I am not a management guru, but I did learn something about management and corporate responsibilities. Recently on Facebook I came across a post from Robert Scoble about how US market is the market that counts. He was talking about an article which reported that the iPhone 5 sales have helped Apple to take climb up the sales chart atleast in the US. I agree with him on the point that US market is one of the major market there is and being the leader there counts for something. But I would like to take a look at the bigger picture.

According to reports, the the individual parts of iPhone costs less than $200, yet it is sold at over $600 unlocked. Is that a 300% markup? Probably not. Though $200 is not the exact price and Apple would obviously get more discount based on the fact they are ordering the parts in bulk, let us round it off to $200. This is the fixed cost to produce an iPhone. Whether Apple makes just 1 unit or a billion units, there would not be any change in this amount. There are different variable costs associated with the product, R&D, salaries, marketing expenditure, shipping etc. But this cost is not associated to a single unit and when you allocate this amount to the number of units produced, the per unit cost decreases when quantity increases. If the total spent of Apple was 1 Billion dollar, and it produced 1 iPhone, Apple would have to charge one Billion and two hundred dollar for that single unit to break even, that is $1,000,000,200. But if Apple were to produce 1 Billion units of iPhone, then Apple could sell it for $202 and still make a profit of a billion dollars.

We could take a look at Apple’s account statement and see how much they have spend on Research, development, marketing and after looking at the profit they have made, we could come to certain conclusions as to how much profit Apple is making on one iPhone. Though the findings might be interesting, we would not be going into it. And it would take someone with much better knowledge about accounting to get to such a figure, if it hasn’t been done already.

The question here is, who benefits from this huge margin? Investors obviously. marketing firms, various relatively small business which are involved with the operations of Apple, few companies outside the US who manufacturer and assemble the product, various small industries over there providing supporting services. My friend Monica introduced me to Dependency Theory and how poor countries would always be providing resources to the rich countries whereby the bulk of the benefit is collected by the rich country. To me it sounds like an exploitation system, but it is how the world works. So, going by the dependency theory, only a fraction of the cost is given to companies outside the US for manufacturing iPhones. Again, who benefits? Most of the benefit is for the investors. Advertising, marketing, distribution channels gets their share of the profit, because they are part of the “core”. I would assume that the profit a a retail store or an online store gets from the sale of 1 iPhone is more than the profit that is earned by the company that assembled the iPhone in the first place. Do not forget that there are more people involved in making an iPhone where as to sell it, you just need one person. The wage that “manufacturer” gives to its employees, if you take per unit, would be a very small fraction of what the retail store receives in commission.

Now the question is, who pays for it. The 3rd world country which does most of the work doesn’t. They are making money, however little it might be, to buy food and live. These people have children who I hope are studying well. Since iPhone is sold mostly in US, it is the American public that pays for this. The American public is purchasing an over priced product that will make the rich even richer and they keep buying it year after year. Is that aesthetics of iPhone worth the premium pricing? I am sure that someone will argue that this money is being invested again and that is driving the American and World economy. But the cycle keeps repeating over and over with different products. I am sure Apple is doing its bit as part of a responsible corporation, but I am not sure whether it is charity or hospital or something else. But is that all that is expected from Apple, the company with the most market capitalization in the world?

Now let us look at Google. Android is developed by Google as an open source software. Any company in the world can use it for free and modify the code as they suit fit. If you are not happy with the way the Android development is happening, you can start another branch off it and develop it as you see fit. Where is the profit for Google in this? It will certainly have a impact on mobile search, some of the Google products would be used by consumers, but is it worth creating a new OS which is given away for free? They could have created a closed system and given it as a free license or at a lower rate than other companies do. Yet, the price is free. Is Google evil that they have an ulterior motive in doing this?

Let us try to figure out where Google is heading. Google is not a company with a Midas touch. There are numerous failed product and many of its Utopian ideas have been shot down. They might have learnt their lesson and might be making small moves so as not to scare other existing players. The first android phones were low powered and would have had very little impact on the mobile world, if it were not for loyal followers who hoped this was the start of something good. At some point Google realized they had to take matters into its own hands, and released the Nexus One. It tried to break away from carriers, but was not very successful. I purchased the Nexus One for $520, cheaper than Apple, but still expensive. Recent release from the Nexus stable Nexus 4, Nexus 7 are high end devices, but the price has come down drastically. Though the sales numbers are not available, the demand has been much higher than Google anticipated with stocks being sold out within a few hours, on its online store. The same store which failed when it tried to sell Nexus One.

What has happened during the period? Nexus One raised the bar, and mobile phone manufacturers responded. Powerful Android devices where designed by all the manufacturers. US consumers became aware of the alternative to iPhone at a lower cost. During some time Android over took iPhone as the dominant mobile OS. Google had peeled a layer to show what Android is capable of. It then removed another layer, showing how cheaper the hardware could be. Google is yet to reveal what it plans to do with its acquisition of Motorola. Google may just want to send a message to hardware developers that they are taking a stake along with others with the lawsuits flying all around, or they may want to raise the bar in hardware too.

On one hand, Google has given companies like Samsung and HTC an even playing field along with Apple in the US market. These companies are not from US, and the profit they make are for its investors. By reducing the price for its Nexus line, Google has indicated what kind of price the market should expect from other companies. Premium pricing is bad for the economy. Does anyone doubt that mobile phone price is going to drop when the demand for Nexus continues?

I said on one hand, here is the other part of it. Android has made iPhone like capabilities available worldwide. There are phones which cost around $40-50 which run on Android. They may not be the most powerful phone, but they do have the functions expected from a smart phone. Cheap tablets like Aakash are made which gives students from 3rd world countries an equal footing with their counterparts in US who carry an iPad to school.

15 years ago, I used to travel 15 Kms (almost 10 miles) by bus every week to nearest decent libraries (2 of them) to get 5-8 books. I used to spend 1 to 2 hours every morning going through the two newspapers that we used to get. This was the extend of my quest for information. The same information can now be made available to the poorest of children at the tip of their finger tip. As a kid, I once wondered how many intelligent minds are lost each year because they are not identified and nurtured. These are the kids should grow up to develop future technologies, economy, their nation and the world.

Would I be out of line if I said that Google has made the poor richer in education. Does this knowledge it not outweigh the billions donated by Bill Gates. If it were not for Google and Android, would it not have taken many more years before such technology was made available to what the world considers as poor? Economically they might be poor, but as human beings, they are equal to the richest person and their potential to contribute to the world is as good as anyone else.

Apple is exploiting the existing market, Google is not just developing new market, it is creating market creators. Let me ask you now, “what is corporate responsibility?”

Related articles

• Google and Motorola rumored to be working on X Phone to once again take on the iPhone (imore.com)
• Google’s Next Target…the iPhone (atlantablackstar.com)
• 10 Reasons I Chose Android Over an iPhone (digitizd.com)
• Why Apple Needs a Really Expensive iPhone (cultofmac.com)
• The Magic of Google Now and Thinking Different (kbskobac.blogspot.com)

There is a very interesting Doctor Who story, from the 80′s, “Full Circle“. I had read it as a child and for some reason I thought about the story today. With the help of Google, I was able to identify the name of the episode and the book that I had read. The story revolves around the planet Alzarius where the Doctor and his companions found themselves stranded.

The planet (or rather the area) is inhabited by a humanoid civilization which crashed their spaceship 40,000 generations ago. They were trying to fix their spaceship, “Starliner” all this time. The complete story is not relevant to the point I am trying to make today. But the Doctor discovers that the spaceship was repaired centuries ago. The problem was, there was no one who knew how to pilot the ship. The leadership team, consisting of 3 self-elected “Deciders”, had over the centuries kept up the charade of repairing the ship, rather than admit that couldn’t fly even though the ship was fixed.

Imagine people replacing each part of the spaceship over and over, generations upon generations, with no clue about their fate. Think about what you do at your job. Are you fixing a problem only to repeat it 6 months into the future? Is it your fault or has the top-level management lost track of its objectives? Think about what is happening in your country and all around the world. Are we repeating the mistakes of our previous generations?

The human race has the ability to learn from its mistake, we should, considering we can put 1 and 2 together and call it 3 instead of 12. We have backtracked our history to 3500 BC and beyond to a certain degree. Watching the documentaries of Michael Wood, I would say there are people who understand the mistakes of the past civilizations. Are our world leaders so short-sighted that they can see only 5 years into the future? Are the “wise old men”, The Elders, of the world sitting back on their chair sighing at the mistakes of the present generations?

“Strong leadership has never been more needed than it is today”.

Out of context, but true. Source

Do a favor to your grandchildren. Let us not force them to do the same thing that we are doing. Don’t wait for someone to change the world, but ask for a change. It starts from one, becomes the need of many, until it becomes the need of the nation and the civilization.

• The Elders are an independent group of global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering, and promote the shared interests of humanity.
• The Elders are Martti Ahtisaari, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Lakhdar Brahimi, Gro Brundtland, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Jimmy Carter, Graça Machel, Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu (Chair). Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi are honorary Elders.

 

And I will give you 10 years of bliss!

If you could live 10 years of your life in total bliss – with NO pain – but in the end, not remember any of it – would you do it?

via A Happiness Tip From Aristotle | Psychology Today.

I was stumbling, after a long time, when I came across this question. And according to Aristotle, you should say no. I would agree with him for various reasons.

I am the sum of my experience

The individual that I am, is not just a 3 dimensional figure frozen in time. I would have to say that every atom that is present in the universe has its influence on me, and so has every thought that goes through the minds of other people. The interaction between 2 or more objects (living or non-living) would have an impact on who I am and how I think. Even a piece of rock could make me think and channel my thought. The sight of two people fighting might make me think of peace, and diplomatic conversations might make me think of taking up a rifle.

For better or for worse, the influence that the world has made on me is part of who I am, and I would not want to lose any part of it, whether it is 10 years or 1 second.

You evolve when you are forced to

If you have total bliss for 10 years, those are 10 years you have wasted. A person who has failed in everything he did in 10 years would have learnt more than you did and he would have been richer for the experience. If you know that you will have total bliss for the next 10 years, why would you try to do anything to ensure your happiness? At best you might save something to keep you going after the 10 years.

What would happen if you release a wild animal into the forest after giving it food for a year? Do you think it will be able to cope?

Happiness v/s Pleasure

Don’t say you are happy when you watch a movie or hear a joke. Your brain is tickled into giving you pleasure. If it is a really good movie, you might feel something close to happiness, but it is still an illusion. The pleasure from a movie, joke, good food etc are fleeting. True happiness is achieved through your accomplishment, or accomplishments of those you care about, be it a fellow human being, a group or a nation. When you set out to get something, there are challenges that you have to overcome and the sense of accomplishment and the happiness you derive from it is based on the perceived difficulty of those challenges.

Imagine a person climbed Mount Everest. Don’t you think he would have faced challenges? At the top of Everest, he would literally be on top of the world. Compare that with watching an inspiring movie. What do you think will last longer? The pleasure of watching the movie or achievement of climbing Mt. Everest?

Let me illustrate something else with the same example. What if that person was set on top of Everest,  call it divine intervention! Will he be able to climb down? The descent is much more dangerous than the ascent and the ascent prepares you for the descent. Do you think you will be able to live 10 years not knowing what will happen and what you should do, when you don’t remember what happened in the last 10 years?

Most people feel that I don’t believe in God and I wouldn’t blame them. Truth is, I have never given anyone a reason to think otherwise. I don’t consider myself as an atheist, and I have often said I am agnostic. But that isn’t entirely true either.

I don’t believe God in the conventional sense. Let me break it down further.

Creator of the universe

Most religions consider their God to be the creator of all, whether it is visible or invisible, living or lifeless, observed or perceived phenomenon. But there seems to be a contradiction with such an assumption. Is God a singular entity that does not confirm to the universe? If we were to assume that to be true, then what is the source that created God or made God, God. If such a singular entity was created why can’t it happen again? If there is such a source, then is it bound by the constraints of our universe or is it beyond it?

The easy way out would be to call it a miracle, or an inexplicable phenomenon and leave it at that.

What I feel is, the entity we call God, is not the creator of the universe, but a part of the universe. It was not created by the universe, nor when the known universe was created. It was created by the first shred of intelligence in the universe. The intelligence that created it, gave it infinite powers and made it timeless.

Let me go off the tangent over here with some wild thoughts.

Logically, it would be the first intelligent being that resulted in the entity called God, but theoretically, the idea of God might still be unborn. Maybe human race would evolve to such an extent that the human mind would be able to create an entity that transcends all of time to embed itself into all intelligence.

We follow a linear time, and it is difficult to think of time as anything other than linear. What if you were suddenly released from the linear timeline. You will be able to know what happened/ is happening/will happen anywhere at any point in time. You would be able to see what happened at exactly 9 AM on 29th June, 1764 and 8 PM on 12th December, 3058 in New York, Beijing, and London as if you were looking right at it the very moment. You can call it immortal existence, or you can call it living all moments in one moment.

And I am back from that excursion.

As I was saying, it must have been the first shred of intelligence that created God. You might wonder whether I am trying to push an idea that human beings created God. Maybe, maybe not. We may call ourselves the first intelligent life form on Earth, but the universe seems to have an intelligence of its own. Not the human intelligence, but something on a wider scale. What other explanation could you give to such a huge system that works non-stop with hardly any glitch? The universe is like a mechanical time piece with each of its smaller part contributing to a near perfect outcome. System is intelligent enough to overcome the small imperfections. Clockwork!

The Big Bang is an accepted scientific theory, and I am going follow that in trying to understand how and when God manifested.

An Explosion that was felt all over, chaos, objects of various sizes and shapes rollicking in all possible directions, hitting against one another,  and then hurling further apart. There is no order in it, and there is no powerful, intelligent or divine intervention. But over time the dust settles, there is a purpose and trajectory in the motions of the objects. There is interaction between those objects. Is there some sort of communication? Once each of the objects gets a measure of the other, they settle into a pattern. Is that intelligence or a logical conclusion? Is there any difference between those two?

Logic is when the subject understands the how variables interact with one another under different circumstances and derive a possible patterns.

Isn’t that what happened after the Big Bang? If that is what happened, then wouldn’t that be the point when God manifested itself? Isn’t what happened manifestation God itself? Isn’t God the intelligence made order out of chaos?

It took billions of years for the universe to reach a state of equilibrium. The entire human history is a fraction of that and each human life is just a firefly flying in front of a sky filled with never ending stars.

This has been sitting in my draft for over 2 months and I forgot where I was going with this. To be continued when inspiration hits me again.

What if…

A genetic mutation allowed humans to communicate telepathically? – wait, there is a catch.

You will have a predefined pool of 10 people with whom you can communicate. But the actual question is, would you rather marry someone with whom you are linked telepathically or someone who is telepathically linked with 10 other people, but not you?

Some might argue that two people who are attuned to each other are likely to be together, and some might argue that mystery is what would keep them together. Hypothetically, if you are so in sync with another person, it might be impossible to get a tickle response from that person.

It is possible that at first we might live with it because of how convenient it is, but would that kill what we call love?

I read a Sci-FI where a few humans had gone to a distant planet. The female of the species had evolved so that they could reproduce without mating, but it brought about a cultural crisis and the aliens had invited humans so that they could learn from us about love. I had read that book at least 15 years but I am not able to recall the name. Does anyone know which book it is?

Related articles

• Scientists Reveal The Mutants in All of Us (geektyrant.com)
• TELEPATHY – A Two-Faced Coin (yomzie.wordpress.com)