Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast !!!

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cell phone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the Smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails.

The "Mahabharata" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately.

Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?"

The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco.

Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no.

Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs.

Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cell phone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore

Woh Teen Din

Please give me some comment after reading this; I want to understand the perspectives on how people think about narcos.


First day, it was 9am on a Sunday morning, me usually enjoying the precious sleep of the weekend which is a rarity, since sleep is something which I do only occasionally. My friend cum colleague buzzed me to invite for a party on the occasion of his already surpassed Birthday(the cake cutting types). I was tentative to go, but went; since there were some new people I would meet, which generally excites me. I love meeting new people and giving them some gyan on life and showing them how much I knew about philosophy.

1pm borrowed car from dad and zoomed 25 km to meet new people, and not for the birthday party for which I was invited. Met old nostalgic friends of my colleague who had travelled all the way from Chennai to celebrate the birthday of their chamiya(that’s what they called him during college). Had a couple of beers and had to return home to meet people who had come for an alliance. Birthday boy insisted me to stay but I had to go so left @ 6 promising to return back by 10.

11pm, came back to chamiya’s place after getting caught by a cop and paying him 200 bucks. Started bantering with friends of chamiya, interesting guys one from Shillong and another from Madhya Pradesh both different in all aspects, learnt one thing that people from Shillong are born guitarists.

12:30 midnight, still bantering... suddenly there was a banging sound on the door, figured out to be the yo-guy in chamiya's room. Always lost, confused but very nice guy but, was completely lost in the world of narcos. Everybody in the room was neglecting him because of this habit, I started a conversation with him which made him come in and we had a couple of hours of brainwashing chat. Explained the ill effects of narcos which he should have already known being in the mid 20's, we made him realize how important his life is for his loved ones. He pledged to quit after some long brain wash session which made us happy.

Second day, 9AM woke up and rushed to office. Finished the day’s work by 5, left to Chamiya's room again where we planned to go to Hard Rock Cafe one of the best Pubs of Bangalore. Enjoyed the place which was like an ancient museum with different guitars owned by Rock stars earlier.

11:45pm, Just returned from Hard Rock Cafe to Chamiya's room to drop him back and rushing for home, The Yo-guy called on me and explained about how he spent his day without taking a single dose, and how my suggestions has helped him overcome the desire. I was really happy for him and felt proud on myself and my skills to convince even such people.

Third day, 10am, at my office, met chamiya who was also explaining about how his roommate was turning out to be good, how he will not neglect him anymore, we both were very happy for him.

10:45am, Chamiya comes to me and says the yo-guy is not responding and the other roommate is rushing him to hospital. We too rushed to the hospital to figure out that he is no more. A man who was well learned, earning handsome money, with almost 2 thirds of his life left to enjoy has just passed away. God please give strength to his loved ones to bear this loss.

This news made me feel guilty, I don’t know if I had not persuaded him to quit he would have still been alive.

One more young life lost with no cause achieved makes me feel a bit scary, why are people knowingly getting into things which can take their lives, are they thinking about people around them? What kind of temporary ecstasy are they looking for and at what cost? This feeling is giving me strength to fight with people who take narcos only for a temporary enjoyment... Is it worth it...?