This independence day, a call for Digital Independence

With tremendous grit, determination and zeal, millions of Indians led by some of the finest leaders struggled for, and were able to, freeing the Indian subcontinent from the clutches of one of the most rapacious colonial masters ever, 70 years ago.

Vande Mataram

India was free, on 15th of August, exactly 69 years ago. The biggest, bulkiest and the most promising democracy of 130 crore citizens is now entering its 70th year of freedom.

These seven decades have been tumultuous for India, which has swerved through the highways of disorder, confusion, conflicts, evolution but definite progress on all fronts. All, but one that's defining global discourse and power today.

Times have changed dramatically in the last few years, however. From a purely brick-and-mortar model of economy dominating the discourse on what freedom and achievement could mean, we are now witnessing a profound shift towards click-and-mortar or pure-click models dominating not just individual national economies, but spanning the oceans at literally the click of a mouse.

Today, digital assets define some crucial aspects of a national economy like

• Ability to share information (email, messengers, chat tools, social media)
• Ability to transact commercially online (marketplaces, payment gateways)
• Ability to connect to the world and showcase one's work (social media)
• Project national power through platforms everyone uses daily (Apps, Software)
• Running parts of the real, hard economy (giant digital corporations)

And in the middle of this profound change, India has emerged as with many natural advantages. A growing nation of 1.3 billion individuals where the per capita income can only improve with time represents the biggest commercial and strategic opportunity for any brand or company. That is the reason for almost every large global brand to make a beeline for starting operations in India where they need to be physically present here in a large way, or to operate with minimum physical presence where the nature of things do not require them to.

What is the difference between Intelligence and Common sense?

I will analyse it using an unfolding story!

Yahoo (and Lycos, Alta Vista..) made a search engine much before Google did. That’s first-mover intelligence.

All of them failed to see Google’s inherent strength when they could have smashed it - that’s lack of common sense and wisdom. And very bad luck.

Google decided to plod on, and build on it. That’s tenacity coupled with intelligence.

Some early investors made a killing. That’s foresight, intelligence and luck combined.

Yahoo still did not see any value in it. That’s a total lack of common sense.

Google kept building on its success. And then launched social media tools (Wave? Buzz?). That’s ambition, and tenacity. But with little wisdom.

Facebook romped home with a much better strategy and product. That’s intelligence.

Google continued fighting. Continues to. With G+.

Facebook trampled it. That’s tenacity coupled with intelligence.

Whatsapp emerged. That’s super-intelligence. Yahoo - the employer - misses again.

Yahoo got hammered in the long run.

Finally, Hashtags are mainstream!

The humble hashtag

Say what you may, but going mainstream sounds hollow unless the biggest of them endorses you. And Facebook has done the humble Hashtag the favour finally. The “#” is now officially the disparate-content-puller-aggregator on the world’s biggest social media platform also, in addition to the hugely addictive Twitter.

So what is this Hashtag (hashtag from here on), what does it do, and why the fuss?

Many years ago (six is many in internet lingo!), open source and open standards advocate Chris Messina introduced the hashtag to Twitter, thereby transforming it into the fast moving yet stable content reference and sharing microblog we know it today. What would Twitter be without the humble # that so easily helps us look up any topic we wish to, in real time?

Perhaps it is this very ease of use that has finally prompted Facebook to accord the distinguished “officially approved” status to the hashtag. On its official blog, Facebook calls the hashtag feature the first step of “a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics.”

This is a nicely couched way of saying – “Hey, we seem to have missed out on a great simple tool to collect separated information on same topic. Let’s catch it from hereon!”

Why are hashtags so cool?

Hashtags are perhaps the easiest way to read the BIG picture on a topic, rather than views of only those you are connected to.

The Limits of Success - what internet companies can teach us

As we go about experiencing and studying the business model of internet companies, there is a fundamental big lesson to be learnt about managing businesses - the limits of success.

Every business, new or old, successful or not, has to undertake strategic planning for its future. It can be an informal approach (as it is with most SMEs and FMBs) or it can be a formal HQ directed approach (as with most MNCs). Whatever the model be, there was a time when strategic planning meant creating a vision for the next several decades. Then it got reduced to perhaps around 10 years, and then 5, and then not more than the present fiscal. I doubt if strategic planning today can be done with any amount of confidence even for the next 6 months.

This is especially true for internet companies. By the term "internet companies" I refer to those firms whose main business is to provide a certain platform/service to users on the internet. This platform/service can be social media (Facebook), search engine (Google), online auctions (eBay), cloud services (Microsoft) or retail store (Amazon).


What do we mean by "the limits of success?"

Going beyond strategic management, the internet companies are a great way of learning crucial lessons about the most pressing question in business management - the limits of success. Four questions define this:

1. How much can a company succeed in its business?
2. For how long can a company succeed in the same business?
3. How profitably can a company keep on, in the same business?
4. Is success permanent?

These questions almost seem encroaching in the domains of philosophy and futurology, but they remain the core questions that every manager worth his/her salt has to confront some or the other time. As I said earlier, studying the internet firms is a fantastic and enriching way of understanding the answers to these questions regarding the limits of success.


Let me illustrate my thought with some detailed examples :

The engine and the windows

• Browsers I remember way back in 1993, there was a time when the email was just beginning to make its presence felt. As the email spread around the corporate world as the most fancy thing to have, the path was set for the development of the first business model of dominating the internet - the browser. Netscape Navigator (NN) was the first classy internet browser that came along. Created by the famous Mark Andreessen, it soon became the dominating force for desktop internet search. However, this lasted only for a couple of years when Microsoft made a u-turn on its stand on the internet, and decided to come full force and destroy the NN. In classic Bill Gatesian style, Microsoft bundled a free Internet Explorer browser with its dominating operating system the Windows, and naturally, as always, it killed the NN in a short span of just 2 years. NN could do nothing and watched in horror as it almost vanished from the market. It still exists, but the glory days are over. As a dedicated user of the NN, it was quite shocking for me to see its sudden demise, and the inexorable rise of the IE browser. This - amongst other things - culminated in a legendary battle between Microsoft and the US Justice Dept, which again Microsoft won, and saved itself from being cut up in parts to avoid its monopolistic abuse of power.