woods are lovely dark and deep..

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep

Whose woods these are I think I know

Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening was first published on March 7th, this day in 1923. The story goes that Frost wrote this poem in a few minutes, after being up all night writing another. He took a sunrise walk, and got an idea.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, 1923
by Robert Frost (26 March 1874 – 29 January 1963)
source: Wikipedia

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: Memories, Old and New

Like many Americans, this was one of the first pieces of grown-up poetry that I was exposed to as a child. I remember sitting quietly at a little square desk in a darkened room, listening to a female voice reading. I felt dreamy, ignored fidgeting classmates, and wondered if we’d be required to write big kid style book reports about poems.

When I was getting ready to make this post I asked around about other people’s Snowy Evening memories. Many were from childhood, but not all. One 33 year-old person described recently sitting around an outdoor fire pit in Winter weather, roasting marshmallows, drinking hot cocoa, and reading read Frost to each other. I think that would be a lovely tradition for Winter Solstice, “the darkest evening of the year.”

The idea of reading this poem for Winter Solstice makes me think ahead to what might be a nice, poetic tradition for the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring. In two short weeks we will be just as close to Summer as the dead of Winter. I’m thinking of planting some snap peas, or maybe some cool weather greens – that sort of thing makes me happy. It will also be a class break for the college student in my family, and she is nothing if not poetic. We will think of something.

"Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"!

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon.
Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia
whose main line of business in India is not
cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cell phones are
outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents
the cell phone from replacing the camera outright?
Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and
Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in
India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The
answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that
play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what
music companies make by selling music albums (that
run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It
is the mobile service provider with the largest
subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor
is difficult to detect, even more difficult to
beat (by the time you have identified him he has
already gone past you). But if you imagine that
Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing
easy you can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the
smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and
Google's Android can make life difficult in
future. But you never thought Google was a mobile
company, did you? If these illustrations mean
anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is
not so much about mobile or music or camera or
emails?

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is
about "what is tomorrow's personal digital
device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a
palmtop with a telephone? All these are little
wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind
all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my
competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a
question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony,
Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get
the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its
market as audio (music from the walkman). They
never expected an IT company like Apple to
encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of
it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer
maker has both audio and video capabilities. So
what made Sony think he won't compete on pure
audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined
its business as film cameras, Sony defines its
businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly
meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and
sacrificing money on camera film or staying with
films and getting left behind in digital
technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had
to. It did not ask the question "who is my
competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for
IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from
seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who
declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned
around to bundle the browser with windows to bury
Netscape. The point is not who is today's
competitor. Today's competitor is obvious.
Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to
British Airways in India? Singapore airlines?
Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there
are better answers. There are competitors that can
hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned.
The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence
services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to
recession. Senior IT executives in India and
abroad were compelled by their head quarters to
use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So
much so, that the mad scramble for American visas
from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008.
(India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas
to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on
recession!). So far so good. But to think that the
airlines will be back in business post recession
is something I would not bet on. In short term
yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if
there is one place where Newton's law of gravity
is applicable besides physics it is in electronic
hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the
now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player)
crashed to one-third of its original level in
India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of
thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this
trend repeats then telepresence prices will also
crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is
not many are making money. Then it will surely be
RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two
markets were distinctly different. So were the
icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag.
The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah
Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit).
That was, when cricket was fundamentally test
cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL
and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL
brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL
match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie.
Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of
IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate
multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for
screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to
the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay
of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to
sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL
matches. As far as the audience is concerned both
are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha"
(entertainment). Cricket season might push films
out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in
the last 20 years. When did you last see a black
and white movie? When did you last use a fountain
pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The
answer for all the above is "I don't remember!"
For some time there was a mild substitute for the
typewriter called electronic typewriter that had
limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed
them all. Today most technologically challenged
guys like me use the computer as an upgraded
typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be
seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were
Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The
answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a
monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be
physically keyed every day to keep it running. It
made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke
you up and the rest of the colony. Then came
quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much
more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms."
What do we use today for waking up in the morning?
Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks
disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones.
Big watch companies like Titan were the losers.
You never know in which bush your competitor is
hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for
authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak,
the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a
Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to
the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the
competition be story telling robots? Future is
scary! The boss of an IT company once said
something interesting about the animal called
competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be
breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

- Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an
M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
and a post graduate in management from IIM,
Bangalore