"Turning the other cheek" is an incomplete description of Ahimsa

I recently heard someone mocking the Gandhian concept of Ahimsa, by making fun of this commonly invoked phrase - "If someone slaps you on one cheek, offer the other cheek". What stupid thought and looser's mentality, he argued. 

Of course, I disagreed with him but somehow I felt very sympathetic to him. How is he supposed to understand the concept of Ahimsa if it is commonly explained by such a poor phrase? You can't expect everyone to have a Ph.D. in Gandhian philosophy. To make something popular, you need to explain it in short, clear, and precise terms. That is what is missing. 

"Turning the other cheek" is a very poor phrase. It does not capture the essence of "Non-compliance" which is the core of Ahimsa. Suppose A is asking you to do X which you don't want to do. If A slaps you on one cheek and tells you do to X then as per Ahimsa you are supposed to refuse to do X and offer your other cheek to A. The key here is not just that you offer your other cheek, but that you refuse to do X regardless of the number and intensity of physical attacks on you. A can hurt you, torture you, and in the end kill you. But A will not have your obedience only your corpse. This is the essence of Ahimsa. It is not meek capitulation but a steadfast non-cooperation.

Violence is a viable option only if you are the stronger party. Injustice does not happen to the stronger party but to the weaker party. This is the reason why Gandhi is famous the world over. His ideas are practical and relevant while the path of violence to achieve political ends has become archaic.

What can be a short phrase to explain/market Ahimsa. I don't know. Let me know if someone has a good idea. 

Does Elon Musk understand the right problem to solve in Twitter?

Elon Musk has an extremely impressive record of understanding big problems correctly and coming up with the right solutions for it. For example - Tesla electric cars, Space-X re-usable rockets, PayPal payments, solar roofs etc. Even in the cases where his solutions have yet to prove themselves (Boring Company, Neuralink etc.), he has correctly identified the right problem. 

 

Elon Musk has bought Twitter by paying far more for it than its actual commercial worth. From his interviews/tweets, it seems that Elon wants to buy Twitter for solving some of the fundamental problems of social media, especially when it comes to freedom of speech. Elon will no doubt like to call the acquisition as "social work", in the same sense as Telsa or SpaceX can be called as social work (and I partially agreed with that definition). But does he really understand the actual conundrum between “freedom of speech” and “dangers of social media”? Does he have a solution for this? I am not sure till now.

 

Elon has been running Twitter for some time now and he has still not articulated the problem clearly. Only once he seems to have been on the right track when he said the following about misinformation on Twitter – “Freedom of Speech but not Freedom of Reach”. However, apart from that one instance, he seems to not understand the problem and neither the solution (at least as per the public information available). However, I am still very hopeful. Maybe he will prove me wrong.  

 

Let’s first try to define the problem. The problem is not just with Twitter but most social media platforms. Here I will not be talking about the mental health issues or lack of attentiveness or poor social skills caused by social media platforms. Those are minor problems. Similarly, bots or fake accounts on social media are a minor problem or rather a “business valuation” problem. Let’s focus only on the bigger problems (solving which will be considered “social work”). I believe that many social media platforms pose an existential challenge to the entire human civilization and especially to the democratic systems around the world.

 

As users spend more and more time on social media, these platforms become the primary source of information and news for the users. The information which each user gets is highly sensitive to individual biases (confirmation bias) and prejudice. It is curated “only to enhance engagement” on the platform. The difference between fact and fiction disappears in the post-truth world and people increasingly start living in one of the many alternate realities. This results in many negative consequences in the real world ranging from online harassments to loss of lives due to vaccine misinformation. 

 

To complicate matters further, when social media companies try to fight against fake news and deliberate misinformation through de-platforming or other penalties, the actions appear extremely arbitrary, one-sided, and completely against the freedom of speech. This is the conundrum in which most social media platforms find themselves. On the surface, it appears that there is no solution to this problem. 

 

Moreover, there is no grand conspiracy here. Platforms such as Twitter were not originally designed to spread hatred, subvert democracy, or encourage divisions or enmity. These are all unintended consequences of their algorithms and revenue models, which became apparent later. Similarly, I don’t believe that the people running social media companies have a particular political agenda while de-platforming individuals or discouraging certain ideas on their platform. Despite their genuine sincere and honest efforts, the result remains highly arbitrary, completely unsatisfactory, and highly dangerous.  

 

Let’s go slightly deeper into the problem. 

 

Freedom of Speech

 

The basic hypothesis behind the concept of Freedom of Speech is that an overwhelming majority of people will choose the option which is logical / socially beneficial when exposed to all the various opinions and facts in a free market of ideas. More importantly, the most harmful options will be quickly and automatically weeded out. The role of any regulation must be as less as possible and limited only to maintaining law and order.

 

There have been multiple sources of propaganda earlier, but Social Media platforms are different in both their reach and influence (impact). Social Media platforms have too large an impact on the thought process and decision-making of a majority of the population, as they become the primary source of information and news. This is a growing problem and will soon start invalidating the basic hypothesis behind the Freedom of Speech. We are not there yet but we are headed toward that. The resulting consequences (if nothing changes) are going to be devastating. 

 

Various degrees of Truth

 

There are undoubtedly several nuances when it comes to defining what is a fact (a verifiable truth irrespective of one’s subjective opinions), what is an informed subjective opinion, and what is a deliberate misinformation (the creator is aware that he/she is telling a lie). There is a spectrum of various degrees of truth and not clearly defined categories.

However, if you ask a random person whether any statement is a ‘fact’ or an ‘opinion’, and he/she will generally give the right answer if you present both sides of the argument to him/her. The problem is no human being will want to put in the mental effort to hear both sides of arguments on every issue or verify every statement by doing independent research. 

 

While machines have become very good at identifying patterns in images, natural language processing, and several other areas, they are currently poor at identifying whether something is a fact or misinformation. Since there are not many commercial applications for this problem, not enough AI models have been built for this.

 

Capitalism 

 

Capitalism runs our modern economic world. The basic hypothesis behind capitalism is that in a free market, it is morally and economically good for society if private enterprises only focus on profits above everything else while remaining strictly inside the regulatory framework. 

 

Due to the principle of Freedom of Speech, the regulatory frameworks/rules for Social Media Platforms in the USA, are currently extremely weak (only limited to maintaining law and order). For social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., their bottom line is directly driven by user engagement. It appears slightly unfair to expect social media platforms to worry about the damage they are causing to society (and do self-regulation) when the same expectation is not there from any other sector. 

 

Elon’s decision to make Twitter into a private company (from a public company) is most likely due to his desire to be free from capitalism’s golden rule to only focus on Profits. But in a capitalist world, non-profit organizations find it difficult to survive even if the owner does not want anything for himself/herself.

 

Monetizing Strategy

 

To achieve network effect, most social media networks are free for users. To make money they are dependent on advertisers. Advertisers will give money based on the reach and user engagement that they get. Hence the extreme competition for user attention from which no social media company is immune till now. While it may appear that some social media companies (such as Twitter) are running virtual monopolies due to their network effect, that is not true at all. The corporate competition for user attention is immense and every 7-8 years a new wave of social media platform disruption sweeps the globe.

 

Elon wants to charge $8 per month for blue tick verification. This is one way Elon wants to make money directly from users without being dependent on advertisers. Will it lead to some financial independence and sustainability for Twitter? Maybe. However, will this approach be enough to get Twitter out of the global race for higher user engagement? Is the moat around Twitter deep enough? My guess is No.

 

                                                                   --------------

Now that we have discussed in detail about the problem, let’s start discussing my solution. Yes, I believe a partial solution exists for this (else there is no point writing this blog !!). 

Let’s start with the simplest principles - 

 

Separation of Power

 

Social Media Platforms should not have any power to block any post or any individual on their platform. Each country must set up its own institution (quasi-judicial body) to flag a post or user to be banned (temporality or permanently) and their recommendation must be binding on the Social Media Platforms. In the absence of such a body, a separate non-profit entity must be created to serve this purpose. 

 

Moral Duty towards Truth

 

There is a moral duty of all social media platforms to promote Truth in the world. This needs to be acknowledged as a principle of Human Society. Only after we accept this societal principle can we begin the discussions on how to implement/regulate this.

 

Regulation on Algorithm (Personalization and Reach)

 

Any platform which has the ability to change the thoughts and beliefs of millions of people needs regulation to ensure that the Platform fulfills its moral duty toward the Truth. Social Media Platforms are digital public goods and need to be regulated. However, something unique is required for Social Media platforms. What is required is regulation on algorithms that control user personalization and reach (both organic and paid). 

 

Public list of “True Facts”

 

Everything that a Social Media Platform considers as “True Facts” must be publicly available in Human Readable format. (E.g. Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955). Each item has to be very specific with no generic statements. This is a very difficult engineering problem – both in scope and complexity. Essentially the list must be simultaneous “Human Readable” as well as “input to the algorithm which controls the reach of any post/person”.

 

There should be a way to get public feedback on each item in the list and people should be free to bring evidence both for or against any item. The public should be able to give requests to add missing “True Fact” in the public list (similar to the Wikipedia model)

 

Public list of “False Facts”

 

“True Fact” list alone is not sufficient to contain misinformation. Each social media platform must have a public list of “False Facts” (as per their definition) that are present on their platform. Again, this must be “Human Readable” as well as “input to the algorithm which controls the reach of any post/person”. The platform must ensure that the organic reach of “False Facts” is zero. 

 

There needs to be a way for the public to debate about items in this list as well as add new items to this list. Contrary to popular belief, original “False Facts” (present on social media platforms) are not very prolific. A limited number of False Facts keep getting used in multiple different various ways and different subjective opinions.  

 

The rate at which the “True Facts” list and “False Facts” list are updated needs to be significantly more than the rate of creation of misinformation. 

More importantly, once false information is identified by the platform, it must be very efficient in preventing the same misinformation to spread again in the future. 

 

Transparent communication about Reach

 

Users have a fundamental right to know if their reach (or the reach of their posts) has been restricted and the reason for the same. The reason should only be limited to – “Public list of True Facts” or “Public list of False Facts”. Any other reason must be out of the scope of the Social Media Platform company and in the scope of the quasi-judicial body (institution) mentioned above. 

 

Restricting Manual Discretion

 

Ideally, there should be zero (or minimum) manual discretion or decision-making when it comes to restricting the reach of any post/user. This is because manual discretion will always lead to arbitrary and unsatisfactory priority orders and outcomes (with everyone questioning the motives). As an industry, social media platforms must self-regulate and remove manual discretion. Decisions by machines are more socially palatable than decisions by human beings. 

Conclusion

 

Without commonly agreed rules, social media platforms will take any decision against their goal of higher user engagement, only when the chaos they cause has come too close to their homes. I am of course referring to Trump’s false claim regarding 2020 election rigging. The small possibility of a non-peaceful transfer of power in USA, scared all the social media platforms into doing random arbitrary actions which raised more questions than answers. The current situation is non-sustainable. 

 

The solution I am proposing is to separate the entity taking decisions on punitive actions (blocking posts/users), establish moral duty towards truth as a basic principle, create a public list of True and False Facts and regulate the algorithms controlling content personalization and reach. 

 

Will Elon take Twitter in the right direction? I am keeping my fingers crossed. 

Can Blockchain transform land records in India ?

The Indian land and property ownership records are a very sorry state of affairs. More than 40% of the pending cases in Indian courts are property disputes. Anyone in India who has tried to sell his land or house would tell you how extremely illiquid the land/property market is in India. Irrationally high property registration fee and archaic registry laws have not helped matters either.

For any capitalist economic system to work, guarantee to private property is the basic founding principle. Unfortunately, for millions of India, their most important private property - land/houses are highly vulnerable to theft by mafia & land sharks. Land/property ownership on paper and actual possession on the ground are highly divergent. It's extremely difficult to raise capital against property in India unlike any other developed country in the world. The situation is so bad that for any developmental or corporate work, the corporations depend on Indian Government to acquire land (through Land Acquisition Acts) for them, rather than buying land from the open market, like any other developed country.

India critically needs a radical overhaul of land/property ownership record system(s). Most researchers have claimed that implementing GST will result in a 2% increase in GDP growth. I can confidently say that proper digitalization (will define proper digitalization later) of property records in India will result in a much higher increase in GDP growth than GST implementation. 

The term "digitalization" of any official record, is very tricky, as it may mean either a complete process transformation or just storing a scanned copy of the paper records in a database, which leads to no real impact at all or it may mean something in the middle. There have been multiple failed efforts to digitize land/property records in India but all of them were half-hearted typical bureaucratic measures which do not utilize the latest technologies. Projects such as Aadhaar, have proven that the Indian Government is capable of executing rare technological feats, such as creating a biometric identification system for over a billion people. Payments systems such as UPI have shown that Indian government can build most technically advanced systems in the entire world. India has been able to achieve technology leapfrog in multiple sectors such as telecommunications, e-commerce etc. Hence it is extremely surprising that no one seems to be talking about reforming our archaic land ownership record system using the latest technologies.

Land is a State Subject in India and so each State has slightly different laws, land usage types and transaction processes. However, the basics are very similar in all states. Essentially there are two important types of documents - (1) Land/Property Registry document and (2) Area Land/Property Register. These, of course, are generic names and there are different terminologies in different places. I will explain both these documents in greater details below.

The "Land/Property Registry" (or a title deed) is proof of transaction between the seller and the buyer along with the transaction amount, registration fee etc. However, the thing to note is that the Registration Document is not the final proof of ownership. It is only a proof of transaction between one party and another. If anyone proves in a court of law, that the seller was not the original owner of the property, the buyer will have to relinquish ownership of the property even though he/she has a valid registration document. This can go back any number of steps - the owner before the current owner, the owner even before that etc. Hence there is always some risk associated with ownership of any property in India (except if you have bought it from the government itself). The other big problem of the registration document is that it does not mention the latitudes/longitudes of the property. While the registration document describes the property in wordings (surroundings) and in terms of plot number (or some such equivalent Official Land/Property Number) but not something which can be independently and scientifically verified such as latitudes and longitudes. This leads to a lot of problems when it comes to the division of property. Most of the land records do not have a non-duplicatable and reliable ID such as Aadhaar but have any of the unreliable archaic government IDs. Hence there are several disputes related to the identity of the buyer (person or a company) in whose name the Registry document has been generated.

The second important document is official Area Land/Property Register which essentially is a map of the geographic land area, divided into multiple plots along with the current ownership details as per government records, official land use and many other details. There is no integrated Area Land/Property Register for the entire country. There are multiple distributed land records, generally for each district. The quality of the Land/Property Register(s) and the amount of information available varies very widely with both geographic areas, legal jurisdictions as well as different durations of time. These are not GIS maps but a rather old style cartographic maps with verbal descriptions. Multiple deliberate errors have been introduced in these Land/Property Register(s) to enable land grabbing, illegal commercial property in residential-only areas, extortion, bribery and other types of frauds over the years. Even if someone proves in a court of law that he/she lost their title due to state error (along with private fraud), the state does not provide any compensation unlike in countries such as Australia. The boundaries in these maps are not very accurate (they are not linked to latitude/longitudes), especially in rural areas where boundary demarcations are not very clear. This is the major reason why GIS-based land record digitization attempts have not been very successful in India.

Apart from multiple types of frauds contained in individual Land/Property Registry documents and the official Land/Property Register(s), there are a huge number of unauthorized constructions in India for which no official records exist. These illegal constructions have also changed hands multiple times and there are no reliable records for any of them. The only proof that residents/companies occupying illegal properties have are utility bills, address in personal IDs etc., which are highly susceptible to frauds. Due to the heavy social costs involved, it is impractical to advocate for the demolition of all unauthorized constructions across the country. Also, the first step in any solution to the problem of unauthorized constructions in India has to start with having an accurate record of all unauthorized constructions and their current possession status. Creating such a record is extremely difficult. 

India Bureaucracy is extremely corrupt and cannot be trusted for correcting the system. They thrive and flourish because of these errors in the system and are constantly looking out for ways to find loopholes. The amount of corrupt coordination that the bureaucracy can manage in India is extraordinary and any type of manual investigations has proven to be futile in India. Various studies on the implementation of different government schemes in India have shown that corruption has been brought down to zero only in cases where - (1) The entire process is online and the citizen does not have to go to any Government department or (2) There is no monopoly and multiple agencies (including 3rd party agencies) have the authorization to complete the task. 

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology for creating shared/distributed databases between multiple parties who do not trust each other. Blockchain transactions are extremely costly and slow. Hence the ideal use case for Blockchain technology should be in cases where there are multiple non-trusting parties, transactions are of high value and some latency in any transaction is acceptable. Blockchain has few viable business use-cases till now (I don't think cryptocurrencies are viable business use-cases), even though the buzz surrounding it is very high. I believe Blockchain technology is ideally suited for solving the problems of Land/Property Registration in India.

Indian Land/Property Registrations fulfil all the important criteria of an ideal Blockchain use case -

1. Multiple non-trusting parties: There are multiple parties which need to do multiple different types of transactions -  
1. Land/Property Registration Department (State/District specific) - Issuing Land/Property Registry document and updating Area Land/Property Register
2. Different types of Planning Departments - Categorizing land under various uses-cases (land use type), carving out new pieces of land, future planning, forest conservation etc.
3. Cartographical Mapping Departments - Mapping the land/property records (with actual  Latitude/Longitude on the ground. 
4. District Court, High Court and Supreme Court (Court Administrative wing) - Deciding arbitration cases and changing both Land/Property Registry document(s) and Area Land/Property Register(s)
5. Different Complains Departments (for Citizens and Companies) - Raise official complains (both to the bureaucracy and courts) on the official Area Land/Property Register and playing a crucial role in determining whether a piece of land/property is under any dispute or not. 
2. High-Value Transactions: Government receives very high registry fees for documenting each transaction. There is enough margin in these transactions to justify the use of extremely expensive Blockchain technology
3. Transaction Latency: Significant latency is acceptable for Land/Property transactions

India needs a dedicated Private Blockchain Network which will be at the centre of all processes related to Land/Property ownership, record, disputes and planning. This has also been recommended by NITI Aayog recently. Using a private and permission blockchain network to create and maintain Land/Property Register, it is possible to solve all the following problems independently - 

1. Ensuring atomicity of all new transactions across a wide variety of stakeholders. Lack of atomicity of transactions, across all the different records, is the biggest loophole that land sharks use on gullible people. In the first step, all new transactions will be recorded both in the new blockchain-based system and the old system. 
2. Incorporating the legacy Land/Property Registry documents (available with bureaucracy or people or company) into the new system without introducing more frauds by bureaucrats. The process should work even if limited information is available in multiple different formats
3. Incorporating the legacy Area Land/Property Register with the new system without introducing more frauds by bureaucrats.
4. Permanently link all new (and old) Land/Property Registry documents with Area Land/Property Register based on all the various numbering schemes (Official Land/Property Number) used over the years, with the ability to provide a complete history of ownership details at the touch of a button.
5. Creating a complete process for registering official complains (to bureaucracy or to the courts) on the latest versions of Area Land/Property Register, along with the ability to collate and track all complain(s) for a particular Land/Property.
6. Creating a mapping between official land/property number with a common cartographical GIS map having latitudes/longitudes by combining data from multiple surveys different Land Registers etc, highlighting all errors/mistakes
7. Creating a parallel system for storing details of unauthorized constructions and their ownership transfers without providing any legal status to them and incorporating data from multiple surveys.

The beauty of Blockchain technology is that it is a completely decentralized solution. There is no central database with any entity. Creating multiple systems specific to different stakeholders and trying to achieve atomicity of transactions is very very difficult. However, with Blockchain technology, it is easier to coordinate between different completely independent government agencies because of its inherent features of Smart Contracts, Direct to Doer (D2D) architectures, ability to audit transactions without dependence on any participant as well as ensuring transactional confidentiality. 

Mapping the land/property records with Latitude/Longitude requires heavy manual work and multiple surveys. It is not a simple one-step process. It can also lead to creation of new Official Land/Property Numbers. This requires a very flexible architecture and ability to handle various corner cases. Any large-scale attempt by the government to map land/property number with latitude/longitudes will lead to multiple litigations and deliberate errors by bureaucracy. Hence the system should be able to incorporate data from multiple surveys without any legal ownership changes. Ownership disputes must be handled subsequently.

I dream of a day where buying Land/Property anywhere in India, should be as easy and secure as buying a share. Once this basic asset with the people become a liquid asset it will lead to unprecedented growth in the Indian economy.  

A Product Management prospective on Jewellery containers

Until very recently in my life, I had neither owned any jewellery nor bought any jewellery. Last year I got married (a typical big fat Indian wedding) and so was suddenly introduced to the world of the Indian jewellery market. Apart from appreciating how lucrative this market is, what really surprised me was the complete lack of innovation in jewellery packaging. In this blog, I will try to point out some of the obvious customer pain points when it comes to storing, using and managing jewellery as well as very easy/simple solutions for the same.

Most people keep just a few ornaments at home and keep the rest of their jewellery in a bank locker, where the standard locker sizes are too small. However, most jewellery brands (both corporate brands and local shops) seem oblivious to this obvious fact. Thus the packing in which the jewellery (rings, necklace, earrings etc.) comes from the shop is hardly ever used, except for first time showcasing. They are then discarded in a forgotten corner of the house. The packaging is so bulky that their only use is for display purposes and not for continuous future use. Customers are forced to use ad-hoc measures to store, organize and use jewellery. I believe that all brands have missed a very simple low-hanging fruit here.

Every company wants brand recall each time the user is interacting with its product. Since it is very difficult to put a logo in the ornaments themselves, it is extremely surprising to me that companies do not take extra measures to ensure that jewellery packaging (having the brand logo) is retained and used again and again by the customers. If you compare the jewellery industry with other consumer wearables such as spectacles or watches, the difference in packaging & branding is extremely stark. Spectacle brands put a lot of thought behind the spectacle case. There are a huge variety of spectacle cases from being extremely hard to lightweight; from being opaque to fully transparent etc. and using a very wide range of materials and styles. The same is the case with watches and every other consumer wearables.

The user requirements for ornament packing for continuous usage, are significantly different from spectacles/watches. I have listed down all the requirement here -

1. Small Size: The packaging (for ring/necklace or earrings) should be as small as possible because customers will either store it in Bank Lockers (which are small & expensive) or conceal it in a hidden corner in their homes, for the fear of being stolen. At the time of gifting, customers want big packaging but not at the time of using it. They ideally want the packaging to be inconspicuous and easy to hide. This key insight is missing in most packaging solutions currently in the market. 
2. Personal Context Information: There is a strong latent customer need to record the source (name of the person/organization) from where the ornament has come and the occasion (marriage/anniversary/birthdays etc.) for which it was bought/gifted. Currently, customers memorise these details but a significant percentage of customers will willingly undertake the effort to write/print these details down if provided an easy method/place for doing this. Customers love refreshing these details and memories each time they wear the jewellery. Jewellery has great nostalgic value in addition to other functionalities. Moreover, this is a great place to put company logo and increase brand recall.
3. Being part of a larger group: Customers don't store each ornament (or set) separately. Customers store all their jewellery together or in separate groups. For example, customers might store all rings together or all the different earing together. Some customers store artificial jewellery separately and some store them along with the original/precious jewellery. The underlying point for any jewellery packaging is that everyday usable packaging should be able to co-exist along with other types of ornaments in a small space. If possible it should be able to connect to another ornament packaging. It should not allow the ornament to get entangled and help customers to easily search for the right ornament in the overall container/package.
4. Digitizing bills and Purity Certificates: Customers fear losing the physical bill for their ornaments. Jewellery is perhaps the only category of consumer goods, where customers value the bill so much. Most Indian customers want to sell the ornament at the same shop from where they have bought their jewellery as they remain sceptical of the weights/purity and other details mention in the bill. Hence having a barcode / QR code in the packaging from which a digital copy of the bill and original purity certificate can be reproduced, can have a very big customer impact.
5. Keeping Track of all valuables: There is a latent need for keeping count/track of all jewellery. A growing problem among the new generation is that they are finding it difficult to keep track of all their jewellery. The new digital generation will ideally like to keep photos as well for archival purposes. There is currently no easy solution to this problem without involving extra efforts (mental/physical) which the customer is unwilling to do. However simple packaging ideas such as number stickers can easily solve this problem.  

The biggest question that I am assuming most readers will have is, whether it is worth the time,  effort and cost for any organization to come up with packaging solutions, which solves these customer pains and latent demands. Moreover, any new innovative packaging solution will be an add-on to the existing packaging, which serves the purpose of showcasing the jewellery & has become a default customer requirement. My answer to this question is an emphatic YES. The customer pains in this area are large enough for customers to take immediate notice and appreciation of the right solution. This is not only relevant for people who love organizing thing but also an average disorganized consumer, who would love the luxury feeling associated with specialized packaging for everyday usage. Apart from being a great differentiator, the brand recall advantages would be enormous. 

I can suggest multiple prototypes of packaging which will solve all the above customer pains/concerns as well as being easy to use, easy to stack and easy to track. My favourite form factor is rectangles of different standardized sizes (from credit card size to A5 sheet size) with as less thickness as possible. They are can be easily opened using a simple push and can be easily connected together. The interior design should make a small click sound when ornaments are fixed properly. There must be a place for personal context information, numbering as well as QR codes. Of course, branding would play as important a role as functional aspects, for any final packaging design. I am sure that professional designers can come up with much better solutions by working with a well-informed Product Manager. The number of potential innovations waiting to happen in traditional industries is staggering. I sincerely hope to see some changes in jewellery packaging soon.

What is wrong with the pricing of Cloud providers?

When I passed out of MNNIT in 2010, the latest buzzword in the IT industry was cloud computing. Everyone was talking about how cloud computing is poised for exponential growth in the coming years. The prevailing consensus at that time was that public cloud computing industry had stabilized after several years of continuous development and adoption of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other service providers. The cloud industry had evolved from the "startup era" to being "enterprise ready". More than 6 years have passed and the overall sentiment today is exactly the same as before i.e. being at the threshold of a major change. However, cloud computing has still not become the de-facto standard for enterprises (except tech enterprises) as almost everyone had predicted, during my engineering days. The transition from a non-cloud environment to a cloud environment remains as challenging as ever. So what has gone wrong?

According to me, there are multiple reasons (data privacy, vendor lock-in, perceived lack of control, lack of bet-your-business SLAs, painful transition, lack of in-house expertise etc.) for the slow transition to the cloud by non-tech enterprises. It is not possible, in this post, to go into detail for each of them. I will probably be taking up each one of them in multiple subsequent posts. In this post, I will focus on just one reason - wrong pricing strategy, by cloud service providers.

Current pricing strategy of Public Cloud providers

The basic pricing strategy(s) of public cloud providers are very similar. There are multiple pricing options for different cloud services by different cloud vendors. I will classify them into the following two broad types of pricing strategies -

Type 1: Pay-only-for-what-you-use Pricing Strategy

In this type of pricing strategy, the cloud provider does not guarantee a fixed cost per month/year. The final cost depends on the number of resources provisioned and the usage characteristics of those resources. Internal cost controls for such on-demand/on-spot pricing is done by using tools such as quota/alert mechanism. Some common mechanisms are -

1. Fixed rate, single-metric based pricing: The fixed rate depends on a number of factors/conditions chosen during the initial setup of the cloud resource. The final price to the customer depends on the total usage of some metric such as usage time (hours), storage used (GB), IOPS-month etc. For example - AWS EC2 c1.xlarge instance is priced at $0.11 per hour for 'Asia Pacific - Mumbai' region.
2. Fixed rates, multiple metrics based pricing: This is the most common type of pricing adopted by most cloud providers. The final price depends on fixed rates for multiple usage metrics. Few examples are - (1) AWS EBS SSD io1 volumes are priced at $0.131 per GB-month + $0.068 IOPS-month and (2) AWS RDS db.r3.2xlarge is priced at $1.320 per hour + $0.22 per million requests. (Both for Mumbai region). There is also step-pricing where the fixed rate is different for different ranges of values and add-on pricing for one-time activities such as data transfers, configuration change requests etc.
3. On-spot pricing: In this pricing strategy, the rate per metric(s) is determined through some sort of bidding process (creating a marketplace) rather than being fixed by the cloud provider. This is very popular among startups and tech companies which use this, to lower their operating costs significantly.

For any typical customers, the actual usage of resources reserved is very low. Hence even though the fixed/variable rates for this type of pricing strategy are quite high, the overall bill for the customer is significantly less.

Type 2: Pay-only-for-what-you-reserve Pricing Strategy

In this type of pricing strategy, the cloud provider reserves a certain resource for the customer for a fixed amount, regardless of the usage of the resource. The cloud provider gives alerts to the users when they are close to exhausting the resource reserved. This can be further sub-divided into -

1. Reserved Virtual Resource: The virtual resource is reserved during the initial configuration phase. The cost to the customer changes only if the resource configuration is changed. New resources can be reserved whenever required.
2. Reserved Physical Resource: This strategy is very similar to renting hardware on third-party data centers, where customers reserves physical resources and these resources are not shared with any other customer. This is not the preferred pricing strategy of cloud providers for obvious reasons. However, cloud providers often use this strategy to acquire customers initially.

Most of the cloud services and features have been built keeping pay-for-only-what-you-use model only. The pay-for-only-what-you-reserve pricing model has been introduced much later. Various studies and research papers have shown that large non-tech companies generally prefer pay-for-what-you-reserve pricing while startups and large tech companies generally prefer pay-for-what-you-use pricing. Both these pricing strategies are far more complicated and difficult for customers to understand compared to the simple software licensing agreements in the non-cloud world.

Budgeting & Procurement process in a large enterprise

Before I start on what is wrong with the current pricing strategy of cloud providers, let me briefly describe the budgeting & procurement process in a typical large enterprise.

Budgeting is one of the most political exercises in any company. In modern times where designations are losing their value, the budgeting exercise establishes the real political power of a person/department in the company. Because of this, budgeting takes a lot of time, effort & negotiations. Given the semi-fixed nature of the budget, different departments overstate their requirements, based on over-optimistic future projections, and add buffers for handling exigencies. A strict time-consuming audit process is required to limit the overall company cost, resulting in a long lead time for budget approval. In this way, a vicious cycle is formed and it becomes worse, the larger a company grows. The net result is that once decided for a year, the budget is not subject to any change for a lot of decision makers in the company.

Because of the very nature of budgeting process, year-after-year, it is essential for any manager that his/her estimations are taken seriously. The budget estimation must closely match the actual spend in that year else it would be extremely difficult to get budget approvals for the next year. Managers hate surprises and uncertainty when it comes to pricing. Also, they are extremely unwilling to let engineers (or even lower level managers) have any role in making monetary decisions for the company.

Most surveys rate "procurement" as the most painful process in any large organization. It is made even more complicated by internal cost allocation rules between different projects/departments/regions, various procurement guidelines etc. The ERP software (generally SAP) is often so complicated, that a special team, generally called MIS team, is designated to manage that. The entire procurement and payment process requires coordination of multiple stakeholders such as - cost approval authority, procurement team, legal team, MIS team, accounts team, audit team etc. Hence it is very important that the 'cost to the company' is easy to understand and allocate internally based on the different company rules. Also, it is very important that the vendor's bill (i.e. line-items in the bill) can be easily matched with the budget approvals entered earlier, in the company's ERP software. Delays in the procurement process for 'Change Requests' is one of the most common reasons for the failure of IT projects, even though the monetary value of the 'Change Request' is insignificant in comparison to the overall project value. This may seem counter-intuitive but that is how all large organizations work.

Preference of CapEx over OpEx

For any large and growing company, that has a steady stream of revenue & a predictable future, there is a strong tendency to prefer capex over opex for all small (<5% of the overall expenses) expenditures, including IT expenditures. Apart from the fact that capital expenditures are easy to budget and procure than operational expenditure, it is easier to get bulk discounts for one-time capital expenditures. The main focus of procurement team is to get the highest possible discounts and if excess resources get purchased due to over-optimistic estimations, that is not the fault of procurement department but the department providing the estimations. Moreover, even if a department gets more resources that it can productively utilize, it will not highlight this waste. Once a capital expenditure is made, its usage is rarely subject to audit, in sharp contrast to operational expenditures (opex).

Challenges with current Cloud pricing strategy

The current pricing strategy of major cloud providers lead to the following challenges for large non-IT enterprises -

1. The cloud pricing is far more complicated than simple license-based pricing for IT products or pro-rate based or milestone based custom product development pricing models that most companies are used to, for all their IT needs. For different cloud services, the pricing depends on very technical usage metrics, which are difficult to understand for decision makers in large companies.
2. In a non-cloud environment, a very high-level design is sufficient to finalize the hardware requirements and make a relatively accurate capex/opex projections. Multiple virtual machines can be spawned off from the bare metals as required by the IT architecture decided later on. However, if an enterprise decided to build a new IT product using public cloud providers, the final price that the company needs to pay each month/year depends entirely on the detailed IT architecture. The current pricing strategy makes budgeting difficult for companies who have no experience with a cloud provider earlier. One of the main reasons why the Bare Metal Server by IBM SoftLayer is so popular is because it is easier to get budget approvals for it, even though it comes with minimal features.
3. The biggest pain point for enterprise customers is the variability in monthly/yearly bills by the cloud provider. The last thing that a product manager wants to do is to go to the accounts department and explain to them the line-items in the bill and get it cleared for any vendor. It is a thankless job which no one wants to do. In general the more complicated the bill (irrespective of the total amount) the longer it takes to process it. I know a lot of executives who give their personal credit card information to cloud providers and then get the amount reimbursed from the company under miscellaneous category just to avoid the procurement process of the company.
4. Most cloud providers like to delight their customers by reducing their pricing unilaterally when their costs come down (due to the economies-of-scale effect). Also, most cloud services have provision for some sort of monetary penalty to be paid to the customer, in case they are not able to meet the SLA agreed upon. While customers surely are delighted by these, enterprise customers find it difficult to account for them in SAP/ERP. This is especially true if the costs are internally allocated to multiple cost centers.
5. Cloud resources (on which customer billing is done) can only be created by system engineers or software developers or 3rd party vendors. However, they cannot be allowed to take any monetary decision on behalf of the company. In most companies, even engineering managers or product managers do not take any monetary decisions. The process in large companies are designed to ensure that untracked and unauthorized expenses do not happen, even by mistake by developers/QA/system engineers etc. Public cloud platforms do have quotas (and similar mechanisms) to manage/control the resources used/reserved but they are considered inadequate for micro-managing costs. This leads to a feeling of “lack of cost control”.
6. For a lot of cloud services (especially where billing is based on IOPS-month), the customers are completely dependent on cloud providers to find out the actual usage metrics and there is little that they can do to cross-verify these claims. This increases the strong stickiness problem (being vendor hostage) that anyways cloud providers have to deal with.
7. The extremely detailed pricing of public cloud providers, do a good job at highlighting resource waste in any department. Departments using public cloud providers are flagged far more often by internal audit team for improvements. However, this sometimes lead to non-adoption of cloud by the decision makers. This is also one of the reasons why pay-for-what-you-reserve is more popular in enterprises that pay-for-what-you-use pricing. IT audits hardly ever highlight under-utilized capex/reserved resources of any department.

Most of these pricing problems are applicable only for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaP (Platform as a service) cloud services and not for SaaS (Software as a service). SaaS are generally license based very similar to the familiar non-cloud license based software.

Suggestions / Recommendations

I don’t think there are simple solutions to the pricing problems that I have listed above, for all the different cloud services. Please note that the current pricing strategies work very well for startups (and even large IT companies) and hence they must also continue. The below recommendations are only for large enterprise customers -

1. Simplify Pricing for Enterprises: All cloud services should have an alternate pricing strategy especially for enterprise customers. The pricing should be as simple and very similar to license-based pricing which enterprises are so familiar with. The pricing should not be linked to usage or any metric and there should be no additional cost for data transfer, configuration change requests etc. Instead of transferring cost of each underlying resource used (compute, storage, network etc.) to the customer transparently, the cloud provider needs to provide a uniform price assuming average utilization of the underlying resource. This will result in a revenue loss for some customers and a revenue gain for some customers but will help simplify cost and get more enterprise customers. For any application, customers use several cloud services. Hence for this pricing strategy to work, it must be applicable to all cloud services and not just for some select services. This is what is lacking in the pricing strategy of all cloud providers currently.
2. Integration with SAP and other ERP solutions: Cloud providers must build add-on(s)/middleware(s) which integrates their billing and pricing module with SAP and other leading ERP providers. This should improve the “Resource Tagging” feature and make it easy for all stakeholders to match the budget approvals to the monthly bill by cloud providers. It should make the work of auditors easy by highlight price reduction by the cloud vendor, SLA penalties and other reasons for variations in the monthly bill.
3. Create tools/process for better micro-management of cost: There are some cloud providers who do not provide an admin login to change any quotas. The quotas are made zero by default (except if some service is provided for free). Any change in quotas requires contact to the customer support team which would increases quota for that service on behalf of the customer. Cloud services can also create internal approval tools where the engineers can only request for any new cloud resource or any other cloud service (initial data transfer, configuration change request etc.) which impacts billing. The request would then goes to the customer’s IT procurement team for approval. Also, changes need to be made in services such as Elastic Load Balancing to add extra approval processes.
4. Budgeting & Procurement process change consulting: Cloud providers generally do a great job of technical follow-up of customer cloud implementations and resolving their technical queries. They generally have senior architects helping customers with initial cloud adoption. However, cloud providers neglect helping enterprise customers change their budgeting and procurement process, to deal with the different cloud pricing mechanisms (especially on-demand or on-spot pricing). These are not small process changes for customers. Process consultants are required which can take a large enterprise, step-by-step (first adopting simple pricing mechanism and then shifting to on-demand or spot pricing) into the cloud platform, after stabilizing & auditing the process changes for each step.

How Aadhaar can usher the biggest political reform in India !!

Aadhaar is arguably one of the best government schemes that have been implemented in India in recent times. It is poised to bring revolution in a lot of sectors in India. One such area, which has unfortunately not been discussed at all, is reforming the Indian electoral process. In this blog, I will try to highlight how easily Aadhaar can be used to usher the biggest political reform in India. Hope someone important in Election Commission reads this post.

One big difference between Indian constitution and any other constitution in the world is that the Indian constitution mentions in great detail about the election process and the powers of Election Commission (EC). Rather than leaving the election implementation details to laws made by the government of the day, the founding fathers decided to explicitly keep them in the constitution. This was one of the major reasons why India remained a democracy even though almost all other countries, that gained independence after World War-2, quickly succumbed to dictatorship or civil wars. India did not have to depend on political incumbents to implement electoral reforms, which adversely impact political incumbents the most. Key electoral reforms in the past, such as photo-based voter id cards, electronic voting machines etc., were spearheaded by EC, despite strong opposition by political parties. Any realistic plan for electoral reforms in India should be implementable by EC, with minimal or no support from the government.

There is no doubt that India is a thriving democracy and we have relatively free-and-fair elections, as compared to other democracies in the world. Due to the efforts of EC over multiple decades, the era of ballot stuffing, booth captures and fully rigged elections (such as 1987 Kashmir elections) are now over. However, there is still much to be desired in our current election process. Some of the major problems include - high cost of conducting elections, missing names in voter lists, multiple entries of the same person in different (or same) booths, fake names in voter lists, names of deceased people in voter lists, difficulty in finding the booth in which a person has to go for voting, enabling voting for people who cannot go to the booth for some genuine reason (E.g. soldiers, migrant workers etc.), low voter turnout especially among well-educated class etc.

Before I start on why integrating Aadhaar with voter id cards & electoral rolls is such a great idea, let me quickly go through the basic features of Aadhaar. Aadhaar is the only database which guarantees almost zero duplication and has 99% coverage of all Indian adults (1.08 crore people). Unlike a bank card or a chip-based driving license card or PAN card, the Aadhaar card can be easily printed at any Aadhaar center. There is no logistics required to transfer the card from a central printing location into the hands of the citizen. It allows instant identification of any Indian, through biometric identifiers such as fingerprints or iris scan. All other fields in Aadhaar database (such as name, address, mobile number, email id, photo etc) can be incorrect, but the biometric data to Aadhaar number mapping is 100% accurate. Moreover, the Aadhaar based India Stack APIs have proven their reliability, scalability, performance and efficiency for both authentication and fund transfer purposes.

In 1993, EC introduced photo-based voter id cards called EPIC (Electors Photo Identity Cards) and it took more than 11 long years for it to become compulsory for electoral voting (there are still some very limited exceptions allowed). EPIC was a major step in reducing electoral frauds. It is now time to link EPIC cards with citizen's biometric information to make it even more secure and error proof. The good news is that because of existing Aadhaar's biometric database, it would take less than 2-3 years and only 1 general election to completely shift to bio-metric based voter id card and electoral rolls. I will call the new voter id card as Biometric Electors Photo Identity Card or BEPIC going forward.

Challenges in linking Aadhaar with EPIC

1. Aadhaar is legally not compulsory for Indians, except for getting certain monetary benefits from the government. No one can be denied the new biometric voter id cards because
• He/she does not have Aadhaar card or 
• He/she does not want to link his Aadhaar with EPIC. 
2. Aadhaar is not an official proof of being an Indian citizen and so a citizen cannot demand BEPIC based on just Aadhaar (it requires some address proof). Many illegal immigrants, especially from Bangladesh, have an Aadhaar card but no EPIC or presence in the electoral rolls. 
3. The minimum age for voting is 18 years. However, Aadhaar card has no age restriction and there is no sanity of the age (date of birth) in the Aadhaar database.
4. Secret Ballot is fundamental to democracy and no IT system can be allowed to store the vote(s) cast by any individual. The current EVMs only store the total votes cast for each candidate and not individual votes. 
5. The time required to cast a single vote in a polling booth cannot be increased, else it would lead to complete chaos of elections which need to be conducted in a single day only.

Proposed Solution

Given the privacy concerns that are increasingly going to be associated with Aadhaar in future, it is important that new bio-metric based voter-id database of EC is not an add-on to the Aadhaar database (or any direct integration), but rather a completely separate database. This database must maintain its own copy of the biometric information for each Indian citizen, along with Aadhaar number (optional) and all other fields that the current voter-id database maintains.

If the Aadhaar number is voluntarily provided by the citizen, then the biometric information saved on both the databases must be the same (i.e. or easily matched by a standard algorithm). Currently, Aadhaar does not provide any mechanism for transfer of biometric information to any other database and this need to be custom built specially for the EC. This is where the biggest legal and implementation challenge lies, as this cannot be done by EC alone. This requires government approval and active participation.

If the Aadhaar number is not provided by the citizen, then Election commission need to take the bio-metric details of the resident themselves and classify citizens into the following two types -

1. Indian having Aadhaar but new biometric voter id card is not linked with Aadhaar: 
   Biometric information of the citizen matches exactly with a particular resident in Aadhaar database. The same biometric data must be stored in both databases which can be matched by a standard algorithm.
2. Indian not having Aadhaar but having new biometric voter id cards: 
   Biometric information of the citizen does not match any of the existing residents in the Aadhaar database. The biometric information must be saved in such a format that in future if his/her Aadhaar number is issued, the biometric information between the two databases can be matched.

Similar to the Aadhaar card, the EC centers should be able to easily print and give out BEPIC in real time without any logistics required to track the transfer of card from a central printing location into the hands of every citizen. Similar to Aadhaar, a citizen can have any many copies of his/her BEPIC card as he/she wants.

The link between Aadhaar database and BEPIC database can also be severed in future after enough elector coverage has been reached, if required for privacy or control concerns. There are pros and cons for both cases - having a permanent link between Aadhaar and BEPIC or having a temporary link in the initial phase only. I will not go into that much details in this blog.

EC will also have to replicate the relevant portion of the Aadhaar system which enables instant citizen verification anytime using his/her biometric information (fingerprint or iris scan). Of course, since this system will only be used by EC and no other third party/organization, it can be at a much lower scale/capacity than Aadhaar system. This instant biometric verification system needs to be enabled at each polling booth. This will reduce the manual dependency to verify address and streamline multiple EC processes.

A single system of electoral rolls based on BEPIC needs to be developed for all types of elections - central, state, municipal or panchayat elections. I will call the new electoral rolls as BEPIC electoral rolls subsequently. The main aim of BEPIC electoral rolls will be to ensure that the same BEPIC does not have different addresses in different electoral rolls (including municipal and panchayat electoral rolls). Change of address, at any EC center, by a citizen before any type of election, must be reflected in all electoral rolls for all subsequent elections as well.

Operations & Change Management

• Online linking of Aadhaar number to EPIC number
  Similar to the various forms that exist on National Voters Services Portal such as Form 6, 7, 8, 8A etc, a new form should be created which allows residents to voluntarily link their Aadhaar number with their EPIC number after uploading relevant documents and manual back-end verification. Once this is done, the citizens must be asked to collect their new BEPIC from designated centers. The website http://electoralsearch.in/ used to have a link for linking Aadhaar number with EPIC number but that was discontinued later due to unknown reasons.
• Issue BEPIC at Polling booth stations before elections
  Every year the election commission asks citizens to come to polling booth centers to verify that their names are in electoral rolls and to invite claims and objections for inclusion, deletion, modification & transposition. The Election Commission should enable these EC centers to necessarily have biometric devices similar to Aadhaar centers. All the above processes need to be changed to incorporate the instant biometric verification functionality that is now available with EC.
  Citizens can link their Aadhaar number with EPIC using standard e-sign functionality and instantly get their BEPIC card (without the need for a second visit). If citizens don't want to link their Aadhaar or do not have Aadhaar, then they can give their biometric data at these centers. BEPIC cards can be collected from these centers after 15-20 days or can be simply printed online
• Preparing new BEPIC electoral rolls before elections
  Currently, electoral rolls for each polling booth is divided into various Part numbers with a serial number assigned to each EPIC (each voter). Electoral rolls are refined before each election (state or central election) to remove wrong entries, update address changes of residents, remove deceased residents etc.  Each entry in electoral roll must be classified into the following categories
• EPIC only
• Aadhaar link request pending
• Biometric taken - BEPIC request pending
• BEPIC approved 
• BEPIC issued
• Giving BEPIC card during elections
  Each polling booth should pre-print BEPIC for all citizens for whom BEPIC has been approved but cards were not issued. On election day they must be given their BEPIC before casting their votes. Even voters who were issued BEPIC card but did not bring their BEPIC card must be given a new copy before casting their vote.
• Change in the voting process during elections
  BEPIC cannot be made compulsory in the first election after its launch. However, biometric details (or Aadhaar e-sign) can be taken for all non-BEPIC voters, after they have cast their votes, so that in the next election BEPIC can be made compulsory. The important thing is that taking biometric details for creating BEPIC can be outsourced to agencies, similar to how Aadhaar details are currently being taken. All voters are asked to carry some ID proof when they come to cast their votes. If Aadhaar card as an ID proof is presented as the most preferable option by EC messaging, the queues in polling booth can be made much shorter.

Benefits of linking Aadhaar with EPIC

1. Aadhaar has already done the heavy lifting of checking each person's biometric identifier with everyone else to determine that it is the unique one and reject duplicates. The costly and time-consuming step will not have to be done by EC for all those cases where citizens themselves volunteer to link their Aadhaar number.
2. BEPIC will lead to near zero election fraud (missing/duplicate/wrong entries in electoral rolls) in Indian elections. By leveraging Aadhaar, Indian elections can have lower election frauds than any developed country in the world.
3. Providing a valid address proof is very difficult for certain sections of the society such as homeless people, migrant workers, flood/earthquake victims etc. Biometric based instant verification devices at each EC center, connected to a central database, can be easily used to remove the need for any other address proof.
4. Currently transferring the address mapped on your voter-id (and electoral rolls) from one state/city to another takes a very long time as it requires paperwork at both ends. This leads to effective disenfranchisement of a large section of the society. The proposed solution will enable single visit, at-the-counter instant transfer of address in BEPIC and change in the designated polling booth for any citizen.
5. Suppose a person goes to the wrong polling booth during an election, he can be easily redirected to the correct polling booth. It is technically possible to even create solutions where a person can go to any polling booth to cast his/her vote. Similarly, it is also possible to create a system for early voting (similar to USA) or online voting or removing the need for indelible ink. However, these are not advisable in Indian context at present.
6. Due to a focused effort by EC, the electoral rolls for central and state elections have few errors. However, electoral rolls for local municipal & panchayat elections are extremely flawed. Local elections in most places in India cannot be called free and fair. The BEPIC electoral rolls system will clean up the electoral rolls of municipal/panchayat elections as well. 
7. Conducting elections is very expensive for a developing country with a huge population such as India. A very large percentage of the cost is because of manual efforts to maintain multiple electoral rolls, continuously conduct data correction exercises before each election etc. BEPIC will result in a one-time high capital expenditure but will reduce the operating expenditure substantially.
8. Mature democracies around the world are moving towards participatory democracy from representative democracy. Going forward there will be far more referendums and other forms of direct public participation in shaping policy. BEPIC will make India future ready for participatory democracy.

I have long believed that the solution to most of the Indian problems is technology. Technology will help us leapfrog several challenges that other developed countries took decades to solve. This step alone will not usher India into an era of clean politics but will go a long way in institutionalizing free and fair elections and deepening the roots of democracy in this country. Given the pace at which new applications are being built on top of Aadhaar, I am very confident that some variation of what I have described above, will be implemented by EC in the next 5-7 years. It will be very interesting to find out how accurately I was able to predict the future !!

Make right trade-offs in designing your mobile app

Smartphones & mobile internet are one of the defining technologies of our age. The promise of very high stock market valuation, industry disruption potential, unlimited customer reach, easy incremental improvement, low capex cost, high customer engagement and very low entry barrier has led almost every technology company and even non-tech-savvy companies to come up with their own mobile app(s). However, most companies are now facing the following harsh realities of the extremely competitive app business -

1. Usage/Reach: An average mobile user just has 10-30 mobile apps on his phone at any given point of time. Hence out of the millions of mobile apps, very few of them have more than a few thousand installs.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost: The customer acquisition cost is extremely high for a new mobile app, ranging from Rs 500/- to Rs. 1,500/- (This varies widely based on the industry). It is generally far cheaper to acquire a new customer through traditional means rather than through a mobile app for any business.
3. Retention: Customer loyalty/stickiness is difficult for 95% of the companies who are not aggregators and whose product/services do not require repeated/periodic customer engagements.
4. Customer Lifetime Value: Trying to monetize a mobile app has a direct negative impact on the overall reach & customer retention objectives. Even meeting non-monetary business objectives (indirect benefits) from a mobile app is tricky. For example, if a mobile app gives too many notifications, the customer will soon uninstall the app. Hence the overall Customer Lifetime Value (both direct & indirect benefits) frequently falls below the initial estimation.
5. Operational cost: While the capex required to create a new mobile app is low, the opex to maintain the mobile app is significant. This is especially important for non-tech-savvy companies. 

In spite of these major challenges, it is very clear to most companies that they will have to keep investing in mobile apps, till the time they get it right. If they don't do this, then they are at a big risk of their business model being disrupted by someone else.

I believe that the key to success is to understand that there are multiple categories of mobile apps and different design principles need to be followed for every mobile app. At each step of creating the mobile app some or the other trade-off has to be made. The key to success is to make the right trade-offs based on the category of the mobile app and its usage pattern. In this post, I will try to define few broad rules/heuristics for mobile app design for different categories of mobile apps.

There are multiple ways (customer need, industry segment etc.) of classifying mobile apps into different categories, but for this post, I want to classify them, based on different design requirements, into the following three broad categories -

1) Mass-market mobile apps

Mass-market mobile apps either do not require user registration or new registrations/onboarding can be easily done online with no offline component. These mobile apps are open to everyone and are not restricted to a segment of the population. They can be further classified into the following four types -

1. Aggregators & Market-Makers (Eg. Uber, Amazon, Bookmyshow, Oyo rooms etc) 
2. Networking (Eg. Facebook, WhatApp, LinkedIn, Tinder, Jeevansathi etc.)
3. Personal Utility Applications (Eg. Gmail, Maps, m-Indicator, Clean Master etc.)
4. News, Entertainment & Games (Eg. Netflix, Youtube, Hotstar, Pokemon etc.)

The mass-market category of mobile apps are most well known and they are generally cited as examples to create the do's and don'ts list for mobile app designing. Each of these four sub-types within the mass-market category, require slightly different design approach. 

Instead of exhaustively listing down all the common well-known design heuristics (such as late/delayed login, frequent controls on bottom and less frequent controls on top etc.), I will only be listing the ones which I believe are less known -

• If you can choose between using either email id or mobile number as the basis for new customer registrations, always prefer mobile number over email-id. I am still surprised by the number of product managers that are not aware of this even after Whatsapp's remarkable success story.
• Integrate voice commands wherever possible and as soon as you can. Voice commands are going to be the next big driver of almost all mobile apps in a multi-lingual world and it would take considerable time & efforts to gain expertise in this. Hence starting early will be a big advantage for most companies in long run.
• Customers worry about battery backup and data usage the most and this is unlikely to change for a long time. These can be one of the biggest hidden advantages of a mobile app, especially for mass-market apps (E.g. UG browser)

2) Target customer segment mobile apps

This category of mobile apps are meant exclusively for a target customer segment such as - (a) Customers using company's high-involvement product/service, (b) Residents of a city/state, (c) Subscribers of a repeat service/product (d) B2B services etc. Some good examples are Maruti Care, Kotak Bank, Bharatgas, e-Aadhaar etc.

The main difference between this category and the mass-market category is that these mobile apps are not meant for new online customer acquisition. At best, these mobile apps can be used for lead generation, but the actual customer acquisition process is much longer. The main purpose of these apps is to improve customer service, get repeat orders, get new customers referrals, increase customer engagement/loyalty etc.

Most non-tech company apps belong to this category, but there are very few success stories in this category. Even large product companies such as GE, Philips etc are struggling with their mobile apps.

Some common design rules for these types of mobile apps are -

• Be extra careful to ensure that there is no way in which duplicate accounts or cross accounts can be created. One of key to success for this category of mobile apps is not to give access outside the target customer group and to have zero duplicate or cross accounts even if the customers change their email id or mobile number or address or even their names.
• The app must be designed for quick installation and un-installation as most customers will install the app for doing particular tasks and then will uninstall the app. The app must be as light as possible on internal memory usage, especially when the app is not in use even if it means trading off some non-core features.
• Give customers a detailed option to customize the notification that they receive from the mobile app. Each unwanted notification has the risk of customer uninstalling the mobile app especially since the stickiness of these apps are very low.
• Companies must be open to integrate with other partners, suppliers, 3rd party agents etc. if required to meet all customer needs through a single app only (E.g. Maruti Care)
• Creating a smart chatbot (chatterbot) to be integrated with top chat applications such as Facebook Messenger, Google Chat, Yahoo! Messenger etc. is a much wiser option for a lot of companies, rather than creating separate mobile app.
• Wherever possible, prioritize giving data to top aggregators proactively, rather than creating a separate mobile app for the company.

3) Captive customer or Business Support mobile apps

These are apps meant for employees & business partners for helping them with their day-to-day job or business functions. There is no marketing budget required to make these apps a success. For example - Uber Driver, Amazon Seller etc.

• The key to success for these apps is not to be light and glossy but to be as productive and comprehensive as possible.The trade-offs for this category of mobile apps is completely different from the previous two categories.
• The initial registration process for these can be as complicated as possible and the mobile app can be heavy on mobile resources. Process workflow optimization must be prioritized over UX optimizations.
• Many organizations choose not to put their internal apps on public app stores. This is a very big mistake as without having them on the app store, there is no efficient way of ensuring that every customer has the latest updated version of the app. Making the app available on public app store does not mean that you have to spend time & money on optimize display on all screen sizes or create a way for online registration etc., which companies may not want to do for internal apps.
• These mobile apps are generally used as means to implement process changes in the organization and hence their launch must be accompanied by careful change management and training.

In this post, I have deliberately tried to avoid discussing the latest technical trends, frameworks & architecture for mobile app creation even though it is a very important decision to take. The focus has been to enable Product Managers to take the right trade-off decisions, regardless of the technical details. Many companies make the mistake to keep upgrading and redesigning the UX design of mobile app but not to change the wrong back-end trade-off decisions that they might have taken earlier. Hopefully this post will help companies avoid making such mistakes.