Will CSK [and IPL] crumble?

Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel.
David [Police] winning over Goliath [BCCI and all evil in general].

Interesting few days. First the cricketers were caught. Then the bookies. Then a few more bookies and a few more fringe players. Then Bollywood evidence. Next one big fish. The CEO of the CSK with apparently insatiable greed for money or stupidity. Start the usual stone walling but need to appreciate the police depts perseverance and ensuring that he is arrested. Good job!

However, India Cements claims that Gurunath Meiyappan is only a horny honorary member of the board and not the team principal or owner or CEO as he claims. Then, how is it that he had access to the team and how is it that he was part of auctions. How is it that he was seen amongst the team very frequently and the team called him the boss. He was the designated SPOC for CSK for player transfers and such. He was also the one who called the shots and raised the paddle during auctions [the privilege thats given only to owners].

When teams like Kochi Elephants (or was it Tuskers?) and Deccan Chargers were reprimanded for unclear ownership [now its the turn of Pune Warriors to be hounded]... wouldnt this be unethical too - to have unclear ownership if Meiyappan is just a honorary member?

There are clear conflicts of interest and time [and the police] will answer. Srinivasans time at the top of the organisation that controls and mismanages world cricket BCCI is counted... in minutes rather than days.

Interesting days. Lets remember... if the boss is unclean, it raises lots of questions about the players too.

But a few interesting stats from what I remember:
a. Why is it that RR has always been hounded with match fixing claims ever since early seasons. [Season 1 was fixed so RR can win was also alleged. They also claimed it was Lalit Modi's front team]
b. How is it that only CSK makes it to 5 out of 6 finals. [Agreed that they have a good team. But even Mumbai has been having a good team and they make it only 2 times to finals incl this year]
c. There were allegations that CSK got the best players [Flintoof in 2k9 is a good case in pt. They moved strings so that they could pick him]. Wouldnt that amount to unethical practices too? What about  cases that happen outside the field that influences matches inside the ground.
d. Most importantly, what about the conflict of interest? There were allegations that Dhoni was saved as captain, by the skin of his teeth, because Srinivasan intervened and vetoed. Every other member of the board was against his continuing after 2 disastrous tours where BCCI team lost 4-0. Whitewashed. Kaput. No other Indian captain since we started playing test cricket was allowed to lord over the team after 2 disastrous whitewashes. And we were No 1 when we got whitewashed and ended up becoming No 4 after the whitewashes. Which is where we still are... even after a token whitewash of Aus at home. [We lost 2-1 to England. At home. Before the 4-0 home win against Aus]

About time truth came out. CSK were dismantled or atleast changed owners and hands. About time BCCI came under some scrutiny and also has proper laws and regulations.

This is from what I read from earlier: BCCI claim to be a not for profit charitable institution and so pay exorbitantly low rates of taxes. And the players are charged about 10% of their earnings as taxes as they come under the entertainment sector. Shameful. Disgraceful.
The richest body in world cricket and its totally opaque and its about time things are one right. And if CSK loses out for the greater good of the game, so be it.

IBM Disappoints

Been late to latch on to this news. IBM has had a piss poor  disappointing quarter. The numbers are appalling to say the very least. I cant remember a result like this when Sam was around. Its been 2Q's for the new CEO and she hasnt really delivered. Boh Q's have been poor... and whats more, she didnt even consider it necessary to be with Mark Loughridge, CFO, during the call. Shocking, truly shocking.

Been checking a few links and sites to find out what the problems that ail are... and see that IBM is betting big on the private cloud... mmh, tough chance that. I am sure that there is a market for private clouds and it should grow at a decent clip - but its a tight and a closed market and there isnt a lot of opportunity there. Besides, a lot of the people who get into pvt clouds will be IBM customers already.

In another interesting news, Tivoli got rebranded to IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure. Has anything to do with the debacle? I would like to think so.

The transcript of the call tries hard to makes one believe that a lot of big ticket deals [400mn $] didnt get clsoed and should get closed for the 2nd Q of 2013. But if that has to be believed, what about the same reason that was given during the last Q meeting. mmh.

Wide speculation about IBM trying to hive off the x86 server business too. MS puts the business at around 4.9 bn$ out of the 15.5bn $ that Hardware brought in to the coffers.

Interesting but very challenging times ahead and I personally feel that these are testing times for Big Blue. They have lost a trick or two and are playing catch up. Not confident of them in 2k13 from here is my opinion.

It remains to be seen if the failure is just because of poor execution as the executive team will like the people to believe [which can be course corrected. Cyclicals and the like] or if its more deep rooted and its because of secular challenges and the competitive environment [which will mean alternative strategies and the current strategy of going behind pvt cloud is a poor one].

Time will answer. But my bets are currently off IBM in the near term.

A few interesting reads here, here

Update on my personal opinion: Thought I had added it. Looks like I didnt. So here is:
What exactly is a private cloud? I mean, what really is it? Looking up on the internet it says, its personal h/w that companies buy to load it with their personal and confidential data and also their business applications so they can leverage their IT h/w and have seamless access to data and applications and so on.

Mmh. Very interesting. Game changing. Fantastic. Way to go... Mmh, hey, wait a second. Wasnt it done all the while? Didnt people call it data centers earlier. Wasnt it called server farms before that. Werent they called hardware that companies owned [pr assets perhaps? along with their associated depreciation costs]. Wasnt this budget getting squeezed and companies wanted to reduce their own infrastructure and hence tried to move to the cloud? Seriously now, is this even about to take off at such a fast clip as IBM and a few other companies forecast. Am I wrong in my assumption or the company executives and forecasters getting it all wrong becasue of the rebranding of pvt infrastructure to pvt cloud. Are customers going to fall for this trick too? I doubt it!


Update 2: Aaha. I am not late to this. IBM is acquiring SoftLayer. Link here. Agreement signed and this should help in accelerating their cloud push. But private cloud growth? Needs to be seen.

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Been a month...

A month with little to talk about... but a month back I was travelling to the Angkor and Borneo and seeing things and looking at places.
Broke my feet and leg - the right one and was left with two right legs [considering that I am a left handed one].
Well, quite decent and well done.

Keep doing the stuff you are doing and WAIT FOR THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.

alls well ends swell.

A

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Psychology of overconfidence

Been checking on various methods of estimation, seemingly, to make myself better at it.

Friend sends this gem today. Thanks Jigs.

I do a bit of forecasting for fun at good judgment project [and finished on the leader board too this year] and this seems to have even more ramifications than just plain software engineering.

As an aside: the good judgment project has got a lot of publicity - check the search engines for the same.

Snippet from the same:

"
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman explains a great deal of psychology as the interplay between two “systems” which govern our thoughts: System I and System II. My far-too-brief summary would be “System II does careful, rational, analytical thinking, and System I does quick, heuristic, pattern matching thinking”.

And, crucially, it’s as if evolution designed the whole thing with a key goal of keeping System II from having to do too much. Which makes plenty of sense from an evolutionary perspective — System II is slow as molasses, and incredibly costly, it should only be deployed in very, very rare situations. But you see the problem, no doubt: without thinking, how does your mind know when to invoke System II? From this perspective, many of the various “cognitive biases” of psychology make sense as elegant engineering solutions to a brutal real-world problem: how to apportion attention in real time.

"

Que Sera Sera

What ever will be, will be.

Beautiful.

The futures not ours to see. Que Sera Sera.

youtube video

wiki link

thanks M for teaching this beautiful song.