Infosys says they wouldn’t hire Satyam employees and has advised their recruitment teams to not entertain calls from Satyam employees who intend to jump ship at this time of crisis. Nasscom has also asked not to poach from Satyam.

I don’t know if the first story was a misinterpretation, but if NRN had said that in the light of ’safeguarding’ Infosys’s ethics, it was a very wrong statement. Let’s look at it this way, the World Bank refused to work with Satyam for the next few years, another noted Bank canceled their contract with Satyam a few weeks ago, and who is going to fight for these businesses now? Will all the other majors including Infosys ‘let go’ of these businesses? I don’t think so, they would undercut and quote even with the least margins to win these businesses at this time with both Satyam crumbling and the economy being shaky.

However, if the announcement was directed more towards senior management from Satyam’s board that will try to jump, then it should have strictly been an internal communication and not a public announcement.

Isn’t this too funny to be a coincidence? Or is it not a coincidence?

Enough has been said about the shocking events that shook Mumbai and the whole of India in the past week, what was expected to be a nice and long thanksgiving weekend was turned into a weekend of terror.

I read some nice articles on the Viewspaper and observed different perspectives, thought I could post the links here. Also, a nice photo set on flickr here.

Best-selling author Michael Crichton died unexpectedly in Los Angeles early this month, after a courageous and private battle against cancer.

While the world knew him as a great story teller that challenged our preconceived notions about the world around us — and entertained us all while doing so — his wife Sherri, daughter Taylor, family and friends knew Michael Crichton as a devoted husband, loving father and generous friend who inspired each of us to strive to see the wonders of our world through new eyes. He did this with a wry sense of humor that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget.

Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand.

He will be profoundly missed by those whose lives he touched, but he leaves behind the greatest gifts of a thirst for knowledge, the desire to understand, and the wisdom to use our minds to better our world.

I am an ardent Michael Crichton reader and have read all books by Crichton. In memory of MC, I will be starting a ‘mini-series’ sort of extracts from my favorite Crichton novels soon.

I have done great deal of work in customer facing jobs to date, and have very strong opinions about what the measure is for ‘quality customer service’. I think I deserve the right to opine since I consider myself a good advocate of customer service, having won Microsoft’s ‘Direct Measure of Quality’ award when I did work for Microsoft.

On the other hand, I am a consumer of many services in India like any of you – starting from broadband internet to milk delivery. I have, until now, seen very few instances or companies in India provide ‘quality customer service’. I have written about my customer service experiences on this blog earlier here, these were my experiences and what I perceived of incidents around me.

Lately, I have been noticing poor quality of service more often than not from various places. Here are some of my experiences:

The Good:

I am a customer of the ‘world’s local bank’ and have been very impressed with their customer service staff every time I call them. I was impressed when I recently received an email and SMS stating that their systems would be undergoing upgrades and I will not have access to all services for a period of time; I received these messages well ahead of their maintenance and promptly received a message when the upgrades were completed apologizing for the inconvenience caused.

My Rating: Excellent!

The Bad:

I have been a very loyal customer of one of the US banks that operates in India, and use their credit cards, had a personal loan with them, and also held two savings accounts with them. When I called to pre-close my personal loan it was a nightmare! First, they need 30 days of notice, so when I called to say I want to pre-close, they would ask me to callback after 30days and will charge me the subsequent EMI, they wouldn’t send anyone to collect the cheque, would have me visit their offices (not any of them but a specific office) within a stipulated time that doesn’t work for me, the office is open only between 9am – 1pm and is closed on weekends, and when I actually visited their office to drop the cheque, they would take 15days to process the pre-closure and if it exceeds the 20th of the month, I will be charged the subsequent month’s EMI and I have to provide a 30day notice all over again and repeat the process. Okay, all these are company policies, but when I call the customer care center I would expect someone to say ‘we will try to help’. Both the rep and his manager I spoke to ‘refused’ to help and did not even tell me they will try. I would have been happy if they told me they will try and callback in a couple of days to say they tried but it didn’t work.

My Rating: Bad.

The Ugly:

I ordered pizza today and I was promised a forty minute delivery; when it was beyond fifty minutes and I called, I was informed that there was a ‘problem at the outlet’. Don’t I deserve the right to be informed about the delay if there is one? Its not that I will die of hunger after forty minutes, but the main reason we ordered pizza was because I was running out of time to get ready and leave for work. I would have expected a phone call to inform me of the delay. The rep that answered the phone sounded anything but apologetic and also had sarcasm when he asked if it was the delivery when our door bell rang while I was on the phone. [apparently, it was not the delivery].

My Rating: Ugly.

I use a datacard for Internet usage while I commute to work, it is so critical to me that this worked at all times because I spend two hours in commute and that is when I catchup on reading and writing. I have only begun using the datacard since August this year and the bill has never reached me on time, neither email nor the hardcopy. Since the bills never reached me, I did not know about the billing dates and missed payments. Ironically, every time I use the datacard and connect to the internet, I receive promotional SMSs through their software but no notice of bills due. So they never told me my bill was due, they charged late payment fee, disconnected my service on the card, refused to waive off late payment fee when I called to explain, refused to send me bills on email and hardcopy stating they could only do either and not both, said they can’t ’see’ my information because their systems are down when I called another time, refused to transfer me to another technician whose system is up so I could be helped, and finally refused to put me on to a supervisor so I couldn’t complain! It took them a very lengthy email from me to their service assurance cell to cancel the late payment fee and agree to send me bills on time. However, I am still waiting for the bill for November when the bill date has passed!

My Rating: Ugly.

Don’t we house customer service operations for most international banks in India? Don’t we house technical support operations in India for most technology companies? Isn’t India supposed to be the ‘outsourcing hub’ for the world?

So why is the customer service situation in such a sorry state throughout the country? Why should I always have to complain to get a treatment that is supposed to be given to every caller and every consumer otherwise? I don’t ask for the fake ’sir’, ‘thank you’, empathy or phone etiquette, all I ask is that you man the phone with people that are at least capable of doing their jobs right.

Will this ever happen? or would you say ‘Sorry this is India, that’s all you get’!

This is g-speak, their video humbly closes after showcasing an awesome interface that mimics what you have seen in Spielberg’s Minority Report.

Without any further delay, presenting g-speak:

This is ‘pure awesomeness’!

Its amazing what live Internet video can do today – you can watch the NASA shuttle launches live, MLB, NFL everyone has a live broadcast, and so does a 19year old disturbed young man from Florida who ‘live streamed’ his suicide on Justin.tv

The boy Abraham K. Biggs, also wrote a suicide note on another forum, it was a very disturbing thought to read someone’s suicide note online so I did not post it here.

Here’s an official statement from the website Justin.tv:

As for the broadcaster incident last night, we don’t comment on individual videos, however, our policy prohibits inappropriate content on Justin.tv. We rely on the community to flag videos that they feel are objectionable. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed and quickly removed from the system if it violates our Terms of Use.

Here’s a question raised by NewTeeVee:

… it’s not as if technology enabled the taking of a life, or as if this hasn’t happened before. A British man hung himself last year after allegedly being goaded on by fellow users on Paltalk, another live video site. There was even a widely distributed movie on the topic of live-streamed killings released earlier this year called Untraceable. But last night’s incident raises a thought-provoking question regarding free hosting of live broadcasts — what could sites like Justin.tv possibly do to prevent live-streamed snuff films?

The irony is that Biggs overdosed on pills while on camera and appeared to be breathing for hours until watchers realized he might be serious, at which point they alerted the police. The video kept running until police and EMTs broke Biggs’ door down and blocked the camera’s view.

This blog now includes posts on life that were earlier written on a separate blogger url; these are categorized into ‘Life’ and imported from BlogSpot. Formatting and style may vary now but I will work on those and get them to adhere to the new styling and formatting soon.

This is a beautiful article by Nicholas Carr on The Atlantic about what the Internet is doing to our brains, is it making us stupid or better. A must read!

I was at the BangaloreIT.biz event last week and was a disappointed with the audience, a lot of school/college kids and general public but not many technical or business decision makers were seen. It was boring for not being able to have a mature conversation with anyone. I asked an IT worker if he knew what ‘cloud computing’ was and he asked if it had to do with weather prediction! I ended the conversation abruptly and excused myself.

Talking of cloud computing, I realized that the term which was just used as a buzzword until a couple of years ago is now actually a technology that is both practical and profitable, here are a couple that I think have a very strong business model:

Amazon Web Services:

The AWS as it is called is a collection of infrastructure services as they call it. The Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 provides scalable computing capacity for applications and devices on the cloud, their Simple Storage Service of Amazon S3 provides resizable storage on the cloud, their SimpleDB provides a cloud database that can be used to query large amounts of structured data in real time, and finally the Simple Query Service or SQS is a virtual message queue on the cloud for communication between networks, clients, devices, applications or servers.

The beauty of these services is that they can all work individually or together to create a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure. You cut down on all the infrastructure capital investments that you will have to make otherwise because you only ‘pay as you go’ with AWS. There are also other benefits like ease of scalability, security and being able to integrate with any platform.

Microsoft Azure:

The Azure services platform is a cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft Datacenters. Built on the same lines of AWS, the Azure platform consists of Windows Azure a cloud services operating system, Live Services which provides social applications, SQL Services which provide SQL Database instances on the cloud, .NET Services for managed application hosting, Sharepoint Services and Dynamics CRM services all capable of working independently or together.

Business model is the same as AWS and you can ‘pay as you go’ depending on usage. Limited setup time, ease of scalability, and ease of management are selling points as against regular capital investments against infrastructure build outs.

However similar AWS and the Azure platform may sound in terms of functionality I think Microsoft will have an edge due to the vast majority of existing enterprises on their platform already and the ease of integration.

It will also be interesting to watch what Microsoft does with its cloud services platform and their existing Hosted Exchange and Sharepoint services. Also interesting would be to watch Microsoft’s roadmap on the Unified Communications front as they already own TellMe networks for hosted VoiceXML solutions and interoperability between the Azure services platform and applications like the TellMe platform + Microsoft OCS will be a dream come true for any architect.