Ramblings of an Eccentric Soul...

An MBA grad student @ Thunderbird School of Global Management, a musician, a gadget-freak, a committed geek, a doodler, a babbler, a cook, a lover of the simple things in life, a proud T-bird...

I am available on a lot of services. You can access them here - Renganathan Ramamoorthy

When I find time, I am usually writing at
Ramblings of an Eccentric Soul...,
Life as T-bird,
Grad School Guide,
Scribez,
and posting interesting tid bits using Tumblr.

@gurupanguji

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"… the tyranny of averages always conceals sparkling exceptions to the rule."

Richard Tanner Pascale and Jerry Sternin

Your Company’s Secret Change Agents

HBR May 2005
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Twitter: The Criterion Collection on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

Amazing video. Must watch
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Microsoft is doing some wonderful stuff with Bing Maps. Kudos guys!!

#microsoft #ted
link Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Awesome article by The Onion. :)
link Lukas Mathis on focus

I like Lukas’ main message - no applications or tools can help you concentrate better than your own mind. If it’s important, you’ll remember it or you’ll remember to pencil it in, else you’ve already decided that it’s not important for you. =)

#focus #software #design #lukas-mathis #gtd
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"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."

Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
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applearts:

9GAG - What The Fun!

That’s what I need to wake me up in the morning.
link About this Blog | Free PeepCode Blog

Very cool!
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xkcd: Convincing Pickup Line
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Embrace Life - always wear your seat belt (via SussexSaferRoads)

Wow, one of the best ads I’ve seen in a really long time.
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"So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’"

via http://blogs.bnet.com/corporate-strategy/?p=101

It’s not about not wishing that Microsoft had done it. I am positive that Microsoft could have done it, if they had thought of it in the first place. Oh wait a minute, they did.
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notes Feature checklist dysfunction

marco:

The tech press loves checklist comparisons. Let’s evaluate the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:

Sounds like a terrible product. I bet it will fail.

Remember the MacBook Air’s launch?

Sounds like there’s no reason to buy one. (Like nearly everyone else, I complained about all of this when the Air launched. We all do it sometimes.) But it’s been very successful, especially in its later revisions, and the SSD models are great machines for people who travel a lot.

So it bothers me when either of two common failures occur.

Assumed equality

This is when a competitor advertises (and often, truly believes) that their product is at least equivalent to another one because it has checkboxes in many similar categories.

Since the iPhone’s launch, every other phone manufacturer has made competing phones with 3” touchscreens, music playback, and square app icons arranged in a 4x4 grid. (Well, except Microsoft’s hilarious interpretation.)

It’s like the CEOs commanded their engineering teams to come up with lists of the iPhone’s “features” and copy them so their phones would sell as well as the iPhone.

Every few months, the copy-list gets longer. Everyone just finished checking off their App Store box and is wondering when the developers are going to rush in.

Miscomparison

This happens when a geek or manager makes a list of features to compare two products and comes to an oversimplified conclusion based on which one has more checkmarks in its column.

The main problem is obvious: how do you determine which features go on the list? It can’t possibly be exhaustive enough to represent the entire experience of using the products, and it won’t be the same list for everyone.

Here’s why I decided not to use a Nexus One (or any other Android phone):

The Nexus One may be the better choice for people who care about what it does well, like synchronizing with Google’s services. But I don’t care about those things, and I do care about a lot of factors that the iPhone is a better fit for.

It would be ignorant and arrogant for me to presume that your priorities are anything like mine.

Word!

Only correction: CEO’s rarely get involved with the phone features/design. Only Steve Jobs does that with so much rigour and vigour. The CEO’s usually just tells the manager who manages product managers within a company - I need topline growth of so much with a new phone. It’s usually the product manager who asks the design team to come up with a design along with the software group and the hardware design and production group.

Then it’s to the product marketer to gauge the customer interest etc. So, the CEO rarely even involves in the product. Yet another quirkiness that pays off for the truly talented and the people who care.
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=’(
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"You don’t have to like competition in order to understand that it exists. Your fair share isn’t going to be yours unless you give the public a reason to pick you."

Seth’s Blog: The ubiquity of competition

YASGAP - Yet Another Seth Godin Awesome Post.
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The idea of a new gig, a fresh start, is appealing because of its simplicity. You know nothing about your future team; you have no idea about potential death marches, or that guy down the hall that just bugs you for no particular reason. It’s simple to think about the future optimistically because the future hasn’t screwed you, yet.

This optimism fades in the middle of the night when you open your eyes, startled, and think, “Why in the world would I leave a solid gig with people I know and a bright future?” The reasons are myriad, but that’s not the point. The point is for any big decision, you’re going to question it from every single angle. You’re going to have endless inner dialogues with yourself. You’re going to talk yourself into the gig and then you’re going to talk yourself out of it.

It’s exhausting.
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Rands In Repose: Wanted

Rands in Repose has another awesome article that every person with the potential and capability to hire or be hired should read in detail. =)

Thanks mate. Wonderful article.