Wager!!

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Hectic day today … no seriously! Have a late night conference all regarding work. Hope it finishes within an hour or so, while my roomies (who are all single and loving it) are celebrating the V day, I will be discussing business and revenue models.

Read a nice post on entrepreneurship, here.

Today, I made a wager on the daily sales of one of your brandstores. We had launched a sabse sasta din offer on Sapient Brandstore. My MD was saying that the daily revenues will barely cross a lakh. I informed him that it would be much more than that. Rs. 500 more to my CTC!!

Valentine’s Day

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

So its that time of the year again. When all the retailers and big brands of the world try to woo the lucky couples off to a romantic time and great gifts!! Fly a couple and get 10 tickets free, buy for two and get 10% off … is it really all just a marketing gimmick? Open any newspaper or surf to any channel, and you will see what I am hinting at.

Abstract from Wikipedia –

Saint Valentine (in Latin, Valentinus) is the name of several martyred saints of ancient Rome. Of the Saint Valentine whose feast is on February 14, nothing is known except his name and that he was buried at the Via Flaminia north of Rome on February 14. It is even uncertain whether the feast of that day celebrates only one saint or two or more saints of the same name. For this reason this liturgical commemoration was not kept in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints for universal liturgical veneration as revised in 1969.[2] Traditional Roman Catholics continue to venerate St. Valentine on his feast day, February 14.

Funny, isnt it? If so little is actually known about the group of saints who gave their life for the masses, still this day is celebrated on such a vast scale.

Aamchi Mumbai

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

This just in.

Thank god for some good sense!! Saamna was bound to slam one of their own. The moment Raj Thackeray must have said those words, there would have been some minds tracing the eddies those remarks must have caused in the social currents of the city.

Slamming non-mumbaikars to garner the vote of the marathi manus is one thing. This is more like trying to take the cake and eating it too. At any point of time, if you see what is running a huge city like Mumbai, then it is the corporates, the financial markets, bollywood, underworld, politics, et al. How many maharashtrians (I am trying to use the politically correct term here!) do you know in any of these fields?

Take the non-mumbaikars out of Mumbai, and the city does not remain Mumbai!! It looses its proverbial charm! The economy goes down, unemployment goes up … from a T1 city, it might plummet to as low as a T3 city. I am not exaggerating here!! What are you standing to gain after coming to rule in such a city?

Some things are better when shared. Aamchi Mumbai is open to all. It feeds on precisely that.

Microsoft Vista

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Do not worry, I am not going to complain about (or sing paeans) on this product of MS. Its about their much needed SP1 release. Just read a release here.

This is precisely the kind of impatience that results in a bad product. I do not blame the firm for this excuse of an OS. I blame its users and its channel partners. Microsoft is a business organization after all, also one that is customer centric. So, it will follow the market demand … needless to say, if customers want a new thing now!!, then a new thing they will have. Who cares whether it works properly or not.

This reminds me of Howard Roark from The Fountainhead, and his stubborn indignation to do things his way. At least that way a good product is delivered. Could this be a case of escalation of commitment? Now that you have decided on Vista being a marketable product, make it better and within a given timeline.

I do not envy Microsoft. Lets leave it at that and thank the Ubuntu guys for making it run perfectly on my laptop.