Technology: January 2007 Archives
I am fighting between the words "baffled" and "amazed" to describe what I saw today on Google Trends. "Baffled" has a bit of speculation and "amazed" is all happy. God, it doesn't matter. It was cool !!(for the lack of words).
Google Trends is a pretty neat service that plots various search request Google receives. Basically telling you how many search request it received over a defined period. I was trying out some of our favourite searches in there raw from (no extra qualifiers). The service also tries to map news stories related to the search request and how it affected the search behaviour. One other bit of information around the graph : where did the search came i.e. Location. One can view cities, countries and even language. Neat han.
Now the interesting part. I search for java, xml, j2ee, linux, eclipse and also some odds like ubuntu linux, ruby on rails, phython, php. Well, the graph wasn't shockwave here. If you look at the cities, almost always there were 2-3 Indian cities in the list of 10.WOW. There were times there were 5 in the top 10. Most notably Banglore, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi. It was a great feeling in a way but am still baffled (there, i picked the word).
Well, we know India in booming in the high tech industry, but what surprises me considering the popularity of google, having a majority share in search request is a big big thing. That to me, means a hell lot of people back home are searching for tech stuff. The baffling part :
- Internet is not that widely used. Its changing but we have a long way to go.
- Not everyone is doing computers. This is relative to a huge large population base. Thus the search request are maily concentrated to only a very small fraction of the people. This would mean lots of clicks per geek.
- This one is a bit sad then baffling. All the cool searches don't have Indian cities listed at all. Atom, Ruby, ubuntu,django. An appeal : Atom Pub is goooooooood, RSS is not.
- It seems only the big brands (in terms of amount of money spent on advertising) have hit a chord with india i.e. .Net and related technologies and Java and gang. Python and PHP not hitting the nail right, which is sad again.
- Is the tech industry that hot in India? I knew it was warm but this definitely is hot.
Disclaimer:
I do understand the usual caveats of statistical analysis, there are lot other factors involved, dataset is not really connected to the topic in question. And ofcourse, I did not try every available tech search possible but tried enough to get the picture right.
iPhones are taking the masses by a rave. Try search for in on the Internet and you see everyone is talking(i.e. blogging) about it. why not, its such a neat piece of technology. It is indeed is really cool. I personally think it has a very good potential to take the market by storm. I do believe the the price is a bit high for a phone but apple products have generally been above the standard price range compared to competitors. So to some extend, most of us had expected this.
Generally everyone of us seems to be happy with the iPhones, except some of our kind. I mean developers. There rant: "Its not OPEN". These people (yes, I am not one of them for this one) believe this move of apple (frankly, not quite surprising) can work against them. I think not. I can see it would be really cool to develop apps for iPhones. Think of all new fancy stuff you can put in and with the loads of technology comes built-in possibilities are endless. What does Steve Jobs has to say about it:
"These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them"To me it seems fare enough. Reasons listed below:
- Softwares are going to be buggy. Not that Apple's software won't but in that case, if software team doesn't fix the problem atleast Steve has an option of firing them, which is ,of course, not possible for third party softwares.
- Apple is all about UIs. UI to Apple Softwares (and hardware) is like a fashion to the urbanites. Things have to look good. And not everyone can make great looking UIs. Look what happened to Konfabulator. It is a pickup project of the mac widgets (or otherwise). Most of widgets are as ugly as they can get. They do have utility value but come on atleast work some on the display. Steve's thought, I cannot give out my beautiful piece of tech to these geeks who don't know shit about user experience.
- I am almost very keen to think there main reason for not making it open, multi-touch interface. Either they just love it too much to give it out in the wild or they are still working on an API to abstract it enough from the developers. That makes sense, as there is a lot of buzz around multi-touchy things.
- As far as its marketability is concerned, iPhone not being open, won't hurt it. I don't think people outside the tech community really care if the phone is open or not. Heck ! Most people don't even know what open mean in this context. I can bet apple will preload the phones with the enough goodies and apps which a normal PDA-class user will need. Frankly, what else you need apart from calendar, browser, maps, contacts, email, music and ofcourse the ability to call someone. For large part of the consumers this is quite techy already. I understand our (geeks) urge always do a bit more. But you don't have choice in everything. Not everything can be OPEN.
