The point of this article is not to bash Microsoft, there are enough articles on that. And here is a video on the topic:

The point is to say that while (in my opinion), Apple produces better products, Apple’s corporate vision is as dangerous as Microsoft’s. Both are aiming to box users into their proprietary formats and their applications. I realized just how strong a grip Apple has on its user when I set off to hack my iPhone OOB 1.1.2. I got the hack from GeoHot a few days ago. I am usually pretty enthusisatic (not cultist) about some of Apple’s avant-garde products. But the iPhone’s lock down was oppressive enough for me to support the hacking of Apple products so as to allow access to source and unrestricted operation of the devices. A few years ago I met Richard Stallman ( of The Free Software Foundation/GNU Project ), and at the time, I got a glimpse of what the fight was about; although he does not advocate hacking, merely boycotting.

There is a difference between a software lockdown and hardware lockdown. Until today, I had never seen a piece of hardware so shamelessly rendered useless by its manufacturer. I would certainly feel bothered about using a piece of pirated software on my computer because I have the choice to look for an open source alternative. In the case of the iPhone, I have the option of not buying an iPhone. But there is something profoundly revolting about bowing to the will of Apple and AT&T while getting overcharged for sub-standard plans for 2 years.

I believe…

1. Any hardware/software device, once purchased, should allow its user to take advantage of its full programmed capabilities

2. (on a slightly different note) While applications may choose to be closed source, they should always use an open file format so that other applications can fairly compete and contribute in the best interest of the user.

I think that proprietary software is a necessary reality because of the logistics and costs involved in the development. However proprietary file formats are simply designed to confine users to a particular software. That paves the way for gross abuse of power by large software manufacturers. Proprietary hardware is another ball game altogether, I have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that the device I hold in my hand - which is mine - does not work because I haven’t signed up for a price-gouged phone plan designed by two big monopolies.
That said, here is a good guide to unlock your iPhone

Pour moi l’Inde représente un monde où il y a encore de la magie et de l’espoir. En France (et aux Etats-Unis) j’ai des offres de travail bien payées mais je les ai toujours refusées, soucieux de ne pas me faire prendre dans l’engrenage d’un système qui broie et qui formate les gens. Aujourd’hui la France c’est le pays de ma famille et il m’importe d’y avoir un pied à terre à un moment de ma vie, mais je ne pourrais pas m’y installer à plein temps sans avoir l’impression de me faire en quelque sorte emprisonner par une société extrêmement consommatrice, conformiste et déboussolée. Je trouve la France d’aujourd’hui tellement fade, tellement ligotée. J’ai besoin de ma liberté d’agir et de penser, j’ai aussi besoin de m’émerveiller des choses simples de la vie. J’ai voté aux dernières élections, mais en voyant la direction que prend mon pays, je ne m’y sens pas du tout citoyen. Parfois on me demande qui il restera si tous les jeunes quittent la France pour faire leur vie ailleurs. Ce n’est pas moi qui ai fait de la France ce qu’elle est aujourd’hui. J’étais encore enfant ou peut-être même pas né lorsque la France a piqué du nez. J’ai du mal à comprendre pourquoi je devrais rester dans un pays qui n’a pas de place pour les jeunes, auxquels on décrète sans cesse qu’ils sont trop diplômés ou pas assez, pour de toute façon les exploiter en stages. Il y a d’autres pays qui sont ravis d’accueillir ces mêmes jeunes.

Je me demande aussi où est la qualité de vie dont parlent les gens? Personne n’a plus le temps de passer boire un café, d’aller voir le voisin de l’atelier du coin. On ne saurait sortir ne serait-ce qu’un peu des sentiers battus sans être totalement marginalisé par un système qui n’a aucune tolérance pour les aventureux. Et après on se demande pourquoi la France ne brille plus… Je suis marginalisé et je m’en porte d’autant mieux que je n’ai pas ce poids sur mes épaules. Que ceux qui veulent les soit disant bénéfices de ce système y restent. Je n’ai pas de sécu, je ne bénéficie d’aucune aide sociale et je paie mes impôts en Inde. Tant mieux. Je suis en train de monter ma boite informatique ici. J’ai des clients en Europe et aux Etats-Unis et ma qualité de vie me plaît. Je m’organise à long terme pour construire quelque chose de sensé et durable. J’ai déjà fini de payer mon appartement en plein centre d’ Ahmedabad, ça m’a pris à peine 2 ans et sa valeur a doublé depuis l’achat. Il y a tout à faire ici, alors que l’Inde est en train d’éclore, la France est déjà fanée. Je préfère laisser la France d’aujourd’hui mourir … pour éventuellement m’y réinvestir lorsqu’elle se décidera à renaître, mais je ne souhaite en aucun cas l’entretenir dans son état actuel.

Voilà donc ma position par rapport a la France. Mon expatriement est surtout une prise de conscience par rapport à moi-même.

We’ve redesigned Petrossian.com, and we’ll be writing a short case study on it very soon. Until then, visit the new site and let us know what you think…
http://www.Petrossian.com

The redesign:

The ordering pipeline
We’ve streamlined the ordering pipeline immensely on this relaunch, incorporating a zip-code validation check in Ajax, a more stable calendar picker and larger fonts wherever user-input is involved.

I’ve been in India for several wonderful years now. I’ve been web designing professionally since 1998, starting out in Los Angeles, California. Something about Asia had always appealed to me and one day I took a one way plane ticket out of the US. That was six years ago…and I never looked back. Mind you, I still visit friends, family and clients from time to time, but it’s safe to say that I plan to be in India for a while. Upon settling here, I was approached by clients to develop new websites. One of them approached me with a fairly high profile e-commerce site with a modest budget, and I thought this project would be a good time to dive into outsourcing with local consultants.

When I called upon a small (twice-defunct, thrice born) IT company in Ahmedabad India, I thought it to be a ship with a captain and a crew. I realized a little too late that there was a vast difference in my standards and theirs. Eventually I had to become both the captain and the crew. I found myself steering the ship every inch of the way on all aspects from front to back end. Clearly, there were some vital cultural differences that I had failed to anticipate, and which many are likely to face when outsourcing, whether as specialized consultants or direct entities looking to take their business online. My advice to such entities is to always have a qualified project manager, whether in-house, independent or hired by the IT company you are dealing with. By qualified I mean a sharp, knowledgeable, critical, analytical and responsive. If you are the only one coming up with comprehensive solutions to problems, then you could have an issue on your hands, because the technical implementation of the solution is a reaction rather than a proaction to a problem that had not been foreseen by the developers.

On a more technical note, the coding style that this company was using was ghastly and absolutely unmanageable. The company’s co-founder and technical director advocated CodeCharge Studio, a clunky WYSIWYG Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to code the site. There were no separation of design/content, poor or no use of classes, no separate template files for header, body, sidebar, footers etc… and no coding standards or comments. They had claimed to know PHP and MySQL but as with most companies here, were only proficient with ASP and SQL Server - read Microsoft products.

They were not ill-intentioned, but simply had no clue what “design and usability” meant by European or American standards. My expectations were unrealistic and I didn’t have enough technical elements to assess them before this project started. This is why an onsite consultant is so important. In the end I had to set aside all of my other activities to see this project through and I did managed to deliver a solid solution with a good life cycle. Lucky for me and my client, I was onsite and had a working knowledge of web development.

I am going to tackle some of the issues I faced in this first project-cum-trial by fire, and their implication in the same manner that I go about preliminary project briefs: from the point of view of the humans involved… and they fall into these three broad categories:

1. the client/visitor,
2. the business/individual/organization
3. the web developers/consultants

In this case, let’s work backwards from the third group to better understand the repercussions of the issues dealt with…

The Web Developer’s Perspective

Let us suppose I had been corresponding with this company from abroad, I certainly would not have been able to keep them in the office until the wee hours of the morning or to make them code and recode until the quality was satisfactory. And the consequences would have been crippling for the future development of the site since it takes a programmer 10 times longer to update such a site than a cleanly coded one. And it’s also far more treacherous to keep track of updated and possible bugs.

The Business/Individual/Organization’s perspective

Just to list a few of the issues you may face with such projects and small IT companies (some of which have glitzy websites):

1. Backend usability is often neglected making it unfriendly to use and often impractical, the reporting too
2. Dysfunctional layouts - for example, a submit button that appears at the top of the form instead of the bottom
3. Crude navigation: filtered list views that becomes unfiltered after updating/viewing one of the list’s item, redirections to neglected pages, unnecessary steps in a checkout process, etc…
4. Design that looks so 1997 - I really think that less than 1% of Indian IT companies are capable of producing designs that stand up to the competition on a world scale - Take a look at their portfolios, I can spot one of those websites from a mile away
5. Differing values on the importance of punctuality
6. Poor or awkward language style - you will have to write the copy of every page down to the error messages on form validations

What all of this means for your business in a nutshell can be any or all of the following:

1. a shortened life cycle for the solutions you outsourced,
2. dissatisfaction of your employees when using the solution
3. inadequate needs assessment of your business that results in a limited ROI or worse a negative one
4. a poor business image
5. costly site maintenance and difficulty to retain quality programmers on a small budget
6. security risks that can make you legally liable - outsourcing is no joke, if you are in the US or Europe and your customers’ information is compromised, there is a good chance that you will be liable.

The client/visitor’s perspective

Well a poorly designed site makes for a poor user experience, and visitors will be quick to search for a better site. Moreover, the quality of a company’s website is one of the key factor to building prospective customer confidence. In addition, customers are far more reluctant to enter their personal & payment information on a sub-standard website.

Conclusion and more to come
Ok, I’ve spoken at length about the risks of outsourcing to small and medium unknown IT companies when starting out. Fortunately, I have also had wonderful experiences. And this first experience by no means implies that all small Indian IT companies are alike. It’s just a crash guide for newcomers. Some companies are absolutely brilliant, and they know their worth. Those who advertise rock-bottom prices, will deliver rock-bottom solutions. So beware of expecting too much bang for your buck… it could well blow up in your face.

I am going to post again on this topic. Now that I’ve stated the issue, I think elaborating a solution is in order. In my next post I will attempt to explain how to avoid falling into such problems.

1. I’ve heard that it is respectful and recommended to wear more conservative clothing for women - longer skirts/pants and t-shirts that
cover shoulders/upper arms, but several of the pictures I’ve seen show tourists in tanks tops and shorts. What would you recommend for a woman traveling solo who wants to be respectful, blend in, and stay cool?

2. Any recommendations for train or airline travel - different companies or classes you recommend? How early do you need to book tickets?

3. What should I expect from the monsoon? Rain all day every day? Sporadic hard rainstorms? Light constant rain?

4. I’m a runner, and I would like to continue running while in India. Any suggestions about this?

5. I’m also a fourth grade (9/10 year olds) teacher, and would love to visit a school in India to hopefully observe and take some photos to bring back with me. My students are fascinated by seeing how kids that are half way around do things! Any suggestions on how I might arrange this or if schools will be in session?

These are my personal answers keeping in mind that, India is so vast, it cannot fit into neat little boxes or generalizations…

1 (about the dress code)… Many tourists are often inadequately dressed according to local standards, though some tourists never realize it, and locals in touristic areas are quite used to it. If you are traveling alone, it’ll be a lot easier if you cover your shoulders, and avoid shorts.
Some of my colleagues and roommates are western women in their 20’s, their impression is that they are least hassled when they wear indian clothing like Salwar Kameez, or anything Indian that you feel comfortable with. One thing I can say about India, is that it is too diverse to generalize. If you go to Bombay, you’ll see girls in miniskirts walking down the streets, the same is not true in rural areas and even in some cities like Ahmedabad (5 million people). Many women who travel alone have been mildly annoyed by men staring at them, or acting like silly pre- pubescent boys. This is in part because you’re a foreigner, but mostly because you’re a woman alone, Indian women also have to deal with that. There is a good deal of sexual repression in many social circles. As a result, some people never go through adolescence until marriage, which effectively creates little boys in men’s bodies, feeling things that they cannot quite come to terms with. This is probably why SOME men act ungainly towards women in public places.

2. Any recommendations for train or airline travel -
For planes, book 2 weeks ahead for best prices 1 week head for good prices. For train, you can get on the tourist quota which reserves seats for tourist travelers (indians usually have to book 1-2 months in advance). You’ll have to ask for the quota, often, it will only be available from a particular teller. In terms of planes, the best (but more expensive) are Jet Airways and King Fisher, Indian (Airlines) may have dellusions of grandeur, but I don’t think they’re up to the mark. In the budget airlines, Spicejet is very reasonnably priced (though sometimes late), Air Deccan serves a wide range of destination, I’ve never taken it so I cant comment on price and quality, some people say it’s a little shoddy.
The train is definitely an interesting experience in India, if you travel a popular tourist route, there’s a chance that you’ll be sitting next to
tourists since they reserve blocks of seats for tourists. I would generally recommend 2nd Class Non-AC or Sleeper Class Non-AC, those give
you a good taste of the railways in India and the peole who travel on them. Avoid the General Compartments class, those are really crammed and dirty (on an Indian scale).

3. What should I expect from the monsoon? Rain all day every day? Sporadic hard rainstorms? Light constant rain?
With the climactic changes and the impact of global warming, no one can really predict what the Monsoon is going to be like. RIght now it’s not raining in Gujarat, mostly it hits in hard rainstorms that could leave you stranded for a day or a few days at most.

4. I’m a runner, and I would like to continue running while in India. Any suggestions about this?
I’m a runner too, running in public parks or lush green avenues works best for me (Marine Drive is a must if you’re in Bombay). Mostly you’ll find lots of walkers in India. I prefer running in the morning when the pollution has settled and traffic is calm, also if you jog in the morning, you’ll get to see people doing Yoga and other such activities.

5. I’m also a fourth grade (9/10 year olds) teacher, and would love to visit a school in India to hopefully observe and take some photos to bring back with me. My students are fascinated by seeing how kids that are half way around do things! Any suggestions on how I might arrange this or if schools will be in session?
While some Indian schools are doing very interesting work in education, most will show you a very outdated and overpopulated education system where learners are passively learning from a textbook. You should really look them up, many are using fancy pedagogical terminology that does not always translate into their classroom practice. Schools are in session at this time of the year (August) - though they may close for a day or two if there is heavy rainfall. If you want to see a truly innovational school in India, checkout Mahatma Gandhi Gandhi International School in Ahmedabad Gujarat ( http://www.mgis.in ) .

First, lets start with the basics:

1. The internet is a tool, not an obscure new world before which we bow down in servitude. It must work for us, not the other way around.
2. Any entity/individual, whether computer literate or not, has the same rights as the next to harness the power of the internet. This is the spirit of democracy.
3. It is the responsibility of firms like ours to use our knowledge responsibly, to listen and to educate you about the possibilities and limitations of the technology. And at the end of the day, the solution offered must empower not enslave.

No matter who you choose for this exciting new netventure, consider the solution from the point of view of all the people who will interact with your site :

Your business’
Your customers’
Your webmaster/programmer’s

For your business, your site should be:

inline with your business image
built around your needs
up-to-date in terms of content and aesthetics
low maintenance
make it easy to administer categories, products, shipping, orders, users and reporting without touching a line of code
upscaleable
For your visitors, you site ought to:

inspire their trust and confidence
be easy to browse and search
include a product search feature
draw them into the site right from their entry point
expose them to new products unknown to them
allow the users to update their profile and retrieve a lost password
facilitate secure online transactions

For your webmaster/programmer:

This is what most IT firms won’t tell you and most prospective customers don’t realize:

Your website will need servicing and if it experiences growth, then it will also need upgrading. People come and go, but you are stuck with your site. So it’s absolutely key for any experienced web developer to ‘pop the hood’ of your site and say, ” here is where we’re going to insert that new module”, without having to sift through a jumbled sac of code for days on end.

Good coding is important because once your site is launched you are not bound to the support of the same company that made your site. You can approach the programmer or firm that best suits your needs. Keep in mind that a programmer often charges around $100.00 per hour for servicing and periodic upgrades. Add it up and the hours spent cleaning up code and searching for targets can dramatically increase the maintenance cost. Also, a sound logic and good coding increases security and minimizes or eliminates malfunction.

The code that drives your site should be such that it can accommodate future business endeavours that you didn’t initially anticipate or that you perhaps wanted to phase in at a later date.

That’s our bit on democratizing knowledge and educating the prospective client.

1. Outsourcing means subcontracting or exporting non-core operations to another company/entity
2. Offshoring means exporting operations to another country, whether or not it stays in the same corporation/entity
3. Offshore Outsourcing means exporting operations to another country to another corporation/entity

Though the terms are often misused, the bone of contention in the 2002 US presidential race was offshore outsourcing.

The economic logic is to reduce costs. If some people can use some of their skills more cheaply than others, then those people have the comparative advantage. The idea is that countries should freely trade the items that cost the least for them to produce. When your are offshoring, you are typically helping another country’s economy, so it should be ideologically compatible with you. India is the world’s largest democracy founded by Mahatma Gandhi, on principles of non-violence and equality. It also boasts a very active National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

Offshore outsourcing is not is not synonymous with loss of jobs. We are now going through a period of transition as the workforce of developed countries adjusts and retrains according to the decidedly changing trade scenario. Resources previously tied up in time-consuming or costly processes can now be used for expansion and reinvestment in new areas.

The real challenge of offshore outsourcing is overcoming cultural differences. How do you reconcile two cultural perception of aesthetics, time, symbolism and representation? You have a buffer, a person that interfaces the client with the local workforce. The best Indian IT companies have international experts on site for quality control and communication. If you are considering outsourcing, a wise practice is to listen to the level of English spoken during phone conversations and video conferences. If it’s not fluent, it may mean your agent or developer has little international exposure and will interpret your input with a very localized perspective. This makes communication difficult, moreover you might find yourself proofreading for spelling and grammatical errors or awkward literary style.

At ilaniam you will be directly communicating with international multi-lingual staff fluent in US English, French and Hindi. You can expect from ilaniam the same level of service and solutions as high end US firms but with superior financial advantages.

The other day, in Paris, I lined up behind 4 people to buy a subway ticket. For some reason, the RATP (the company that runs the subway) decided that tickets at this station would only be available through the automated vending machine; fair enough. One very patient tourist didn’t have change for the machine and had a train to catch to London 20 minutes later. A cashier of the RATP in his nearby booth stared at him helplessly, he wasn’t equipped to sell tickets. Finally he came out of his glass cage to help the tourist. By then there were another 4 people behind me. And after 15 minutes of waiting, i finally got my ticket. I’m pretty sure the guy missed his train to London in the process.

So when is it ok to use automated technologies? In my opinion, it’s ok to automate redundant tasks that are prone to human errors, and where an array of variant scenarios have been carefully taken into consideration. Automation can also be used to ensure non-essential 24-hour service.

When is it not ok? Well I have an issue with companies that impose automated processes as the sole way of doing business. I believe that for every automated process, there must be a reasonnably efficient and accessible alternative, whether it is phone support or in vivo. And it doesn’t include websites that use treasure hunt techniques to disclose their phone number and address. Nor does it include hotlines that require you to sift through 10 subsequent departments to find an obscure option that finally gets a human on the line. Automation must be used to increase productivity, but not to replace human interaction. Automation must remain an option, but business models and budgets should not be based on fully-automated systems or an evolution towards them. Yes, there is a price to human transactions, but it is well worth the cost.