About Human Psychology:As I Interpret it!!!

It's been time since i decided to write on this particular topic...Used to make word documents and sketch out some of the characters(read :people) i have met till now....Sounds strange!!!!!..yes it is indeed strange..But you will be more surprised when i put forth my findings about different people and you will notice that there exists a definite pattern (logic) behind the behaviour of each person.
okie i guess by now you would be totally confused as to what this guy is saying!!!
Let's beign with the basic stuff of Psychology.

People may say if you are optimistic which i am,then u must also agree that there are only strengths and weaknesses which ,how contentious it may sound,i don't.
For me,an individual has three aspects :strenghts,weaknesses and limitations.Yes Each and Everyone of us have our own limitations and sometimes we misinterpret these limitations as our weaknesses trying to overcome them and sometimes find that we arent able to do it.

This is not because we are lacking on something,it is just the fact that we are overlapping our weaknesses and limitations.Weaknesses are meant to be overcomed and not limitations.
You would never be able to overcome your limitations .that's why they are your limitations...
I know by now you must be getting the feeling that this guy is presenting a very pessimistic approach.

No i m not.The fact is the moment we get our boundaries(strenghts,weaknesses and limitations) right,that is the moment when we will experience "Happiness".
Believe me it is the fact which i m presenting to you.

Let's look at it from a different prespective.During one of my normal travelling days from office to home,i was just thinking of this widely known principle the "Total energy always remains constant.The energy gained is equal to energy lost".
Hence I took the liberty to extend this by replacing it by the above three aspects.Just imagine if there wasnt the third component of limitations then if one would have overcomed his weakness into strengths then wouldnt it would have caused imbalance with the total energy gained (strenghts) increasing as compared to total weakness (energy lost) which then contradicts the above principle.Hence if i have to draw an analogy to this principle then the total strengths =total weaknesses=total limitations.It's a three way traffic and if you look at it closely this priciple can be extrapolated to each n every aspect of life.


I will be continuing on this in my next post..So keep Visiting this space

Okie I guess i would be starting all over again on this topic after 15 months...But yes these 15 months have immensely added to my continuing learning of understanding people and their behaviours under different situations and circumstances.

Sometimes we wonder or i should say, we label or categorize some people as bad,arrogant,not worth it,useless.....even i have made those mistakes time n again....which perhaps when you go deep into it u realize that it is the biggest blunder ever made when it comes to understanding people.

In my Understanding of Human Psychology,it's never the person who is wrong or (any negative adjectives u can think of)...it's always the situation in which you interact with him that makes you form such a opinion.

Let's try to look at it from a different prespective.If whatever i said above was not true then how can a person be a nice human being to some and a pathetic one to others...It's just not possible because the person's inner self always remains the same ( Unless he/she is suffering from Multiple personality disorder which is an exceptioanl case).....

This means that the situations in which you have interacted with the person from the start have led you to believe or form "A Particular opinion about that person"....

Remember the cliche "First Impression Matters" what does it say....Basically it states that the first situation in which you encounter a person has to be perfect because that will govern your image in front of others...

So Next time when you start cursing a person .Think Twice...The Person was not Wrong but the Situation was not right.I know it's tough for an human mentality.but when you achieve that then you will defintely take a huge step forward to being a better human being!!!!

More to follow.........

Ahh...Its been a long time since I last wrote on this subject...even now as I write, I was actually reminded by one of my friends that your subject is still pending..so here it goes....

I guess this is nearly after 2 years ,i m continuing on this topic. However last 2 years have been a truly enriching experience for me in understanding people and their behaviours....and perhaps a great case study as it had a recession cramped in (recessionary behaviours :P).

On a serious note, my observations in past 2 years have again reinforced what I had stated above in my previous posts...i.e when it comes to understanding human behaviours, then its all about Situations, situations and situations...and not actually about people...Last 2 years have been a tremendous learning experience personally for me, as I could observe people reacting in diverse ways in different situations ...most of them have been really testing ones to say the least.

Let me start with competition....According to me, there is nothing called as Peer Pressure existing, it an internal conflict which every individual goes through but he focusses on abilities fother people rather than his own...

"Has the Time come for Human-Powered Search"-Part I

Human -Powered Search?? Yes you have read it right.Perhaps I also had the same reaction and lots of apprehensions and doubts when one of my friends told me about this beta developing idea until I myself tried it practically.

Before I actually come to this Particular Search Engine,let me put forth my understanding about what must have led to this idea.

Let's start by analyzing the world's best search engine-"Google"
Google has n numberof advantages and i can go on n on talking about it's advantages .However as the saying goes "nothing is perfect ",so is the case with google which perhaps was picked by Mr.Scott Jones(most people in core technical arena would be knowing about this guy..if not we can discuss about him later)

Suppose in Google I have to search for say a particular article in economic times which is not so famous.However u dont know the specific name of the article but u know some contents about it and what it is all about.Also u know the author of the article.

So how would a normal person(non-technical) would search for it in google "Econmic times + pranay Roy + it's all about the scale and the utilisation" and when you press enter google returns you tons and tons of search results.

To add to this,since your article is not that famous and you cant refine the search to specifics,the article you need would in all probability will not come on the first page.
However I can assure you that Google will definitely search for your article but on which page it will come depends upon your refinement of the search which unfortunately in your case you arent able to refine it further.

So is this a Flaw in google.Well in practical terms it is not!!!Because google has found your article but since it is not famous( as google follows the page rank accessed algo),you dont get it on the first page which becomes inconvenient for you as a user though Google is not to be blamed as you have not refined it properly.

Now this is where the Human-Powered Search begins where you can actually ask the online guides in normal English language what specifically you want from the search results you have got.

And this is where www.chacha.com begins!!!!!

Basically when you search in chacha,it combines all the search results of all popular search sites namely google,yahoo.msn.amazon and then provides you with the facility of an online guide which will help you to either refine or get to your particular search.

I m in the process of exploring this search and perhaps would also like you guys to post comments about your findings on this one.
I will keep posting about my findings in this particular post.

Disclaimer: I have no relation or association,whatsoever, with this particular site.Just thought about writing a post on it as i liked the concept.

Financial Times Rankings 2007 :-

Financial Times Rankings :-

Financial Times 2007 Global Ranks
http://www.ft.com/businesseducation/pdf/table_mba.pdf

Financial Times 2007 for Top American Schools
http://media.ft.com/cms/95deebb4-a6ee-11db-83e4-0000779e2340.pdf

Financial Times 2007 for Top European Schools
http://media.ft.com/cms/96983cf4-a6ee-11db-83e4-0000779e2340.pdf

A Tribute to Manchester United Team Disaster :The Black Day In ManUnited's History: 6th Feb 1958

On 6th feb 1958,an airliner carrying the Manchester United team who were returning from their European Campaign and the coaching staff,alongwith the journalists, crashed in it's third attempt to take off.23 out of 34 passengers on board lost their lives.

The following are the list of players who lost their lives in one of the disasterous tragedies in Football history of Manchester United.

Bent
Roger Byrne
Eddie Colman
Duncan Edwards
Mark Jones
David Pegg
Tommy Taylor
Liam Whelan
Walter Crickmer
Bert Whalley
Tom Curry
Alf Clarke
Don Davies
George Follows
Tom Jackson
Archie Ledbrooke
Henry Rose
Eric Thompson
Frank Swift
Kenneth Rayment
Bela Miklos
Willie Satinoff
Tom Cable



After this Tragedy footballing world thought that this was it!!!! Perhaps this was the end of one of the passionate clubs.

However Manchester United stood up and showed to the world that they are still there !!!

I pay tribute for the holy souls of Manchester United in 1958!

I salute the glory, the raise of United after 1958!

Perhaps this year will end the 3 years looong wait......I can sense it coming ......

I truly believe that come this MAY ,a New Script will be written for Manchester United......

However the question to be answered is "Will Treble of 1999 be repeated in 2007???".

Why Is Microsoft Afraid of Google?

A Really good article showing the way Google has come of age!!!!

In the few short years of its existence, Google has come a long way, simultaneously striking fear in the hearts of major players in the computer industry and also arousing their curiosity.Its search engine is so ubiquitous that "to Google" somebody or something is now part of the lexicon of hard-core knowledge workers and casual web users alike. Google also has become a gateway to the Internet and taken steps to develop desktop applications, such as Google Toolbar and Google Desktop, not to mention other products like Gmail and Google Earth. The company's initial public offering was a big success and its stock has risen ever since. What, everyone wonders, will Google be up to next?While Google, of Mountain View, Calif., is keeping all competitors on their toes, it poses a special threat to one particular company -- Microsoft. Why? Because Google's existing and potential products -- as well as those of other firms -- raise the specter that the behemoth of Redmond, Wash., may witness the erosion of its control over the platform for the next generation of software application development, according to Wharton faculty members who follow the technology sector.But being a threat -- even a formidable threat -- is one thing. Actually beating Microsoft would be a different accomplishment altogether, the Wharton experts agree, and only time will tell how this David-and-Goliath-style rivalry will fully shake out.Microsoft's concern over Google has been evident recently on several fronts.

Microsoft recently announced a major reorganization designed to streamline the company's huge bureaucracy and make the firm more nimble -- a move that the Wharton scholars say was in direct response to fear of continued inroads made by competitors, especially Google, on Microsoft's turf. Microsoft has also suffered the embarrassment of watching key employees defect to Google. Most recently, on Oct. 4, Sun Microsystems and Google announced a partnership to distribute each other's software, a deal that is viewed as another assault on Microsoft. Among other things, the Google Toolbar for web browsers will be a standard component of the software that computer users receive when they download Sun's Java software.But the central challenge to Microsoft goes beyond corporate reorganizations, defecting employees or the popularity of Google's search engine as a gateway to the web, according to Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of information technology at Wharton.

Microsoft's success has been due in large part to its realization two decades ago that control of the operating system on personal computers would give it a great amount of leverage over PCs, he says. Most companies in the 1980s saw the operating system as a pure commodity product, but Microsoft understood that it held the keys to the kingdom.But many in the computer business have long believed that the core platform could be moved to a higher level, that technology gurus could establish a web-based platform that runs in the browser and is written in the language of the browser rather than the language of the operating system."This was the dream of Marc Andreessen [co-founder of browser company Netscape Communications] and others back in the mid-1990s when Andreessen boasted that the web would reduce computer operating systems to nothing more than 'a poorly debugged set of device drivers,'" Whitehouse recalls. "And this is why Microsoft responded so aggressively to the threat of Netscape after [Microsoft Chairman] Bill Gates issued his famous memo warning of an Internet 'tidal wave' that threatened Windows. Netscape didn't succeed. Microsoft managed to thwart Netscape's attempt to establish a new platform on the web."How, specifically, do innovations at Google threaten Microsoft? Whitehouse points, for example, to Google Maps. The API of Google Maps lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages using JavaScript.

A visit to http://www.googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/ -- which bills itself as an unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, ideas and tools being influenced by Google Maps -- shows a long list of applications built using Google Maps as the underlying engine.Google is not the only company offering products and services that run on a web platform. Feeling the heat, Microsoft has already announced products to compete with those of Adobe (developer of the PDF document format) and Macromedia (developer of Flash and ShockWave software for video and animation), which announced a merger earlier this year. "To the extent that PDF and the Flash SWF file format could be an emerging platform for web application development," Whitehouse notes, "Microsoft has to be worried."A Commodity Product?It is important to note, Whitehouse adds, that "all the applications I have talked about are written in the web browser. They work equally well on Windows, Mac or Linux. Your computer still needs an operating system to run -- but it doesn't matter which one. The operating system may eventually become the commodity that people in the 1980s thought it would be, and that's bad news for Microsoft."Lee says Google benefits from two key strengths.


The company gives free rein to talented people to innovate and it encourages program developers to use Google as the basis for products of their own. "Google has hired really, really smart people. Some of the smartest graduates coming out of the top computer science programs are going to Google. When you put that many smart people in one place, neat things happen. Google also has not been threatened by people working off their products. Look at all the product extensions that are tied to Google Maps."Balaji Padmanabhan, professor of operations and information management at Wharton, agrees with Whitehouse that "there is a move toward PCs that don't have a lot of software installed on them, where most applications can run off a network." Padmanabhan notes that Sun Microsystems and Oracle envisioned such a system, in which people using nothing more than a simple PC would wirelessly communicate with a central computer."But that idea never really took off, to a large extent because the network was not as large and as fast as it is today," says Padmanabhan. "Yet there are advantages to that concept -- less software to update for users, for one thing, and that's exactly what Google would capitalize on. The second advantage is PC users get better security, since apps can be constantly updated on a server to fix errors and add patches.

The big challenge is the reliability of the network. You don't want to get into a situation where users want to open a spreadsheet program but can't because the network isn't up right now. That is certainly an issue that will have to get resolved down the road."Legal studies professor Kevin Werbach asserts that the competitive issues facing Microsoft go beyond Google. "At some level, any successful Internet and software company is a threat to Microsoft," he says. "Microsoft is in a uniquely dominant position in the computing ecosystem. Anything that attracts a significant amount of use or activity is potentially a threat to them.

Microsoft is a threat to, in some ways, virtually everyone in the industry and likewise everyone is a threat to Microsoft."Werbach says that Microsoft is in such a powerful position because the PC operating system is at the center of most users' experiences with computers. As the Internet becomes more of an essential part of the computing experience, if anything else from a network becomes a central link in the user's experience, that poses a challenge to Windows and software programs like Office, which has higher profit margins than Windows itself. "Google does not prevent people from using any particular operating system on a PC," he says, "but if the functionality that users engage with is driven through a Google experience rather than something controlled by Microsoft, that harms Microsoft."The Task Ahead"The big challenge for Microsoft is the law of large numbers," Werbach notes. "It's harder and harder for the company, as it gets bigger, to keep growing as it historically did.

The computer industry is a mature industry. In the developed world, virtually everyone has a computer. So Microsoft, to continue growing, needs to find new ways to expand its market, which is why they want to get into games, wireless and business-software markets. In these areas they're generating substantial losses. To the extent that Google becomes a dominant player in the Internet market, it blocks an opportunity for Microsoft to expand."But Microsoft did not achieve the position it enjoys today by rolling over in the face of adversity. Microsoft executives "aren't sitting on their laurels; they see the threat," according to Lee. "They see a future revenue stream in web advertising and desktop search functions and in better knowing the consumer.


So they are organizing their own formidable brainpower to attack the competition. And there are plenty of people who like Microsoft and its products just fine.""If you ask me why I didn't buy Google shares at the IPO, I'd say Google at the time had one product -- its search engine," says Amit. "As it expands its base, it might harm Microsoft. But Microsoft has a much broader product line. It's sitting on 90% of all computers around the world and Google has a long way to catch up."Marketing professor Peter S. Fader says Google's threat is a tune Microsoft has heard before. "It's history repeating itself over and over and over.

Every time a new threat emerges to Microsoft, people think, 'Oh, this is it -- the one that's going to knock Microsoft off the block.' There's no reason to believe it will play out any differently this time. Google is a different kind of competitor, but Microsoft has dealt with a pretty wide range of competitors before. It's a tortoise-and-hare scenario. And Microsoft is a very good tortoise. What the company will do is figure out a way to replicate the features of competitors' products. The products won't necessarily be better, but they will be adequate."Whitehouse suggests that Microsoft may have to change its philosophy if it truly wishes to compete with Google. "Microsoft has tremendous resources, and it performed a similar turnaround once before when it took on Netscape in the 'browser wars' of the late 1990s.


Microsoft, however, tends to focus on stopping the onslaught of the web -- which it did very well with Internet Explorer in the late 90s -- but then falls back and refocuses on its core operating system and desktop application businesses. So, for example, in recent years we've seen a major push to develop Vista [the long-delayed operating system, once code-named Longhorn, that is scheduled to replace Windows XP in 2006], but there have been no major new improvements in Internet Explorer in years."It's not clear how much Microsoft actually believes that the web is the platform of the future. After conquering its immediate adversary, the company tends to retrench and fall back on developing its core assets. That may work again this time. But, eventually, it may not be enough to forestall the Internet tidal wave that will eventually arrive."


SOURCE : Wharton