US exits from Paris Climate Accord - announces President Donald Trump

Donald Trump decides to walk way from the Paris Climate Accord. A move that should not be a surprise, as it was part of his election pledge. It's surprising how the US media and the opposition are shocked and surprised again and again, when they should realize that their president had listed all his actions in his election pledge.

The majority of the American people should be happy with whatever is happening and with the overall Trump administration, except for the "press covfefe" which goes against him. It almost looks like this is what majority Americans secretly wish for, but are reluctant to admit it in public.

"Make America Great Again" - really?

Ubuntu eats up Windows 10 - Windows not showing after installing Ubuntu - GRUB

After installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a dual boot mode with Windows 10, my laptop boots directly to Ubuntu and shows no option for Windows.

The solution for this is to run this command in the Ubuntu Terminal.

sudo update-grub

Click on the search icon on the top right of your Ubuntu Desktop and type in Terminal. Click on the icon that says "Terminal" (you can also use Windows+T keyboard shortcut).

This should list any unfound OS on to the Grub list boot options.

A not-so surgical strike

Demonetisation of ₹500 and ₹1000 notes was no surgical strike, it was a nuke. Mr Modi has dealt a blow to all the black money hoarders ( stool hoarding cash in India).  The media is talking about it even more than the TRUMP pulled off by Donald in the US Presidential Elections.

The question is, who is really affected? The simple answer is everybody.

The rich are hit in the long term - whether they have stashed away black money or not, the middle class in the medium term - again invariable of whether or not they have unaccounted money (unaccounted, because they are not really huge or ill-gotten like in the case of black money hoarders) and the poor in the short term.

The Rich
They have made heavy investments into the real-estate sector, which was pretty much been the staple medium for high investments. Those are definitely going to fall. The ones who had hoarded black money no longer do (atleast theoretically at this moment). The rich can only hope that there is no further action on all the foreign accounts that they have dumped their money in.

The Middle Class
Not enough cash on hand or have a few savings from gifts or chits and other such small payouts that are unaccounted. Some saving made over years which probably can't be really accounted for at this point of time. Realisation from sake of some ancestral properties, part of which was taken in black. These are amounts that they can probably deposit to bank and pay up some tax, but that could be a significant amount if you look at their overall income and saving.

The Poor
Hit hard immediately, but stand to gain in the longer run (hopefully). Most of their transactions are fine with cash, and cash has just been vacuumed, the payments to many I feel were circulated through the black market. Small traders can't run businesses with card swiping machines and mobile wallets. Not now, not in the near future. Until cash is back in the market they are going to be hit.

So effectively, everybody stands to loose and everybody stands to gain.

Not a surgical strike by any means. Is a total nuke on the parallel system, the epi-center being the black money hoarding rich who are still in India (that's a dig at people like Mallya and the other Modi).

Services vs Solutions vs Products

Services, Solutions and Products. These terms are very commonly misused. To a large extent it's a matter of interpretation, and to some extent it's about misleading marketing jargon.

My definition for the three are as follows

Services are limited to the scope of one time deployment or single customer or client requirement based applications. These are applications which are very specific to the needs of an individual customer. They do not factor-in industry best practices or processes, and to a large extent driven by customer inputs.

Solutions are more generic than services, in that they are about 50%-70% pre-built application, and the rest is customer specific requirements. These are applications which have a set of standard modules that address a key part of the customer needs in a particular domain. Solutions are half way to a product, as some modules would meet requirements of-the-shelf and the rest would be customer specific development. Typical the ready modules are built to be standards compliant.

Products are applications which are ready to use. These are nearly 90% ready modules and in some domains could be 100% ready with just a few minor configurations for roll out. Products require the application to be compliant with industry standards. Most customisation would be done with configuration and additional customisation would also be structured as extensions to prevent the core product being tampered with.

In terms of costing for a customer, they would see products being available at much lower costs than solutions or services. Services being the most expensive.

At the same time, services are highly customised to the need of an organization and rewrite minimal change in organisation for adoption.

Selling IT services, why pre-sales is key

Being a part of the IT services industry for a little less than 2 decades, there are many challenges that I have faced and overcome. But the very first challenge on any new requirement is always about bagging the order.

From my perspective, pre-sales is a crucial cog in the whole cycle which can define success or failure of an assignment at every stage there on.

From the clients perspective cost is a key factor in the decision making process.

Prospective clients always tend to want everything at the least price. Nothing wrong in it, the whole point of being in business is about maximising returns, and what better way to do that than cutting input cost or support cost?

If you ever faced a client during the sales / pre-sales cycle, you would have come across "when I have offers for x amount from other companies, how come you guys are quoting x+ for the same?"

If you have worked out your costs and estimates right, you might have the numbers to prove your quote mathematically, but to win the deal, you need to convince the client of the cost. This is where Value Proposition kicks in.

Value Proposition is all about showing the customer what he is going to get for the money he is going to part with. Some of it are tangible assets, some are not, but all of them have to be explained in clear terms. In short Value Proposition is the ROI to the customer.

Apart from Value Proposition, you have to specify the differentiators,
1. Experienced Team
2. Domain Knowledge
3. Quality Assurance
4. Standards and compliance
5. Documentation
6. Maintenance & Support

These are what can make or break a deal.

So just remember that for every pitch you make, you check for these factors to be covered and you could possibly have a quick positive closure.

Kanhaiya Kumar and the Delhi Circus @ JNU

We've been hearing a great deal about this guy Kanhaiya Kumar repeatedly over TV, radio and print but frankly I think he's another media sensation. Many are projecting him as the next big name in politics, going as far as comparing him to Narendra Modi and A B Vajpayee. Agreed that his oratory skills are great, but it doesn't help if his topic of choice is anti-national.

The fact that he was part of a so called cultural event, which had a strong anti-national sentiment is good enough to raise suspicion about the character. When I say anti-national I specifically mean anti-India. Not like how many have skewered this whole national pride thing to BJP. It's of great importance that every citizen love his / her country, there is no two ways about it in any nation across the world, so why attribute this to BJP.

Coming back, our great Kanhaiyah Kumar becomes an overnight hero, and for what? For being part of a cultural evening which on it's propaganda posters raised issues about afzal guru, talking about India creating problems in Kashmir? Breaking up and dividing India? How do you justify that? If you didn't shot anti India slogans or didn't super any of the topics of that days event, then why the hell were you there? What stops you from denouncing those statements, what stops you from stating your stand on those topics clearly?

All said, we should not encourage such people influence the youth who can easily be  misguided by such anti-national elements.

A sham called freebasics

Over the past couple of months Facebook had tried to push it's new free basics plan in India. So what is free basics? Why is Facebook so bent on it? And why it's a very bad idea?

Facebook first came out with a plan called internet.org, a service through which it wanted to push free access to Facebook to all mobile users, even for those who did not have data services enabled. This brought up the net-neutrality debate, and very soon people realised Facebook was up to no good.

Facebook realized that with the net-neutrality debate kicking in and the service providers backing out (because of a wider boycott thereat) , internet.org was not gonna be accepted. But they didn't stop, they came back with Freebasics, which basically is internet.org with a new name and a few inconsequential services thrown for good measure.

Consider this, if services providers like Airtel and Vodafone were to tie up with each of the social media sites, portals, ecommerce players with similar free access schemes, the internet would no longer be an open domain where everybody is equal. Currently access to any information, site, search, portals costs the same. Without this it would very soon become a skewed market. New platforms and startups would not be able to break into the scene because of an entry barrier created by free access to certain players. People will have to pay for certain services while some are free. You no longer have a level playing field.

With Freebasics, Facebook says, users will get free access to educational and select government sites along with, you guessed it, Facebook. For heavens sake, from when did Facebook become a basic human need? Facebook is probably the most time wasting and productivity killing tool in the whole of the IT industry.

And to top it all Facebook is running media campaigns, spending billions to convince it's a social cause is bs.

To sum it all up, we don't need Freebasics, we don't need internet.org, we need net-neutrality.