“Sir, please don’t say this openly … we will lose half our revenue if our key clients hear that!” This was the anguished response from a friend who had started a software company in the 1990s, when I suggested that I could help design an algorithm to perform marketing analysis in one-tenth the time it was taking at that time. His business was then to conduct marketing analysis, a service that his company provided to blue-chip clients in India and the United States (US). His revenue was generated by charging clients in accordance with the number of hours spent by