I am not sure if it is an unfortunate coincidence or a sadistic prank by fate that three popular figures of the IT industry who died this month were all pioneers in their respective fields. If you don’t know who Steve Jobs is, I may be able to understand but you would have to be living under a rock to not know of his sad demise. While Steve Jobs died, after a long fight with pancreatic cancer, on 5th October 2011, exactly 1 week later a greater legend breathed his last. Dennis Ritchie the creator of Unix and the C programming language was found dead in his home on 12th October 2011. As if the loss to the digital world wasn’t devastating enough, 12 days later, on 24th October, John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP and the concept of Artificial Intelligence, logged out of the world.
It was the night of 20th September 2011 and I was returning home after attending a party at a friend’s place in Saheed Nagar. My friend’s sister got a job in TCS which made him invite some of the close friends in our group for a party at their home only. My phone started ringing right from the evening.After at least 15 calls from different friends and explaining them that I had some work to finish,finally I left office at around 8 o’clock. All of my friends already reached and were having a great time. By the time the food was ready we started gossipping and rewinding the happy college days. Finally got the call from aunty “Dinner is Ready”. The food was prepared by my friend’s mom and sister and as it was utterly delicious,all of us had a nice dinner filled up till the neck.After a small chat when we decided to leave,it started raining heavily. At the request by uncle and Manas(my friend) few of us decided to wait till the rain stopped or at least slowed down a bit.Few lwft as they used to stay nearby.
Google+ may not be turning out the “Facebook-Killer” many predicted it to be, but as of yet it has been sailing smoothly. Providing API for developers was the next logical step and sure enough,yesterday it released Google+ API. Be it Facebook,Twitter or even Foursquare, nearly all successful social services provide development platform to facilitate developers build apps which eventually contributes to the success of the service. In fact Google is one of the earliest providers of Web APIs such as Search APIs,Google Maps API. This would definitely provide a boost to the 3-month old project which is now beginning to see decline in popularity after a period of rapid growth.
A voice buzzed near me. The pitch of the voice was high, and i could feel that it must be piercing through the walls into the green playground outside. The voice grew muffled – ” What i am to do with this kid! He just does not ……… ” I could not hear anymore..
But this story is not about Rehaan or his mom. It is about me.
I never talk to myself. I just give Gyaan. I am not intelligent. I am just efficient. But because i am efficient, i just am not able to get any rest. Who am I? I am Google. Google Search. I would have helped you so many number of times but sorry i dont know your name since you have not logged in. If you want, just click Sign in and say Hello. But yes, even though you will just tell me your userName, i will come to know about all your secrets because you know i am very good in archival of history. But dont be scared. I dont tell anyone – I am very secure and based on how you treat me or use me, i help you get to your results better with this archival based on your preferences.
I am Google Search
When i was born, I dont remember much of the exact date – (Please – No need to search Me for this) but my parents were very happy. I did not look as beautiful as i look today and I was small and was barely able to walk, let alone search. My dad told me, “Google, Dont worry. You are my most beautiful child. A day will come when everyone in the world will know you and you will be praised by everyone alike”. I had only learnt to listen to it and think it being daddyish love.
I had heard stories when i was playing with text searches, I often heard daddy talk over the phone to someone – “So what if Altavista can do …. ?” I would look at dad and think if I can help him but i could not- I was just a kid. At times in the middle of the night, i would wake up when someone typed something and i counted that to my memory. I dont know how but dad always used to come running to me to see the hit counter of mine. And this continued for days, months and years.
When I was about a year old, one day my dad drove me into a house where i had to “Live”. Dad told me that everyone calls this house as the Internet explorer. I cried a lot since i was going to be live for the first time but dad said you will manage it just fine. At times when i fell sick, dad used to come and repair me. But i was not allowed in the garage home anymore. Dad said i am grownup now and have to live with the IE. I recall one day when someone came and typed Altavista on my face and I showed him a few results. The guy just shouted – ” Man, I dont believe this.. Altavista is just gone.. There is nothing getting returned from this. I could know that something happened to the other search engine.
From then on, i could see myself getting sick very much very often. I would often be taken to the garage home and dad and his friends would give me medicines. I never cried – I was a brave boy and dad told me that you would be one of the finest gentleman of all time. I believed him and took all the medicines which he gave me. Some of them I could not bear and i crashed out! Some i gave random results out but then dad loved me so much. Only when i was stable, he would take me to Internet Explorer house.
I was getting more and more loved by all people who came to this house. Everyone came to this house, met me always, typed on me and i gave them good results and slowly people loved me more. In IE, there were a few friends which i made. There was one called Lycos, he did similar things as i did but still i liked him somehow. And people did like him too. Then Dad said, “Google – From today you dont have to climb the stairs to go upstairs if someone calls you. I have made a Google Search Toolbar and pasted it in front of the house – IE. So users will find it easier to find you and then you will have to answer them. Will you get tired son? ”
I said, “No Dad. I love to work. I will be the best search engine. I will fulfill your dreams to the best of my abilities”. Dad said nothing. He just smiled.
Blogger-Picasa
I dont remember how many years went by. But in a couple of years, i had so many of friends, and brothers and sisters which dad sent to my IE house. There was this guy called Picasa, who captured photos of everything whenever someone smiled, he used to archive that photo. Then there were the google office kids – Google Docs and Google Calendar. Someone told me that you dont know – dont go by their looks, they are trying to do something on cloud which much older people are doing on the desktop clients. To this i would always feel, “Well, Yeah – Its all inside me but i will know only when someone searches me! ” Couple of years back – Dad brought home two guys into IE saying they will be my companions – One guy – God he talked so much.. He just kept on talking and talking. His name was Blogger. Then i later knew – my dad adopted him. Then there was this cool hunk – You Tube. Picasa was always jealous of him because youtube showed the exact emotions, exact video that just photographs. But I was cool with everyone because everyone loved me.
Years later, Dad took us all into a new house altogether. We all love it. It is our own house. We call it the Google Chrome. Till today we also go to the older house of ours IE and at times to the garage home too but we all love chrome. We also have a marketplace where we meet other people belonging to the Chrome app store or Google app store. All these new members too love me. I am the darling of all – I am google search. Today I remember what Dad used to say..
Son, You are the most beautiful of all searches. You have to work hard and always keep focussed. You cant complain for the pain which you will have to suffer in the interim period. You cant cry out loud. Learn to be patient. Dont worry if you cant be the cynosure of all eyes overnight. A day will come when all your efforts will pay off. A day will come when the entire world will just love you like anything. And i could know that this is the day which dad was talking about. I love you Dad.
“…… Where are you hiding?!!” Rehaan’s mom’s voice slowly faded in. She stood near my world. Started at my world’s screen and the screensaver and said,” God, the laptop has been on all this time!” and switched me off.
I was not scared.
I knew that this is the time to take a power nap to get ready for more efficient searches when my world sees the new sunshine! After all, I have to live my dad’s dream and make him proud.
It was the evening of 1st July 2011,when the daily official routine was heading towards an end,I just thought of checking my GPS hoping for a message from Soumyanwesh regarding salary. I was even happier to discover the message count showing “1”. But it was not a message from Soumyanwesh,it was not a message from the Finance Department nor a message related to salary.It was a message from a Mindfirean named Asish Tripathy and was related to the “Corporate Social Responsibility” what we term as CSR in short.
Is the customer always right? And if he is not, what do you do? One of our Software Development Leads faced this dilemma in almost an “Arjuna moment”..
(In the epic Mahabharata, as Arjuna stood ready for battle facing an army composed of his own family members, he wondered whether it was right for him to fight the battle at all. This dilemma froze his legendary skill and warrior will into non-action) Situation Detail (you can skip this section which has some technical details)
The client wants to make a mobile-compatible version of their web site. The web site is an online e-commerce site, developed using Adobe ColdFusion server technology.
Client priority is to get the mobile site out as quickly as possible. The thought process is to reuse as much as possible ColdFusion code developed for main web site, while generating a screen-compatible and down-sized mobile “face”. The strategy he suggested was to use front-end CSS scripts that would be added for mobile access only. Pages would be processed and downloaded exactly as the main web site. Then the additional CSS would also be downloaded on detection that page was being accessed from mobile. This CSS would do front-end browser-level manipulation (such as menu manipulation, image size and so on) to give an entirely different look and feel to pages, suited more to mobile screens.
While client wanted to follow this strategy, our technical and professional opinion said otherwise. Our Lead had tried to explain to client that this was a sub-optimal approach in the long run. Entire pages being downloaded and then “mobilized” using front-end CSS was essentially a trick with high bandwidth impact and soaring expense on data plans.
The real solution would be to restructure the application to move logic to sets of ColdFusion Components (CFCs) and use those from ColdFusion. ColdFusion code would be separate for mobile and normal web pages, and site redefinition should be done to evolve mobile-relevant functionality and pages. In short, a proper path to a mobile site.
Summary
You have a situation where client wants to follow technical path X, which has disadvantages. And there is a longer path Y, which is the correct technical approach. What do we do? Should we do X just because client says so? Or should we do Y because that is the “right” way to do it?
Opinion
Clients make choices based on a wider set of thoughts and priorities, some of which we may not be aware of. There may be a trade show the client wants to attend, or venture capitalist they need to meet, and they need a “quick and dirty” mobile-enabled site rather than a true solution. Maybe the client has thoughts on how a split code-base may cause maintenance and consistency issues, in spite of code restructuring for logic centralization. Maybe the client is not savvy enough to understand the technical aspects of both solutions. Maybe the client is simply not smart enough. Many possibilities exist.
Although we work in 1’s and 0’s, the real world is not binary. There is no black and no white, it is a range of greys. There is no right and no wrong, it is a range of possibilities.
A client’s choice is not necessarily wrong just because it is not the technically superior solution – there may be aspects we are not aware of. When you understand those aspects, perhaps you would make the same choice in his shoes. Perhaps the same choice is correct in his context, even if it is wrong in isolation or in our opinion. And finally, the client may make a wrong choice – after all every human (including us) is born with the right to make wrong choices.
Confusion
As self-respecting professionals, following something blindly is, to say the least, a criminal sin. Client or no client, we need to know and express our opinion based on facts and expertise. We cannot accept day as night just because client says so. Doesn’t matter if he is the client, if something is wrong it is wrong. We are professionals, not clerical staff to follow orders blindly.
However, at the same time, we do have to accept client choices. This is a simple and fundamental truth. We do not work in isolation. We work for clients. Clients pay for work with their hard-earned money, and if a client makes a choice we do not agree with or understand, we still have to follow the client decision.
So what does this mean, how can you do both?? How can we preserve our professional integrity and yet accept something that goes against our professional opinion?
The answer is simple.
Clarity
Before choices are made, our duty is to advise the client, to update him with our professional advice and informed opinion on negatives and positives of available options.
Once a choice is made, our duty is to do. Our duty is to align and focus and do as per client choice, even when we professionally disagree with that choice.
Who gets to make the choice? The client.
Why? Not because he is paying and is the client – that is an immature and misdirected thought process. But simply because the work is being done for him, and only he knows the entirety and facets of the situation and conflicting priorities, and can make the choice that is right or wrong for what he is trying to achieve.
Bottomline
The customer is NOT always right, and it is our job to express that opinion to customers openly instead of blindly accepting whatever customers say. But it is also our job to respect customer decisions once they are made.
What do you think?
(This incident and thoughts reflect some opinions, beliefs and a way of looking at things. I hope sharing these will lead to debate and discussion)
Today, even the massive amount of processing power generated by computer manufacturers has not yet been able to quench our thirst for speed and computing capacity.
Although progress in VLSI technology has reduced the size of chips immensely and thus contributed a lot in making more powerful and high speed processors, conventional technologies have their limitations. Conventional processors use transistors for computing, which cannot be made smaller after an extent because then Quantum effects will come into play leading to erroneous results.
In 1982, Nobel prize winner physicist Richard Feynman coined the idea of a “Quantum computer“, which could use the effect of quantum mechanics to its advantage. Unlike conventional computers in which a bit can only be in 0 or 1 state, a quantum bit(qubit) can exist in both states simultaneously.
“Applicaton.DoEvents() processes all Windows messages currently in the message queue” is how the msdn defines it. It has been a developer’s tool to organize the response of forms in .net. But it has got its own limitations attached with it.Its own good, bad and ugly attributes. So, let’s see the different faces of it.
As most of you would be aware Facebook’s promised awesomeness turned out to be a one-to-one video chatting feature. Now is that really innovative ? It is something that has already been introduced since almost a decade by companies now vanished. Of the barely surviving companies, ICQ introduced video chatting in 2007. In fact, for some inexplicable reason, I always feel ICQ was precursor of Twitter in a way. Going back to video-chatting, the much-touted Google+ Hangout feature isn’t the first group video chat either. I remember at least one service, ICU , which had similar features, then Yahoo Messenger + Public Chat + Group are so similar to the phenomenon that is now termed as Social Networking.
From the looks of it, Google‘s latest foray into social web, in the form of +1 button might end up with same fate as its predecessors. In case you are unaware,it is the button at the top with +1 caption which according to Google official blog is digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool” is the search engine giant’s reply to Facebook “Like”. The fact that Google replies with a sentence like “this is pretty cool” to Facebook’s four letter “Like” may give us a rare insight on the mindset prevalent within Google’s team. The 2 character button itself may conform to the Web 2.0 trends,the descriptive sentence makes one wonder if they have embraced Web 2.0 with all their hearts or are just going along with the tide. This would also explain why Google continues to fail in getting a foothold in Social Web. Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself 😛 the pertinent to ask at this point of time is whether +1 is really going to be successful or not.
I am not sure if it is an unfortunate coincidence or a sadistic prank by fate that three popular figures of the IT industry who died this month were all pioneers in their respective fields. If you don’t know who Steve Jobs is, I may be able to understand but you would have to be living under a rock to not know of his sad demise. While Steve Jobs died, after a long fight with pancreatic cancer, on 5th October 2011, exactly 1 week later a greater legend breathed his last. Dennis Ritchie the creator of Unix and the C programming language was found dead in his home on 12th October 2011. As if the loss to the digital world wasn’t devastating enough, 12 days later, on 24th October, John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP and the concept of Artificial Intelligence, logged out of the world.
Today, even the massive amount of processing power generated by computer manufacturers has not yet been able to quench our thirst for speed and computing capacity.
