Yoowalk.com – Interesting..

Ever wondered what would it be to browse the net in 3-D?  Here’s one place where you can probably experience it.

www.yoowalk.com

I am not a 100% convinced by the fact that these guys have a business model.  It’s more like going to Rockefeller Centre to watch the Christmas tree during the holidays. 

On that topic, just FYI, there is a web-based parallel virtual world that is developing out there. I will keep that topic for a different blog. But just to give you a teaser, people have invested close to $600 million as of Q1 2008 in “virtual investments”. Virtual investments here mean virtual houses, virtual beaches, virtual real estates, virtual businesses – investments that are just pure bits and bytes.

Will you spend real money to buy 1′s & 0′s ?

SATYAM Shivam Sundaram – You wish !!

Satyam Shivam Sundaram – “Truth is God and God is beautiful”.

Ya right !! Try telling that to a million shareholders of Satyam today.

I was having a nice cup of tea today in the morning trying to enjoy my lazy, laid back vacation to the fullest when I saw one of my friends from my REC  (I still associate myself with the REC rather than NIT) days online. A few hellos later he broke this news on me by commenting on the sorry state of affairs in India. Wow !!

Well, there you go. Satyam Computer Services is nothing but a 7000 crore lie !!

Ahh….I cringed at the very thought of it. Not that I  worked for the company or have shares of Satyam, but by the fact that right when we were breaking the age-old barrier between the developed world and India, this has come and put a stain on the Indian IT industry.

People might have different opinions about this but I really believe in the fact that the Indian IT story is the real reason where India is today.  Manmohan Singh opening up the economy in 1991 only gave the IT companies a booster. These companies, opened the dreams of a million engineers and entrepreneurs in India, exposed the urban middle-class youth to the developed culture and filled their wallets beyond their ancestors’ imaginations. These filled wallets automatically opened up to the malls, retail stores,  cinema halls, cell phones which in turn gave jobs and opportunities to million other folks. So all in all I do believe that the IT industry has been the vanguard of Indian growth story.

But alas, now we have to endure this shame.  Satyam means truth – what an irony !!

Think about the 53,000 employees of Satyam.  If the company goes bankrupt and shuts down, it would have a catastrophic affect.  An already tight job market cannot handle 50K influx.  According to reports, clients are asking prodding questions to the consultants working on their projects. Poor souls – they must be dazed themselves.

No doubt about it – clients must be crossing their fingers thinking about their projects.  183 of the Fortune 500 companies are clients of Satyam. They have in total more than 650 clients across the globe.

The first to get affected would be the production support activities. Over the past decade, almost every single IT application that has gone live is in some way or the other is supported in the night by an Indian IT team. Imagine the plight of the those 183 companies. Most of them have thin onsite and thick offshore support models. These thin onsite teams would be stretched in meeting some of the expectations.  Hundreds of thousands of IT applications being developed from offshore would be shelved or delayed. All in all billions of dollars would be in peril.

Some companies have been smart enough to go with multiple such vendors – spreading the risk you could say. Of course nobody would have imagined a scandal of this nature. (well nobody imagined a credit crunch of this nature as well, but that happened right?)

So why did Ramalinga Raju do this? He claims to have not profited out of this in anyway. But wasn’t the hero of the ponzi story closer to home (Madoff) saying the same? Was it competition from other bellwethers of Indian IT industry? Or was it plain greed? I guess only Raju can answer that question. 

I dearly hope this is the last of such cases from the Indian shores. 

Bottom-line, I am saddened