Mayank's Blog

My three year old daughter today asked me if I would take her to the mall. This would normally have been an ordinary request but these are extraordinary times. I had to say no. She bargained - What if she wore a mask? To escape the situation, I had to put the blame entirely on Narendra Modi. 😉 When I see someone coming towards me on the road When would we go back to normal? This is a question on everyone's mind. But how do you define normal? Let's examine this objectively. The current lock down cannot last forever. Sooner or later it will have to be lifted for people to earn livelihoods. It may be lifted in phases but don't expect schools, malls, or places of social gathering to be opened up anytime soon. Any potential vaccine is still forever  12-18 months away. Even if a vaccine is invented quicker than that, production, distribution and finally vaccination itself would take years. People would keep falling sick due to COVID-19 and dying and there is nothing we can do to...

"Hez!". If you were in Hyderabad for the opening of first IKEA store in India, you would be forgiven for thinking that it's a religious chant for followers of a religion who are trampling over themselves for getting into their place of worship. Except they were visitors to the new IKEA store. For the past few days, the news had been carrying multitude of articles related to IKEA opening. The marketing by IKEA team only hyped the situation. Since I was looking to buy a bed, I made the unfortunate decision of going to the IKEA store for a quick in-n-out shopping with my wife on my way to office. The first red flag should have been when we couldn't get parking at 10 am in the morning of a weekday and were asked to park at one of external parking locations. The IKEA folks were kind enough to handout a map of the same. We were asked to park near ITC Kohenur. From that location, like every well organized pilgrimage, there was a shuttle service to IKEA after eve...

Have you recently tried to shop on any Indian e-commerce website? If you have, you too would be frustrated by the constant nagging done by these sites to download their app. Myntra has gone ahead and shut its website down completely! Others like Flipkart won't let you browse any product in peace and will immediately try to "connect" you to their app - even when you are already at their site and trying to buy a product. Amazon India will release "app-only" offers and discounts. All this is done in the garb of making customer experience better. @mayankMSFT We direct users to the mobile App in order to provide better shopping experience. We have passed your feedback along. — flipkartsupport (@flipkartsupport) August 7, 2015 Only problem is that it makes user experience even worse. These companies are trying to lure the consumer into a walled garden so that they make bad, misinformed buying decisions . Let me elaborate. On a desktop browser...