Have breakfast or be the breakfast.

Please do not miss to read this

 

                                   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 cellphones are outselling stand alone

cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone 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.

sent by Sriram Srinivasan