Musings on the Human Condition

A private sector enterprise is meant to distinguish from organizations that serve the public good , i.e. government enterprises such as the police, the fire station, the construction of roads and bridges. The list is getting shorter every year. For example, government used to include space exploration . Is space exploration an initiative for the public good or a private enterprise? NASA used to be exclusively responsible for sending rockets into space for scientific research and exploration. That was partly because no private enterprise could afford such a huge expense. Furthermore, the investment was assumed to be for the public good because new science benefits us all, right? When the government sends a vessel into space, the goal is to study the universe and add to our scientific knowledge about the universe. Well, no longer. Now we have SpaceX launching flights into space. The motivation is unclear. It doesn't seem to be driven by science. Perhaps the goal is space tourism...

If I could do anything at all, I would buy a single engine plane (perhaps a Cessna) and fly from place to place forever and ever. The first career I thought of as a kid was to be a fighter pilot. But my eyesight wasn't perfect and I was told I wouldn't qualify. I was also discouraged for reasons of safety.  A used old Cessna in working condition can apparently be bought for $50k or so. But there would be the additional cost of learning to fly.  When I was 15 or so, I had bought one of those small handbooks you could buy (perhaps the Observer's Book of Aircraft) which listed every plane in the world with a picture and its specifications. I took pride in identifying the few planes that flew overhead where we lived on the IIT campus in New Delhi. We were close enough to Palam Airport (now Indira Gandhi Airport) so that planes would fly overhead low enough to be identifiable. Of course, most of what we saw was easy enough to identify. Boeing 747, 737, and the occasional 727 com...

  AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) is Adobe's software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), which provides clients with a CMS platform (Sites), Digital Asset Management (DAM, or simply Assets), and Forms. It was released a few years ago with several upsides and a few downsides. In the intervening years, Adobe has continued to build on the pros while the cons continue to dwindle. Some fairly large companies have been enticed with licensing discounts and package deals to embrace CS and migrate their AEM instances to it. We have helped a few of our clients with this journey and some are now live on CS. This post briefly describes the key steps involved in such a migration. Assess Current State The migration from on-premise (data center) or cloud-hosted to CS is not a lift-and-shift. Significant refactoring is required in order to make your AEM implementation ready for CS. Additionally, it's a great opportunity to modernize and clear off technical debt.  ...

This year's Summit was as good as ever! As usual, there were hundreds of sessions covering every imaginable topic. However, there were a few themes that were new this year and deserve special mention. Generative AI Adobe's implementation of GenAI comes in the form of their Firefly toolkit (currently in beta) that takes in a textual description of an image and generates artificial images that match the provided description. For example, you could ask Firefly to create a "flat design logo for a towing company featuring a tow truck using grey and orange and primary colors". And Firefly will produce several images to choose from and tweak. You can customize things like the aspect ratio, content type (photo, graphic, or art), styles, color and tone, lighting, and composition to create truly custom and unique content. Additionally, Firefly can also generate text effects.  Features under development include vector recoloring, text to brush (create custom Photoshop brushes)...

As we head into 2023, there are three key pillars that ought to be part of every client's digital marketing strategy, described here in the context of the Adobe stack.  In other words, these are the most likely three initiatives Adobe clients are likely to be embarking on 2023. First-Party (1P) Data As browsers and devices begin to restrict third-party data, companies need to ramp up their 1P data collection.  This is accomplished by incentivizing users to provide their data (for example their email address ) by registering on a website or to download a PDF, etc. Adobe's Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP), which is part of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is a key component of Adobe's martech stack for enabling efficient 1P data collection  Personalization 1P data enables companies to attach web analytics data (captured via Adobe Analytics or a similar product) to the user. And products like Adobe Target, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), Customer Journey Optim...

  I've been attending Adobe Summit every year for years and it never fails to disappoint. This year was no exception. Whether your cup of tea is shorter 30-minute sessions or longer 2-hour training workshop-style immersion sessions (my personal favorites) or the not-to-be-missed Summit Sneaks  (cutting-edge innovations) hosted this year by the entertaining Kristen Bell, there's something for everyone. In the following paragraphs I'll highlight the key takeaways I came away with and point you to some of the must-watch sessions. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is clearly the future and was at the center of a bulk of the sessions. AEP is much more than the Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP) you see in the typical sandbox. This is where most of Adobe's next-generation products are being incubated. Although the CDP is foundational, several products sit atop the CDP and leverage it's near-real-time 360 view of the customer to deliver their magic. Customer Journey...