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Vanity Brands

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

We were having a team lunch … the four of us, Manish, Mayank, Ranjith and myself. One of the rare occasions these days when all four had a free time slot in the middle of the day. So, sitting at Eat Street, Hyderabad near the Hussain sagar lake, having fast foods like the rest of urban India. As I reached for the Subway Cookie that I had bought, Manish remarked that I could have bought an entire packet of biscuits at 60% of that cookie’s price.

While the others were laughing, I informed him that the utilities in both the cases are different. In case of Hide&Seek, the utility is value-for-hunger, in case of a Subway Cookie, its more or less Vanity (well actually its not vanity, but I just like them). But then we got into a discussion where other well known brands are often flaunted for vanity. There are so many of them … Ferrari, Mercedes, Maybach, Apple, Tommy Hilfiger, Rolls Royce … effectively all brands that could be used as a status symbol.

IIM Jobs

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

No, I am not job hunting. Atleast not yet :)

But I came across this great site. Its iimjobs.com

Its a portal for all job hunters or for those of us who want to know our market value, and feel good with that information. The site has a simple layout with all the recent job openings on top. Plus, if you are particular about one stream only, then you can browse through the job postings by specialty.

And the best part about the site is that you do not have to register to get to the content.

Kudos Tarun!!

Coming back to this post after a decade, and can say so much has changed about IIM Jobs. It has become one of our default sites to post jobs, and also refer to friends and family when they are hunting for opportunities.

In the start-up eco-system, I can see that founders are posting jobs for co-founders.

Business World

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Theres a section of Business World which is Quick take, the question of the next week’s issue was posted to me via through a friend.

The Indian IT industry has several set backs –

  1. Lack real technology work – with around 60% of the work lying in the AMC and Testing (Support) bracket, there is dearth of scope for your average Indian techie to get their digits (pun intended) dirty in some concrete techie work.
  2. Project orientation – Most of the biggies in the Indian IT industry are service oriented, and more concerned with projects for foriegn customers. Their business orientation is towards projects, so much so that the entire organization bases its financials upon projects and their profitability. It may seem as a sweeping statement, but think about it, projects for the same client cumulate into an account. Accounts cumulate into a Geography. How this is bad is that there is no focus on IT products in the market.
  3. PPP of economies – How can one sustain themselves on pure projects alone? Esp. those that are based on a foreign economy. The moment the domestic economy starts doing better than the foreign economy (read those of the clients), the cost of the project rises (either for the firm or for the client). To remain competitive vis-a-vis other foriegn IT vendors, the indian firm will have to drop rates, losing profitability.
  4. Attrition – With an average attrition of around 15%, the costs of a project are constantly going up. Whenever a resource switches to a new firm, he gets a pay hike. A pay hike translates into more costs for the same resource. More costs without increasing revenues results in reduction of profitability.

That was my answer, I was a little surprised to learn that theres such a small amount of people who agree with me. No matter, it will be a good thing for India if I am wrong ;-).