* Posts by sketharaman

185 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2019

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How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

sketharaman

Re: Better option

That's always what customers say before they get a feature. Back in the day, many software products had exactly the kind of "technical license limit" that you mention. Customers hated it. They'd complain that, just when they desperately wanted the 31st user to use the software, it was a horrible practice for the software vendor to restrict the use. That's how software vendors progressively withdrew their realtime technical license limits and replaced that with commercial licensing limits, which are enforced only once a year, via audits.

India effectively kills e-wallet used by over 300 million

sketharaman

Not really. PayTM has two operating modes: Wallet and UPI. Only Wallet mode requires topping up and that will not work after whatever date. However, UPI mode uses a bank account as funding source and that bank account can be some other bank than PayTM Payments Bank. Only problem is, PayTM's UPI license is held by PayTM Payments Bank. If that bank is shut down, then PayTM needs to get UPI permit for itself to continue to operate in UPI mode. Not sure whether that will happen or not by the D-Date.

sketharaman

Do you still believe everything that PayTM says - in its ads or on X fka Twitter??

Infosys enjoyed a boom in UK government invoices in 2023

sketharaman

Less than peanuts

Infosys did $18.21 billion in revenue last fiscal year. £7 million is less than peanuts. I'm guessing Infosys bid for these contracts only after it faced backdoor pressure from PM's office to do so when no other vendor was willing to bid for them.

Competition is decreasing in enterprise IT – and you’ll be poorer and dumber for it

sketharaman

Miners earn about the same in a coal mine or a diamond mine.

Money Quote: "Miners earn about the same in a coal mine or a diamond mine."

Google to bring India’s Unified Payments Interface to the world

sketharaman

It won't. Not only UPI, no A2A RTP offers the same level of fraud protection as credit card. And that's a feature, not a bug. https://gtm360.com/blog/2022/06/15/why-doesnt-upi-provide-fraud-protection/

US Supreme Court doesn't want to hear Apple, Epic's gripes about in-app purchases

sketharaman

"Apple is allowed to require that in-app purchases must use Apple's own payment method (through which the mega-corp takes a cut of the sales) but it can't stop apps from linking to outside payment systems through which people can also buy stuff (and from which Apple may not be able to take a cut.)".

From the app owner POV:

- First part of sentence means apps MUST use Apple's own payment method.

- Second part of sentence means apps CAN use non-Apple payment method.

Sounds contradictory unless app developers split their price into two parts, route Part A through Apple payment method and Part B through outside payment method.

sketharaman

Exactly. In India, Google is saying 26% for hosting etc. and 4% for payments.

US tech innovation dreams soured by changed R&D tax laws

sketharaman

I just had a quick glance at 10-Ks of a few American software companies. They show salary costs under either Cost of Revenues or R&D (or both). Most software companies deploy a vast majority of their engineers to develop and maintain their software and a small minority for futuristic R&D work. The new rule only impacts companies that show 100% of salary costs under R&D, which helps companies goose up their Operating Margin (which considers Cost of Revenues but not R&D). What's to stop companies from showing bulk of engineer salary costs under Cost of Revenues (where it rightly belongs in most cases), which can - and is - expensed 100% within the financial year?

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

sketharaman

Competitors?

When something like Post Office Horizon fiasco happens, customers blacklist the concerned vendor. That obviously didn't happen in this case. But I wonder why competitors didn't lobby the government to get Fujitsu disqualified from future tenders?

Uncle Sam will pay for your big ideas to end AI voice-cloning fraud

sketharaman

Re: Respond to fake recording calls

LOLOL.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

sketharaman

Much of customer service is just people blindly following a script anyway.

Well said. Back in 2017, I made the same point in my blog post https://gtm360.com/blog/2017/05/26/can-chatbots-replace-humans/. With ChatGPT / Gen AI taking chatbot capabilities to the next level, AI will likely be better than human CSRs in many more areas. As for displacement of labor, virtually every technology has caused a certain amount of movement of workers from one field to another, I don't think AI will be drastically different. If anything, we might be able to use AI itself to suggest how to redeploy labor displaced by it!

HMRC launches £500M procurement for new ERP, though project's already a 'red' risk

sketharaman

Hard enough to get one company with 150 employees (Dunbar number) to agree to a common set of business processes. Good luck expecting three government agencies to do so. But, wait a sec, I remember reading "However, the necessary business transformation and associated change management are not within the scope of the contract.", so best wishes for a jackpot to whoever wins this contract.

sketharaman

Since this is a "family site", I'll restrict my speculation to "buck", "muck" and "suck". Am I right or amirite?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

sketharaman

Great post! I've often thought about this topic myself. I've been using Windows, Word and Excel since ca. 1993. I haven't seen any sensational improvement in their functionality in the last 30 years. I once asked people on Twitter how many new features they could name in Excel during the last 30 years. Followers cited availability on mobile device and other areas of improvements that I wouldn't call functional enhancements. Then there were some people who pointed to live links to external data sources but I've used that feature to import inventory data from my company's mainframe in ca. 1994, so it's not new to me. If anything, I find it takes a few more steps to plot charts in Excel today than it did in 1993. For example, if there are two datasets, it's obvious that, in a vast majority of cases, one is X-axis data and the other is Y-axis data. The default line chart Excel 1993 plotted them that way but the default line chart in Excel 2023 does not have an X-axis at all and plots both datasets on the Y-axis, and I have to jump through a few hoops to change it to an X-Y chart.

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

sketharaman

Wall Street Yawns

Rightly so.

"Wall Street is betting big tech can amass power faster than antitrust regulators, judges and juries can chip away at it. The stock prices of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms and Microsoft have seen more than twice the growth rate of the S&P 500 index this year - a time during which most of those five firms faced an onslaught of claims that they had abused monopoly power. Investors have had plenty of fuel for their confidence this year. Lina Khan's Federal Trade Commission, demonstrating more bark than bite, keeps losing important cases against tech giants like Meta and Microsoft." ~ @theinformation.

Besides, there's nothing stopping Google from scrapping free listing and charging listing fees on all apps in Play Store. Rake affected only 3% of big app developers, listing will kill most of the 97% of small app developers whose apps are free. This will end up favoring the big app developers and killing the small app developers, thereby shrinking the supplier base, which is exactly the opposite of what antitrust is supposed to do.

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

sketharaman

Fastest way to bankrupt Amazon

Please tell me this hook spy cam is the only product sold on Amazon that can be used for illegal purposes? The other day, I was watching a movie called THE K!LLERS on Netflix. At one point, the protagonist buys a FOB COPIER from Amazon to duplicate the keycard to the villain's home. If the villain sues Amazon... If everyone starts suing Amazon for such products, it would be the fastest way to bankrupt the world's fourth largest company. While on the subject, it would also be the fastest way to bankrupt the world's largest company WalMart, which also sells similar products.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

sketharaman

"Funny how marketing messages change depending on the audience".

It would be funny if marketing didn't craft different messages for different audiences.

I've been selling tech for 35+ years. Vendor lockin is an open secret of the IT industry. While vendors may not talk about it openly to customers, they have always been bragging about stickiness / loyalty and other manifestations of lockin to investors for ages.

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

sketharaman

Pleasant surprise!

I know I'm dating myself but, back in the days of 3.1, '95 and XP, Windows used to install drivers for HP, Epson and other popular models of printers, scanners and other peripherals by itself. I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that recent versions of Windows give a checkbox to let the user decide which drivers to install.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

sketharaman

Well said. Meta / Facebook is a private sector company. It's under no obligation towards fundamental rights, which are obligations only on public bodies. Users are not entitled to Facebook. As the last line of the article says, they can always quit Facebook.

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

sketharaman

Re: Private property

Elon Musk didn't become the richest guy on the planet by paying $44B for public property.

sketharaman

Private property

Twitter / X is private property. It's none of the business of Wannabe Activists like CCDH to question what Musk has or does not have on it. Per law in many American states, property owners can shoot tresspassers, so shooting the messenger is not wrong in USA!

Digital democracy or IT anarchy? Gartner flags the low-code revolution

sketharaman

One man's robust governance...

"Democratization... accompanied by robust governance" is a nice soundbite but one man's robust governance is another man's redtape. It was redtape that caused "non-democratization" of digital delivery in the first place. Not sure how it can accompany democratization of digital delivery.

Europe bans Meta from using personal data to target ads

sketharaman

So spam ads are okay, huh?

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

sketharaman

Kudos to Meta / Facebook for calling EU regulator's bluff. We'll finally see how many people who find it fashionable to complain about privacy infringements put money where their mouth is by opting for the paid account and how overzealous the EU regulator is for overestimating that number.

When is a PC an AI PC? Nobody seems to know or wants to tell

sketharaman

What happens in a PC anyway?

With the growing use of virtualization, VDI, cloud storage and cloud computing over the last 10-15 years, virtually all programs and data of the PC user are increasingly resident on the cloud. As a result, a PC has virtually become a Dumb Terminal these days. I wonder what user-specific data is even there on the local hard disk of the PC anymore for AI PC to get trained on and work as a Personal Assistant.

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

sketharaman

Re: A drop in the ocean

+1. My heart bleeds to see Oracle being made the Fall Guy here (Disclosure: Ex-Oracle employee).

UK procurement is too glacial to bring AI into defense, MPs told

sketharaman

Not just AI

Why just AI or Defence, public sector procurement is too slow for a lot of technologies. Woz a time when we quoted 386 based PC to a bank. By the time they placed the order, 486 was out and 386 was out of production. We offered free upgrade to 486. But, due to rigid tendering rules, bank refused.

No customer left behind, SAP's Klein tells users angered by cloud-only decision

sketharaman

Re: If you are a SAP customer, you are already doomed in any case

I don't know what exactly but it says something that SAP gets away with this practice all the time. Not only did it win SAP v. Diageo but it pulled a similar one against Microsoft in ca. 1998. Microsoft built a VB-based indirect materials procurment portal with access to all of its 30K employees. Once the portal processed the Purchase Request, it handed over the approved PR to SAP MM to raise the PO. Microsoft had a 2K user license of SAP and SAP wanted Microsoft to buy up licenses for all the 30K employees who indirectly accessed SAP. IIRC, the case was settled out of court and Microsoft agreed to cough up for 5K more licenses of SAP.

sketharaman

Jawohl!

Singapore may split liability for phishing losses between banks and victims

sketharaman

Float Income Redux

Banks will thank regulators for the opportunity to delay payments and thereby earn float income under the pretense that they need to "carry out extra due diligence on the authenticity of the payment". Once again regulators will have transformed a problem of 5% of culpable customers into a problem of 95% of blameless customers. Good job.

Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

sketharaman

ChromeBook - Peak VFM!

My daughter got a ChromeBook as prize when she won the national Doodle 4 Google contest in 2013. For the first time, it has gone to the repair shop today. Enough said about length of support and repairability of this product. In my 35 years experience of working in the IT industry, ChromeBook easily has the highest Value For Money.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

sketharaman

Q: Local governments aren't businesses, so why are they force-fed business software (like ERP, HCM, Financials)?

A: Because many politicians think running local governments like a private sector company is the most efficient use of taxpayer money for providing public services.

Want tunes with that? India-made POS terminal includes a speaker

sketharaman

Soundboxes like this have been supplied by PayTM, BharatPe, Walmart PhonePe and other PSPs in India for over a year. I'm told that they have been supplied by AliPay and other PSPs to stores in China for many years.

I've been to dozens of stores that have a soundbox. While playing music is not a bad idea, I haven't seen a single store doing so.

The key functionality of the soundbox is to announce completion of a payment. Before soundbox came along, the store attendant had to stop what he was doing and look up his mobile phone to track the SMS or PUSH notif announcing payment completion. With the soundbox, he is able to multitask. Also, the SMS and PUSH go only to the phone used to sign up with the PSP. Quite often, that phone is with the storeowner, who may not be in the store all the time. As a result, the store attendant would need to look up the notification on the payor's phone. Crooks have been known to show a fabricated screenshot on their phone and scoot with the goods without paying. It was too late by the time the store realized that it had been swindled. Whereas the soundbox is a standalone device that's always present in the store.

Soundbox solves a very tangible pain area for stores, especially small stores where there are only one or two employees, there's no checkout line and the store attendant attends to the next customer by the time the previous customer makes the payment. Literacy or accessibility have primarily nothing to do with soundbox although they could be useful secondary use cases for it.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

sketharaman

bristle.slam.parsnip

Sneaky of W3W to use extremely convoluted numerals to buttress its claim that words are easier to remember than numbers. In practice, nobody quotes LATLONGs. They text it and the recipient just clicks the link. Ergo, there's no need to speak out, much less, remember numbers like 40.712772, -74.006058. Besides, there are alternative systems like LinCode, which use a sequence of pure numerals like mobile numbers or credit card numbers, without any decimals or plus / minus signs, and they're way easier to speak out than W3Ws like mine: bristle.slam.parsnip.

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

sketharaman

Re: Please can we have a standard like a robots.txt file

Yes. OpenAI recently announced the two lines that website owners can add to their robots.txt to tell its bot not to scrape their website's content. I already implemented on my company's website: www.gtm360.com/robots.txt.

User-agent: GPTBot

Disallow: /

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

sketharaman

Where are the backups?

As the article says, backups also got hit by ransomware when its servers were being moved from one datacenter to another: "Some of the machines were apparently infected before the move, and during the transfer servers that had been on separate networks were all connected to CloudNordic's internal network. This gave the intruders access to both the central administrative systems, storage, replication backup system and secondary backups, all of which they promptly encrypted for extortion."

Brainwaves rock! Scientists decode Pink Floyd tune straight from the noggin

sketharaman

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

If this had art, it would be the modern day equivalent of GEB.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

sketharaman

We've been hearing that bots are better at cracking CAPTCHAs for at least four years - ever since Verge published this article in 2019: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence. Still a vast majority of the most popular websites in the world continue to use them, even at the cost of annoying their users. I'm somehow inclined to take these research findings with a barrel of salt.

Workday wants racially biased recruitment algorithm claims thrown out

sketharaman

Re: Data vs what you do with it

This is tricky terrain. It could be argued that, had the software not provided protected classes in its filter options, the human user wouldn't be able to discriminate by protected class. It's somewhat like one's belief on whether guns kill or people kill using guns. IIRC there have been cases where software vendors have been ordered to modify their features to ensure compatibility with local law.

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

sketharaman

Not Whether But When

For at least the last 10 years, I've received, on an average, better quality of customer service from chatbots than Human CSRs. Six years ago, I wondered if chatbots can replace humans. I think it's clear now that the question is not whether but when. But there's no need to cry for CSRs - by relieving them from mundane tasks, chatbots will enable human CSRs to focus on more strategic things. https://gtm360.com/blog/2017/05/26/can-chatbots-replace-humans/

SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation

sketharaman

Incidents like this will add fuel to the fire of SAP user group's concerns about whether SAP is really better at running SAP than its customers. https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/23/sap_americas_user_review/

FCC questions ISPs' selective memory about data caps

sketharaman

Well played FCC

Suppliers will now think twice before they rise to the occasion and waive their TOS during Black Swan events. Well played FCC.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

sketharaman

Jargon rocks!!!

According to a study, when stripped of all the jargon, a 6-page credit card agreement ballooned to 24 pages. So there's a reason why jargon is there. ProTip: Make the onetime investment required to learn jargon. Otherwise, you'll find every meeting taking 4X the time and perpetually whine about lack of work-life balance.

Chinese chipmaker insists it has Intel on-side, not inside

sketharaman

Onside Inside Hardly Matters

Reminds me of the mid-90s when Compaq got tired of the Intel hegemony and replaced the Intel CPUs on its PC range with rival AMD's processors. This was a time when Intel's high-decibel "Intel Inside" ad campaign made PC customers question the brand of CPU used in their PCs. Compaq countered this with an ad that went, "When it says Compaq on the outside, nobody cares what's on the inside".

Healthcare org with over 100 clinics uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to write medical records

sketharaman

"Carbon Health claims 88 percent of the verbiage can be accepted without edits."

As long as they know which 88%, what can go wrong, huh?

H/T John Wanamaker: 'Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.'

Australia fines tech companies for exploiting foreign tech workers

sketharaman

Going by USA, UK, Germany, etc., the foreign workers on visa know what they're signing up for and will happily work at the underpaid wages. The ones really being exploited are the local workers who are replaced by cheaper foreign workers basis an immigration policy that purports to prevent any pay disparity.

This legit Android app turned into mic-snooping malware – and Google missed it

sketharaman

No big deal?

I don't see what's the big deal when Google is the developer of the #1 app in this genre. Called Google Amplifier, Google positions it as an accessibility feature but, going by the PI in Scott Turow's latest novel SUSPECT, it's more widely used to snoop conversations taking place in your neighbor's apartment!

SAP's cloud drive hits speed bumps with American users

sketharaman

Brilliant Concern!

"SAP historically has been a manufacturer of its software, not an operator of it. Its customer base is very savvy operators of SAP software, not good creators of it. When you do a RISE Cloud deal, you give operational control away to SAP, and you're not sure if SAP can do it equal or better than you."

This is a brilliant concern about Cloud in general and SAP in particular. I've never heard a single customer articulate it in this manner. For vendors who have been providing managed ops of their software in addition to building it, this could be a huge competitive advantage over the SAPs and Oracles whose first tyst with operations is very recent - in the cloud era.

What's your Mean Time To Innocence – the time needed to prove that mess is not your problem

sketharaman

ROTFL:)

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