Walk Alone

Quite a few of my friends work in TCS. I might know some code-coolie in Infosys and Wipro too, given the way these companies vacuum up students during on-campus placement drives. I pity them. These companies have just sold their souls to the devil.

Maybe they view it as a case of level-headed pragmatism winning against naive idealism.

But some hard questions need to be asked.

• Do they know what a standard is?
• Were they not aware that ODF got there first with unanimous approval?
• Are they aware that against all definitions of a standard, OOXML can’t be completely implemented by an ISV because of references to Microsoft’s proprietary file formats?
• Were they sleeping while Microsoft subverted the ISO process? Or maybe they are hand in glove with Microsoft? Preferred partners, channel partners and all that sales stuff.

Here are twenty reasons - listed out succinctly because we all know how busy these companies are churning out software - why you should say NO to OOXML.

Tsk. Tsk. My dream employers’ list just grew shorter by three.

Is it any good having a racing team in F1 called Force India? What is Indian about this team other than its owner and its colors? Formula racing is the ultimate symbiosis of engineering and passion - in which other sport does a human pilot half a ton of exquisite engineering to speeds in excess of 300 kmph? Where is the Indian talent in Force India’s engineering? Where is the Indian passion in its driving?

Is this all we can do? Are we so devoid of talent that we have to bank on a billionaire’s purchasing power?

We, Indians, are sure buying up a lot of ready-made pieces. Mittal buys up steel companies in Europe. Tata grabs Rover and Jaguar in Britain. Mallya grabs Midland F1.

And over a billion people pat themselves on their collective back.

As kid, I used to hear an anecdote.

America dug out a lump of iron ore and shipped it to Germany. Germany refined the ore into an ingot and flew it to Japan. Japan machine-tooled the ingot into a perfect square plate and sent it to India.

And India stamped “Made In India” on the plate.

Now that I think of it, I can guess why cricket feels good. Sure, our boys are unreliable. Maybe they are not the best that is out there. But, they are our boys - Indians. And when they win, India wins. When they win, more people than a billionaire and his stockholders win.

I was pleasantly surprised when Amey took a pro-active step involving Linux. He configured GnuCash to track his investments. Not track as quite a lot of people do - using spreadsheets, but actual real-time tracking with updates of his stock prices at COB. This is as much a victory for open source software as for Indian markets. He has taken that small but significant step into a big world of IT enabled services. If only more people took that step.

After much scolding and persuading by a lot of people, I have enrolled into a Systematic Investment Plan. And there was no doubt I would be using GC to track all that stuff. In the GC options, was a name - AMFI. AMFI is an umbrella association for Mutual Funds in India. The reason it popped up in GC is it provides stocks related feeds which are used for real-time tracking.

As soon as I had my investment details, I followed Amey’s tips and set up my GC account to track my funds. Along the way, I had use a handy GC to QIF converter. Why? I was maintaining yearly accounts with seperate files for each year. Amey told me It would be a bear to track investments across seperate files, and I agreed. GC has no way to merge two account files but it can import two QIF files; hence the converter.

All in all, I stumbled a few times - I’m no guru at financial stuff. With GC and a few knowledgeable friends, I plan to make the journey a bit safer.