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The book is 50% story of Jobs and 50% history of the Valley. From the beginning of Apple to it becoming the world’s most valuable company, the book covers everything in depth (and is a bit too long) Some of the key things in the book are Steve Job’s fruitarian diet, journey to India, love for absolute minimalism, extreme (positive as well as negative) treatment of employees, relation with Bill Gates (and Microsoft), battle with Google, battle with cancer and a strong belief that normal rules simply don’t apply to him. The book covers a few major ideas including iTunes store (which brought music online), making of Toy Story, development of iPhone and iPad in detail. At several points, the author clearly illustrates that Apple’s designers and NOT engineers make the rules, for example, during the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco. Overall, it was a nice read, especially, when reading it along with In the Plex which is about Google. ...

An amazing book which describes Google’s journey right from its beginning in the Stanford dorm. The author interviewed several top echelons of Google and presented several interesting insider anecdotes and stories of Google.

The first episode of Aamir Khan’s show Satyamev jayate raised the issue of female foeticide in Rajasthan. While the show asked for stringent laws, it missed a few major reasons behind the same.

Let us say an average American drives 15, 000 miles per year; The exact average being 16550 miles.

The book presents a generalists view of post-independent India. Unlike India Unbound, this book focuses primarily on post-independent India and takes a more pragmatic approach towards understanding the problems of contemporary India. The best parts of the book are the interesting contradictions that the nation went through - love/hate relationship with the English language, fear of technology, and neglected urban development.

Internet, which initially started as a DARPA experiment is [still] under the indirect control of USA government through ICANN despite several objections from Europe as well as IBSA. This worked when most users were from the western world with the notable exception of China and few minor quirks. But in the past few decades, not only the governments around the world are putting more controls but also the internet users (as well as enterprises) are fighting back against US control. In this blog post, I will describe the main threats to the existence of (current form of) Internet.

This blog post is not about how good or bad the product technically is or how indigenous it is; it’s about a fundamental problem with tablets. It amazes me to see that even a journalist like T. Friedman missed it. Anyone who had ever used a tablet will tell you that even the best of the current-generation tablets are for consumption and not content generation.

Came across a few interesting posts like this on my wall today.

The book talks about a set of habits which differentiates successful people from the normal. It criticizes [recently popular] personality ethic which it terms as deceptive and manipulative and calls for character ethic which is a fundamental change in human character. This change must begin from inside and spreads out [inside-out] and the reverse is not possible.

The book compares a set of 17 companies that are considered visionary with similar 17 companies of lesser stature. I am avoiding gory details of their methodology here. To derive theory from practice, the book aims at debunking common myths about visionary companies.