Personal and professional development for technology professionals.
» Bringing Ideas To Life. With Love!
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 15 Jul 2005, 10:34 PM - Leave Comment
Many people who end up in leadership positions think they are leaders.
This little quote explains that it’s not the position or it’s not the
people that report to you that defines the quality of your leadership
but..
Posted under Great Quotes, Leadership, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 15 Jul 2005, 6:34 PM - 2 Comments
The latest version of Microsoft Media Player has a cool feature. If you minimize it, you can have it on your taskbar with all the key controls in place. Here is are two images of the media player on the task bar
1. When play is ON
2. When paused
“What’s the big deal?” you ask.
First, I think the taskbar resident mediaplayer with all controls is cool. Second, observe that the “play” and the “pause” buttons are interchangeable. For ages, there would be two buttons one for “play” and the other one for “pause”
You don’t have to be a genius to innovate. You can just look at doing things differently. Most cool innovations have a common theme – the outcome looks obvious once the new way is implemented.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 13 Jul 2005, 4:33 PM - Leave Comment
Apple and Steve Jobs never cease to amaze me. Today Apple reported earnings and they exceeded the revenue and profit expectations by a wide margin.
Look at the attached graph that shows the iTunes song downloads chart that I made up from publicly available information.
If you observe closely, you will notice that it took about 14 months to sell the first 100 million songs. However, the last 100 million songs will be sold in less than 90 days. The key here is the fact that Apple was able to see this long ago. Steve and Apple have been innovative at a breathtaking pace.
Look at the simple counter that they put on the Apple Home Page (iTunes Music Store 500 million song countdown) and you can see that songs are being downloaded every second and the race towards 500 million songs is ON.
I saw this interesting post by Rory Blyth bashing innovation. Rory talks about innovation being useless if enough attention is not given to quality, support, stability, relevance and value. I agree with Rory there but I disagree with the approach in the article as there are companies like Apple who are innovating and are giving attention to all the other stuff that they should normally give attention to. We don’t want to send a message to organizations that Innovation is useless. Everything has a place and I think in these current times Innovation has an important place in organizations that want to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage.
Hats off to Apple for providing an example for corporate resilience.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 12 Jul 2005, 11:07 PM - Leave Comment
Amazon reports
that the advance orders for JK Rowling’s new Harry Potter book has
surpassed 1.4 Million. That’s a record for Amazon. The earlier Harry
Potter book held the record with 1.3 Million advance orders.
It is inspirational to read JK Rowling’s story. She is really setting the benchmark for “what could be” possible.
If you ever dreamt of something but were putting it off thinking it is
a pipe dream, think again. Unfortunately life has only version 1.0. You
either get it or you don’t. Wish you the very best in your quest!
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 11 Jul 2005, 8:57 PM - 2 Comments
I got inspired by Dave Taylor’s recent post with cool advice for new authors. Joe Wickert provides some more insights into this seemingly common “writers block”
In the recent past, I have met with several “to be” authors. One or two
of them were even taking a course on how to get published. One of
my close friends over analyzed this whole writing process that now his
writing has come to a grinding halt.
I agree with both Dave and Joe. Writers write. The structure and polishing come later.
Here is a bit of my own experience. I caught the writing bug very early
in life. I wrote my first novel when I was nine years old. My parents
thought I was crazy and the my friends thought I copied this whole book
from another book. Those were interesting times and as you could have
guessed there were no rules. We didn’t have a computer at that time and
I didn’t even know how to type. I started writing in a notebook and
kept writing for about 200 pages.
When I re-wrote the book twice, I did the same thing again. Wrote every
single page by hand. It took me four years to get this published (at
age 13) from a reputed publisher.
My most recent book “Beyond Code”
due to be published in September was entirely written by hand the first
round. You think crazy. It’s really not. Let me explain. The alternate
option that I have is to go and type on a computer. While it has all
the advantages, it has one big disadvantage. You can do a lot of things
other than writing on a computer. Being an entrepreneur I will have a
ton of things pending anyways and it’s so easy for me to get carried
away and do “other” things other than writing. Writing in a book also
gives me a discipline to get it right the first time (at least most of
the times). I have developed some page numbering and indexing tricks to
ensure that I still keep sanity while putting content in different
chapters. If anybody is interested, send me an email and I am
happy to share more.
If you still think I am crazy, you may be right to some extent 
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 11 Jul 2005, 1:29 PM - Leave Comment
Paypal has a service to let non-paypal users to pay using their credit
card. However, if you have a Paypal account and you choose to pay with
your credit card, Paypal does not like it. Here is the message from them
It’s an annoyance and hopefully Paypal is working on fixing it. Very simply, Paypal can provide three options
1. I have a PayPal account and I want to pay using PayPal
2. I have a PayPal account and I want to pay using a credit card
3. I don’t have a PayPal account and I want to pay using a credit card
That should take care of it, I guess.
Posted under Business Models, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 09 Jul 2005, 10:35 AM - Leave Comment
This little quote reminds us that our thoughts are under our control.
Many times we tend to forget this simple truth and get carried away
with negative and unproductive thoughts.
Posted under Great Quotes, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 07 Jul 2005, 6:25 PM - Leave Comment
Kavitha got me glued into this cool program on ABC called “Dancing with the Stars” and I followed the last few episodes. This week was the final week and Kelly and Alec were the winning team.
Here is my point:
While they danced superbly, their journey to the top was not smooth.
They were not the favorites by any means and they almost lost out a
couple of times. What kept them going was the sheer determination to do
whatever it takes. They worked hard and simply stated “they would never
give up”
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 05 Jul 2005, 11:09 PM - Leave Comment
While driving to work today, I saw a Zero Emission Bus (ZEB) by VTA
(valley transportation authority) here in Silicon Valley. The bus was
completely powered by fuel cells. It was a delight to see fuel cells in
action (one the road).
May be I had missed the announcement or busy with work but I looked
around and found that VTA had made an announcement related to this a
few weeks ago.
Hats off to VTA for taking steps to save the earth (in a small way)
I remembered reading about such innovations way back in a book titled Unlimited Wealth
by Paul Zane Pilzer. Pilzer’s alchemy theory rests on the premise that
we have unlimited resources but lack the technology innovation to take
advantage of them. With so much of noise about oil prices, may be the
answer is not worrying about the increase in oil production but
increase in innovation to avoid over-reliance on oil. Once the demand
drops, the price drops automatically. Maybe I am over-simplifying this
but read the book and may be there is something there.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 04 Jul 2005, 12:53 PM - Leave Comment
AA just unveiled a program called Operation Hero Miles where people can donate American Advantage miles and AA will pool them and donate to those that are serving in the war.
AA’s goal is to get at least 17,760,000
AAdvantage® miles to Operation Hero Miles. With the matching program in
place all it requires is 17,760 AAdvantage members donating the minimum
number of miles (500) to this program. I hope this will be an easy goal
to reach.
The website says:
I am doing my bit tomorrow. The only drawback of the program is that
you need to download a form, fill it up and fax it. May be it’s a legal
requirement else an online donation would have gotten a higher response.
Happy 4th of July to all of you!
Posted under Leadership, Main Page.
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