, you need renew your licenses and same goes for the movie. Would you really let that happen in those cases? Why do people let it happen in the case of software?

The difference between charging for support and charging for permission to use is quite stark! Taking money without providing upgrades in like giving yesterday’s newspaper and still charging for it. For marketeers, this difference is quite important. With the hybrid model you are essentially pledging that you will not charge the company if they don’t use your service.

So why give out the source code a free community version? I suppose the answer lies in the concept of collective intelligence. With more people working on the product (as users, developers, testers or just advisers), it moves faster and in a direction more homogeneous with what the users (enterprise or community) really want.

This is not to say that traditional enterprise software has no role to play. It has a very big role to play. In markets where there is no software available, a more traditional approach maximizes economic returns for the company that created the software. Traditional enterprise software business model has a lot of marketing costs, which makes the products riskier. With a hybrid model, the risk is reduced as the software is try before you buy!

In India, we are already seeing traditional software companies (usually with proprietary data formats) providing companies the try before you buy alternative. The idea is that after 6 months, the data generated is stored in the proprietary format anyway - hence the user is locked in! To really give choice, the data storage should be standards compliant, thereby allowing the user to shift, if she so pleases. This freedom is the corner stone of the FOSS model.

The more we look at it, the more obvious it seems that this is a more beneficial model overall, considering economic gain of all parties involved. Only time will tell if the markets think the same way!