THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

It is perhaps a very tough task to write about a company such as Google, which somehow has become part of our daily life in many ways. I recently read David A. Vise's The Google Story after resisting it for quite a while. I had earlier read John Battelle's The Search and left brief comments on this blog, but not quite kept my word to write more about that.Battelle's book is more about the core theme of Google which is search, arguably. He focuses a lot on other 1000 lb gorillas of the net, whereas David Wise is more focused on Google and Google alone. It is perhaps, very tempting, but not an easy task to write about Google as a company. This company did not exist 10 years back, and now commands a market cap of USD 155 BN .(Snapshot taken from Google Finance ). A company such as Microsoft which has been in existence for generations now(yes, in tech world 1975 is several generations) and unquestionbly a pathbreaking pioneer and market leader has an M-cap of about USD 294 B...

14 Nov was billed as World Usability Day.( In India, it has traditionally been celebrated as Children's Day ). So what exactly is the big noise about Usability. Ever come across a gadget you had to struggle to make use of? Or, a door lock that you had to struggle to open because the lock system was so complex? Or, a TV remote that refused to help? Or, the car fob with so many buttons that you do not know all the functions. Well, in the words of World Usability Day website it is all about 'making life easy'. Succintly capturing the dilemna, it says: "Why doesn't this work right? What am I supposed to do with this now?" Usability, undoubtably, is something that affects us in our daily lives. It is about user experience in using a product, rather, the ease of it. Imagine,your cousin gifted you a new mobile but you found navigation so clumsy that you had to put it back in the box and started using the old one. As products get more complex and manufacturers come ...

Internet Explorer version 7.0 (IE 7.0) was recently made available for download by Microsoft . Many users have already made the switch from IE 6.0 to the latest version. Many reviews have been written about it, emphasising on the look and feel. There is a very exhaustive review at Computerworld which readers may like to go through, especially those who are yet to move to this version. Most of these reviews have mentioned about the introductions of tabs as coming in quite late. However, there is a killer of a feature in tabs, that makes your web experience much superior to other browsers such as Opera (I like the pink !) and Firefox , which have had tabs implemented for a while. This is the concept of multiple home pages. So when I start IE 7.0 on my machine, it opens not one but three tabs(see the view) and loads three different sites which I have set as the respective homepages. Likewise, when I am browsing with an tab, and I click on the home icon , it opens three more tabs which lo...

All I wanted to know was BCCI's history, official version and looked up on the web. Unfortunately, I failed.In this age when class VII students(perhaps even younger kids do so) host their own websites, I was astonished that a search for BCCI official website on Google made me no wiser . Am I to believe that world’s richest cricket board does not know what a website is? Yes, I am talking about Board of Control for Cricket in India, the body that governs cricket in India. ICC, or International Cricket Council, has its own official presence on the web . 'Poorer' boards such as Cricket Australia , England and Wales Cricket Board , New Zealand Cricket have their own websites, where they have variety of content pertaining to the game. Pakistan Cricket Board too has a website . Is this not snootyness, or plain and simple disregard for public communication, that an organization that conducts the most popular sport in India does not feel the need for official content on the web(sup...