Lessons from the Deccan Odyssey

[prashanthchengi]

This one is a spin-off from my last post on Captain Gopinath's book, 'Simply Fly',  which provides a shot in the arm for any wannabe entrepreneur and also a lot of food for thought.
For those not in the loop,  Captain Gopinath is the man behind India's first ever low cost airline called Air Deccan.  Prior to Air Deccan, he was running India's

Comments

[peeyush]

I don't think the failure was only the software side. I haven't read the book. But these would be my analysis nonetheless (because it's always easy to give uninformed and inaccurate analysis :P

[prashanthchengi]

You are right, there were several factors other than software, but since I could relate best to the software part, I highlighted only the software related gaffes

[asakiyume]

peeyush suggests that some of the failure might be from factors other than the software decisions, but it's interesting to see how even just in the realm of software decisions, there were lots of mistakes. I can see how, being an entrepreneur and developer of a start-up company, Capt. Gopinath would have felt comfortable trusting a start-up software company, but when there were signs that the company couldn't do the job, then he probably should have cut his losses. Maybe at that point it was already too late.

I think people who aren't in the software industry are very vulnerable to making bad decisions regarding software! They need trusted, good advisers.

[prashanthchengi]

True, there were several other mistakes, but I chose to highlight just the ones in the software realm, as I relate to that pretty well. You are right about Capt Gopinath not having time to cut his losses and change vendors. Airline ticket reservation is a classic example for real-time data and even a disruption of service for a few minutes can inconvenience thousands of prospective users, while losing the entire data would be unthinkable, and yet, that is exactly what happened

[asakiyume]

I never have flown on a no-frills carrier--mainly because I almost never fly. My husband is English, so we've been to England a number of times, but our usual habit has been to fly on Icelandair, as they usually have very cheap flights and we get a stopover in Iceland :-)

[deponti]

I too agree that there were far more mistakes than just the software, but Prashanth does say he is talking only about those!

Hm, Iceland....a place in my dreams, hope to go there one day.