Thou $hall Negotiate!

How many times have we felt that,if we had that probably held on for a little longer or if we had such and such info then we could have very well converted the circumstances in our favour.Most often than not it happens when we meet our regular sales rep,the HR of the company,our argumentative neighbours ,our so called -IN LAWS(who gave them a degree?),the sabjeewala and on...Yes the particular topic hit me,when i read the bestseller named "You can negotiate anything" by Herb Cohen.His simple tenets made me think,and think from the point of the winner of the negotiation.Why is it that we send in specialists when we need to tackle an imbroglio like a hijack situation or handling a tough diplomat or for that matter getting an approval for an agreement.
There is often a misconception, that we often bargain harder only with people we do business with.But we are unknowingly doing so at home and everywhere else also.I am doing so when i say to my nephew "A choco after you have your breakfast,completely".So also when i turn up and tell my dad,"I need the latest gadget,as i topped the exam!",even if the timing is wrong and the world is in a recession!What i would like to scrutinize is why we end up on the wrong side of a negotiation.Primarily we lose because we are lazy by birth.Lackadaisical am I?Didn't anyone tell you that it was my birthright?How many of us would actually love to go through the entire Form16 and its various other sections so that we can file the tax online ourselves?(I hardly do.).We would rather give the tax consultant,his due money every year,rather than spend that extra time to go through the document.Aah alas ignorance is bliss!But at who's expense?So also in many metro's we would rather not go to the vegetable market and get fresh stuff @ cheaper rates and bargain our way to glory like most middle class housewife's would(Oh..their skills are awesome and would even put the best salesman to shame with their bargaining skills).We would rather hop into one of those food bazaars or food malls and get whatever at whatever rates.After all time is money time and yes we all love time!
We also have a nonchalance approach, which leads to less homework done on the topic at hand.So in the end, we have very less war material with which we can bargain.Also we give the opposite guy, more that subtle hints,that we are totally lost and you please guide us!How often do we quote,, that we can take the shopkeeper to consumer court in case the goods are faulty?(hardly any)How often does the auto/Taxi guy take you for a jolly ride in case you don't know the shortest or at best the route to our destination?Now that we didn't know,we can still make it our day,but we still give him hints that we are new to this part of the town,when we inadvertently make calls or receive calls.Mind you,he is hearing you all the while,even though he might seem distracted or disinterested.We also lose out on a lot of deals,because we are less persistent ,and are too much hurt,when our desired Master Plan A doesn't work.When i was travelling by train,last week there was this Hare Krishna guy who wanted to sell off his Bhagawat Gita books to people.And there was this NRI too.But the customer said a straight NO,the first time.The seller left off and came again a second round and this time the NRI said a No after having a look at the book .Then again he came a 3rd and a 4th time and finally the guy bought the book which was in Malayalam,which infact was a language, he didn't know!Also whenever we enter a negotiation of any kind, we shouldn't lose our purpose or aim of that negotiation.And we shouldn't enter any negotiation just because we can make a killing!How many times have we gone to malls and ended up buying stuff we know we would hardly wear??(please...i got it dirt cheap!)
Negotiation is a game and the one who holds the aces should use them only as a winning point.And in case we don't have any we can still bluff our way to glory Also it makes sense to evaluate the person who is on the other side of the equation.He might be totally lost and drowning,but is he giving that expression away?In which case how do we take advantage of the situation?Many a time we make a mistake by underestimating the fellow and reveal our aces pretty soon.So if the person on the other side of the table is also an equal competitor,he would probably try to go beyond the ordinary,scoff at you,sneer at you,praise you loud,give myriad excuses.But we we fall prey to any of these ,we are dead meat.How often we give way to loud boisterous people?How often do we keep quiet at such people who repeated get away ? But that is a different Blog altogether!Finally something to chew on..
"Never get angry,never make a threat.Reason with People-Don Corleone(The Godfather)"

ThomasKutty Vittoda!

It is a popular line, from a Malyalam movie called "In Harihar Nagar".Well for all the GenX guys ,who missed the 90's cinema's, well they got a taste of it recently, in the second part of movie.Well my nephew was no exception(he is just three) and could just go on the whole day just repeating it wherever he went, Sometimes to the embarrass us all and sometimes it would have more disastrous consequences.Recently when he came home for a visit,and started blaring out,when Mr Thomaskutty our neighbour shouted back"Erada athu?eh?".Well needless to say the little fella got shocked and kept quiet for sometime!Another incident happened at my in-laws place when he started off again just as a guy had entered home.Needless to say the guy would have got flustered,as to why the kid wants me out, the moment he entered!Well to round it off,when we were reciting our evening prayers,and when the time came to go around and say praise be to Jesus Christ,the little fella went off again.I dont think dad was much pleased with his demeanor.
Well the next day when we went visiting our latest addition to the family Mr Jason,he started off again before the baby,"Thomaskutty vitoda"!I don't know whats with this catchy phrases and kids ,but i do realise that once it get stuck on to them, they don't let go of it that easily.And all along this time they make sure,that the rest of the family have a tough time!Well i am reminded of this story that dad told me sometime back.There was a guy, who caught this phrase "poda auve"(slang in Malayalam for "get lost").He used to throw it at all and sundry.And once when his dad said something,he replied the same.Needless to say ,the fella got a piece of his mind!
I know that we have a difficult time,with children especially when they are in their mood!I must close off, borrowing a snippet from Salman Rushdie's "Midnights Children".The little gujju children in the galli's screaming to a catchy one "Su che?,saru che. danda leke maru che".Bogus and dangerous but catchy all the same!
*Note(Thomaskutty Vittoda means "off you go Thomas" in malayalam)

B-DotNet Bangalore TechEd 2009

Its been some time that the actual event has been over.But there were a few topics that remain fresh in the mind.Some like Windows 7,Azure and Cloud Computing have been in the news for some time now,so it was natural that these topics be discussed in BDot-Net 2009.So on Saturday 20th when I woke up,(actually nish woke me up..I was still enjoying my sat morn sleep)I awaited with bated excitement about the topics that were going to be discussed in the community meet.As i awaited Nish to pick me up that morning ,i checked out the place and found it to be RV Dental College,JP Nagar.Landing at the gate i saw the organizers removing the BdotNet poster from the gate, and we got to know that the event was on. As we entered the auditorium, we were worried if we would get the right seats.But once we registered ourselves,we found the hall to be relatively empty, a stark contrast to the anticipation as the tickets for the event were sold out pretty early.
As I sat in the 4th row from the front, I saw a tall lanky guy going around with a lap top.Only later did i realise that the guy was Mr Ramkumar, our first speaker.He gave us an intro into Cloud and he technologies surrounding itAlso about how companies were building up their data centers in Iceland so that they could have natural cooling and save energy.He also touched upon how companies were using their own power plants near to their data centers as this would lead to lesser wastage of energy,which would otherwise occur if the data center and the power plants to power them were away.But the way did i say that it started half an hour late?Ok anyways poor Mr Ramkumar had to wind up by 10,thats half an hour less .But the next topic Windows 7 by Vijay and Vic had us up in our seats in eagerness.After all it was supposedly the saviour of OS for MS having badly screwed up Vista.Though Vic said that he liked Vista,i had no doubts what so ever that very few in crowd would have given it even a ** rating,provided they would have given us a Survey, like the many they bombarded us with(I don't know whats with sponsors and surveys)!There were more than a couple of surveys which we had nothing to do with.Vijay and Vic gave a quick intro into how useful the new OS was.While Vijay gave a quick intro into Kernel Enhancements, Vic showed us a live demo on Location Sensors .Though Vic said that Windows 7 were a lot better that Vista,we wouldnt believe him until he said that he could run it on 700 Mhz CPUs.Thats a cool number given that the resources(read Memory,Hard disk space as well as Processing speeds)required to run an MS OS goes up exponentially whenever they release a new one.Well they had enough features to come up with a new OS!
Next on cards,Chaitra started the talk on ASP.Net 4.0.Though the features were nice,I was looking forward to tea that would be served next!But Chaitra made sure that we worked hard for it, as she went through all the features in the Gen Next of ASP.NET(you would have guessed it by now that i am not a ASP developer by now!).After a long time i got the break and nish and myself grabbed some .We rushed back again into the hall after 10 min, though we would be first to come back .So much so for thinking we would be late!!After some 15 min the talk on BizTalk started.Now this was unknown territory to me,but Kashi(speaker) was prety much a la Saurav Ganguly,in the sense that he would take his own time in explaining everything(thats so uncommon and so non techie!) that he made it a childs play.But i could already feel people getting fidgety(I think my stomach also gave raised the concern about food having given breakfast a miss) .So finaly we had some good lunch from some caterer's ,and yeah it was free.I should admit these Bdotnet(well i am missing.BitPro guys were also involved in the event.Kalyan,the founder would be really angry) guys really spent some effort into that.Thanks guys.
After lunch we had "Birds of the same feather - BizTalk Server and WCF" by Meena.I thought the speaker would be pretty young or atleast in their mid thirties,but here was Meena who would be IMHO in her forties or more and teaching us a thing or two about being a techie!But the session was mighty interesting about how the two technologies would overcome each others limitations.Hats off Meena.After that we had a Session on Silverlight too before we could wind up.Vic was always there for another entertaining session.Well he showed us how easy presentation layer could be now,we all were dazzled by graphics as well as UI of Silverlight.Meanwhile vijay and co made sure all the speakers had their share of limelight by clicking away at them with an SLR (i presume which was Vic's).Also there were goodies to be given away for guys who raised questions,basically any question.(why am i here?!!)But one fella from the front always had his hands up and for no reason he would always be handed over the mike and at the end of the day he had enough goodies to setup his own shop!I didnt understand why they wouldnt give everyone a chance,But only later did i realize that guys who helped them organise were some college fellas, who had no idea about event mgmt.We had a great mgmt talk from Sampath who instilled some confidence in us showing us some great videos and som great slides which all talked about how we can get our act together and go ahead bang on!(i wish i sould bring some of my office mates here!)
Anyways, day one over and i was mightly pleased that one more saturday of my life didnt go waste!Next day we were early again,so we went across the RV play ground and had a nice cuppa and watched the young kids playing cricket with their coaches in toe.Once we landed back,Janakiram and Niraj, showed us the power of Microsoft Azure.They showed us a demo on how we could actually deploy our app in the Cloud!!Wow ,this was bloody good technology for all new entrepreneurs ,who couldnt afford all the infrastructure needed for office. Having held us in rapt attention for an hour Gayatri gave us a session on Building custom activities in WF.I must admit i was new to WF and was aready ready to doze off ,had it not been for the tea which woke me up till lunch.But after tea we had a lovely session in Beyond Relational SQL Server 2008: Managing unstructured and semi structured Data by Praveen who taught us how we could manage unstructured data and as well as gave us an insight into spacial datatypes and hierarchy ids.After lunch it was "Introduction to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010" from M.Ismail.Though i must say i am pretty much naiveto admin talks like these,he showed me precisely why we shouldn't as admin could very much filter what we received via mail.It was followed up by Windows Server 2008 R2 Overview by Kalyan and Ravikanth who showed us the power of blade servers(courtesy Dell) and why not!He showed us the features of Server 2008 R2 which we could lay our hands on ,only to realise later that it would run only only on 64bit processors. Finally before tea they gave us a session on Virtualization 360 - Technical Overview by praveen,I would say he was awesome so much as the session was.
To wind it up we had a demo on Infragistics by Vic on the new controls that they had developed.
I have always been a fan of their controls having used them a couple of years back,they are cool guys and trust me they offer you a lot more features than anybody out there.No wonder they are the leaders in the market in their space(Click here to know more).Finally we had the speakers to thank everyone and a dumb quiz just to check if we were still awake!But the event came to an end as we awaited our cd's ,which we were told we would get only at the end of it all ,we got to know that the cd's for Win 7 were over.We back with our Win Server 2008 rc2 cd's hoping we would get some day a 64bit processor to deploy.But great effort from the Bdotnet guys.Cheers!!
Here are some links that i picked up from the event
Bdotnet Downloads
http://bdotnet.in/files/
teched2009
http://www.microsoft.com/india/teched2009/
Live Services
http://dev.live.com/