Friday, April 18, 2008

Orange, Apple and Ice-Cream

Hi all, I must confess that the poll results are very very surprising, I was not expecting such close outcomes!

I have not personally voted, after thinking about it....I still have mixed feelings! I believe that it is subjective though...if someone wishes to live only for his passion, it might be obsessive.

Yesterday we had the opportunity of listening to CEO of France Telecom at UoM, very bright guy (a juger par ses accomplissements) and brilliant businessman (a en juger par ses stratégies).

Well I believe he is a brilliant businessman mainly because he has a clear vision regarding the future of his organisation, he is sharp in his responses, his 'strategies d'intégration'...

Orange actually donated Rs 2 000 000 to UoM, which is a good initiative. Lets hope they CEO comes in and regularly repeats this deed. Regarding a question about when the iPhone would be available (and fully usable) in Mauritius, Didier Lombard explained the strategy of Apple which was that of a geographical deployment.

In Europe for instance, iPhones are fully usable only in UK, Germany and France. This clearly demonstrates the Apple's Strategy of exploiting markets where there are big mobile phone users. In Mauritius, though we are rather heavy mobile users, the market size is comparatively small....But as Didier Lombard mentionned...'Il y a de l'espoir'.

Another colleague enquired about how Orange intended to cater for the fact that on average, people in Mauritius pay less for mobile services a compared Europeans. He outlined the fact that there was a tension between Orange's QoS and the amount of money people were willing to pay.

In other words...would Orange decrease QoS parameters to match the amount of money locals are willing to pay.

The answer of the CEO of France Telecom was very diplomatic.

Today, i had a wicked time at Uni, though i know my students had a tough time understanding Tree operations like delete and insert....when they code it, i am sure that they will sort these out, and they will call the destructor for the class doubt:

~doubt();

Well someone made me ask myself a fundamental question today....

Quand devient-on vieux?

Well the obvious reflex action...was to see what did the word young mean, contrast it with the word old and then come up with an answer:

Wikipedia defines 'young' as: Young refers to the quality or state of youth.

It then defines 'old' as : Old may refer to Old age .

Unfortunately it related old as a state or a thing which may refer to age...

For once i tend to disagree.... being young or old has nothing to do with age! It is a subjective thing...rather a perception, or even a state of mind.

Can we be young at sixty and old at thirty? I am sure that many would simply laugh...others would just smile!!!

To me, a person starts growing old when he stops being young... :-)... funny you might say... Let me explain it differently:

Starting from the assumption that its relative state and that it is a state of mind... I would say that a person gets old when he sees 'the others' as being young.

Note that a simple change in mindset would make all the difference... What if i change the sentence to... when he sees 'the others' as being youngER. This would imply that the person sees himself as young too......

IMHO it is all about perception!

Anyways... a good friend of mine organised a little ice-cream party today to celebrate his promotion. The Ice-Cream was wicked and we all enjoyed it. He was very nice and he impressed us by the speed at which he would prepare them.

Enjoy the sight, and imagine how nice it tasted!!!!:

The flavours included Kulfi, Citron, Amande and Chocolate ...along with caramel syrup and other nice little things which enhanced the look as well as the taste.........

Well i would like to say a big thanks to him.

Just after the party, some people stayed back for an informal chat and I must admit that it was worthwhile. A very wise person has shared his knowledge or should I say wisdom with us....

The discussion started rearding wedding love and....and then it gradually got into Theology and Hinduism, and we unanimously appreciated the discussion.

Well being quite passionnate about some 'little stories' about Gods, Saints, the 'Why's of rituals', and .... 'J'en ai eu pour mon compte!'

It ressembled a crash course in basic Hinduism! As i am used to saying...It was Wickedly COOL....What made it more interesting was the fact that constant reference was being made to the contemporary lifestyle, and what are the universal lessons which can be learnt from Holy Scriptures (Vedas, Bible, Quran, Gita, ....) irrespective of their origins!

As i have said before:

Religion is just a set of names.
Lets just have faith (irrespective of the name of the Entity in which we have faith)

Despite being an engineer, that person made it very clear of the lessons which we should learn.

Interesting parallels were being drawn between Science, Religion and our life.

I would like to voice out my apreciation and admiration to that person!!!

I know for fact that all those present share equal admiration reagrding the clarifications which that person brought ...though the appreciation of some might be more equal that others, G.Orwell in Animal Farm!!!)

I will let you guess who that person is!

Comments Welcome!!! (as always!)

OOH Lord........ It is now 23 00 and Google Mail is down!!!! How will I survive!!!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

i don't see any special change in the services besides seeing "orange" everwhere..

the magic numbers thing i don't find it personally useful, maybe its nice for others ;)

well there should have been a mega promo i think to really put emphasis on the new deal.. something to actually scare off any competitors or something to make other people move to orange..

At some point in time i seem to understand that for more services by orange, MT should get a certain number of registered users, don't really know wether the ceo of orange was talking to the room or personally to Mr Lallah..

something that i believe is not right and practically disgusting for the time being is the fairness clause being added to adsl.. its auite obscure right now and in the coming days we'll get a better idea how it works.

G@V!N said...

Well you have to bear in mind that the underlying structure is still that of 'le defunt CellPlus'...It is just a name change.

In Europe they have very nice promos for orange users...there were free texts, and call time to orange customers. They even had free evening and week-end minutes...Orange Weekends...

Well i believe that he might be wanting more Orange customers...but there is one thing which i do not really understand...who is doing the marketing for Orange, is it Mauritius Telecom or Orange itself???

Fairness...that a very subjective thing. Well there is something which ressembles a fairness clause in MyT 2 GB 'guaranteed QoS' its not really guaranteed though.. lets put it this way: If you have downloaded less that 2GB during the month, you are on a sort of priority list for bandwidth and you yet a slightly higher download rate than that of subscribers who have downloaded more than 2GB.

INMHO, it could be that 'a fair user' of the net is someone who downloads less than 2GB per month.... LOL!! Dans quel monde vivons-nous? - That is what many of my friends download in about 4-5 days...

One thing which many European ISPs do is an automatic Upgrade...say you are with 'ISP X' using a 512 Kb download rate for a period of 6 months, they automatically upgrade your line to twice the speed up tp 8 Mb at no extra cost. It helps them retain customers as there is a lot of competition over there between the ISPs. You have to bear in mind that on avaerage, we are actually paying more for broadband, i.e ADSL access than the Europeans are ......when i left UK i was paying 9.99 pounds for a 2Mb line and i had unlimited call time to local landlines ....

N'y a-t-il pas matière a refléxion?????? Au moins personne ne pourra nier qu'il y a matière a comparaison quand meme!!!!

I am just hoping that with Orange, we benefit from similar deals.

Unknown said...

I think that Orange is investing a lot on MYT.. Thats why it is restricting the ADSL users with a download limit... In order to make the ADSL users to turn on MYT...
Orange don't really care about the Mauritius Telecom users ayoooo sori Orange Users, they only want their investment to be fruitful and to make the maximum money out of it...

Anonymous said...

you mentioned it yourself in other countries there is competition.. but who will compete here?

its as if a "monopole" MTML was supposed to be the messiah,but its only false hopes!! without a decent competition the price might go down but at a very low rate i fear..

the problem was that MT was overprotected by the gov and ICTA, so whatever competition there might have been disappeared.

i know about the stuff with garantee usage in MyT but i am used to adsl 512 unlimited and was paying it Rs1360+ vat . the problem with this crap fairness policy is that the price stays the same except that they can manze mo poummm if they want to..

The most important thing is to see how emtel reacts to all this. lets hope they start fighting :)

Anonymous said...

I'm starting to really hate Orange. Now, both MyT and ex-Wanadoo ADSL are capped, limited by the Fair Use Policy (FUP).

Mann... 1-2GB then you are on FUP? What the?! That's what I download in 3-4 days too. Some random OS, antivirus and software upgrades, and you have your 1GB. 2 Linux distros, and you are over 1 GB. Some YouTubing, Online Radio (I love online radios) and I'm again over my GBs..

The limit in other countries is like 100GB. Or at least 20GB. And then, there's FUPs that only impose a speed restriction on heavy downloaders during peak hours. Off-peak, they get full speed (Tiscali for example, imposes this).

Well, it's not for nothing that Orange is one of the least recommended ISPs of UK.

Anyways, let's wait and see. We never know. Maybe we'll get the fabled 8Mbps uncapped! Well, Tiscali offers 8Mbps at sub 10-pounds prices! :s

For orange fans,

[ http://www.reviewcentre
.com/reviews107114.html ]

This will be very interesting! :P

Anon :)

Anonymous said...

orange pou nou vine mangue la!!!

they are trying to fit more users in their crapy network without actually want to invest or make any big investment..

well suppose the price goes down by50% next month..with the number of new users wanting to register, would they handle the new load? i think what they are trying to do is very dangerous and maybe in the coming days we might be faced to a consequent degradation of our internet connection..


well i know these questions am asking myself are kinda stupid and obviously all these are well thought of by MT and orange but hey in Mauritius we all have the policy of performing an action then wait to see if there is any negative reaction lol

this morning for instance, the 3rd lane going to PL was closed because some great people have to go to the airport.. lol.. zotte pena alarm dan lotel zotte resT.. pas conne leve bonheur???
providing them with some police riders wouldn't have been enough??

the way i see it life in Mauritis is becoming more and more fun!!! :)

Anonymous said...

Just checked the link given by anon. Conclusion: Orange s**ks!

1-2gb then FUP? I can tell that I will be among the first in fup then lol coz I can normally dl 1gb per day(though I have restricted how much I dl for the time being coz of exams) but 1gb/day isn’t hard for me to reach with ddl and torrent lol

I wouldn’t my capping PROVIDED we had something like 8mbps and capping at 512kpbs and capping after 20gb…with something like that I can tell I wouldn’t mind…du moins pas trop :P

I don’t know for you but several of my pals on adsl told me that they had speed problems. Or even that websites such as youtube took time to load or even when surfing they had some troubles. Is it the new orange policy in application? Or just some problems like that.

Now concerning mobile hope that we get some good services such as having no-need-to-pay sms day more often, lol and a better network would be great.

So for the time being I’ll just hope n c what happens but without keeping our hopes too high

darklide

Anonymous said...

That is why it is called "The Paradise Island"

I heard there would have been a company willing to invest in FTTH in Mauritius. But not heard of anything. Lets cling to our small hope remaining.