Sunday, March 18, 2007

Importance of end to end quality tracking

Vir Shanghvi today moans about the bad quality of wine across India. Apparently this is because wines are poorly transported thus exposing them to temperature fluctuations; and because they are stored straight up (he says wines need to be stored flat inorder to be in contact with the cork and them preventing some sort of chemical reaction that makes them go bad).

I say its the fault of the wine brands who have not set up quality tracking processes that identify bad quality and the reasons behind it. It is the responsibility of every brand to ensure customer satisfaction....and if they don't do this, then a smart business can step in, map out the pain points, improve quality and steal business from the existing suppliers.

It is the responsibility of the manager of every function to put in place an end to end quality checking process, which includes reports, checks and feedback, and then strive to improve delivery/production. The best managers do this, and when all the managers in a business do this, those business become the best in their league.

Region gets increasingly unstable

Tigers in Sri Lanka, civil uprising in Pakistan and Maoist rebels in Nepal; India is surrounded by extremely unstable neighbors. These countries received their independence at the same time as India, but democracy has been uprooted each time it tried. How many more deaths will it take for the people their to learn that democracy is the ONLY path to peace?

The Pakistani suppression of the Judiciary. Last week President Musharraf dismissed the Head Supreme Count Justice, who refused to step down. When the law fraternity took up his cause, President Musharraf had them brutally suppressed. Many died and many more were injured. Now Pakistan appears to be on the bring of an uprising. What is going on? When are we going to see the end of dictators in Pakistan?

Sri Lanka is a total tragedy, a nice gentle people, held hostage by a small group of so called Tamil liberationists, who are using intense violence to gain their freedom. Why is violence required? Does Sri Lanka not have a democracy? Is their judicial system dead?

And this strife threatens to spill over into India. Did you know, India deploys over 350,000 troops in Kashmir to maintain stability? That other parts of India like Assam & Chattisgarh are facing constant militancy?

So why do people take to militancy? The logical answer is because they are unable to get justice or have their voice heard, so as a last resort their take to militancy. But India is a functioning democracy and has a judiciary (albeit slow), so why is this happening? My reasoning: It is because a few greedy people want to profit from the supply of arms, so they stir up violence and create causes that raise funds, so they can earn their 20% commission in the supply of arms. Or its because governments in their misguided power plays continually try and destabilise neighbours in the hope of I don't know what. Does India want to swallow Pakistan, Sri Lanka & Nepal? Looks like it, because it looks like they have been fingering these countries by assisting rebels. However, Pakistan's case is different because their democracy has been usurped by one dictator after another.

India too must strengthen itself by improving the judicial system to enable speedy dispute redress; without this people will take the law into their own hands. It must also continue to encourage more people to vote thus encouraging an active democracy. Last but not least, education helps improve people's knowledge of their rights and grievance redressal mechanisms.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Internet Explorer IS unsecure

I never believed it, I always thought it was hype...after all who do you really know that got virus infected by surfing the web. Virus' are supposed to come from spam emails, and from files that friends send, or through the office lan network; not by surfing the web.

But it happened today. I was surfing a website using IE (because I was doing some speed comparisons with Firefox) and suddenly my McAfee pops up saying there is a virus and its been deleted ! I was confused because I don't use Outlook email anymore, only Gmail and this is a NEW computer. I checked the path and it was a virus that had come through IE. The Virus had triggered when I had clicked on a link on the website; sure enough IE reported that it could not open that file or some error like that.

Years back I took the decision to shift my website from Microsoft Server to Linux and have been virus free ever since...now I'm going to stick to Firefox and avoid IE.

Alexa's dubious rankings

After 7 years in the business I would have thought Alexa would have figured out how to improve the accuracy of their rankings systems. Below is hard cold proof that Alexa's system needs some serious fixing.

Flora2000's traffic and sales for Valentine's day were more than double in 2007 and compared to 2006. But broken Alexa 2007 shows lower traffic than 2006. Take a look and decide for yourself.


Agreed that Alexa is limited by the number of installs of it's toolbar. But shouldn't they have overcome this by making deals with other toolbars like Google, Yahoo, etc to expand their base and thus accuracy?