Tag: IBM

Attending my funeral

The paper announced “a A student committed suicide for not passing Vietnam‘s first IBM-graded SAT“. So, my classmates showed up at my house the next morning for condolences. True story. Not having seen the column the day before, I was completely taken aback.

Hence, my first exposure to bad journalism, and Vietnam’s first trial run with a machine (1974).

The Luddites must have been out for blood.

They wanted to “grade” our essays, in the old Mandarin style whose exams lasted three long days (camping out etc…) (Leu Chong).

We had been anxious leading to exam date e.g. shopping for the right No. 2 pencils, rehearsing multiple choices etc..

Our real first exposure to the “spiritual machine” with its lock-in platform.

In our little minds, machine was God. It could fail you (and in my case, it did). Turned out, they had to manually grade a few hundred of us in between batches.

I never forget the worrisome faces of loyal friends, who had passed but decided to hang out (our version of “funeral wake“).

I told them they should go out and celebrate. Forget about me.

But they insisted “one for all, all for one”.

Then those girls in the class who also showed up expecting to see me in oxygen mask, or in a casket.

The feeling was “out of the body” to say the least.

How often can you afford the opportunity to look at this scene from the outside? (astronauts get a rare glimpse of the Earth from space, but it’s a matter of geography).

That should put materialism in perspective.

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

The story did not end there without a happy ending.

We were sitting around, long faced, when a friend (drummer from the band), rushed in to announce that they had just posted an addendum to the results. So we raced to the school (on scooters, like the new Zappos ads).

And we found my name (as if it were the Vietnam Memorial, except this one was framed in glass).

And we opened the beer (my father paid for it).

And we jammed the guitar.

And we screamed (no karaoke back then, just yet).

Then we went out dancing.

The dead came back from the brink.

The A+ student got his dog day.

And got admitted to Pre-med (I would have entered the tweet contest for U of Iowa MBA scholarship if there had been such a thing).

With confidence and momentum, I helped raise fund for the refugees floating into our city (public speaking in front of a large lecture hall etc..). After all, I could have stood outside of its walls, cursing  the machine? the manufacturer? the IT administrator?

No college, no draft deferment i.e. enlisted and got maimed ( a friend came back from the front with one eye left in him).

For that one day, I had a preview of my funeral. In Amadeus, Mozart used this powerful visualization to finish his Requiem.

In my end, my beginning.

Unless the seed dies, it won’t produce much fruit.

Lose yourself, that you may find it.

This not a suicidal instinct. Just an acknowledgment that the seed of creative destruction was planted in each of us since day one.

Like a tracker, lo-jack.

We will need to be “disassembled” to be “re-assembled” on the other end.

Pride and prejudice, fear and loathing, all nano bots in the wind (Kansas).

Ask any leader about his lessons in success, he will mention failings.

They went together, like two sides of a coin.

That shock has served me well. South Vietnam collapsed that Spring.

And my summer celebration was the last of “Happy Days” with my friends (drummer, dancer, bass player etc….) many of whom I have lost touch (and I don’t believe they are on Facebook).

I just know that friendship is to be cherished, and that true friends forget  their own celebration waiting out for you. Victory for one is victory for all. That’s why, on Spaceship Earth, we need to be concerned about one man whose vegetable cart was taken away unjustly

(not to mention he got slapped by a female inspector in a Muslim society).

To him, death by immolation was better than death by humiliation.

And one man’s death sowed the seed of discontent that sprung up to become what we now coined the Arab Spring. To him, immolation equals cremation.

Encoded memories

In a fictional tale of modern madness, the author of “the Remains of the Day” brought to us “Never let Me Go”.

A famous quote from the school principal (where students were raised and taught to become “donors” since they were genetic copies made from real people to someday called on to offer their body parts as spare parts) about the students’ art projects “We let you experiment – with arts – to see if you had any soul at all”. That line stuck with me, and it dawn on me we have been fed almost that same line since Taylor pressed the On button to start the conveyor belt. Workers’ input are not welcome. Just screw in the bolt. Just do it. (Modern Times, by Chaplin).

Then arrived Taylor 2.0 (Toyota Continuous Improvement) where workers are welcome to stop the conveyor belt should they find something unusual.  Hence, the age of empowerment. Workers are now welcome to take part in production and discussion. Third phase is happening, to bring user’s input into the production process (T-shirt design and production).

Companies, like people, have stored up years of experience, we call “know-how”. 3M, Symantec and Adobe are where they are today because of their core competencies. They have created an ecosystem of stake holders who care. Consumers likewise feel safe when purchasing their products. Post-it-notes, packing tapes etc.. from 3M command higher prices than its nearest competitors. The power of brand.

Turn on your TV today, you will see London reasserts its “brand” reputation for 2012 Olympics. Rome also got some share of air time, while Lybian uprising was temporarily forgotten. So was the Midwest tornado. Our attention-deficit economy in a 24-hour news cycle.

Apple got to where it is today because it paid attention to the “soul” part of the electronic experience.

First people wanted something smaller than the mainframe.
Then they want “desk-top publishing”.

Finally, they want to “express” themselves (life-style) with Nike+/Apple  I-pod.

When I ran the 8-mile golf course at Penn State, I only had a pair of shoes and shorts.

I thought about the future during those 8 miles (that future is now being lived out), just like Madame Nhu’s pronouncement “I am not afraid of death” back in 1963. She finally had a real encounter with that unknown last Sunday.

Companies like people, stored up millions of  memories to act, react and interact with different set of circumstances.

If the person or company stored up many well-learned lessons, they will come out ahead in adversities (e.g. product recalls).

Conversely, negative memories predispose a person or company to repeat that vicious cycle (i.e. patent infringement, disregard for workers’ rights and environment/ethics).

Companies and people also reinvent.

M&A is just an euphemism for erasing bad reputation, or bad numbers .

It’s not even a make-over. It’s a brand salvage.

They just count on public amnesia. To go back to Taylor 1.0 with the conveyor belt. Just Do It. Think not about tomorrow.

Even the company which gave us the tag line “Think” (IBM) now sold off to Lenovo who owns the rights to its Thinkpad.

I am glad we have not only soul, but also memories. Together, they come in handy against weapons of mass distraction. We do remember, some of us. Never let that go.

Twice, it’s alright

I did everything twice. It’s become a pattern. It’s become a pattern,

6th grade found me fumble from a French-system to then Vietnamese system, so I ended up repeating my 6th grade at two different Middle Schools.

Then, my freshman year got interrupted (by the White Christmas song that was played on US Arms Force radio, the same one that gave us Robin William’s impression “Goooood Morning,Vietnam”) so I floated on barge, navy ship, C-10 cargo plane, then 747 to Pennsylvania to start college again. This time, from the Vietnamese system to its American counterpart (with the help of Red Cross translation services which provided notary public among other relief packages such as toothbrush and underwear). Twice a freshman.

Plug-in: let’s give via Red Cross to the victims of Japanese earthquake.

Back to twice, it’s alright.

Every person’s history is a miniaturized version of his/her larger historical context. In my case, it was a transition from the French-colonial education system, to a more modernized approach (I even took a SAT, the nation’s first, using number 2 pencil for computerized grading). Ironically, when people discuss the efficacy of NATO’s involvement in Libya, Vietnam’s quagmire was once again mentioned. To put some meat into the analogy, we are referring to 3+ million deaths in that conflict, and an aftermath of Agent Orange, PTDS etc…Talking about “Reflections of My Life” (view the Youtube version which features the kids running toward a returning vet).

Others might have it easy (playing tennis on Guam Island in transit). But for me, I had to do things twice at school and in life.

Years later, I met one of my sales agents who had stayed behind in the camp until he got kicked out.

He certainly took the easy way out. To him, it’s always once, the last option that is (like the default choice that software engineer often recommends).

Although my life-changing event happened a life time ago, but to me, it still resonates (still raw, like “the first time, I ever saw your face”.)

I want to silently thank those who lost their lives and limbs, while reflecting on my lost years.

In comparison, my lost college year was a very low a price to pay. BTW, I had to search twice for my SAT IBM-spit out scores (turned out that some of the exams had to be graded manually due to a computer break-down. My grades came in on the second batch, a few days later). So much for the angst of pencil number 2  for the machine to read. Later, to satisfy my penchant for “twice in everything”, I went overseas twice to volunteer for Relief Work (reciprocity and pay it forward), two graduate schools and won two cars at MCI to pay off my school loan.

Twice, it’s alright.

Heterogeneous country, homogeneous thought

Google CEO blurted out what we all know (that tech moves at 3 times faster than other business sectors, who in turn, are 3X than the government). We are analog-built e.g. eating,  buying and thinking habits, while techies thought processing power is on a different plane e.g. Cold-War B53 bomb in TX is finally being disassembled and junked.

A Swedish public health expert gave a TEDx talk some years ago. He put up some slides which span 200 years just to show how entrenched we are in yesterday’s thinking (e.g. that women in emerging nations have a lot of children while the opposite is now true). In short, formative years continue to cloud our lenses (or our teachers’ who got their data from post- War textbooks). Another stat: more deaths from suicide in the US (mostly men in their mid-50’s) than from automobile accidents. Or more Christian in China, than the membership of the Communist Party.

Or  thanks to rural broadband, the creative class in the US can finally afford housing and pursuit their passion, let’s say in software programming, in 2nd-tier cities like Seattle, Austin (as opposed to New York and San Francisco).

One more thing. Back in the days when America found it hard to accept a President who was Catholic

and the only “Muslim” brother who left his last name blank (X). The Big Three in Detroit, Big Three in Broadcasting, and a healthy middle class, with Union wages. Now, things get splintered of, with MNC’s paying zero domestic tax (GE), and CDO peddlers paying no COD (it’s still a mystery that Madoff was the only fall guy – whose rehearsed bio was …”I was an underdog when I started in brokerage, so I got to have my revenge at ‘them'” ” we contemplated suicide but it’s our son that followed it through). The same tax codes hasn’t been 21st-century compliant enough to catch clever white-collar looters.

Meanwhile, across the pond, it will take another three decades for China’s branding to rise (The Chinese Dream) just as it has taken them 3 decades to ramp up manufacturing and exports. Reverse engineering will be followed by reverse branding. Their state machinery will be hard at work to take apart every element that make Cola and IBM global brands.

(try to top Steve Jobs, the marketer who still got marketed in his death: simple and elegant cover featuring his signature stare).

First wave will be tourists. Second wave, engineering students . Third wave, marketing catalysts, Huawei and Haier, try to pry open the US-EU domestic markets (foreign in their perspective). At today’s speed, even Toyota with its continuous improvement still can’t compete with revived brands like VW.  It seems that John Le Carre is not the only one whose career and mindset are stuck in Cold War era. Cuba still has 1950’s automobiles crowding the streets. At least, we must admit they don’t make things like that any more. Should have kept jobs in Indiana, and not India.

Things were moving quite rapidly at the bottom line, and slow at topline.

I want my Skype call!

By now, we all know about our right to make a phone call when being arrested.

That phone call usually is placed from a pay phone (soon to be a museum piece).

Skype has been down (and slowly back up to full speed), and 26 million users worldwide felt the pinch.

VoIP. Conversation chopped into tiny pieces to be reassembled at the other end (with some help from the listeners to “guess” and fill in the gaps).

The process is called quantization which creates a digital graph of an otherwise analog waves used in landline telephony.

Skype helped sell a bunch of headsets for sure.

And it has been disruptive to incumbent Penny-talk services (Skype could be called Zero-cent talk).

With Facebook founder visiting China, we can expect more E commerce apps. How about Facetalk, with caller’s profile and friending list.

People communicate in whatever way they deem convenient.

Skype and Twitter just happened to be King of the Hill at the moment.

Until the next innovation comes along. No wonder there are titles such as “First, break all the rules”. Who would have thought that which was intended for Data transmission (Internet protocol) can be used for voice and video. Even Google which already “got it” more than Microsoft, seemed to have missed the boat when it comes to Web 2.0. If only they paid attention to the human side of users, who are made up to be social animals (hence, the rise of home networking, which caught the attention of Cisco, now Linksys-Cisco).

Sometimes, the market trickles down (IBM mainframe to Texas Instrument, to Xerox then Atari/Apple computers). Other times, it’s the reverse (Social Media and Mobile apps for the work place, business casual attire etc..).

Whatever the case, I admire the distribution channel: they always make sure we have new stuffs to buy for Christmas e.g. Susan Boyle CD, Wall Street DVD (first, it cheated investors out of their money, then the fictional film version is taking Main Street pocket change), Ipad and Blu-Ray. It’s not a new century at all. It just happens to be the most crowded one. Translation: lots of gift wrapping: toys for tots, text for teens. Skype for all..

 

Here they come!

Chinese buyers, that is.

Not a bid for 76 gas station, or IBM hardware (now Lenovo).

A GM unit then Symentech.

On seeing David Stockman on TV. I thought I were back to the early 80’s. This time, just one just needs to replace the word Japanese, for Chinese (remember Michael Keaton and his gold fish?). Now, it’s Wolf Pack in Las Vegas, w/ Chow.

A 30-year cycle, deja vu.

Beijing is rolling out cars on mass. Then the Olympics. Then the Summit near the shooting.

Welcome to the Pacific Century, when personal income and saving are on the rise, this time, across the pond.

From the Olympics to the World Fair, from space to supercomputer, Beijing is flexing its muscle.

This time, we’d better get used to seeing our new competitor outside of traditional type casting i.e. China town, kung fu and acrobat.

When the Wall came down in Berlin, another stood stall in Beijing.

America needs a balance sheet. And the “For Sale” signs are up, for any buyer with cash. Chinese have saved up. Under the mattress. And this time, they go shopping. Cash or charge? Cash. Here they come again. Shallow the pride and give our customers the respect they deserve. It’s time for an American pragmatic approach to a pressing economic problem. Um coy, it’s thank you. Anything else you want to buy?

Forgetfulness is necessary

In clinical terms: selective memory.

Speak ill not of the dead, for instance.

Auto-biography is another version of selective memory (before actual amnesia).

For me, to see Dow Chemical opens a polymer and acrylic factory in Vietnam, roughly 40 years after Agent Orange got sprayed over the same landscape, is a great example of collective amnesia. Vietnam must be a very forgetful country, or a forgiving and pragmatic one.

Intel, Samsung, Canon all set up shop there. These names are not attached to any controversy we know of.

IBM and Coke got their own black eyes in the past.

But one must move on, travel the globe to seek bed partners never thought possible 40 years ago (I may have repeated what Secretary of State Clinton said in her recent remarks about Vietnam).

The President is in India. I thought I saw in passing his test-driving a nano car.

(In an ironic twist, he is a de facto CEO of GM, checking out a foreign competitor, in this case, Tata).

After India, whose stroke of luck continues after Y2K, the President will take a walk on memory lane: Indonesia, home of volcano and the largest Muslim population on Earth.

One cannot schedule a better get-away from gridlock than this. While things seem to jam up over here, everything explodes over there.

I alluded yesterday about how long it took Detroit to build smaller cars (began with Pinto) . And now, Harley Davidson has made-in-USA parts assembled in India (that way, the nouveaux riche in India and China can join in the chorus of “Born to be wild”. It’s expensive to be wild!

The pendulum finally swings to the opposite : “Small is beautiful” is adopted here in Detroit, and Harley in Mumbai.

“I want to hold your hand”, the Beatles sing. They went to India 40 years ago for R&R. Now the seeds finally took hold here in the West. This time, albeit not reversing “the British invasion“, off shoring to a former British colony via broadband links and Harley parts (tattoo stickers not included).

I wish I can be forgetful on demand. The time calls for it: a healthy dose of amnesia. No context, no frame of reference. Just do it. Do not think too hard and too much. Go with the flow (of information and money).

 

Against the tide of commoditization

In Selling Professional Services to the Fortune 500, Gary Luefschuetz warns against mix and match people and rates of various service tiers, which will compromise the rate structure. In short, swim against the tide. IBM got it. Cisco follows suit. And HP is moving in that direction.

The Economist takes an in-depth look at IT future. One dominant theme is ” smart” infra-structure e.g. buildings,water, electricity, appliances… even cows). First, we were glad to get our white bread sandwich neatly cut and refrigerated. Then we want it toasted. Finally, we want the toaster to beep like our microwave oven.

The key to all this is inter-connectedness. From blue-tooth to Blu-ray, RF to RFID, we are moving up the value chain.

Years ago I remember watching a demonstration of hologram at Penn State. Professor Roy Rustum was there among the observers. He later was quoted as saying “I felt the chill in my spine” when his crew at Material Sciences Lab discovered electricity conductivity in water. Now we got 3-D hologram to watch the re-release of Star Wars.

At the high-end of the OSI model is the application layer. This is where our imagination pays dividend.

The physical layer move their facilities off-shored to accommodate better rate structure.

Samsung is slated to be a strong contender in the tablet space against the I-pad with huge facility in North of Vietnam.

I also remember watching the young CNN news gathering crew (in black T-shirts) back in the early 80’s. CNN manages to stay above the fold in the cable news business. That business gets commoditized as well since we can now access hundreds of them.

For CNN, the secret sauce has been their first move advantage, and continuing risk-taking (Gulf war). David Brook of the NYT puts it simply “branding is an effort to decommoditize commodities”.

While companies are in a race to produce “smart” applications, schools and companies should retrain people. Smart people created smart appliances. And smart people take calculated risks. Leaders of India and Ireland saw the hand writing on the wall. They moved swiftly to retrofit their nations for the  21st century, not only in IT, but with new ways to solve existing problems e.g. micro lending, mobile banking, cheap automobiles etc…(see The Miracle).  I read the review of Chevy’s latest small car, the Cruz. It took GM, once the largest corporation under Alfred Sloan, 40 years to reduce its automobile size. May the best car win.

The temptation to compromise and mix the different tiers of services led to the downfall of many sectors, especially telecom.

(South Asian agents and resellers first question was normally, “what’s the rate”).

So I wasn’t surprised to read in Fortune magazine about Verizon’s soon-to-be-rolled out Android perfect phone. Can you hear me now.The old GTE has swam hard against the tide, to become the premier wireless company.

Choose your battle, pick your turf, and retrench at the highest service level.  Who wants to stand next to those robots who don’t get sweat or take smoking break.  And I am sure, after the next round of cost cutting, they still stay until robot 2.0 version displaces them.  At Twitter, those guys didn’t even use up the allotted 140 characters. They tweet simply “Be helpful”. I take that to mean swim against the tide, to offer relevant and helpful service to a market gluttered with commoditized services.

Stay hungry, stay foolish, keep Searching

In his 2005 Standford commencement address, Steve Jobs ended with ” Stay hungry. Stay foolish”. Today, we should add “keep searching”. After Google, Bing and Yahoo and Blekko, which promised to keep out spam.

Wild Wild West.  More content, more classification, increasing need for trusted recommendation.

Part of the reason Facebook is where it is today is due to the ease of sharing (photo, film clip and music video).

We , the anchoring community, are the algorithm, the editorial board of our swam-like network.

See me, feel me, tweet me, show me …

A community needs common language (LOL), ritual (tweet me), and causes (poverty alleviation).

Right now, the obvious need is worker’s retraining ( for America to stay competitive).

Yet, it’s a chicken-and-the-egg cycle i.e. which industry should we be focusing on, and who will pick up the tab for work force training?

The growth of University of Phoenix and the likes shows a need for continuing education .

When IBM saw the writing on the wall, the Elephant learned to walk fast (and finally spun off its hardware segment).

Best of wishes to Blekko. It’s a vast Wild Wild Web out there. Google is taking its own medicine. That of the innovator’s dilemma. After “pageranking”, we will see stack-ranking of search engines. But then, it already knew. Google is moving to the cloud, to TV and to mobile O/S.

That’s what makes America competitive: up the value chain. Stay hungry, stay foolish, keep searching. Fear not.

 

Rare Earth beats

If you want to set the tone for the whole day, pop in Rare Earth collection which opens with a 22-minute long Get Ready followed by I Just Want to Celebrate. The name has nothing to do with current dispute between China and Japan for those planned-scarcity elements.

Get ready to celebrate.

Dream, dream, dream.

Back in the early 70’s, amidst America’s recession, oil crisis, Watergate and Vietnam, at least we got the beat (while pushing those huge Detroit automobiles inch by inch in gas line) and all sorts of movement for change (women rights, civil rights and rare species rights).

Those dudes got hair. And a slight mistrust of government conduct in world affairs (Iranian hostage crisis 1.0).

Fast forward to today’s early voting at the poll. (BTW, they are re-releasing Back to the Future series on Blu-Ray). It is said that France’s protest and Britain’s austerity foreshadow America’s future. Or worse off, Japan’s lost decade. Frantically, policy makers such as Chairman of the Fed are crunching numbers (consumer spending dropped below 70 per cent, hum, not good. What can we do to stimulate Christmas spending? Confidence index at 50, hum! We need to get it to 90) Well, we need those rare earth elements to make electronic components).

In case people forget, America has always moved forward despite setbacks. Just because it is based on checks-and-balances doesn’t mean paralysis of analysis. There is an Opinion piece in the NYT  about our corroded water system. Out of sight, out of mind.

The water department is going to shut down our neighborhood water today. It is advised that we boil our water after it is back on.

There it is. I get ready to celebrate, another day of living (with or without water in America) in Third World America (Huffington).

If I remember correctly, the Obama administration said they were opened to wiki-ideas on how to reduce unemployment (job creation).

And people have opined left and right about clean tech, smart appliances, infrastructure upgrade etc…

Nothing seems to be working. Meanwhile, large companies such as GE, IBM and COke continue to shift their workload overseas where tax incentives are irresistible. According to some accounts, GE paid zero tax for its operation in the US a few years back. I am sure it paid a lot for tax lawyers to figure that out.

So the dudes keep pushing the automobiles, except this time, it’s 40 yrs since our favorite band debut its Rare Earth collection. Get ready, I just want to celebrate. Back to the Future. Selective past is always best

when the future is uncertain. Then I understood the luring smell of a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s like mom’s cooking when you come home after being away in college. It’s the only constant in a not too favorably changing world. You know what CD I am going to play to celebrate another day of living in Amerika. Dream, dream, dream. A portrait of America Before and After Recession could be used for weight loss advertisement. People and cars both get slimmed down. Surprisingly, Rare Earth stood the test of time especially the drum solo part. It serves as a benchmark. That’s the America I first learned to admire, similar to the way Fareed described his version of America when still in India. Maybe it can still be for millions, if we can figure out the beat.