Let's Give Free Markets a Fair Chance

The second largest electronics retailer Circuit City files for bankruptcy. General Motors is on the verge of a collapse with its stock getting to the lowest point in 60 years, DHL shuts down domestic operations cutting close to 10,000 jobs. Starbucks's earnings fall 97% despite valiant efforts from Howard Schultz. IT companies are feeling the pinch in India cutting jobs, freezing recruitment.

These are just a small sample of the news that we have been hearing over the past few weeks. Can't imagine a worse time for a new President (or for a new MBA for that matter).

The dangerous off-shoot of this is the fact that Communism seems to be raising its ugly head. Here is an interesting article from WSJ talking about how this is playing out in India: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122628672919612761.html

For 43 years since Independence till the point where the Indian economy almost collapsed, we have tried communism. And FAILED miserably, we have created a few really wealthy politicians in the process for sure, but the common man has seen no progress, and that was until IT came in which was for some reason untouchable by communists and politicians and it has been successful for that one reason. Now, capitalism will have its share of failures no doubt-and we have to live through it. That definitely does not mean we get into the regressive politics of communists as a reprieve, that will only take us back to a time that we definitely don't want to go back to.

Let's give capitalism and free markets a fair chance in India-let us learn the lessons from them as global citizens, and then may be we stand a chance of becoming the power that we deserve to be.

"As long as there is a Left in India, India has no future left."-Cho Ramaswamy.

Complicating the Web Space..

How would you like it if all your favorite websites had different top level domain names, that is to say, if instead of www.chase.com you could have www.chase.bank or www.walmart.shop or even top level domains referring to brand names themselves like www.laundry.whirlpool or www.laundry.maytag? You could argue both ways-that it could lead to more creative ways for consumers to remember websites or that it would result in more confusion (I subscribe to the latter view).

Whatever your point of view is, apparently the change is coming (a weak pun intended:)). WSJ has covered the issue here and here is an old article announcing the move. And since it needs a membership to read the whole article, I will take the liberty of providing my interpretation of what it says:

1. Costs for companies to maintain top level domain names will go up. For instance, if you are Apple, what domains do you purchase-.apple .mac .ipod .itunes .iphone? What about .music or .cool or .notebook or even .jobs? What if another company took these domain names?

2. Already companies spend an enormous amount to maintain their web domain names, this move multiplies the costs of doing business.

3. The number of fraudsters might go up. What if I purchase .bank and create a site called jpchase.bank that looks exactly like chase.com and fool people into giving their account details? That again means the monitoring costs just went up.

4. What happens if I buy .life and do a bidding between insurance companies, lifestyle product companies, hospitals and sell it to the highest bidder?

5. Finally, it already takes so much effort for companies to make people remember websites, this will complicate that attempt even further.

On the other side, the justification for the move is that there are just not enough domain names for everyone-instead of exhausting the domain names, opening up the top level domain names provides an almost infinite supply of unique domain names (the names are provided by a non-profit organization remember-they are apparently not trying to make more money out of this though they definitely will).

I personally feel, it is time to make things simpler and not more complicated. We are all so used to .com .edu and other domain names and Google search is the way we find 95% of what we need; so why go through this hassle of multiple top level domains and inflate the costs of companies at a time when they definitely cannot afford any slack?

Testing Blogger Buddy...

To get out of this huge rut I seem to have gotten into, in terms of blogging, I am trying out a new gadget called Blogger Buddy, that sits right on my desktop from which I can post directly to my blog without having to open a browser or Word (as if that was the problem all along:)). Here is the tool:

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=c02ee13e-11e1-4a3b-b33c-7a1b8f3b4671&bt=1

Anyway, expect more activity this point forward. Ciao.