Articles by Jayasankar

No Picture
Internet

The power of metaphor or a TeuxDeux for what to build

January 6, 2010

The way you make users understand your program model is with metaphors. When you make things look, feel, and most importantly, behave like things in the real world, users are more likely to figure out how to use the program, and the app will be easier to use. When you call a folder a ‘Recycle Bin’ or a ‘Trash Can’, you automatically tell people the behavior and the usage of that object or feature. And that is a big deal in getting acceptance. So that is why this service TeuxDeux is such a joy to see and use. A to-do list as it should be. As similar as possible to what you would normally have on paper and better too. […]

No Picture
General

The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig

August 18, 2009

Great ideas, specific articulations of them and the books which present them transcend genres. The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig who is a professor of strategy and international management at IMD, Switzerland will most probably, be always found in the business section of the bookstores around the world. It just shouldn’t shouldn’t be so as it is a book which is as genre crossing as any, which should be read by many more than the people who would browse that section and is one which will surely be judged as one of the most important business books ever written. […]

No Picture
General

Through Netaland to Tiger Riders – Some (more) truths from Satyam II

June 16, 2009

The Satyam episode is over, and well too. The government and the populace couldn’t have hoped for a better ending, with the farce of needing to ‘nationalize’ Satyam if no bidder other than some carcass eating Private Equity funds turned up to take it over thankfully avoided. Barring some class action lawsuits or some past acquisitions that Satyam made blowing up on Tech Mahindra, Satyam has moved away from the front pages – except for when we hear about Raju’s sentence. And the pace of our judicial process ensures that the Ramalinga Raju episode will drag on for much longer. It also seems that the government appointed directors are on their way out after doing a sterling job.

So, as good a time for the second and final part of the post-mortem. […]

No Picture
General

Wolfram Alpha

May 20, 2009

Last week, a brilliant web service has been released which has found its niche by redefining the rules a bit and hence maybe able to thrive as a much needed complement to Google. Wolfram Alpha is not quite a search engine, at least in the way that we have come to understand the term and in that may lie the roots to its success in the realm which has eluded others.

Wolframalfa calls itself a computational search engine and the first thing to understand about it is that it does not do phrase searches of weighed and huge database like search engines. So keying in a phrase hoping to find a document hit for it somewhere on the net would not succeed in it. The best parallel is what was attempted to do by one of the oldest ‘search engines’ in the web, Ask Jeeves (same as today’s ask?) which attempted to do natural language processing on the questions which were put into it. […]

No Picture
General

From the Professors to The Sidekicks – Some Truths from Satyam I

February 18, 2009

So what happened at Satyam? This will be a two part series trying to bring in some perspective – now that the big picture has by and large emerged and the media cacophony has died down, its a good time to try to make some sense out of the sordid Satyam scandal. Rather than the chronology of events, looking at the people who played the lead roles in the plot perhaps more enlightening and indeed, more interesting. […]

No Picture
General

On Leadership

November 3, 2008

Once, an assumption was that any leader was an industrial manager. He had to assemble a bunch of specialists, show them the ‘vision’, tell them what they have to do and then ‘manage them by objectives’.

Find the numbers. Show and use carrots and sticks on the ‘worker’.

…..my argument is – this is incorrect :-). Read the rest of the essay to find whether you agree.
[…]

No Picture
General

Powerpointless

August 12, 2008

He had prepared for weeks.  The audience included ‘senior management’ – two middle aged men who would rather be anywhere else than spend their uber important time listening to a ‘kid’ speak. One of them […]