Udayan Banerjee

Google+ may fail … it may not succeed in weaning away enough users from Facebook… …But what G+ has ensured is that Facebook will not be able to make enough money to justify its current market value of US$ 100 billion. Why so? Let us do a quick back of the envelop calculation. For Facebook to justify it current valuation of US$ 100 billion, it needs to, at some point of time, make an annual profit of at least US$ 10 billion. That can be done only if they have annual revenue of around US$ 30 billion. This revenue number is about 15 time their current annual revenue. The user base and the level of usage cannot keep growing indefinitely and will saturate at some point of time. Let us assume that it saturates at double the current level. That still means the revenue per user has to increase 7 to 8 time the current level. Even assuming that enough organizations are ready t... (more)

Agile Practices Now Have Research Support

Adam Smith was wrong. Well … he was not wrong in his conclusion but he was partially wrong in his basic assumption that human always pursue their self-interest. Through the work of many scientists, we have begun to see evidence across several disciplines that people are in fact more cooperative and selfless—or behave far less selfishly—than we have assumed. In fact, recent research shows that in any society majority of us behave cooperatively rather than selfishly (though some people do behave selfishly). The essence of agile is iterative development and a self-organizing team ... (more)

Forrester says Future of Cloud is SaaS

Well … they have not actually said it but the data provided in their report on “Sizing the Cloud – Understanding and Quantifying the Future of Cloud Computing” implies so. The projection claims that going forward more than 80% of US cloud revenue will be from SaaS. This trend will continue for next 10 years. [Forrester has an additional cloud classification of BPaSS which stands for Business-process-as-a-service. It involves provisioning of highly standardized end-to-end business process delivered via dynamic pay-per-use and self-service consumption models. You can think of it ... (more)

Cloud – Market Forces Working

Some time back I had complained that the price of cloud service offerings are not coming down fast enough compared to the drop in hardware price reduction. But then we see the following release from Amazon – AWS. “…we’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you…” (see this) Indeed, from July 1, they have eliminated the inbound data fee. It used to be US$ 0.10 per GB. Also they have reduced the outbound data fee between 20% (for lower end of usage) to almost 40% (at the higher end of usage). Here is the comparison... (more)

Sleeping on a Problem vs. Deciding in a Blink

Barack Obama had chosen to sleep on his decision to authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. This, according to Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy, is exactly what scientific research would prescribe when facing a complex decision. In Harvard Business Review Article titled “A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Making Complex Decisions” they point out that there is clear research evidence to support Obama’s decision to sleep over the problem and it is the right course of action for anyone facing a challenging quandary. They have also outlined a three-step process for such decision making... (more)