Google Simply Rocks!

And My View on What Microsoft Should do!

Google Does It Again!

Google is a perfect combination of technical competency of the decade and the marketing machine - atleast for now. Combining this with their Outside-In approach has made them the "talk of the town". It has used these capabilities once again at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for the launch of its video service

Yahoo News has a pretty good story about their launch:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060107/gadget_show_google_video.html?.v=3

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh05774_2006-01-07_05-32-42_n06140985_newsml

Cringley Column predicts the direction where it might be leading (which is kewl):

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060105.html

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

Every news that is reported is filled with Google vs Microsoft. To me, its funny - newspapers are just trying to increase their circulation, eyeballs etc - selling what would sell!

My View on What Microsoft Should do:

M$ needs to decide what markets it want to play in irrespective of the competition. Their strength continues to be their dominance position in Operating System and Office tools

So they need to ensure that they win the following segments (which they already play-in with different degrees):

• Desktop (enterprise and consumer segments)
• Servers
• Mobile handsets
• Consumer Electronics

They need to pull in all the hardware vendors together - which is so much opposite to M$ today. But if they can do that, they can execute on the vision of Convergence - with M$ dominating on all these different device types!

If M$ wants to have a big presence in the media market, they have to have a focused leadership team with a planned strategy and an execution plan. And then let the battle begin! They would win if they are organized

If M$ wants to have a huge presence in online services - like email, blogging, photo sharing, video - they need to understand where the market is going, what the key players are etc. They need to put down the pros and cons of having a [cloned] online services portal, of investing in one of the other leading-edge services portal or of licensing the softwares to the application hosting sites or these portals

They can come up with a "Microsoft Online Portal Office" which can be licensed to many portals. Under this suite of new office tools, they can then innovate and do acquisitions to grab new ideas (say a new service comes)

What may also make sense is the implementation of the theme Convergence on the web - a relaunch of passport in some other manner! This theme can be combined with the Microsoft Online Portal Office and voila, they can lead that market segment

On the security front, they can turn the tables around. Make everyone responsible for it - it is a collaboration and a shared responsibility of the virus protection guys, the firewall guys, the networking guys et all. They need to realize that security market with all the players is something that can not go away, so let these other players take a part of the blame when these players take part of the pie!

Conclusion

I am not sure whats up at M$ and/or what Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates are planning. But their marketing strategy is broken and they need to show a vision to the world!

My Second Job at Cisco

Richardson, TX April, 2004

Summary:

This job taught me the importance of:

• Communication - It is the single most important thing that matters!
• Building Relations
• Reinforcement of my earlier lessons: (1) Be Precise in your communication (2) Target your audiences appropriately (3) Excite the market by new thinking

I would complete this sometime later!! Probably when I look back two years hence, I would be able to write this better at that time :-)

My First Job at Cisco

Bangalore June, 2001

Summary:

This job would teach me:

• How to Excite the Market
• How to Simplify Communication that out to the field
• Basics of human skills (which I wld have to improve upon during my next job)

Slow Start on the Job:

I joined as a Software Engineer for a product called Service Selection Gateway (SSG). We were working on integrating it with Cisco IOS and it was at a design phase

We would have endless meetings within the team: discussing design criteria and ways to achieve them. The discussions would get hot (read: really long) at times. Amit used to attend every one of them (I liked that fact)

About the team:

On the meetings, you could instantly feel:

• Coolness that T S Ajai would bring during those heated discussions. His words would almost be final - he had that uni-directional shield around him - heat would not come in and the information would only flow out
• Excitement that Murthy would bring in. You knew something is up when he would start with "Boss!"
• Experience that Gpr would bring in and you could feel the hard work he can do

You would also note others like Ranjan Sahoo (excitement), Rajan Dhinakaran and Navneet Aggarwal (experience). Your first impression about Vinodh, Ashoka, K S Srinivas, Vivek Achar would not be a whole lot until you worked with them

One thing that I can not forget to mention: Everyone including Amit liked the fact that Ajai and Murthy knew the whole code by heart - which to my young developing mind was a big thing! It gave me a goal

First Phase:

I would fix some bugs and minor things here and there in the first couple of months. It was a great time to learn the code and follow the foot-steps of Ajai and Murthy. I would play with Cisco equipment and learn the different technolgies

Our product was going through the EFT (Early Field Trial) now and everyone was asked to contribute to make it successful. Ajai and Murthy with their experience would be the folks to contribute the most to it. The product then moved into the deployement phase

Early on, I would just listen to what most other folks are commenting on the customer support alias. Slowly, I picked on some email threads during the night time - so I would help resolve issues when no-one was around to help. Everyone would praise this effort. And hence would start the beginning of a role similar to Technical Marketing Engineer

Second Phase:

At the time, I was working on every issue that would ever flood the Customer Support alias for the SSG. It was a combination of queries from presales effort and postsales issues. Both of these efforts (pre and post sales) were different and I learnt from both of these activities

Since we owned the product, we were most excited about it success. The revenues were not enough for this product to have a dedicated Product Manager

Lessons Learnt:

Presales effort taught me:

• "Simplicity in Communication": Sales is a complex operation with Customers, Competition, FUDs etc. And I as part of "marketing" the product, needs to simplify the communication - the more we simplify, the faster the adoption of the technology in the field and the better chance we have of winning the deal!
• "Exciting the Market": Sales team and Customers both need excitement in the market. We chose innovation as the path and we drove innovation in multiple dimensions. (1) expanding the role from dsl segment to broadband wireless, metro-ethernet, cable, pwlan et all. (2) addition of new requirements (we were known as feature factory): if we heard anything from the customer or sales team that we felt might prove important for other customers, we would add it! And we have to keep that momentum to excite the field

Postsales effort taught me:

• Feedback Mechanism: Postsales support is one of the strengths of Cisco - kudos to Cisco TAC team! For us, to be almost flawless, we had to form a feedback loop for our product. And so it was!

Last Phase:

There was enough momentum to dedicate full time Product Manager and the different market segments (Broadband Wireline and Wireless) had some form of Product Manager attention to it. The management at Central Development Organization (CDO) decided that it was the time for the Next-Gen product. And it was a time for me to move on!

How Did I land up at Cisco Systems

Sept, 2000

Short Background:

I was picked up by Cisco from the campus. It was a job beyuond my dreams. My dream jobs were Sun and probably Novell (as my primary interests were OS and Networking and I was a linux geek back then)

Amit Phadnis had come for recruitment on that day - who eventually became my manager at Cisco

I was from Mechanical background but with my interests and my knowledge in the computer arena, I never had issues passing the written tests. It was always the interviews that used to last anywhere north of 5 mins

Technical Interview - Starts:

I stepped inside the interview room where I had been multiple times already for other companies. I shook hands with the two interviewers and grabbed my chair

The interview started with my background (arggh.. Mechanical Engineering). Amit told - "well, we recruit some of the best people from CS and EE.. we are the best company.. one of the largest market cap (and all that kinda crap that I knew and had heard them during PPT)". I assured them that I can surprise them with my knowledge. Amit scanned my resume once more for a second

Amit looked at his watch uninterestingly and told his partner - "the next candidate would not be in before the next 25 mins. Why dont we ask him something." Voila, my chance to convince them!

Technical Interview - Lasts Forever:
So Amit started with some good C questions like pointers-to-pointers, pointers-to-functions, pointer-to-strings and changing in functions, static extern variables et all. I did fairly well. I was giving them examples of where I have used those trying to convince them that I knew more than what they think I know

So we moved up to Data Structures and then to Operating System and then to Networking. By this time, I knew it was well past 30 mins now and I had done pretty good - missing only one or so! I could feel that Amit was convinced that I knew what I was talking about

Technical Interview - Turning the Tables:

Amit's next statement surprised me - "we hire only CS and EE students but exceptions can be made." And he asked me a couple of questions about when I can join, is moving to a different city (Bangalore) an issue et all

I was further surprised (and probably excited) when Amit started to convince me why Cisco is a good choice for me. He was talking about the challenges, the best company and compensation philosophy (stocks and stuff). He, then, explained me about the HR interview The tables had turned over now!

This interview lasted for 50+ mins when I glanced at my watch as I exited out of the interview room. Amit was apolozing the next candidate waiting and asked him to move in

Interview with HR:

Shiny Samuel was the HR person that visited IIT-Kanpur campus that year. Amit had a closed door meeting with Shiny and I just hoped that HR gets convinced (I have heard of horrible HR stories from seniors - and I was praising that this one is a kind one)

Amit asked me to discuss with Shiny and handed me his card and left to interview the next candidate

The first few sentences from Shiny were to ease me. This was an uncomfortable feeling because I was thinking that the worst part is about to come and she is preparing me for it. Or probably she is thinking the best way to put forth the worst part. Anwyay, it was the bad couple of mins. She then told me "they hire only CS and EE students.. choose the best engineers around the world.. legal issues if they take any other student beyuond CS and EE"

And then the most relaxing part followed that Amit and she could make an outside campus offer - even though they are hiring within the campus. I had no problem for this (its Cisco that I would be working with!). I told her that its a dream come true for me and she could be assured that I have passion for my work et all

Time for the Offer Letter:Bangalore Dec, 2000
It was the winter break when I visited Bangalore. I stayed with S Shridhar (my college room mate) who was then working in Wipro

I visited Cisco Office couple of times. On my first visit, I met with Shiny who asked me to meet with Amit and that he would ask me to join the team. She would progress as per Amit's instructions. I went to meet Amit who told me that he would take care of the process and I meet with him on 2nd Jan. He then asked me to meet with couple of folks from his team, so I met with Navneet Aggarwal and B L Balaji. The team was leaving for lunch and I had a glance of the whole team of around 30 people. On my second visit, I met with Amit and got my offer letter (finally!)


Part of Cisco Family: Bangalore June, 2001

I joined Cisco as a software engineer. I met with other members who joined Cisco with me - we were part of the first batch to join in that cycle. There would be people joining every week for the next 5-6 weeks

We went through orientation period of 1 week where we performed some team exercises and were made aware of Human Resources, cisco products, product life-cycles, software development process etc. It was excitement for me, for sure

The other folks realizing that I was from Mechanical Branch and that I was IIT-Kanpur, they asked me all sort of curiosity questions, and I definitely felt an aura around me

And hey, I am part of Cisco Family now and I owe it to Amit Phadnis!