Author: srungta

Fall of Microsoft

Post author By srungta
Post date July 5, 2012

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

Read the article: Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant | Blogs | Vanity Fair

Business Education Finance Innovation

Silicon Valley: How it works!

Post author By srungta
Post date June 27, 2012

I believe that Silicon Valley is like Las Vegas, except they make you pass a number of tests before they let you gamble. This means that only a relatively select group gets to sit at the table. The purpose of this post is to analyze the folowing problem: Joe Founder comes to Silicon Valley with a laptop full of dreams, but no money. Joe wants to maximize his chances of making a few million dollars in five years. What should Joe do?

Read the article: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

Education Finance Health History Innovation Life Science Social Technology

The 7 Greatest Ideas in History

Post author By srungta
Post date June 19, 2012

Just a few stand out above all the rest. They change the course of history and affect the lives of millions who aren’t even aware of them. Amazingly, they are often the work of a single person. Those ideas are truly great and seven really stand out. To make my selection, I applied three criteria: Longevity (i.e. they survive a long time without being amended or surpassed in any significant way), impact (i.e. they greatly affected the lives and work of others) and authorship (i.e. they can be traced to one person).

Read the article: The 7 Greatest Ideas in History

Uncategorized

No virtuous circle, or how India’s Silicon Valley is… different

Post author By srungta
Post date June 19, 2012

I’ve lived in Bangalore since I was three – we moved here in 1987 after my father retired from the public sector that year. Bangalore, then, was known as a retirement city, famed for its pleasant weather and abundant greenery. The Indian economy was still closed, most of the jobs were in the public sector and salaries were low. Top executives in the public sector earned less than Rs. 60,000 a year – my father retired as the General Manager of United India Insurance, giving me a reference point. At an exchange rate of about fourteen rupees to the dollar, this amounted to around 4200 US dollars a year, give or take. Somewhere around this time was when Bangalore started to be called the “Silicon Valley of India” by the local media.

Read the article: Electric Sheep Blog: No virtuous circle, or how India’s Silicon Valley is… different

Energy Innovation Nature Science Technology

Germany sets new solar power record

Post author By srungta
Post date June 3, 2012

German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.

Read the article: Germany sets new solar power record, institute says

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All of Earth’s Water in a Single Sphere

Post author By srungta
Post date May 10, 2012

This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth’s water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) , with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.

Read the article: Photos: If All of Earth’s Water was put into Single Sphere

History Life Meta Nature Science

Human survival depends on space exploration – Stephen Hawking

Post author By srungta
Post date November 21, 2011

Stephen Hawking says the colonization of outer space is key to the survival of humankind, predicting it will be difficult for the world’s inhabitants “to avoid disaster in the next hundred years”… Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

Read the article: Human survival depends on space exploration, says Stephen Hawking