The Saracen's Sputnik Moment

Last week at the State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama waxed eloquent as he spurred his countrymen on to embrace what he referred to as this generations Sputnik Moment. 

Thousands of miles across the Atlantic a different set of people seem to have picked up the drift. As tens of thousands of frustrated youth throng the streets of Cairo and Alexandria demanding the ouster of their leader, Mubarak's silence is indeed deafening. The Egyptians demands are as genuine as the Tunisians. Corruption, joblessness and a whole host of other ailments that have been simmering over the past 30 years are now coming to a boil on the scorched crowded streets of Cairo.

It is however interesting to note the caution with which world leaders are treading. 

Firstly, President Hosni Mubarak has NOT addressed the nation yet. Of course, it is assumed that as the crisis worsens, he would eventually make some sort of televised address. For the moment though, he chooses to live in ignorance. He is biding time hoping that sooner or later the mobs will get tired, and the protest would loose steam. In fact, in some circles he is even being termed as "arrogant" by announcing the post of a vice president when the country is screaming for his head. Like a poker player he is holding his cards close to his chest and waiting for the other players to call!!

The other player at the table is the US. At stake is a strategically located ally headed by a more-or-less puppet regime which gets 2 Billion dollars in aid receipts annually. Why risk a known friendly neighbourhood dictator for an unknown liberal with an unknown agenda? America has enough on its hands with Iran and Afghanistan. So while America may pay lip service to democratic ideals, secret parleys with Mubarak are certainly underway to untangle the crisis.

Nearly 10 years ago, in 2002, Professor Amy Chua from Yale University published her first book "World On Fire", against the backdrop of the riots in Indonesia against successful ethnic Chinese by a more than a few truckloads of jobless islanders. She made a few valid points about some of the undesirable aspects of Democracy and Globalization at a time when the likes of Thomas Friedman were singing its praises.

Democratic uprisings often place tremendous power and leverage in the hands of rampaging mobs that desecrate everything in their path with impunity. The case of Iran stares glaringly in ones face as an uprising turned sour. Isolated from the International community and a source of constant tension in the middle east, Iran were clearly better off with the Shah, but the Iranians didn't clearly think so.

However in this case, the uprising isn't religion based. The other party at the table, the Muslim Brotherhood is tactfully circling the skies waiting for the mobs to clear the streets in order to swoop down and lay claim to whats left of the revolution.

The 4th player on the table, the one with the most visible might is the army. Loyal to President Hosni Mubarak for all these years, the army has done a u-turn and refused to clamp down on the masses. This has allowed the protests to gather more steam. If at all any party can grab the reins here and set the tone, it is indeed the army.   

Between all these players, lie the legitimate cries for regime change. The once timid Egyptian public has finally arrived at the table are anxiously waiting for action. The players are however nervously passing the buck for everyone else to make the first move in order to retaliate. In such an environment predicting the end result becomes a Permutation formula. 

Things however may not go as badly as one thinks. Egypt is after all fashioned in the similar mould as Turkey is with a large liberal base. Most Egyptians do not favour a return to war with Israel (a scenario that may happen if the Islamic Brotherhood comes to power and decides to scrap the peace accord). A smooth transition by the army to a new administration may yield the much needed reforms needed to boost growth.

Egypt could still stake its claim amongst the most successful yet liberal Muslim nations of the world such as Turkey, Malaysia, etc .. but this certainly will not happen overnight. On the streets, the last tyre is yet to be burnt and the shutters are still half open. The smell of change is ripe in the air. This may after all still prove to be the Saracens Sputnik moment.    

My Open Letter to Bill Gates

Dear Bill,

I must admit it sure isn't easy being in your shoes. I remember curled up in my study room arm-chair in my final year of post graduation more than a decade ago on a hot Sunday afternoon reading the cover story from one of India's premier business magazines - "Business World". The article was about the global IT behemoth Microsoft and how its reach was not only all-pervading but also all-throttling. Those were the days when all you feared was the odd anti-trust case, especially whenever you tried those marketing gimmicks to corner more of your existing marketshare.

That article also had a smal little snippet about how some evangelical Christians had begun to consider you to be the much feared anti-christ. Conspiracy theories were in the air predicting that you and your all powerful juggernaut would ride into power and usher in a new order with the mark of the beast.

A few years after I graduated, the heir to your throne - Steve Ballmer donned your mantle. Now!! Here was a marketing whiz, with no technical experience whatsoever who would spread the brand of Windows to the ends of the earth and thereby cement Microsofts position as IT chieftain for decades to come.

Well, somehow that hasn't really happened yet now, has it !!

In fact you seem to be preoccupied these days with the Melinda Gates foundation, concerned about issues such as Polio eradication in 3rd world countries and curtailing the spread of AIDS. The evangelicals have, as expected, abandoned your candidature for the antichrist and are shortlisting other suspects. However, the nimble powerhouse that you once built now seems tottering like the old elephant IBM once was.

To start with, did you see Steve's keynote address at CES 2011? I thought it was anything but stellar. Does one use primetime on an event as large as CES in taking the audience on a flashback tour of Microsoft's 2010 products!! This is CES, where people are hungry for new technology and new devices. While anxious visitors were eyeing the new smartphones and tablet PC's on display, all that Microsoft could showcase was vague prototypes !!

The Wintel alliance that has lasted Microsoft for decades now has run truely its course. The CISC Architecture worked perfectly with desktops and servers but not with the new range of long-battery life and user-interactive devices. You see, Microsoft needs more baskets to put its eggs into. The future seems (at this point of time) to be RISC based smartphones and tablets. Yet, Microsoft took nearly forever to get on ARM with unnecessary delays.

Windows 7 Phone has been delayed. We do not know when it would be released and even when it officially is, it would fall straight into a market already swamped with androids and iPhones. With all these unnessary delays you have gifted archrival Apple Computers an extra lap in the race, while you sit on the sidelines and toy with options on whether you would tweak Windows CE for Tablets or let Windows 8 rolls out first. I seriously doubt whether Microsoft is serious about the tablet/smartphone market or whether they have decided that the future instead hinges on the success of the other big story - cloud computing.

An article on the Cloud Computing marketplace last year turned up some rather strange leaders (see itweb's report). IBM and CISCO's solutions were among the top 10 cloud solutions listed but names such as Google and Microsoft were nowhere in the reckoning. Companies such as IBM and even Oracle have been in the Enterprise Applications space for a long time and have a wide range of tools at their disposal. Microsoft on the other hand has its successes mainly in the desktop segment with their MS Office toolkit, and even in the gaming segment with X-Box.

To take a step back, Microsoft's forte has always been the Operating system(OS) and productivity tools that revolved around it. As the OS now shifts from the desktop to the tablet/smartphone, I feel that Microsoft would be wise to remain engaged and competitive in its core segment. Trying to be a leader in all segments in an age where disruptive technologies arrive and disappear by the time one's windows PC boots up, is not the best of approaches especially since Microsoft is just not as dominant as it once was!! 

So Mr. Bill, we miss you and your key-note addresses. Everytime you used to get up there on the dias, with your commanding presence and geeky spectacled grin and talk to us (IT developers) about technology (whether it was SOAP, XML or even Sharepoint), we knew you had a vision and knew where you were headed. Now we have to contend with a technically challenged Bozo who apart from chanting "Windows" is pretty much clueless as to how to keep a technical audience engaged.

We need you back at the helm Bill, either you or Paul Allen !! Someone recently said when non-economists start talking like economists, then something is really wrong with the economy. Likewise when non-technocrats start talking technology, then something is surely wrong !!