I spent a whole lot of time today in trying to contact Dell support to help me fix a bug in my PC.  I had to hold on for over 40 minutes before a customer service person actually took my call - and then another 10 minutes or so before i was re-directed to the right person for help.  Made me think of business opportunities around Skype - how easy it would be if they had a 'skype me' support line - i could just buzz them with a skype me request to call - and they could get back to me when i'm online.  So neat if vendors of software and support centers could build this into their systems.

This sounds like fun - Stuart and Phil are organizing dinner tonight (breakfast hour here) to brainstorm and discuss opportunities around Skype.   

10:10:03 PM    comment []  trackback []

Rajesh Jain of Emergic.org points to an interesting roundtable on Increasing PC penetration in India.  

- [via Prof. DB Phatak and Sameer Kochar] ICT3 Quarterly (Skoch Consulting) has an interesting roundtable on affordable computing in India. What is very interesting is the wheel of penetration for increasin IT usage in India.

Prof. Phatak makes an interesting point: "Here is a 'teacher's dream' - that the next 500 million users hopefully in next five years are to come from these countries. The Indian population figure suggests that we should have a share of at least 100 million users, which means that penetration should be 20 million desktops per year over the next five years. Last two years published figures by various agencies including Skoch, suggests that we are in the ballpark of 2 million desktops per year being sold. So clearly, we need a big drive...In my opinion drivers could be of two types, one is a price driver, so if somehow industry can come together, solution developers, system integrators and make the total cost of ownership of any acceptable solution to one-fourth of what it is today, then I get 4 x advantages. Simultaneously, if the end-user - government, industry, banks, financial sector, educations institutions - quadruples their investment in IT, remember, in developed world the level of IT investment is 3.5% of their overall budgets is on IT. In India the percentage is very small. So four times is an essential investment, if you do that you get a 16x advantage, what we desire is a 10x advantage.

11:37:48 AM    comment []  trackback []