Thoughts on Management and Computing

Recently , I have been dealing with multitude of both the above topics. I realized midway through , how management concepts could be applied to Computing and how computing concepts could be applied to management.

Management Network

Lets start of with how management concepts could be applied to Computing. One of the strategies, when you debut a product is to customize the product according to demographics and region in which your launching the product. Consider the Food market , whenever somebody launches  a new food item in America, the emphasis is to be big . Whether its the Cola’s , Beer , Burgers or the Cars (Hummers) Americans like it big , its one market where Size does matter. Now consider the Asian market , the individual purchasing power is not as big as has in the west . So you need to make the your products smaller and affordable to tap into the market. An excellent example of this is , the shampoo sachet. In the west you could sell a Bottle, but in Asia the number of units of 2 Rs  sachets will outsell the bottles , people will not buy an Bottle of shampoo on a regular basis . Going by the same example you have mini cola’s for 10 Rs for drinks , the world cheapest car nano . The nano  may not be your a typical car in the west , yet it reflects a scaled down version of a car made affordable for the rising middle class. The important lesson in business not to view a large population with low purchasing power as an liability , but rather as an market  to whom you could sell your products scaling down on features and size to make it affordable. Now where does concept come in Computing . In fact its one of the tenets of the Cloud computing i.e, Rapid Elasticity. The ability to rapidly scale in and scale out the resources according to the demands of the end user.  This could be server resources which are increased rapidly during live streaming of an cricket match for website and scaled back down after the match is over. It makes no sense to buy all that server capacity  since the sports event is going to be temporary affair , rather renting out the server makes sense. So the Elasticity that offers flexibility to user based on his needs is no different from the  Business strategy that varies your product scale and features based on demographics and purchasing power of the market your selling to.

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How Steve Jobs turned Apple Around

If you have been following news of late, you would have noticed how Apple toppled Microsoft to become the most valuable technology company . Its been quite an turn around for Cupertino based company which was forced to get investment from its Arch rival Microsoft in 1997. I decided to profile Apple's turn around, because there are not many companies that make a comeback , once they start to go down. When Steve jobs returned to Apple in 1997 , Microsoft had become a monopoly in the Desktop PC's, with nearly 95 % running on Windows; Apple was relegated to a niche market. So how does one turn around a fortunes of a  falling company

1.  Focus on your Strengths:

Though Apple had lost out on the Desktop market, Steve brainstormed  to identify the areas where Apple was still making profits and not losing out. Simple enough to put your money where the value comes from.This included Desktop Publishing and Multimedia industry where the Macs where more prevalent and preferred to Windows. He shutdown projects like Apple Newton, CyberDog and Opendoc  to cut costs and put his resources on where Apple was still making money Macs. There are two ways to build a software product , you either develop it from scratch which requires lot of resources and time, second is to go out buy a start up which already has the technology rebrand it has your own and sell it. And the later is what Apple did when they bought NEXT operating system. This later evolved into  Mac OS X powering iMac.

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