Feb 26, 2010
Feb 25, 2010
Why Apple beats Dell
I've had the experience in dealing with computer hardware for 15 years now.In these years, I've used, sold, recommended and experienced the life cycles of HP, Dell, IBM (Lenovo) and Apple products. One difference I've noticed with Apple is that their products are NOT designed just for competitive sales, they're made to be useable. They decide the pricing after all the required quality and design parameters have been met. The other companies make products to compete in prices and features, not usability.
Here's a Forbes article that aptly describes why Apple beats Dell, and probably other vendors like Lenovo.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/23/dell-computer-apple-markets-steve-jobs.html
In technology, its not just about prices and features, its about design, usability and a lot more. Unless brands get it right and innovate, the chances that they will remain forever is low.
Feb 22, 2010
Open letter to Paypal business head - blocked services in India
Dear Farhad
This is in response to your post - https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/02/an-open-letter-from-farhad-irani-on-the-situation-in-india/
Hundreds, maybe thousands on Indians, particularly young people from the IT software industry are dependent on Paypal for receiving payments from abroad. After few years of service, Paypal faces some issues with RBI and it suddenly decides to stop all payments and withdrawals to bank accounts. You must currently be holding thousands if not millions of dollars that belong to people in India.
It raises several questions about the whole way in which the issue is being handled and the ethics at work :
a) There is NO official information on paypal.com/in about the difficulties you are facing. Why are you hiding the issue from customers ?
b) People who initiated withdrawal processes 15 days ago have neither received their refunds, nor has the withdrawal process been stopped.
c) You have sent no email to customers informing them of the situation.
You are casually mentioning about a major issue like this in your blogs instead of making all your customers aware about it.
Is this a way of trying to make your blogs popular or are you trying to help customers here ?
Further, even the responses in the blogs are vague.
Looks at some parts of Anuj's post ( https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/02/update-on-paypal-situation-in-india/)
" 2. When will personal payments be turned back on?
Personal payments to and from India will be suspended for at least a few months .....
3. When will local bank withdrawals be available?
Customers should be able to withdraw their funds to a local bank within the next few days... "
How many days are few days and how many months are few months ?
Here's the ridiculous one from https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/02/personal-payments-and-local-bank-transfers-in-india/
"During this time, customers can still make commercial payments to India but merchants cannot withdraw funds in Rupees to local Indian banks."
Interpreted correctly, this means "Please continue paying Paypal but Paypal won't pay you".
Why do you want to keep receiving funds when customers can't withdraw ? Why don't you suspend all services till you've cleared all pending payments ?
Services like Paypal are the backbone of web, when they fail, not only do they cause short term problems, they cripple the trust of many people in new age systems.
Situations like these may arise with any company (Toyota is experiencing one now) but can be handled better, you and your team are not setting the right example.
I hope to see immediate action, including official notices, and transparency in this matter.
Regards
Anil Sharma
Gmail box full ! Now what ?
Well, a 7 GB mail box is not enough for some people. My official email ID on Gmail (Google Apps) became full and some mails started bouncing. For the past 5 days, I've been struggling with issues probably unknown to many Gmail users. I'm sure many users will reach there some day, so it good to aware. a) When your mail box becomes full, Gmail doesn't send you a warning email ! That's the least you would expect. Instead, it just starts bouncing mails. b) When your contacts warn you that your mail box is full, what do you do ? You hurriedly log in and start deleting your mails. I deleted about 1000 of mails from inbox, spam and trash, but for next few hours, Gmail kept showing that my box was 99% full and it wouldn't reduce. After few hours, it automatically reduced to 94%. That means, when you delete messages from trash, Gmail is 'probably' storing your mails somewhere else before it deletes from your account. That's not comfortable to know c) Ok, so I have 13000 + mails in the inbox. I want to delete say 800 selected ones. How do i do it ? That's where the pain begins. You see, Gmail was built with the philosophy that users should never be required to delete mails so the options for deleting are very poor. I can't delete all email that are say more than 3 years old. I can't list all email by the size of their attachments so I could delete the heavier mails first. I can't reach emails numbered between say 8000 and 9000 - that'll take me hours as I have to start and click through pages from the newest or oldest mails. d) I figure a good way to delete unwanted mails would be to search for mails with a common topic and delete all of them together. Even that's not smooth. Suppose I search for all mails that have say [forums] in subject line and it shows 200 mails. Now I get 20 pages of such emails. I select the mails in the first page, then I click the option to select all the 200 mails. Now , I don't want to delete 1 of the 200 mails - but you can't do that !! The moment you unselect 1, your selection of 200 reduces to just the first out of 20 pages !!
So here I am, staring at the possibility that I might have to spend hours to manually delete mails.
I've highlighted these issues to Google also. I'm not criticizing Gmail, I still love it and I think it's still the best email service.
I'm just hoping somebody somewhere will somehow bring these things to someones notice someday !!
So here I am, staring at the possibility that I might have to spend hours to manually delete mails.
I've highlighted these issues to Google also. I'm not criticizing Gmail, I still love it and I think it's still the best email service.
I'm just hoping somebody somewhere will somehow bring these things to someones notice someday !!
How do I donate ?
Most of us are financially stable or at least comfortable without knowing it. While our needs are met, we want more.
This video on the value of Rs. 500 to different people is a good example of what I'm talking about. I have often wished to find a way to financially assist those in real need. However, the idea of contributing to an "NGO" or an agency that assists people in need has never appealed to me. For one, I don't know what's being done with my hard earned money. Next, their costs of operations are often bloated to cater to needs of management. Also, their integrity is in doubt. Have you found a good way of donating so that those in need and those for whom you intend it to be, really benefit from it ? Please reply here : http://blog.anil.biz/how-do-i-donate
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