So Much for Upgrades

Landed in Dehli last night at 10pm, grinding my teeth that I didn't decide to get on an earlier flight from Mumbai, but then realising that there wouldn't have been anyone waiting to pick me up from the airport if I was early (and the hotel was half an hour's drive away).

The hotel (Sheraton Delhi) is great: one of those palatial kind of places with grounds and be-turbaned guards and doorman. The lady in a sari met me and informed my room had been upgraded, which was really nice, until I realised that it was already pushing midnight and I'd be leaving at 4am just one day later. Oh well, an upgrade for 28 hours is better than no upgrade at all.

A packed day followed: meeting at the office, back to the hotel for media, back to the office for lunch, into a car to do a phone interview on the way to a customer, back to the office for debriefing. Hopefully I didn't make too much of a mess of things with the journos...

Outside a customer's IT department

Traffic Madness

Mumbai traffic is insane. This is something everyone knows, but it's something else to experience it. And I've done a lot of experiencing over the past couple of days. It's not scary so much as just all-in: everyone jostling for that little edge forward. The dumb thing is that if everyone kept lane discipline and, say, didn't run through red traffic lights, the whole system would probably work a lot more smoothly. Still, as the customer I met today said, Indians love to break the rules – to feel like they're winning something over the authorities. A sentiment we can appreciate in Australia, even if trying to drive in this mess would make most of us blow a fuse.

That's one definite upside to having a driver, quite aside from having someone who will pick you up, deal with the issues of parking, look after bags, etc. I'm thinking that if I eventually get to India for a holiday, this is a good way to do it.

There are some good roads – in fact on the first day it was too good: we took a brand new expressway and arrived at the customer site (ahem) 90 minutes early for the meeting. Still, better early than late...
The frightening thing about this 15km raise expressway is that there is no breakdown lane, no turn-offs, and it seems no way to cross over to the other side in an emergency. One broken-down car will cause a huge traffic jam. Two broken down cars will totally clog everything for hours. Fun just waiting to happen.

Open Cloud?

History has shown us how damaging it can be to funnel ourselves down a single proprietary path, no matter how popular a particular platform is at a particular point in time.  

It can even damage organisations who originally benefit from the lock-in: one only needs to look at the trouble Microsoft is having getting people to move on from Windows XP. A lot of that is due to the general move away from desktops to mobile platforms,  but early on a great deal was due to organisations having bought or built internal applications on top of Internet Explorer 6 & that did not work with Internet Explorer 7 or later, so would not work on newer Windows platforms....

Keep things open - make a bigger pie, rather than just trying to take all of the pie for yourself...