Livemint has become quite popular during the last year or two of its existence. But sometimes funny things happen on the first page. Example in case is the screenshot above taken on  Nov 14th about 12:30pm IST. This image shows 4 different values of the BSE sensex index. Which one should I believe? While I can understand why it would happen, but I think it should be embarassing for the site owners.

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There has been a visible shift towards design on Beta Thoughts in the past few months. If you are one of the 1.5 readers of this blog you might have noticed it. While I have always been interested in the design of things - but only after the google reader’s recommendation engine recommended “core77’s design blog” that this interest has gone into over drive. Besides my work as a NetWeaver professional revolves around thinking from user’s perspective aka user centric design. So what all of this has to do with the title of this post? Read on…

Core77’s recent post pointed to a lengthy but immensely enjoyable article about the design and development of Wii Fit which might have over taken Grand Theft Auto sales by  now. Don’t miss reading the complete article for some of the craziest places there ideas come from. Over here I would just point out to how important the user centric design is for them

Miyamoto-san banged the table and said, “That’s wrong!” He told this person that from the consumer’s point-of-view, clarity was important. That people don’t say, “You need to lose 2 BMI points to reach your ideal weight”, they say, “You need to lose 3 pounds to reach your ideal weight”. We wanted people from age 5 to 95 to enjoy using Wii and he pointed out that most of those people wouldn’t know what BMI is. He demanded to know how this person could be so backward-looking when so many employees were working so hard to negotiate with official organizations to allow kilograms to be displayed in the game for the benefit of the consumers.

Image Courtesy - Goodrob13’s photostream at flickr

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When Dash Express, a GPS with internet connectivity and utilizing the collective knowledge about routes from its users was announced, it was quite an innovative concept. But it seems ants might have beaten them to it. Though a bit of rudimentary technology but it works from the Telegraph article (HT Marginal Revolution)

His team set up an “ant motorway” with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup. Soon the narrower route soon became congested.

But when an ant returning along the congested route to the nest collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer onto the other path.

It is a pity that Dash is getting out of making their own hardware. I am sure they will survive and hope to use their technology someday in some form.

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Wow, so CA closed the deal :D. Many many congrats to Barack Obama. It is a historic moment in the US history. Watching so many people jubilant in Grant Park is fun. A good break from the melancholy financial mess scene.

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Thomas Otter was mulling over how analogies are a great tool in internalizing new concepts like SOA. His analogy of pointing the difference between a laptop/notebook and Desktop is a good one and points to the loosely coupled and tightly coupled systems. There is another analogy I really like and I believe is a good one in explaining SOA to someone. It comes from Bernard Wheeler at Sun. Here it is in its entirety

The traditional relationship between business and IT is like having a personal chef: you (the business) can dictate what you want to eat, or take menu recommendations, but your chef (the IT department) only buys supplies according to the pre-agreed menu. You play no part in how the food is bought, cooked, etc., but you pay the whole cost for the chef, cooking fuel, food and all the waste from each meal. In addition, if you suddenly change your mind about what you want to eat, there’s unlikely to be an alternative meal ready in a short time - apart from re-cooked leftovers.

Using commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) software is more like eating in a restaurant: there’s typically less flexibility available to you in the actual make-up of the dishes and the more customization you want, the more it’ll cost. But you share the costs of the chef, facilities, etc. among other restaurant-goers - reaping some benefits from the ‘economies of scale’ of the restaurant. Furthermore, if you change your mind about what you want just before ordering (e.g. pizza vs. pasta), there’s probably a reasonable alternative that can be available in an acceptable amount of time. But if you want to include a totally different culture or flavor (e.g. vegetable tempura as a starter), you may have to visit more than one ‘restaurant’ and figure out for yourself the logistics of how the ‘meal’ as a whole is going to be achieved. Also, there’s nothing to stop the restaurant from suddenly hiking up their prices, radically changing their menu, or being bought out by a bigger chain who then ‘trashes’ your preferred meal.

SOA is like eating at a buffet: the chef (either private or shared) prepares a range of dishes from which you build your own meal. The meal you choose does not require the whole ensemble to be put together ‘in the kitchen’: rather, the chef focuses solely on ensuring that there is an appropriate range of dishes provided in the buffet to keep most people happy for most of the time, based on market demand, season (and other prevailing conditions), consumer feedback/requests/suggestions, etc. And if the cost of any item changes dramatically (or there’s an ingredient shortage, "food scare", or some other reason to change a menu choice), you don’t have to change your whole meal, just that one piece of it (although granted, it may be the centrepiece of the meal).

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All of us have seen the rise of social software wave in the last few years. If I were to put these software on human life scale - wikis and forums would be the oldies, blogs the middle age folks, FaceBook-Myspace-Orkut-LinkedIn as the young adults and twitter, friendfeed as the teens. The underlying human behavior for the success of everything social on internet is greatly summarized by Clay Shirky in his book “Here Comes Everybody”

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Similar views were echoed by Seth Godin in this post where he said

It’s so tempting to believe that we are merely broadcasters, putting together a play list and hurtling it out to the rest of the world. Louder is better. But we’re not. Now we’re leaders.

People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.

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A quick look up for the meaning of internalize at answers.com tells me it is “to take in and make an integral part of one’s attitudes or beliefs”. Over the years I have realized that it takes quite a long time for ideas to “really” sink in. You might read a book on behavioral economics and really like the ideas and various biases presented in it and say wow that is cool. But unless the idea is internalized you will probably forget it. It would be akin knowing a word and its dictionary meaning but never use it in conversations. It is only after you have read the same idea again and again in various contexts, have discussed about it with your peers, friends etc that the ideas are absorbed. Some of the ideas that have taken time for me our opportunity cost, time value of money and the one pertaining to my profession IT is enabler of business or a tool if you would.

What ideas do you have that took time to sink in?

Image Courtesy - http://openclipart.org/media/files/yves_guillou/6505

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