Recently, I had to use the PGP for the first time when one of my colleague wanted to send some documents securely. Over all, this is an easy process and works quite well. I use Windows XP, Thunderbird and gnupg for this to work. Following are some instruction to do this…

You download the software from http://www.gnupg.org if you’re using Windows. If you have Linux, you most likely already have GnuPG.

Enigmail is the plug-in for Thunderbird. You can get it from https://addons.mozilla.org. Alternately, on GNOME-based Linux, check out Seahorse. You can use GnuPG with Outlook, but it isn’t pretty. I would recommend Thunderbird any day.

The software will generate a key pair for you.

Unlike traditional S/MIME, where you use an X.509 certificate signed by a trusted CA, PGP / GnuPG is based on a more general model. You determine if a key is “valid” if it has been signed by someone you “trust”. So, let’s say, you trust that I will not sign any key without verifying that it actually belongs to who it says it belongs to. Then, you can be assured that any key you get that is signed by me is valid.

For distribution, you can upload your public key to a few key servers at PGP and MIT. Keep your private key, well, private.

Signing a message is easy. You just click a button in Thunderbird that says, “Sign message”.

Encryption requires that you have the public key of the person you’re sending the message to. Either he can give it to you, or you can download it from a key server that you trust and that he’s uploaded it to. Once the public key is downloaded, it is stored in your “keyring”. When you send a message to a person whose public key you have, you can click the “Encrypt” button, and it will work.

Some of my random observations and rants about BAD managers and bosses…

Motivation : Manager thinks that every employee has the motivation and he need not do anything. This is a typical problem i see in the managers who grow up the ladder from the technical streams. These manager’s seldom believe that employees need to be motivated to do their best and not all “jobs” are interesting.

Don’t assume that  employees have Motivation because you are paying for their work.

Right Job : At the time of recruiting, you have a set of job responsibilities and tasks that you want an employee to fulfill. Things change in time and so are  the responsibilities. As a manager, it’s your JOB to assign the right Task/Job to your employee. Are you wondering why your team-mate is not able to succeed or he is not performing to his level you imagined ?

Choose and Assign the right job for your team. If you ask them to do an ODD job, then apologize to them and explain the situation.

Information Sharing : Information spreads fast. Very Fast! If something is happening with your team, project or customer. Inform the team with the right information AS SOON AS POSSIBLE – ASAP. Holding back the information or maintaining the secrecy has a negative impact on the employees. They loose trust on you. Be informed that your employees always have contacts to get the information.

Understand that Information Sharing is CRITICAL. Never share an information that is stale and known to everyone except you.

All-In-One Responsibility : Some managers have the concept of “All-In-One/ Open Responsibilities”. This means, everyone in the team should be able to do everything. You know what, this is the Disaster Recipe. When we call set of individuals as team, we are talking about individuals who are specialized in an area and able to collate different strengths for a common goal. The side effects of this theory is that the individual employees are completely demoralized as they don’t work on any specialized task anymore. They are not experts in any area as they switch the context of the tasks very frequently. e.g. today they work on Java issue, tomorrow they work on Perl problem and day after they work on Install Shield. The important side-effect that i see is that none of the tasks will be “Complete” or “Perfect” or “Designed to Last”, because no one owns it.

Assign the Ownership of tasks and define the Responsibilities to Individuals.

Appreciation of Efforts : Individuals like to hear their appreciation in group and criticism in private. Unfortunately, some managers do other way round and this really sucks. Even if you slog for months and months, this manager does not appreciate you and he does not even look at you. He probably has an attitude of “You are working and I am working. You are getting pain and i am getting paid”.

If you need a stable team, be a God Father to your team in every respect.

I will keep on adding more and more to this list with my experience. I strongly feel that everyone knows what to do but very few know “What NOT to do”

Did you experience similar things at your work place ? Do you have more points to add to this list ? Please do share your experiences…

Cross posting from HarvardBusiness Blog. Very interesting problems with Senior executives…

1. Delegation
It is your job to delegate as much as you possibly can: your ultimate goal should be to delegate everything, find a successor and move on to a bigger job. If you are having trouble letting go or trusting others, try to remember how it felt when you were given the first big challenge of your career. Did you relish the challenge? How did you approach it? Did you succeed? What did you learn about the job and yourself? How did it help you to move forward in your career?

Remember that however talented you are, your career is likely to have stalled had your boss not trusted you with a challenging piece of work. He took the risk and delegated: now it’s your turn to do the same. No excuses, just follow the rules.

2. Managing distance
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a manager is to spend too much time either in your team or away from it. If you are too close, you risk becoming a micromanager, you can lose perspective on the business, you can become too friendly and lose authority within the team, and your team can become over-dependent on you. Being too distant, on the other hand, can result in a directionless team, potential crises, lack of control, and you being perceived as too remote or political. Also, maintaining social distance is an important discipline for managers that should not be overlooked.

3. Visibility
Visibility and personal profile are important for your career as well as your team, so make sure you are being seen and heard in the right places. If you don’t manage your reputation and profile, someone else will do it for you — and they may not have your best interests at heart. Take time to network, share your successes, and ask to be included on steering committees or cross-functional initiatives to create opportunities to showcase your talents and your team’s achievements.

4. Work-life balance
It’s incredible that this point still needs to be reinforced. Remember that you are a human being, not a machine. You may pride yourself on being able to work long hours, never taking a holiday and putting your company before your own health and well-being (and that of your family). But be very clear that you cannot do this forever. Sooner or later your health will give up and you will no longer be in control. Burnout is a one-way ticket, so be sensible. It’s smart to look after yourself. Work reasonable hours, keep the weekends sacred, leave early one evening a week and build in an exercise schedule. Not only will this help you keep effective, it will make you easier to be around and probably prolong your career.

5. Continuous learning and reflection
Adaptability and being able to flex your style as your company or situation changes are critical. Seeking feedback, identifying your development needs, and monitoring your own progress are all vital if you are to develop as a leader and a person. Lasting behavioural change requires time, patience, dedication, and support, so don’t expect it to happen overnight. One of the best things you can do to support yourself is to give yourself time and space to reflect: try to schedule a meeting with yourself for an hour each week for reflection.

Few points from a post i read somewhere on a blog…

• Employees are afraid to speak up: “People are very deferential to those at senior levels and they’re afraid to be the bearers of bad news”.  Also, if playing the blame game happens a lot within the work environment, employees might hesitate to mention their own mistakes for fear of repercussions.
• Gatekeepers block information: These are the employees who help senior executives manage the flow of information. While these staff members are invaluable for helping senior managers streamline their work, “gatekeepers can often filter out and be an impediment to key news about problems getting to senior executives”.
• Isolation: “Many executives don’t get out to the front lines and see what’s authentically going on. They may have a townhall meeting type thing, but often those are fairly staged events, and they aren’t truly finding out what’s happening out there on the ground.”
• Managers don’t want to hear problems, only solutions: Many managers essentially instruct their employees, “don’t tell me about the flood, build me an arc.” While it’s good when lower level employees can provide possible solutions, this is still the wrong message to send. “What if your employees see something very serious, but don’t have the expertise to solve it? Are they supposed to stay quiet?”.
• Data Corruption : Due to the fear of Bosses and Fear of Failures many middle level and senior level managers manipulate the data to be pretty. When they see issues cooking in future, they try to cover it temporarily and just wait for the big explosion. This is the time that they have a big blame-game.
• Employee Responsibilities : Some organizations typically feel that everyone should do everything. This sounds simple but very frustrating and pathetic at the work and implementation. A job should define the set of Responsibilities and Accountability for certain tasks. When there is no owner of a task, a person who is doing it always looks to complete the task as soon as possible and take the next task. And very often there is no interest in a task as that’s not your’s. In such teams people get frustrated very soon and before anyone knows the team is no more.
• Unplanned Manager : This sounds like a paradox. It is assumed belief that the managers are good planners. But not all of them. Some really suck at planning and they make their team members to run on toes 24/7. Professionals understand that often they need to work extra to meet deadlines and work on weekends. But if it continues for a long time, everyone’s personal and professional life gets effected. An unplanned manager can make your life hell.

One of my close friend is a professor in Rajagiri Engineering College for Computer Science and got me introduced to the head of the Department. This engineering college conducts guest lectures from variety of technology verticals and they requested me to have a Eclipse lecture session. After a lot of initial planning we finally started a 5 hour series of lectures on Eclipse (Eclipse course).Eclipse Guest Lecture Series

In the first session i Introduced the basic idea of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and it’s win over the conventional text editors. We then moved on with different text editors like Notepad, Textpad, EditPlus, vi and then talked about the Eclipse, Visual Studio, NetBeans, JDeveloper as an introduction. Typically in the Engineering colleges there will be budget constraints and they seldom has access to expensive IDEs. The faculty and students are very excited to know about the IDEs and the role it plays in their day-to-day development life.

Here are some pictures…

Everyone in Software and IT industry are exposed to the what i call as “Context Switching” problem. Bosses are so adept in giving different kinds of tasks to the “makers”, they often dont realize whats involved in the context switching. Before i move on, i was reading a very interesting article from Paul Graham on the “Maker’s Schedule; Manager’s Schedule“. Indeed, he was right on to the point of where the programmers (aks Makers) and managers spend their time and what does “meetings” mean to each of them.

We very well assume that most of the programmer’s have 8 hours of work time in a day and schedule all the work according to it. What we very often forget to take in to account are the obvious and non-obvious tasks. As Paul says, programmers one piece of work/task is normally in the 1 day chunk  (for some at least, it’s in 1/2 day chunks) and any disturbance in that 4-8 hours of time proves to be very costly. We all want to concentrate and make sure that the entire program is in our head till the time we are done with it. This phenomenon is very well explained by Paul in his article “Holding a program in one’s head“.

When you start your brand new day at office thinking over a problem or a algorithm, your boss calls up and asks you for a status update because his boss asked for a team update. Well, that is the request you need to honor without a question.  Usually the calls will not be 5-10 minutes but goes for minimum of 30 minutes to 1 hour, because we are trying to solve a problem over the phone or in the meeting room.

• Meetings,
• Weekend vacation talk,
• Extended Lunch and coffee time,
• Status reports to manager,
• Status report to customer,
• Helping the Sales and Marketing Team,
• Attending the personal calls
• etc… (i am sure there are 100s of such things)

The tasks, your manager thinks of as 10 minutes actually takes 1hour and after sending the sweet report or tools comparison to him, you again head down to start writing your program and after 1hour you get a call to say that the report format should be changed so that he can submit it right away to his boss. Phewww…. you did that one too. Now the time is almost, 2.00pm and you really want to concentrate and do the REAL work. All in all, When i analyze the average programmer probably gets around 5 hours of quality time out of 8 hours in the day time. No wonder, we often end up working late nights just before the delivery. Many programmers has the similar habit of working in the dark/late hours. Yes, that works perfectly. No one to call you or ask for reports or for help. The only thing that you really think of is the problem before you.

I work on a project which has a very tight dependency with the environment(installed software on the machine) . Every thing installed on a machine matters and a lot of legacy code is maintained from past 15 years or so. The environment is so critical that if one installed the required software in anyway other than the prescribed order, you may need to burn the mid-night lamp to find some non-obvious, strange and scary system behavior. Of course, initially i was under the impression that the software system MUST not depend on the environment, but as i got into the system, i believe that some times the dependency just exists (due to several legacy apps and unimagined integrations of different products).

Context Switching is one project impedement that Agile Methododlogy and Scrum claims to remove. Scrum recommends the values where the team has a specified time for meetings and tries to decrease the buerocracy in th project against the traditional adhoc meetings  and untimely calls for context switching. Of course one can say they are following Scrum and still do the traditional way, but i have seen this working in my experience.

Did any of you have such problems of Contect Switching ? What do you do to come over it ?

I was happy to see the news that Google announced the Chrome based OS. Soon after a week of my recent blog on Google and the way it transformed every ones life, i was pretty excited to see this announcement. I am particularly happy that Google is entering into the Operating System market and i believe that they will do justification to what they claim.

For many the announcement has been generating mixed feelings. Many technology enthusiasts (and pro-googlers) feel that this is a great step ahead and some are skeptic about the success of this project.

Simplicity : Google has been leading in the simple, usable and intuitive UI. I hope it continues to do so with the Chrome OS. When i see a simple Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing, that the major difference i see (that Bing has a distraction and Google not).

Open Source : Apache and Eclipse have redefined the view of an open-source software. The common concept of “Collaborate on Platform and Compete on Products” is a great idea. Google Chrome’s source code becoming open source, will open up all the channels to improve, contribute and extend the OS.

Competition to Microsoft ? : I don’t think so.  Google has been redefining the way people think of Internet and World Wide Web. Microsoft is the PC Operating System and Corporate IT infrastructure giant. There are lot of articles and blogs about the Google and Microsoft comparison on the Chrome OS and that’s all absurd for me. Comparing Chrome OS and Windows is like comparing apples and apricots. Does it makes sense. ??? Google is the company (in my opinion) trying to make web as a platform and building all it’s applications on web. So, i would see the Chrome OS only as an alternative for the heavy weight Internet users.

Would it be the next Linux ? : (No offense to Linux lovers please) During 1998-2000 time frame i was very excited to know about Linux as an alternative to the existing operating systems. When one compares the time to install a Windows box and Linux box with the same capabilities for a home user, Linux lacked the ease of installation and application support. As a technologist, i took hours to install the Linux and at the end i would abandon it as i don’t find the applications that i want or incompatible drivers. I still remember that installing the CD drivers is a big deal and took hours to find a compatible one. I guess, the story changed a little after the arrival of Redhat, Fedora and Ubuntu distributions. It is still a nightmare for the advanced home users to install and configure a Linux distribution. I really really hope that Chrome OS designers would take care of this issue.

More space on Internet : If Google wants to make the web as the platform, then it may need to increase the email, docs and picture sharing space on the web. Why? It is for the natural reason that if you want to use the web for everything, i don’t want to be restricted by the space in my account. Compared to the 120 to 250 GB of hard disk now-a-days, we are only talking about few gigs of memory on line.

Security and Personalization : As such Google is having problem to fight against the privacy laws regarding the google mail and advertisements. Would it become more controversial with the Chrome OS. If web is the platform and i would use Chrome OS, would my documents be secure ? Would Chrome install/suggest applications/plugins depending on the email, documents or photo content. These are some of the questions that Google for sure has to think about.

ChromeWave : Yes, i think and imagine that the architecture of Chrome OS has the Wave built in. That would be such an awesome thing for the home users and corporates. I could talk, video conference, share documents and pictures with my parents and friends in India seamlessly from the Chrome OS with the Wave capabilities. Corporates can make sure of  the ChromeWave to video conferencing, decision making, pair-programming (?), real time collaboration and others. (Note: ChromeWave is my own creation to combine the Chrome and Wave’s capabilities)

So… It is too early to conclude anything about the success or failure of the Chrome OS. Perhaps once the source code is released and the Architecture is known,  only can one have valid comments. One thing for sure is that Google is gearing up to take on other areas of the computer and Internet industry. Its the time for everyone to be alert and more innovative in terms of the technology, usability and the perceived benefit they give to the corporate and home user.

Some Interesting Reading…

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
• http://mashable.com/2009/07/07/google-chrome-operating-system
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/meet-chrome-googles-windows-killer
• http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/08/google.chrome.os/index.html
• http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/five-things-googles-chrome-os-will-do-for-your-netbook

I would not have written this blog in the year 2000 and by now i am highly opiniated towards Google, of course in a good way. During my graduation years (1996-2000), i highly used Rediff and Yahoo search for my college projects, and ACM seminars. In the year 1996/1998, Google was known but to very few people. At the present day Google is not just a Internet search company but a World Wide phenomenon which changed the way everyone things. Google virtually got implanted in today’s life of everyone. I was quite amazed with the following news from Yahoo CEO in the annual share holder meeting.

When asked why Yahoo continues to lag Google in financial performance and employee productivity, Bartz said it was time to stop comparing the companies to each other because they have different business models. “Please, this direct comparison model to Google is not fair and is frankly not relevant,” she said.
While Google is purely a search-advertising company, search is only part of Yahoo’s business, she explained.

Source : http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12688924

While i have all the due respect for the Internet Portal company “Yahoo“, i think Google is not simply “Search-Advertising Company”. Google is the company that revolutionized how people viewed e-mail, blogs, advertising, analysing the web sites and viewing the world with google maps. Of course i am sure others may have other favorite applications. But i personally feel these are the applications that every one uses daily. Everyone means really everyone… my parents use google for everything. Anything my parents want to learn, they just google it. I had difficulty in explaing when i said to my father that i would like to do Computer Science in my under graduation. I still have difficulty to explain the differences between C, C++, Java, Oracle, Windows, etc… but they just used almost all google technologies without any help. This is the amazing part for me.

Technology is one thing that i am extremely fond of with Google. But more than technology the amount of research that would have gone into designing intuitive applications is AWESOME! There is so much of Computer Interaction Design necessary for a company like Google. I don’t recall any technology or product from Google, which i had problem in understanding. All of them are so intelligent and intuitive that everyone feels ease to use the Google products.

Everyday many of us use Google in many ways. Some just use the Search, some use the e-mail, some use the Google’s Android technology to build application, some use GWT to build web applications and so on. The list probably is never ending and a matrix can be established to depict different technologies and users.

I am in no way different from any of the technology savvy guys out there. However, the affinity towards Google and Apple has been tremendous and I just can’t think a day without the help of the applications and gadgets from these companies.

Google and Apple in my Life : I wake up with a morning alarm in my iPhone and  look for any important mails. For me iPhone is the “world’s smallest computer” and does great things. While looking into my closet for the day, i look into the iPhone weather to get the right outfit. Because even though i live 40 miles from San Francisco, the weather dramatically changes there from Fremont. If i get little time before i am off to office, i would invariably open my google mails and connect with my friends, family and my old and new colleagues.  Of course, i don’t have the habit of the reader news paper but i open my google reader and start reading my technology and general news across the world. Google reader helps you to aggregate lot of great sites in the form of RSS feeds. The good thing is that i can share the news that i like with my friends and colleagues.

Mpst of my planning about my monthly expenses and small documents for my personal use happens with the Google Docs. This is a wonderful application  and i love it. The way Google built the Docs application with almost all the features of the Office and Open Office is amazing. The cool thing is the ability to collaborate with multiple people for editing a documents such as Word, Spread Sheet and recently i can save my PDFs and open them from Google itself. This is extremely useful feature for me. A year back, when i was working on a personal project, i collected requirements in Google Word and then shared it and gave the editing rights to my partner and view rights to developers. This was so cool… me and my partner could also do the real-time editing on documents by talking to each other with the google talk. I maintain my personal finances in Google Spread Sheet and my wife has the viewing rights on it (for this time ).

Sitting in San Francisco, i could nicely see the image of my home in Hyderabad, India. I could see the arial view of the places that i wish and Google Earth made this possible. The great thing is you can search and tag all the places that you roured and share the content like photos. You could also get the historical content from Google Earth.

In the earlier days before iPhone, i had a real dumb mobile; no other features except call and receive. As long as i am hooked onto the Internet i got all the information that i am looking for in an area. Me and my wife are fond of the Italian and Chinese food. So where ever we went, we made sure that there are some good restaurants around. When we went to places like, Napa Valley, Monterey, Carmel-By-The-Sea, Los Angeles, San Deigo, San Francisco, Morrow Bay and many more places, we had to take a printout of the restaurants around or used to catch a local guy there and ask him for good restaurants. But with the invention of the GOOG-411, things have changed. It is so easy to find a local business and get connected in seconds. Just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 from any darn phone that you have and say waht you want, listen to the options and then get connected. Its that simple. After this peice of cake, i never had to bother about printing the restaurants, or addresses of any local businesses.

Google Mail is one of the cool things i like about Google. As i remember Google was the first email provider that gave 1GB of space free for your mails. Till that time people used to struggle with low space and used to create multiple accounts on the same provider to safeguard the data. At the time of writing this article when i looked my gmail account it shows “You are currently using 955 MB (13%) of your 7342 MB“. Of course over the time the cost of hardware has dramatically reduced. However, the credit of providing the premium service goes to Google in the early days. The idea of a “conversation” is so cool and intuitive than the emails sorted by the date or size.

Youtube revolutionized the way people viewed the video content and sharing. A simple concept of being able to upload your videos on to Internet and billions of people can view the quality content is amazing. The ability to share to public or to specific users is the cool thing that everyone liked. There are videos that we wanted to share with world, and some only with family an friends. Youtube is the only reliable solution as i see till now.When my father got cardiac arrest early this year, it was the Youtube that i could get so much of information about a heart surgery. My in-laws who are doctors get so much of information on the Youtube about the surgeries and medical interviews, etc…Of course this product is not the brain child of Google as i know. Google acquired Youtube.

Orkut probably redefined the way friends used to communicate and the way people got connected. Even though i don’t use it now, i was a great fan of it during the year 2003/2004. The purpose of the Orkut by the founders probably is little different. However, it re-united all our school and college friends in a matter of 6 months. Though initially privacy issues was a serious matter, looks like they worked on it now. Orkut was also acquired by Google.

Where ever i go, i make it a point that i get some memories along with me in the form of photos. I take great pictures of the nature, historical buildings and people (i am not a big fan of pets or animals). It used to be a pain to upload on to the Yahoo Photos and then came the Flickr. However, Picasa was so easy and loaded with features, that Picasa actually overpowered the Flickr. I dont use Flickr anymore and all my iPhone and digital photo pictures goes straight into Picasa Desktop to Picasa Web. The recent features of being able to make a movie, colleage, and edit pictures are really really great. Of course we may have Adobe PhotoShop for couple of hundreds of dollars, but Google gives it for free.

With so many applications that i use from Google and iPhone, i just can’t imagine my life without these gadgets. If i plan for a vacation, this starts from using the Google Search to research the places and use Google Docs to store the information then use the Google Maps to look fot the driving directions to that place (could also select multi-route), look for the beautiful pictures uploaded on to  Google Maps then send a Google Calender invitation to my family members about the vacation planning and information.

All the above features from Google are only from a Technology USER perspective. One should remember that i never wore the hat of a technologist. Till now i am only a home user of Google.Though all these applications till now are great and does a great job, i do have some complaints.

Google Talk is one application that i liked initially but not anymore. Google Talk used to be a dll installed and i could see it in the process explorer all the time. I dont like Dlls. However, i am happy user of Skype. Skype i great for messaging, video conferencing and such.

Google Chrome is a sweet thing but i had several problems with major banking and financial web sites. I could not use it after a week and reverted to my good old friend FireFox.

Google Toobar and Google Desktop Search are 2 applications that i would definitely avoid. The Google Update Manger that gets installed and runs in the processes all the time is a bug pain. I just done want Google to update it. I know when to update and I will update.

I am sure many technology an software developers are earning their life on the technology inventions like Google Android, Google Web Toolkit, Custom Search for Google and other things.

Of course, the great thing is that almost all the things that i mentioned above are possible with iPhone . So, as of now Google, iPhone, Twitter and Facebook seems to be inseparable.

Do you also think that modern technologies are helpful for us ? Do you think we are dependant on these technologies and we are slaves to these technologies ?

GM is in bad economic shape now and selling it’s some of the famous brands.  Looks like Pontiac, Hummer , Saab and Saturn are officially dead now. So, GM probably has the other 4 great brands – Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and Buick. GM has enjoyed the supremacy of No 1 Car  manufacturer for more than 70 years and now the moment of truth has come and its pretty hard for GM to take it.

One of the challenges for the executives at GM is not only to stay where they are but also to put efforts to regain their No 1 position, sooner or the later. There is an immense challenge ahead of GM’s CTO Fred Killeen to make sure that the GM stays in control of the IT costs.  According to a recent article in the eWeek, GM is doing a variety of things in IT to achieve it’s financial goals.

I really liked a statement of Killeen that “If you don’t invest in future of company, you won’t have one“.

Looks like before Killeen took over as CTO, there used to be thousands of applications at GM and now they are trying to consolidate and standardize the applications. Following software stack is core for GM…

• Siemens NX enterprise CAD application
• Siemens Teamcenter Community platform
• Microsoft Communicator for instant messaging
• Microsoft Sharepoint server for virtual meetings.
• VM Ware ESX
• Sun’s Virtualization Technology

VM Ware ESX and Sun’s virtualization technologies are implemented at its data centers. GM is not yet into the band wagon of the Cloud Computing. Perhaps GM may be skeptical about the reliability of the cloud computing from Google, Amazon and Salesforce.

In any case i am very surprised that GM is not adapting any of the open source solutions in the area of the Virtualization, Communication and Team Collaboration. I am sure many of the GM’s current strategy is falling into the expensive category and i believe GM can definitely benefit from the open source strategy. Of course, if i were Kelleen things may have been different .