Whatever happened to Toyota Legend!

Everyone dealing with the topic quality used to swear by Toyota. Toyota's production system was an absolute benchmark everyone will cite as a benchmark. It was a legend and it endured for a long time! However this is totally shaken now. There has been several recalls of different models of Toyota cars on quality issues. So what happened! Difficult to say. May be the company got complacent and all those watchful eyes monitoring the assembly lines slipped. May be there was conscious cutting of corners. In a nutshell they must have deviated from their legendary quality assurance processes.

Some reports of bad component quality surfaced but then the vendor of the final product is responsible for the overall quality and these sound like passing the blame. If true, it'd still mean processes failed in determining the incoming quality of these components/sub-systems. It would be interesting to find out what really happened! Let's watch and see.

Places have Vibes

I was at another educational institute couple of days back for a couple of nights. reached there one evening, spent the complete days and then came away the next morning. The hospitality was nice, my presentations went well; those are some factors that may have played the part. But then the hospitality bit was apparent only after the day has gone by completely and the organizers let us know that they'll pick up the tab on the hotel bill. Presentations happened in the evening and until then I could not have felt good because of this factor. However, I felt good about the seminar right from the morning. Ditto about the institute, the way everyone was friendly and smiling and so on.

There is something always that you cannot define, nor analyze rationally that quite often gives you positive and negative feelings about a place, even before you have enough data to analyze things objectively. That's what must be this thing, commonly known as the "vibes"!

Confusion over the roles!

I have seen this happening several times before during my long career. in many organizations the administration and/or accounts departments have this wrong notion that they hold power over the main service providers. For example in a software development organization the administration would try and make the software developers run around for small little things. The software engineers needing a writing pad may have to go back and forth to the minion holding charge of the stock of pads. As this person feels power in controlling and giving away this pad he would exercise his authority by turning away the seeker of the pad couple of times. He will say how this time was inconvenient for him and the requester must come back at a more opportune time.

Unfortunately many a times the overall manager also does not understand what should really happen and encourage this bureaucracy. The basis is simple, the administration and/or accountancy departments exist for facilitating the work of the service providers, the real generators of revenue for the organization. These support functions are then service providers to the business generators/fulfillment people!

Saw this example come up once again! In this educational institute there is a system of signing the salary register by all the employees.So the faculty and other employees must go over and find the convenient time for the particular clerk or the accountant and get hold of the register and sign it. Problem is quite often some slots are signed many a times. So, suddenly there was this office order that they must be signed or else! The "or else" was that the current salary would be stopped. Then the affected person will have do a "prayer" to get the salary. A prayer for his legitimate dues!

Simple issue is what are we trying to save with the process! The time of a clerk or an accountant or the confidentiality of the financial data of who gets what! Looked like that was not an issue.Then why could not the register be circulated to the people for signing! Saving everybody's time, in fact! By making multiple other people come round multiple times there is a lot of wasted time and chaos in the support division anyway!

AVG and AVAST

Both of these are free anti-virus software products. Both claim to be in use by hundreds of millions of users. They are based on the model where you give customers a foretaste of good products and then try to up-sell into more sophisticated products. Both are obviously good products and have been around for some time now. I personally think that's a good model too. After people get used to the anti virus protection, they can then take a decision about additional protection. Using these known good sources is a vastly superior strategy compared to getting into the clutches of the fake anti-virus products that some people are making a lot of money from. According to some estimates these rogues made more than 150 million dollars from selling such products last year alone.

One small silver lining for such scary stats is that a lot of people do want to install anti-virus products. But what really matters is that you get it from a known good source, unless you have been deceived into buying such stuff and contributing to their kitty. Here are two good choices for your protection.

Patent Championships 2009

Last year IBM won the most number of patents. That is a championship the big Blue has won for the 17th time in a row! IBM has this image of being a very conservative company. That has changed a lot in the recent past. It has gone through couple of transformations. While it was previously synonymous with big iron, it earns a large part of its revenues through software services now! So, looks can be really misleading. Somehow the innovations must run pretty well if they have to manage this for 17 years consecutively! I am sure IBM is still not as casual as a Google or one of the start ups. Yet, this is running the innovation machine so well. There are a couple of really interesting things about the roll of honors. The second in line, Samsung managed to get significantly less number of patents. IBM received 4914 patents while Samsung received 3611 patents.

The other interesting aspect of the list is that out of the top 10 spots, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and HP are the only American companies. The others are from outside the US: the likes of Samsung, Canon, Panasonic Toshiba, Sony and Seiko Epson. A couple of trends become obvious. Things are going global without a doubt! And companies think that patents are an important tool in the global playing field.

Recently active malware

Sunbelt Software found the following malware pieces to be the most active last month. It is good to be aware of the threats that are current. Maybe you can ensure that your malware protection does have detection and correction capability of these threats:
1.Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT
2.Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen
3.Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0
4.Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v)            
5.Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v)             
6.Fast Browser Search              
7.Trojan.Win32.Malware              
8.INF.Autorun (v)                  
9.BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v)     
10.Trojan.Malware               

Medical Technology

This morning my wife went through a knee surgery. This is a corrective procedure so that the knee joint replacement (as suggested by most doctors we consulted) was not necessary for some more time. But this post is not about that, though the knee joint prosthesis certainly rates as one of the wonders! There were couple of pictures about surgery in olden days hanging at the entrance to the OT complex.

One was of a woman who was totally conscious and yet a surgeon had started the removal procedure of one of her breasts. There was one assistant holding her hands and patients had to endure such a process. The other was that of a man hanging from some contraption, one person hanging on to one shoulder and the other was straining at the other shoulder trying to correct a dislocated shoulder! I was struck by how far we have come! I am sure many must have died simply from the shock/trauma of the surgery itself!

But today knee replacement is possible and works well for at least twenty years! I am not even looking at heart/liver/kidney transplant like really sophisticated procedures. The surgery itself is not that much of a trauma anymore. There are a whole host of things to manage the post surgical pain and recovery. After you have recovered, it feels so good! Most often at least! With this corrective procedure my wife should be able to start walking reasonably comfortably again and that should last 5 to 10 years! I remember with my own surgery, the ankle fracture was completely healed. Three years later when the hardware were removed, there was not one spot on the pieces of metal that remained inside my body for three years!

But all this happened step by step, one baby step at a time! These advances on so many areas have brought us this overall advancement! I kept wondering how many experiments, how many researchers toiling away at it and technological advances made all these advances possible!

You cannot help wondering how small improvements at the boundary areas of any discipline keeps moving the boundary in small increments! Yet over a time you have a larger area representing the body of knowledge!