Talk of Many Things – Personal Blog of Ketharaman Swaminathan

Funnel – Or Why Most MoUs Don’t Lead To Investments

27 May 2026

Every few months, headlines and editorials lament a familiar phenomenon of large numbers of Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with various states not translating into actual investments. Take, for example, the…

When Intrinsics Matter

20 May 2026

When I sell something to a buyer for 500 rupees and receive a 500 rupee note from the buyer, I don’t pause to analyze fiscal deficits, central bank balance sheets,…

Calling BS Of MSM Narratives About Slopaganda

13 May 2026

Slopaganda = Slop + Propaganda. While slop can jolly well originate from sloppy reporters working in the mainstream media, it refers to genAI's output in the context of slopaganda. There’s…

Disruption Can Only Be Caused By New Technology – Not Better Functionality

6 May 2026

In Technology Matters - Just Not At The Top Of Funnel, I argued that technology matters at the MOFU and BOFU stages of the sales funnel (though not at the TOFU stage). In…

Law of Conservation of Inequality

3 May 2026

The law is erected on many fictions and perhaps the (biggest fiction of them) ... all is that humans are rational. - Defence Attorney Sandy Stern, The Last Trial by…

Like Success, TAM Breeds TAM

22 April 2026

According to a popular joke on X fka Twitter, the greatest fiction is written in Excel, not Word. This is a dig at projections of Total Addressable Market made by…

Software Is Licensed, Not Owned

15 April 2026

Even though software products have been around for over 30 years, there's one basic fact of the industry that's still not widely understood: Software is licensed, not owned. The IP…

What Does A McKinsey Consultant Tell His AI Chatbot When It Hallucinates?

8 April 2026

According to the Business Insider article entitled Inside the AI boom that's transforming how consultants work at McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte, At McKinsey, consultants are using an in-house generative AI…

How To Kill The UPI Duopoly

1 April 2026

From: Ketharaman Swaminathan To: editet@timesgroup.com Subject: Cap Two Two UPI Players; Clearly Say, No Free Digi Lunch This has reference to the opeds entitled Cap Two Two UPI Players by Bikash Narayan…

Six Laws Of Software Marketing

25 March 2026

During the dotcom boom, ERP customers wanted Internet-enabled Manufacturing Resource Planning. Now, MRP was a very resource-intensive workload and took several hours to run on an enterprise network. Not surprisingly,…