Software product's contract set to change

Software product based companies, especially software giants, have been setting high price tag to gaps in their product. Software updates, bug fixes and new funcationality adds come with a yearly price tag for businesses. Gartner is trying to standardise IT maintenance contract by IT maintenance bill of rights.

Some of the key clauses in Gartner recommedation are following
-- a right to "regular, appropriate, predictable updates to software products";
Why can't businesses buying the software demand it from vendors. Being in software industry I can surely say that bug fixes cannot be predictable but they can have cycles of bug fixes planned and delivered to clients for small minimal fee. Bug fixes should be seen as gap in product and provided to clients.

-- response times and support levels "based on application criticality and other business factors";
Support levels surely play important role for a product. Third party support should also be considered by businesses buying the software. A product company may decide not to invest too many resources on support but then they should allow third party to provide good level of services. In recent past Oracle seem to have sued TomorrowNow system and trend may increase. So clients should make sure what is the stand vendor is taking on providing a support. Keeping the support the option open to all makes it competetive and may provide more options to clients buying the software.

-- fair percentage ranges for annual maintenance fee hikes or reductions, and long-term caps on increases;
This should be controlled by monopoly law.

-- the ability to stop or alter support at any time for unused products;
product based companies cannot be forced to continue support for products they want to discontinue. But this should open the door for third party vendors. I am assuming that the product doesn't need bug fixes.

-- predictable and reasonable support levels for the entirety of a product or contract's life cycle;
I agree that this should be spelled out in contracts.

-- clearly spelled-out support time lines for older systems; and
Do we hold the builder responsible for a constrcution that is 10 years older? No. We contract we new people to maintain the building. Same should apply to software.

-- the right to "explicit statement and approval of support details at the line-item level"
I agree that this should be spelled out in contracts.

Software contracts will take centre stage when CIO will try to keep IT expense under control. Predictability of expenses of owning a software will be key in decision making and these recommedations seem to help make it more predictable.

Relaunch of mile sur mera tumhara

The launch of 'Phir mile sur mera tumhara' made me nostalgic. But I couldn't help comparing the new video with older version. It may be because of childhood memories or first liking, I like the original one



Original one seems to more melodious and has continuity in the music. I would have listened to it million times on DD and youtube.

New version is more grand and better in terms of cinematography. Celebrity selection is also good. But the tone and tune of new version seems to break at times. The geographic diversity of India was more evident in older version. Sonu Nigam, Amir Khan, Aish, Dipika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Shilpa Shetty and others seem to be singing in their own tunes. If composer wanted to show that same feelings in different tunes then he succeeded.

May be the I am getting into older generation and starting to reminiscence in old memories saying - in our days things were better :)

Evony and market place

These days I got hooked up to my laptop again and reason for that is not a new laptop but new online game. www.evony.com offers new civilisation and strategy game. Its fun to be part of the game. Although the game server keeps ticking when I am offline, yet I end up spending 2-3 hrs continuosly trying to figure how I can progress faster.

The game is like age of empires where one has to build cottages, farms, people, townhall etc. But it is much more than that. It offers reason to login each day and check your progress. The concepts of amulet and market place is good. The site offers unique way of quest to offer help in guiding what to build. I am currently in 7 day protection period where no one can attack me and I am getting ready to defend myself and attack others.

The best part which I want to talk about is the market place. I am into financial market in real world but I do commodity trading in virtual evony world. I actually made a spreadsheet to track if the offer and bid prices are high or low. I made 120% profit in stone trading by buying it when it was at low price and then offering it at high price. While I was sleeping the demand for the stone increased and people bought stone at higher price. I made good amount of gold from it.I have to make manual entries into it and you can have a peek into it at "Google Evony trading sheet". Gold can be gathered either my levying taxes on my people or buy selling item. I cannot tax my town man a lot so I resorted to building stones and trading them. I guess everyone in the game will have some strategy and mine is to make use of market place.

If I was a programmer I would have thought of making a ticker for evony world and offered my stock exchange. Who knows in coming days this is what will happen. May be its already built and I just have to advance in my civilisation.

I am waiting to reach level 9, level 10 in each building and see what is next for me. Its like thinking what is nirvana. What is next when you have achieved everything. In real life I may not have the answer or I may not be satisfied thinking I have got everything I wanted. But I hope in virtual world it will be done in short time and the feeling will help me find the answer - What next?