Friday 20 January 2012

Have Breakfast or Be Breakfast !!!

The recent Kodak bankruptcy case reminded me of this article. Dr. Murthy was spot-on !!!


Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above.

The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones. Reason being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cell phone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sony’s and Canons are taking note.


Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry.

The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India.


That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.


Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smart phone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?


The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question - "Who is my competitor?"


Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately.

Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising?

Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson".


So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital." In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?"


The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.


In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget.


So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no.


Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands.

If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!


India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmy gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket.


Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 over’s. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the day of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment) . Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.


One last illustration.

20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cell phone!

An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!


On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots?


Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition.

He said "Have breakfast ...or.... be breakfast"!

That sums it up rather neatly.

Article by (Professor) Dr.Y.L.R.Murthy, IIM, Bangalore, India

Tuesday 29 December 2009

Sunday 4 October 2009

Inglourious Basterds- The Review


Only Tarantino can pull of a movie like Inglourious Basterds, and does he do it with some panache or what. Inglourious Basterds is a movie high on steroids with a jolts of white lightning profusely mixed into it. Tarantino has the magical ability of creating an utlra tense situation and adding a dash of subtle humour, which by no means reduces the tension per se, but keeps you rivetted all the more. You can actually laugh at the sheer grim and horrific situations that the characters find themselves in.

Take for example the opening sequence which introduces us to the cunning, conniving, scheming, adjectives are less to describe the sinister nature of Hans Landa, who slowly but surely gets all the information from the poor french farmer LaPadite, while cooly sipping away at milk. Christoph Waltz has given a performance of a lifetime and would definitely deserve a shot at the Oscars for this. You would definitely need a subbed version of the DVD to enjoy the conversations better. You can watch him get evil by the minute, as he starts comparing the Jews to rats, and that they are the cause for the bubonic plague. Just as you think that their conversation has become less tense where Landa starts comparing squirrels to rats, saying that both are rodents the scene takes an amazing reversal and Landa's men discover the Jews hiding in the basement a-la rats.

Tarantino breathes life into some amazing characters like Hugo Stiglitz- the gestapo killer, the baseball wielding Bear Jew, little man-Smithson, and the heavily accented Aldo Raine played by Bradd Pitt. As, in the case of some of his earlier movies Tarantino has arranged the movie by chapters and some of these amazing characters come to life in the second chapter titled Inglourios Basterds. The Basterds led by Lt. Aldo raine are a bunch of Nazi german killers put together to instill fear across the third reich. One of the scenes that will remain etched in the viewers memory is that of the Bear Jew mercilessly beating a gestapo with a baseball bat when he does not divulge the german hideouts.Tarantino has the notoriety to use extreme violence and gore, and this movie is no different, with the uncut version having multiple head scalping and extreme bloody scenes. Aldo also has his own unique way of marking the German officers who can be identified later as Nazi jew hunters.

The movie unfolds further in the third and forth chapters where we are introduced to the beautiful Emmanuelle who owns a theatre in Paris, and a completely smitten war hero Fredric Zoller. So smitten is zoller by the beautiful Emmanuelle that he changes the venue of a war movie 'Nations Pride' starring himself for which the the Fuhrer Hitler himself is going to be present. Enter the beautiful Diane Kruger as Bridget Von Hammersmark who is a German actress but actually helping out the Basterds in their plans. One of the scenes in a bar is utterly hilarious but which ends up in a messy gun fight, since Hicox -An english officer is not able to maintain his german accent.On being found out Hicox has this to say "Now, about this pickle we find ourselves in..." and then ensues a Bar brawl like no other. Soon we find out that Emmanuelle is no bimbo and she has some plans of her own, as she is the lone survivor of the assualt that Landa had carried out earlier. Watch out for the scene where she does a Rambo, getting ready for the D-day of Operation Kino, complete with lipstick doubling up as Facepaint and all. In between all this commotion Bridget tries to slip Aldo and his team as Italians inside the theatre. One of my most favorite scenes from the movies is that of Landa asking Aldo and his henchmen to repeat their names again and again- Gorlomi, Margherita and Deccocco. Little does Bridget know that Landa knows everything about her and is quite fluent in Italian as well.

You do feel sorry for Emmanuelle/Shosanna since both her and zoller die in the shootout in the projector room but her friend Marcel keeps his promise and the theatre turns into a fireball. And just as you think that Landa has managed to strike a deal with the Basterds and would go scott free, there is another twist in the tale. You kind of feel the pleasure when Aldo creates his masterpiece marking Landa on the forehead.

Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino at his best, pure and pristine film making with a complete assault to your senses. Go get attacked and feel the pleasure in the pain.