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Sunday, October 31, 2004Why Adam Kalsey Doesn't Recommend FirefoxAdam Kalsey, a Web technologist and CTO of Pheedo has written an article in his blog titled Why I don't recommend Firefox. The article makes good reading, but Kalsey adds, in his own words,"I am a user of Firefox and have been since Phoenix 0.2. I switched to it as a primary browser sometime during the 7 days in October where 0.3 was the stable version. For a period of time (around 0.7) I was using the nightly binaries. My list of installed extensions includes one I wrote myself. I never got around to compiling the source myself (although I did with Mozilla 0.8), so I suppose I can’t claim alpha-geek status". However what makes interesting reading are the 150 plus comments and counter comments that have followed Kalsey's blog about Firefox, clearly qualifying to be among the best discussion series about Firefox.Disclosure: I use firefox regularly and is my choice browser and use IE only for browsing sites that are optimised only microsoft standard specific HTML features. Also read my earlier blog Firefox Taking Off and my affirmation in support of Firefox. | A New Goliath In Big SteelBusinessweek covers the latest steel mill acquisition of Lakshmi Mittal in the process his group emerges as the largest steel producer in the world. Excerpts:Mittal announced a deal that will create the world's largest steelmaker, with estimated annual revenue of $31.5 billion. The two-step transaction first unites Mittal's European companies -- Ispat International (IST ) and LNM Holdings -- in a $13.3 billion merger. The new entity, Mittal Steel Co., will then acquire International Steel Group (ISG) in Richfield, Ohio, for $4.5 billion. By enlarging Mittal's U.S. holdings with ISG, Wilbur L. Ross Jr.'s collection of once-decrepit but now revamped U.S. steel factories, the transaction unites four of the seven largest old-line U.S. steelmakers that existed in 2001 -- LTV, Bethlehem Steel, Weirton Steel, and Ispat Inland Steel. The move is almost certain to set off a new wave of global steel consolidation as competitors, such as Luxembourg's Arcelor and South Korea's Posco (PKX ), seek to match the scale and clout of Mittal Steel Mittal has rarely made a misstep before. Like Ross, he's a big risk taker who has proven that new money can be made from an old industry. Shopping around the world whenever steel mills come on the market, Mittal has built a powerhouse that stretches from Europe to Africa and Latin America. He has been able to generate profits by using his scale to buy lower-cost raw materials and by importing modern management techniques into previously inefficient state-run mills. The consolidation will deliver better economies of scale. The new company will own three mills clustered on Lake Michigan, making it easier to centralize management, consolidate material delivery, and optimize what each plant makes. Thanks to its size, the combined company will have access to larger, lower-cost supplies of ore, coke, and coal. "We already run the lowest-cost, highest profit mills in the U.S.," says Mittal.Mittal Steel's rise opens a new chapter in the industry's consolidation. Till now, the game has been mostly regional -- with U.S. and European players tending to merge in their respective markets. Mittal's move globalizes this trend. The world's top producers have little choice but to bulk up to match Mittal Steel's post-merger output of 57 million metric tons. Moving forward, it is expected that Within five years,the highly fragmented world steel market will be dominated by six or so "super producers." Today, only Mittal Steel has entered that league. I was amused by the tone of the article - it unduly focussed on Lakshmi Mittal's expenses of his party and family marriage rather than the very creditable acheivements of his past acquisitions , turnarounds and in creating several low cost operations in many countries - this is acheievment of sorts and his acquisition strategy has helped him form the largest steel group in the world - several good lessons are hidden inside - anycase his part expenses pale into insignificance when compared to US CEO compensation and perks enjoyed by some currently. As for the criticism that steel prices shall go up because of consolidation - elemenary business knowledge would negate this idea, any case with so many players around - it is impossible that this can happen and in a away the answer lies in Mittal's style itself -user industries would benefit by consolidating and procuring better. In a way this move would inject drive to accelarate efficiency in steel using manufacturers and the argument that steel prices would move up because of this looks totally absurd. Examples of such size abound in all industries - Oil, Minerals etc.. endless argument comes to my mind. The Rule of Three, US companies enjoying dominance in several industries,automobile clusters, entertainment industry etc etc. | web2.0 Presentations(Via Jeremy Zawodny) The web2.0 presentations are available here. The slides includes amongst others presentation made by John Battelle, Peter Norvig, Bill Gurley,Mary Meeker,Jim Buckmaster,Craig Newmark,David Sifry,Tim O'Reilly and others.Another important reference is Jeremy Zawodny's web2archives available here capturing his notes about presentation in each session. |Saturday, October 30, 2004ACM queue -special issue on RFIDACMQueue has come out with an issue devoted to RFIDs. In an article written by Roy Want,Intel Research, RFID is equated to magic and introduced as an electronic tagging technology that allows an object, place, or person to be automatically identified at a distance without a direct line-of-sight, using an electromagnetic challenge / response exchange. Typical applications include labeling products for rapid checkout at a point-of-sale terminal, inventory tracking, animal tagging, timing marathon runners, secure automobile keys, and access control for secure facilities."Initially, commercial deployment is likely to focus on pallet- or crate-level tracking in a warehouse, and depending on its success, may lead to item-level tracking in the future. RFID could improve the efficiency of warehouse management considerably. RFID tags would allow crate identities to be checked at a distance when entering or leaving the building, whether or not the tag is directly visible. A bar code used in the same application could well be facing the wrong direction, making it impossible to scan automatically. Once RFID has proved beneficial and has been well established, economies of scale such as mass production should help bring down the price. This would enable item-level tracking for high-value goods, and perhaps eventually, even tracking low-value items. RFID provides a data transport mechanism between a tag and a reader, which can be extended to provide greater utility than returning a simple identification number. The three important extensions of electronic tagging are: sensing the environment, security, and electronic memory. Apart from cost, the remaining technical issues for RFID are all solved. A number of issues, however, still present a challenge: tag orientation, reader coordination, multiple standards, stored data, range, cost, and customer concerns.Product Packaging Independence,Multiple Standards,Data Formats and wraps up with noting that progress is being made on Longer Range, Lowering Manufacturing Costs. | What Is Podcasting and Why Should You Care?Amy Grahan introduces Podcasting in an interesting way. She writes, Podcasting - intriguing new online media channel,holds considerable promise for creative, diverse, and useful audio programming that can serve a wide variety of audiences and purposes. Podcasting is simply online audio content that’s delivered via webfeed. Think of it as radio on demand. However, it gives you far more options in terms of content and program style than radio. While the field of radio has generally settled into few established types of programs, podcasting reflects more of the variety that is available on CDs. Plus, podcasting is like TiVo for radio. That is, you can download whatever programming you want and listen to it whenever and wherever you want. You also generally have full access to the audio archives for the programs you like. This removes time, use, and content restraints. The article also lists ways in which podcasting can be used and also illustrates how to createand receive podcasts and provides resource references for further reading.| Why Outsourcing Isn’t Really the IssueFortune's David Kirkpatrick writes,In the Age of Globalization, outsourcing becomes just another way for U.S. companies to remain competitive with foreign counterparts —and ultimately keep jobs at home. Kirkpatrick addresses outsourcing critics quite intensly. Excerpts: Companies typically now see themselves competing in a global environment, with customers, resources, suppliers, and employees potentially being anywhere. The problem is that just about every American company now has non-American competition. Over time, companies from every country will have access to the same resources in any country. This is another one of those disturbing but world-changing facts that emerges from the existence of the Internet and a globalized economy. If there is an opportunity to reduce costs by outsourcing some functions to other countries but a U.S. company is prohibited from taking it, what happens if their non-U.S. competitor does? We risk not only losing the outsourceable jobs, but all of a company’s jobs as it no longer can compete.But only a resolutely parochial or ignorant nationalist can deny that there are good aspects to these globalizing changes. It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the aspirations of the world’s poor hordes that are willing to work incredibly hard just to get a portion of the wealth that we take for granted. If you don’t think that the sheer numbers of such people will fundamentally alter our lives in coming decades, both for better and for worse, you simply aren’t paying attention. According to the Population Reference Bureau website, more than 90% of the world’s population growth through 2050 is projected to take place in poor countries. We are just 290 million in a world of 6.4 billion people. We need to start thinking harder about what that means. Kirkpatrick again writes brilliantly on this topic - he is quite right. Offshoring should be viewed as means to become more competitive and thats the way forward looking US corporations are beginning to view. US investors are asking tech entrepreneurs about India leverage strategy before making commitments to additional funds. Major tech companies( providing leadership to US) seeing the trend have rightly beginning to move engineering/support functions to India like Oracle. Google,Kana,SAP all follow - This is for not only maintaining leadership - in a few cases for survival itself. | The Future of MobilesOm Malik writes about the shape of things to come in mobile handsets.NEC’s 232 provides a glimpse of where mobile phones are heading.. An unremarkable, if technically solid tri-band GSM phone available in November, the 232 is NEC’s attempt to move past the mass market for cellphones. In a partnership with Fitness magazine, the 232 will come pre-loaded with a number of fitness applications—BMI index, calorie counting, max heart rate tracking, etc—designed to appeal to women interested in tracking their fitness routines.Matt Maier,in a guest review writes, segmentation is the future. Mobile penetration in most of the big cell phone markets—India being a huge exception—sits well north of 60 percent. Price competition is fierce for carriers and phone-makers alike, so both are desperate for mean to reach specific subsets, build a little loyalty, and hopefully milk a few extra dollars on data services. Nokia knows this. The N-Gage is an early example of this trend,it was a smart move the part of Nokia. Samsung also realizes this.Well in an effort to spread this message, they have repeatedly teamed up with fashion designers, especially in emerging markets such as India. However, they are now bringing that model to the US. They have teamed up with Vogue, and Diane von Furstenberg to develop a new line of products. |Challenge Of IT - Conquering ComplexityThe Economist has an Information Technology Survey up that I highly recommend. The first article in the survey is Make it simple , about how unnecessary complexity prevents technology from being used to its fullest, or sometimes from being used at all. John Meada at MIT is researching to keep computing simple.“It is time for us to rise up with a profound demand,” declared the late Michael Dertouzos in his 2001 book, “The Unfinished Revolution”: “Make our computers simpler to use!” Donald Norman, a long-standing advocate of design simplicity, concurs. “Today's technology is intrusive and overbearing. It leaves us with no moments of silence, with less time to ourselves, with a sense of diminished control over our lives,” he writes in his book, “The Invisible Computer”. “People are analogue, not digital; biological, not mechanical. It is time for human-centred technology, a humane technology.” Greg Papadopoulos, chief technologist at Sun Microsystems, Ray Lane, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,Chris Capossela, the boss of Microsoft's desktop applications -all of them agree that complexity of computers is to be tackled for growth and better usage.The economic costs of IT complexity are hard to quantify but probably exorbitant. The Standish Group,has found that 66% of all IT projects either fail outright or take much longer to install than expected because of their complexity. Among very big IT projects—those costing over $10m apiece—98% fall short.Gartner, another research firm, uses other proxies for complexity. An average firm's computer networks are down for an unplanned 175 hours a year, calculates Gartner, causing an average loss of over $7m. On top of that, employees waste an average of one week a year struggling with their recalcitrant PCs. And itinerant employees, such as salesmen, incur an extra $4,400 a year in IT costs, says the firm.Tony Picardi, a boffin at IDC, comes up with perhaps the most frightening number. When he polled a sample of firms 15 years ago, they were spending 75% of their IT budget on new hardware and software and 25% on fixing the systems that they already had; now that ratio has been reversed—70-80% of IT spending goes on fixing things rather than buying new systems. According to Mr Picardi, this suggests that this year alone IT complexity will cost firms worldwide some $750 billion. Even this, however, does not account for the burden on consumers, whether measured in the cost of call-centres and help desks, in the amount of gadgets and features never used because they are so byzantine, or in sheer frustration. Why the urgency now to tackle this? The most obvious change is the IT bust that followed the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. After a decade of strong growth, the IT industry suddenly started shrinking in 2001. In early 2000 it accounted for 35% of America's S&P 500 index; today its share is down to about 15%. “For the past three years, the tech industry's old formula—build it and they come—has no longer worked,” says Pip Coburn, a technology analyst at UBS, an investment bank. For technology vendors, he thinks, this is the sort of trauma that precedes a paradigm shift. Customers no longer demand “hot” technologies, but instead want “cold” technologies, such as integration software, that help them stitch together and simplify the fancy systems they bought during the boom years. This article interlinks to all of the other articles in the survey, which discuss additional topics such as feature creep, the “invisibility” of ubiquitous technology, and using “the Mom test” to determine simplicity. A lot of thought-provoking points here about the state of the industry, and things we should keep in mind if we want to be successful moving forward. Steven Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, another bank, offers a further reason why simplicity is only now becoming a big issue. He argues that the IT industry progresses in 15-year waves. -In the first wave,(1970s and early 1980s) - companies installed big mainframe computers; -The second wave - they put in PCs that were hooked up to “server” computers in the basement; -The third wave,(breaking now) -beginning to connect every gadget that employees might use, from hand-held computers to mobile phones, to the internet. The boundaries between office, car and home will become increasingly blurred and will eventually disappear altogether. In rich countries, virtually the entire population will be expected to be permanently connected to the internet, both as employees and as consumers. This will at last make IT pervasive and ubiquitous, like electricity or telephones before it, so the emphasis will shift towards making gadgets and networks simple to use. UBS's Mr Coburn adds a demographic observation,saying that some 70% of the world's population are “analogues”, who are “terrified by technology”, and for whom the pain of technology “is not just the time it takes to figure out new gadgets but the pain of feeling stupid at each moment along the way”. Another 15% are “digital immigrants”, typically thirty-somethings who adopted technology as young adults; and the other 15% are “digital natives”, teenagers and young adults who have never known and cannot imagine life without IM (instant messaging, in case you are an analogue). But a decade from now, Mr Coburn says, virtually the entire population will be digital natives or immigrants, as the ageing analogues convert to avoid social isolation. Once again, the needs of these converts point to a hugely increased demand for simplicity. | Russell Beattie On GoogleRussell Beattie, who last minute chnaged his mind from taking an interview writes,he is .not particuarly bullish on Google services and innovation going forward. He adds, "I like Google Search and I like Blogger, but everything else they're doing is disjointed. They're slowly creating a mess of services with no real cohesive plan and it's just not compelling to me. Orkut, GMail, Froogle, Desktop Search, etc. are all in beta and have no common thread or business plan. How many logins do I need? How is any of this stuff going to make money? Orkut even uses Microsoft tech on the back end, is that a joke? I compare Google to Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo and it seems like amateur hour over there.Also, I think that Google has shown a penchant for being duplicitous and mean spirited in a variety of ways, despite their motto of "don't be evil." Two examples: the arbitrary cutting of AdSense websites last year (and subsequent including a gag clause in their T&C after I wrote about it in this weblog) and their blocking of Chinese dissident websites from their news search to appease the Chinese Government. The latter is particularly galling because of their lame excuses about it. Jerry Yang gave a thoughtful and compelling reasons why Yahoo deals with China at Web 2.0. Google just seemed to make excuses". While the criticism's may look harsh, they are certainly valid. Google does not seem to have a good plan to keep its astronomical marketcap intact. |Championing a Wiki WorldBusinessweek in their Tech's Young Entrepreneurs section writes, Socialtext, Ross Mayfield's Web-collaboration outfit , is the antithesis of the cash-fat startup, but its aims are hardly modest. At first glance, Socialtext doesn't look like a company running on a shoestring budget. Founded less than two years ago, it now has more than 50 customers around the world, including Walt Disney and Eastman Kodak , which use its Web software to help people collaborate online. Yet a peek behind the slick Web site reveals a truly virtual company: no offices, only 10 full-time people -- all working at home, and a chief executive who answers the phone himself.Socialtext co-founder and CEO Ross Mayfield makes no apologies for the threadbare setup. Increasingly inexpensive and ubiquitous information technologies such as the Internet, wireless connections, and cheap computer servers, he says, allow him to run the company with far less money and fewer people than he could have a decade ago -- without scrimping on features or quality. Says the 34-year-old serial entrepreneur: "This is the prototype of the new Internet startup."Socialtext sells so-called wiki software. Offered as a service over the Web, the software makes it quick and easy to set up Web sites with a simple browser.Anyone in a company or department can post material on these wikis, and anyone else, subject to approval by the creator, can edit or add to them. They've become a cheaper, more flexible collaboration alternative to both overtaxed e-mail and complex groupware such as IBM's Lotus Notes.Essentially, Socialtext's wiki software allows everybody in a group or even a whole company to literally stay on the same page -- that is, on their shared Web pages. That speeds up everything that involves coordination, helping to cut costs. Socialtext has subsisted on less than $300,000 from friends and other social-software entrepreneurs such as LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman and Tribe Networks CEO Mark Pincus. Last month, it got another $300,000 from the Omidyar Network, the semi-philanthropic organization launched by eBay founder and Chairman Pierre Omidyar and several other individuals. That's in stark contrast to the boom, when multimillion-dollar initial rounds were all but mandatory.Surrvival secret -Partly by using his company's own wiki software to get things done. Mayfield does his work on Socialtext's internal wiki wherever his laptop is, from his home office to the nearby café that has free wireless Internet service. So do colleagues in places such as Silicon Valley, Chicago, Indianapolis, New York, Canada, and Taiwan. They also use free Internet-based teleconferencing and long-distance calling services. "The infrastructure costs are a tenth of what they used to be," says Mayfield. "We can do more work with lower cost because of teleconferencing and the Internet." They also use the Net to do all their marketing, essentially for free. Analysts figure larger companies such as Microsoft and IBM could simply make them part of their suites of software. At the same time, Socialtext's niche is attracting attention from new rivals. JotSpot, a new company in Palo Alto recently launched by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer -- two founders of the boom-era portal Excite , is backed with $5.2 million in venture capital. Kraus contends that JotSpot has a more ambitious goal beyond mere collaboration, allowing minimally technical people to write customized software The Tech World roars because of entrepreneurs with ideas and initiatives like these. | Friday, October 29, 2004Ram Shriram Talks About - "The Google Story"Matt Marshall blogs about angel investorRam Shriram's talk about -"The Google Story" Ram Shriram, the angel investor who counseled Google’s founders during the earliest days, says success has no magic formula, but stems rather from continual small “block and tackle” moves and,it helps to have a little book called “Ram’s Book of Mistakes” to guide the way. Key Takeaways: --Success is pretty much a crap-shoot; there are too many unknown facts in a company’s early life to make all the right decisions. But good, quick judgment calls on multiple fronts helps multiply the chances of beating the odds. --Not even the wise man can see it coming: Shriram took more than two months after seeing the demo for an investment decision. --It’s the people. Bad hiring decisions are the most fatal.Shriram helped co-founders Larry Page and Serge Brin in the Menlo Park garage by consulting his “Ram’s Book of Mistakes,” which he said he started eight or nine years ago to help remind him of all the bad decisions he’d made. -- It’s all in the grooming. Shriram set out to made sure Page & Brin hired only the very best, or “A” people. He cited the well-known Silicon Valley tenet: Hire only A people, and they’ll hire other A people. If you hire the B person, they’ll hire C or D people. Someone asked a good question: How did Shriram decide who are a so-called “A” people? Grooming is a part of it. “I try to find out who their mothers are,” he said. If they are raised well, they’re more likely to make good citizens, employees and entrepreneurs. --Shriram counseled the audience: “Be bold and dynamic,” noting that there are huge opportunities afforded by the new Internet economy -- in China and India, especially. --He noted that Yahoo, Google and eBay had created 24,000 jobs, and that Internet companies had created $200 billion in stock market value in the last 7 years. --Launching a company is easy. The great thing about the Internet is you can launch and test an idea easily, and cheaply. If it doesn’t work, you can go back to the drawing board. “If you build your field of dreams, and no one comes, you can shut it down,” he said. --The trick is small engineering teams. “Bite-sized engineering projects.” Quite interesting. | Legoland RFID Tracks Lost Kids, Collects DataHere's an interesting article on how Legoland Denmark is using RFID on wristbands to help parents keep track of their children.ach season, Legoland Denmark welcomes 1.6 million guests, and about 1,600 of them end up getting lost. This spring, the theme park adopted an AeroScout RFID location solution, offering parents use of an RFID bracelet for their children at a nominal fee. If their children wander away from them in the park or try to exit unaccompanied, parents can receive instant text messages on their mobile phones telling them the location of their errant offspring -- within ten feet.The wireless Relevant Products/Services from Hewlett-Packard Mobility Solutions LAN technology chosen for this installation means Legoland had to invest in fewer readers than a traditional RFID system for a wider range of service. Parents view the product as a value-add, quieting their anxieties about lost little loved ones. Legoland management, meanwhile, benefits from the ease of child tracking as well as the data the tags collect on families' use of the park.Legoland collects data in the aggregate, not on individual users. Park officials may apply collected RFID information to improve its in-park restaurant service. For instance, consumers might be able to look at menus outside of the restaurants and order there, from a wireless system, and outdoor restaurants and food carts could have wireless cash registers. Legoland may also apply RFID to manage long lines, redirecting families to attractions with fewer visitors on queue, or to gauge consumer interest in new rides, even new Lego building sets. An interesting way to apply RFID for business purposes on top of usage for tracking.| Robert Frances Group: WebSphere vs. .NET: Comparing e-business platform for the enterpriseFew weeks back, we published in this blog details of a massive study that compared IBM WebSphere / J2EE against Microsoft .NET on a number of dimensions: developer productivity, manageability, reliability and application performance - the report was prepared by the Middleware Company. IBM blogger,Ed Brill points out to a new research report analysed slightly differently. The report available here , compares websphere and .net for suitability to adoption to ebusiness for the enterprise ,prepared by Robert Frances Group states,that some of the costs involved are not necessarily lower for WebSphere... but they are competitive, in terms of acquisition, development costs, and definitely in management and support.WebSphere deployments may involve more architectural elements and higher developer salaries than Visual Basic(VB).NET. However, better out-of-the-box security levels, higher functionality, higher server-toadministrator ratios, and more extensive management interfaces reduce long-term ownership costs, and make the platform a much better choice in the long run.WebSphere also addresses enterprise elasticity because it provides customers with choices should a hardware platform or operating system change be required. Strategic elements such as these can provide long-term benefits that can help a company meet aggressive growth schedules, weather tight economies, and address other business challenges. RFG thus believes WebSphere is generally the best choice for enterprise development projects. P.S- The middleware group study was partially funded by Microsoft and Robert Frances Group study was partially funded by IBM. | Thursday, October 28, 2004Adapt Your Supply Chain—or Die Via HBSWKUnless companies adapt their supply chains, they won’t stay competitive for very long. The secrets: trend spotting and supplier change - say, his Harvard Business Review article.Great companies don't stick to the same supply networks when markets or strategies change - such organizations keep adapting their supply chains so they can adjust to changing needs to build a sustainable advantage. In addition to unexpected changes in supply and demand, supply chains also face near-permanent changes in markets. Structural shifts owing to economic progress, political and social change, demographic trends, and technological advances force companies adapt their supply chains, to stay competitive.Lucent - Lucent twice woke up late to industry shifts, first to the rise of the Asian market and later to the advantages of outsourced manufacturing. Lucent recovered the first time, but the second time around, the company lost its leadership of the global telecommunications market because it didn't adapt quickly enough. The best supply chains identify structural shifts, sometimes before they occur, by capturing the latest data, filtering out noise, and tracking key patterns. They then relocate facilities, change sources of supplies, and, if possible, outsource manufacturing. HP - Hewlett-Packard set up both its R&D and manufacturing divisions in Vancouver, Washington for manufacturing pprinters. HP wanted the product development and production teams to work together because ink-jet technology was in its infancy, and the biggest printer market was in the United States. When demand grew in other parts of the world, HP set up manufacturing facilities in Spain and Singapore to cater to Europe and Asia. Although Vancouver remained the site where HP developed new printers, Singapore became the largest production facility because the company needed economies of scale to survive. By the mid-1990s, HP realized that printer-manufacturing technologies had matured and that it could outsource production to vendors completely. By doing so, HP was able to reduce costs and remain the leader in a highly competitive market. Companies that adapt supply chains when they modify strategies often succeed in launching new products or breaking into new markets. Microsoft - When Microsoft decided to enter the video game market, it chose to outsource hardware production to Singapore-based Flextronics. In early 2001, the vendor learned that the Xbox had to be in stores before December because Microsoft wanted to target Christmas shoppers. Flextronics reckoned that speed to market and technical support would be crucial for ensuring the product's successful launch. So it decided to make the Xbox at facilities in Mexico and Hungary and later to china helping Xbox to wrest 20% marketshare from Playstation 2. Smart companies tailor supply chains to the nature of markets for products. They usually end up with more than one supply chain, which can be expensive, but they also get the best manufacturing and distribution capabilities for each offering. Cisco - Cisco caters to the demand for standard, high-volume networking products by commissioning contract manufacturers in low-cost countries such as China. For its wide variety of mid-value items, Cisco uses vendors in low-cost countries to build core products but customizes those products itself in major markets such as the United States and Europe. For highly customized, low-volume products, Cisco uses vendors close to main markets, such as Mexico for the United States and Eastern European countries for Europe. Despite the fact that it uses three different supply chains at the same time, the company is careful not to become less agile. Because it uses flexible designs and standardized processes, Cisco can switch the manufacture of products from one supply network to another when necessary. Gap - Gap, too, uses a three-pronged strategy. Gap set up Old Navy's manufacturing and sourcing in China to ensure cost efficiency, Gap's chain in Central America to guarantee speed and flexibility, and Banana Republic's supply network in Italy to maintain quality. Toyota - Toyota was convinced that the market for the Prius, the hybrid car, would be different from that of other models because it embodied new technologies and was in its infancy. The Japanese automobile maker had expertise in tracking U.S. trends and geographical preferences, but it felt that it would be difficult to predict consumer response to a hybrid car. Besides, the Prius might appeal to particular consumer segments, such as technophiles and conservationists, which Toyota didn't know much about. Convinced that the uncertainties were too great to allocate the Prius to dealers based on past trends, Toyota decided to keep inventory in central stockyards. Dealers took orders from consumers and communicated them via the Internet. Toyota shipped cars from stockyards, and dealers delivered them to buyers. Although Toyota's transportation costs rose, it customized products to demand and managed inventory flawlessly. Building an adaptable supply chain requires two key components: the ability to spot trends and the capability to change supply networks. - Companies must retain the option to alter supply chains. To do that, they must do two things: • They must develop new suppliers that complement existing ones. • They must ensure that product design teams are aware of the supply chain implications of their designs. Designers must also be familiar with the three design-for-supply principles: commonality, postponement, and standardization. | Hollywood and Digital ContentRichard Hull of eContentmag writes abut, Film Industry Struggle with Digital Content. Excerpts :Almost a decade back, riddle of how Hollywood's content would merge with emerging digital technologies was dominant. The bigwigs at Microsoft made a bold march onto studio lots and proclaimed that they held the keys to the convergence kingdom. Yet in a short time, the two sides called a truce and returned to their respective corners, declaring that Hollywood would stick to content, while Microsoft would stick to technology.Content : Now for the first time in years, Hollywood's online ad spending is up.Typically a minimum of 5% of overall marketing budgets for a film are being allocated for online promotion, and this is expected to go up. While these numbers can't compete with budgets for television and print, they do indicate a steady improvement in Hollywood's attention to online audiences.For Hollywood content-makers, the Internet boils down to only two things—marketing and distribution. And each represents a double-edged sword.Rather than being an end-all, be-all…the Internet has become simply a piece of the marketing pie.Just as with movie marketing in general, Hollywood learned that some audiences respond to online marketing, and some don't."While studios struggle with using the Internet as a tool to create box office punch, many Hollywood content-makers feel that using it to develop and extend a brand is the real untapped power of the Internet.The Internet for Hollywood is about community. If you build a branded community that people can participate in, they'll come back over and over." Levey points to Hollywood film franchises such as Spiderman, Harry Potter, and Lord Of The Rings. The online communities for these types of franchises can be huge when they emulate the ‘water cooler' atmosphere, giving visitors the ability to chat and exchange ideas between installments of movie episodes. Branding is important - each movie's branded marketing assets—logos, artwork, photographs, movie clips, trailers, and the like—must be created on very short timelines. Digital management of these assets is even more cumbersome. Using INSCI's ActiveMedia digital asset management (DAM) software as its platform, Sony has created cineSHARE. cineSHARE is designed to move and share marketing materials and stock footage with post, print, finishing, and marketing houses,providing secure access to more than 20,000 assets, accessesible through the Web. Solutions like ActiveMedial together are wrapped up with a bow and become Sony's enterprise-wide solution. As a piece of this enterprise solution, cineSHARE enables access by producers, directors, lawyers, editors, and marketers alike to digital media from around the world and in all parts of the production cycle—digital dailies, location photos, head-shots, and production notes, among others. Because it is Web-based, collaboration can take place in near real time. Distribution : Legal online distribution of Hollywood's content to mainstream audiences appears confined to downloadable movie trailers and program clips. But, as the music industry has quickly discovered, things are changing…and fast. Whereas only a few years ago the download time for a full-length feature film was seven hours or more, widely used broadband connections have cut the time to less than one hour. A new study conducted by the Motion Picture Association of America and online research firm OTX reports that an astounding 58% of online users in South Korea—where 98% of the population has high-speed Internet access—have downloaded movies. Although the study claims that the number of Americans who have downloaded films is around 24%, the penetration of high-speed access for Americans hovers at only 46%.And this, 10 years after the start of "convergence," is where Hollywood and technology might be showing signs of becoming bedfellows. In addition to developing its electronic anti-piracy protection and digital rights management applications, Hollywood now seems willing to consider accepting the technology industry's latest overtures. Although each is wary of the other, there's no question that the ability to quickly and efficiently download a film opens Hollywood's content to all sorts of new platforms. This holiday season, Microsoft expects to debut its Portable Media Center, a handheld PDA capable of playing downloaded movies, music, and other recorded programming.If Hollywood indeed gets a handle on the piracy issue, the landscape is clearly moving rapidly towards allowing easily-downloadable, mainstream access to Hollywood content online. With distribution now set to be ingrained in the same medium that is currently seeing a resurgence in marketing attention, perhaps Hollywood will finally become focused enough to allow the two to work hand-in-hand online. It'll become imperative that DAM developers keep these Hollywood'ers supplied with fresh software (and strategies) that will allow them to quickly and consistently extend their properties and their brands online, and to do so in a way that safeguards the creative assets from unauthorized uses. And it'll be incumbent upon Hollywood to actually accept the use of this technology and leverage it to generate new revenue streams. | What commoditization means for IT spendingEd Sim , the well known venture capitalist writes on this topic -"The numbers are coming out, and it is clear we are moving to a low growth environment for corporate IT spending in terms of dollars spent. Companies spent too much in the 90s and are being cautious about how they spend their hard-earned cash. Total cash and savings for companies in the S&P 500 have doubled since 1999 and is equal to half a trillion dollars which means companies have added almost 300 billion dollars to their balance sheet in the last 5 years. While companies have so much more cash these days versus 5 years ago, they are spending roughly the same amount on IT.. After all there is a ton of cash out there and corporates have to invest the cash or give it back to shareholders. The funny thing is that the commoditization trend means that companies can do more with less. What that means is that companies can keep the same IT budget and accomplish the same amount or more without increasing their capital expenditures. Competitive forces make customer the king in negotitating better prices. Both of these factors obviously work against significant increases in IT spending. In fact, customers have so much power these days (and rightly so) that companies like GM are forcing vendors like Sun and Microsoft and Cisco and Microsoft to work together, to standardize and integrate with one another".Steve Lohr, writing in the New York Times writes about the IT market having matured and the industry enjoying the benefits of low cost computing. Robert Carter, CIO of fedex, points to that conclusion. "Technology is coming to us in much smaller bundles that cost a lot less," where budget is slightly more than $1 billion. "Our intent is to hold the line on I.T. spending and get more bang for the buck." The flat spending does not suggest any lack of enthusiasm for technology at FedEx, a sophisticated corporate user of technology. Mr. Carter reels off a series of projects for helping customers use the Web, e-mail alerts and wireless messages to track inbound and outbound packages, trim inventories and fine-tune operations. "The global interconnectedness and technology services available are growing at an unbelievable pace," he said. "We are at an inflection point in the adoption of these technologies." This theme of doing more with less continues to ring aloud with CIOs and technology arhitects. Many corporates are going through a fundamental rearchitecture of their systems to a service-oriented model, one that will take a number of years, but one in which startups will have plenty of opportunities to thrive even with flat to limited growth in IT spending. It would be great if corporations continue to grow their IT budgets. However,the great news is that new architectures and hardware equals lots of new software opportunities. There will be plenty of chances to make great investments in this environment. Norm Waite, writes,For large IT departments, of which R. Carter's at FedEx has to be a leading example, and for considering "chances to make great investments in this environment", the total spending is not a very interesting number because: (1) Some huge fraction for, say, people and leases, has to continue year after year with relatively little change. (2) The spending on PCs should be strange now because (A) there is not much reason to replace PCs quickly now and (B) replacement costs keep falling quickly. So, total numbers give little view of the opportunities for selling new products and services. Information technology can look like it is achieving "commoditization" if we look only at personal computing for small organizations, but for a large organization personal computing is usually only a small part of the whole and for the rest "commoditization" is not a very appropriate word. E.g., the whole picture would not much change if Dell sold their standard popular desktops and laptops for $10 each.Broadly there is a severe problem with the popular media in their remarks on information technology: Because the writers are users of personal computers, they assume that they have 'fingertip feel' for 'information technology' in large organizations; this assumption is inappropriate. At FedEx, CEO F. Smith's view from the beginning was to be a leader in exploitation of information technology; I doubt that he has changed that view at all. FedEx was a leader in computer-based fleet scheduling, exploitation of wireless (e.g., work of C. Brandon), computer-based package tracking and handling (e.g., work of M. Basch), their corporate digital communications network (e.g., work of R. Carter), and the Internet. The world of information technology moves on; I am sure that Smith will want FedEx to continue to make the best exploitations.Few CEOs are as ambitious about information technology as Smith; in being effective with such ambition, he is close to unique.Still, it is a rash CIO or CEO that will conclude that IT is a 'commodity', seek only to reduce IT spending keeping only the obvious essentials, and turn a deaf ear to solid proposals for high ROI. Really, the main challenge for all concerned is just good ideas, ones that clearly offer high ROI. With such ideas, anyone involved would be foolish to say "Great idea, but it doesn't fit the budget." There is plenty of cash on the corporation balance sheets, in the VC 'overhang', etc. Again, the main bottleneck is just the good ideas. | Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!David A. Wheeler, the well known expert on systems programming, security and author of several technical books publishes a blog as well. David has come with a massive paper on opensource/freesource software covering market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, total cost of ownership and a well written background note on the origins, development and adaptation of the open source movement. This is a well researched and well wriiten paper that all open source enthusiasts and IT service professionals must read. The conclusions that David arrives at about using opensource is indeed insightful -it reads, " OSS/FS has significant market share in many markets, is often the most reliable software, and in many cases has the best performance. OSS/FS scales, both in problem size and project size. OSS/FS software often has far better security, perhaps due to the possibility of worldwide review. Total cost of ownership for OSS/FS is often far less than proprietary software, especially as the number of platforms increases. These statements are not merely opinions; these effects can be shown quantitatively, using a wide variety of measures. This doesn’t even consider other issues that are hard to measure, such as freedom from control by a single source, freedom from licensing management (with its accompanying risk of audit and litigation), Organizations can transition to OSS/FS in part or in stages, which for many is a far more practical transition approach.Realizing these potential OSS/FS benefits may require approaching problems in a different way. This might include using thin clients, deploying a solution by adding a feature to an OSS/FS product, and understanding the differences between the proprietary and OSS/FS models. Acquisition processes may need to change to include specifically identifying OSS/FS alternatives, since simply putting out a “request for proposal” may not yield all the viable candidates. OSS/FS products are not the best technical choice in all cases, of course; even organizations which strongly prefer OSS/FS generally have some sort of waiver process for proprietary programs. However, it’s clear that considering OSS/FS alternatives can be beneficial". |Google may have set the pace for searching information, but Yahoo! may be setting the pace for new ways of serving information!( Via CBS Marketwatch) Mary Meeker, sees money in blogs.Morgan Stanley's Internet analyst says the hottest things on the Web now are RSS, blogs and Yahoo.In a new research report, Mary Meeker writes that the inclusion of syndicated news feeds -- known as RSS, as in "rich site summary" or "really simple syndication" -- in Yahoo's My Yahoo page is playing a key role in driving blog readership and RSS usage. More readers translate into more advertising revenue opportunities, she reasons.Ultimately, Meeker wonders whether Yahoo could "accept smaller payments for access to certain content" and split the fees with blog publishers. Inserting ads into syndicated news feeds, as Weblogs Inc. has begun doing with Engadget, is another option, she said. We believe Internet usage should continue to grow rapidly (20-30% annually for the next few years) as broadband usage continues to grow and as content providers continue to ramp their creativity and increase user engagement. Monetization of the usage—driven by improvements in advertising tools and targeting and integration of onlinepayment systems—should rise at an even faster rate (30%+). We see the potential for next-generation content to positively affect Internet leaders including Yahoo!, Google and eBay as they leverage their distribution channels and/or content and services. In general, we believe ongoing improvements in the following areas will be important to watch: 1) search; 2) personalization; 3) user-generated content (including blogs, reviews, images and audio); 4) music; 5) short- and long-form video; and 6) accessibility (including mobile devices and the PC desktop). Net, we are moving nicely down a path toward every Internet user, in effect, having a personal media server… and if Yahoo! has its way, My Yahoo! will be the front-end to the server. The full report is available here. | EDS offers early retirement to U.S. staffersInfoworld reported, Electronic Data Systems Corp- ( EDS) offered voluntary early retirement options to about 9,200, or 17 percent, of its U.S. employees, as part of its ongoing efforts to reduce costs. EDS Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Jordan said last month the company plans to eliminate between 15,000 and 20,000 jobs over the next two years as part of an effort to slash $3 billion in costs.An EDS spokeswoman said the company is taking steps to prevent problems related to losing older workers. EDS has succession plans in place across the organization and the retirement offer excludes certain employees, such as some government account workers with high security clearances. Employees in the AT Kearney consulting wing and most workers on the General Motors account also are ineligible. In addition, the retirements will be staggered through Sept. 30, 2005, "to ensure service quality is maintained," EDS said in a statement Tuesday. Some big churn is definitely happening in the IT professional services market. Yesterday we covered the rise of India based outsourcing companies the rise of India based outsourcing companies giving a tough time to the global professional service organisations. |Nominations Open For the Best Software Essays of 2004Nominations are open for the Best Software Essays of 2004 The papers selected here shall become part of a book on this theme. The best software essays published anywhere -- on the web or in print during 2004 shall be considered for nomination and the book shall be titled -"Joel on Software" in honour of Joel. More details are available here. |Google buys satellite image firm Keyhole( Via News.com)Google announces the acquisition of satellite image firm Keyhole . Google, one of first of the truly Web companies, is increasingly a Windows-Web company.Consider: - In July, Google acquired Picasa, a digital photo management company. The application only runs on Windows PCs. - Google's Desktop Search application, launched earlier this month, is Windows-only. - Today, the company announced it had acquired Keyhole , which does digital mapping in amazing ways. All these run on Windows platform. Keyhole, founded in 2001, offers software that lets Internet users view geographic images collected from satellites and airplanes. The technology relies on a multiterabyte database of mapping information. The software gives users the ability to zoom in from space level; in some cases, it can zoom in all the way to a street-level view. The company does not have high-resolution imagery for the entire globe, but its Web site offers a list of cities that are available for more detailed viewing. The company has focused most on covering large metropolitan areas in the United States and is working to expand its coverage. The software lets viewers tilt and rotate an image. Users can also search for information such as the locations of hotels, parks, ATMs and subways. Given Microsoft's monopoly status, it's almost impossible to compete with Microsoft without simultaneously boosting the monopoly. Lets hope that Google is not abandoning its Web roots. But its increasing Windows-centricity, at least on the desktop, sends an unfortunate message to Mac and Linux users -- and to those who believe in diversity and open standards. Also ironic is the fact that Google search servers are all Linux Based yet the end user products they seem to have in line are only WinTel. The fact that Google is making windows only products surprises many. One of the great things about the Google search engine is its simple interface and the fact that you can use it from any computer on any platform with a web browser. | Digital infrastructure must get smarter(Via Dan Farber)Keynoting at the Digital ID World conference, VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos outlined how the move toward digital infrastructure, like the build out of railroad, power grids and telephone networks before it, almost went off the rails during the frenzy of the dotcom boom, survived the bust and has now emerged as the driver of economic growth and societal transformation. "About a decade into every build out, it almost goes off the rails," Sclavos said. "There is such a rush, and it gets swamped. You can't support both a massive amount of usage and the complexity introduced. An intelligence layer gets built on top." For the digital world, the challenge is dealing with from 50- to 200-percent growth rates in Internet users, broadband, ecommerce, and wireless access.The railroads used the telegraph to provide intelligence (operators could signal ahead about incoming traffic), aviation got air traffic control systems and the telephone SS7 networks. Digital infrastructure needs intelligence built in to drive further innovation. Sclavos identifies strong authentication and identity management as a foundation for leveraging the digital infrastructure. It's not an insignificant problem. Internet users have an average of 17 passwords, which cost about $85 each to replace when lost or scammed. Most users are more willing to give up vital information about their online identity than to enter their credit card info for an ecommerce transaction. Identity theft will impact an estimated 10 million users in 2005. With RFID, hundreds of millions of products have IDs, which will result in trillions of lookups per day (currently VeriSign does 14 billion DNS lookups per day), requiring trace-and-track mechanisms to deal with supply chain management, Sclavos said.Identity management–including authentication and authorization–is tightly bound to the issue of security and regulatory compliance. Security is a race between good guys and bad guys that has no end point, Sclavos said. It's a game of leapfrog. "If you look at infrastructure build outs, guess who follows the money–criminals. Every time the economy moves, so do the crooks," Sclavos said. |Wednesday, October 27, 2004The Rise & Fall Of A Dot Com PioneerIn the 18 months since Andrew “Flip” Filipowski’s watched as his high-tech incubator-turned-integrator, Divine Interventures Inc., was sold in pieces at a bankruptcy auction, he has regained several of his former companies, created a new entity—— SilkRoad Technologies ,an enterprise blogging and CMS company ——and found new challenges and success in North Carolina. Filipowski, an iconoclastic sort who was often described by his appearance——sporting a pony tail and Hawaiian shirts——had wowed the high-tech world through his use of strategic alliances and acquisitions to build an integrated software company——Platinum Technologies, Inc.——guide its growth for 12 years and then sell it in 1999 to former rival Computer Associates for $3.5 billion.And since the Divine bankruptcy sale in May 2003,he appears to have done well.“He has this core of people that he worked with since he started Platinum,” said Darcy Evon, the executive director of corporate relations and international studies in the development department of the Illinois Institute of Technology who has chronicled the Divine saga as former owner of I-Street.“There’s a huge loyalty factor in all of Flip’s relationships, not all, obviously, because some people burned him and he burned others,” Evon said. “But if you get to be his friend, you’re usually his friend for life.” Irrepressible indeed!| Outsourcing Realities: Time to Stop WhiningEdward Yourdon, well known consultant, author and lecturer has recently published a book, “Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race”, writes in the Editorials and Opinion section of the Software Development Times focussing on white-collar jobs, particularly IT jobs that IT workers in the west should stop whining about loss of opportunities due to offshoring and focus on reskilling and upgradation of knowlegde. He adds,"Information technology was the first of the white-collar industries to have experienced offshore outsourcing, but the phenomenon has now spread to call centers, help desks, tax processing, mortgage approvals, medical technicians and a long list of other knowledge-based professions. Yourdon tells IT professionals -Stop whining. Stop waiting for someone else to solve the problem. Take charge of your own jobs, your own career and your own future. Yes, of course tax loopholes should be eliminated to provide fair competition and level playing field for offshore work, just as we have done in various blue-collar industries. We should ensure that offshoring of knowledge-based work doesn’t create security problems and privacy problems. But that’s not going to eliminate the offshore-outsourcing phenomenon; at most, it will simply slow things down a little. Proof - Auto industry, Steel industry and Textile industry.But there are some key differences between the IT industry and the blue-collar industries that first started moving overseas 20 to 30 years ago. Our knowledge-based industries are not going to be wiped out, or reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves: None of the serious economic forecasts suggests that 60 percent, or 80 percent or 100 percent of IT jobs are going to move to India and China. Instead, the predictions are that 10 percent to 20 percent of IT jobs will move elsewhere. While the loss of 10 percent to 20 percent of IT-related jobs would indeed have a significant impact on the overall national economy (assuming that such jobs were not replaced by other, economically equivalent jobs), the personal impact of such a scenario is fundamentally different than it was for the auto workers, steel workers and textile workers a decade or two ago. In a Darwinian world, the same is unfortunately true for the hard-working, well-meaning veterans in that vulnerable 10 percent to 20 percent economic bracket: They’re not “entitled” to jobs if there is an alternative supply of lower-cost, higher-quality, higher-productivity people. Understading how one can add consistent value to enterprise, learning new skills/toolsets, are ways of insuring against being rated redundant.You need to understand how your “economic value” is determined by your employer, vis-à-vis alternatives from India. It’s trivial to determine that your salary is four times higher than an Indian programmer with equivalent education and experience, but is your productivity four times higher? Is your defect rate four times lower? Is your “value” four times higher because of your specialized knowledge of your company’s undocumented business processes? Do you have detailed, quantitative metrics with which to make a credible cost-benefit calculation that demonstrates your superior value to the employer? Will your employer respond in an objective, rational fashion if you present such economic figures?Several outsourcing decisions may be taken out of poor judgement and for other reasons - a few of them may fail and a few may meet the objectives.The high-tech boom of the 1990s masked the growth of the Indian IT industry, but now that we’re in a situation where supply exceeds demand, it’s no surprise that employers are looking for what they perceive to be the best source of cheap, productive, high-quality labor. Yourdon states the realities of IT offshoring in a manner that is direct, easily understandable digestible, for the apprehensive IT employee. | Infosys, Outsourcing –Next FrontiersJohn Heilemann writes in Business 2.0 - Accenture and IBM,Watch your back, Infosys is racing ahead . Excerpts:Nilekani's consulting gambit exhibits both in abundance. It's based on a premise that Infosys's outsourcing model is not only a cheaper mousetrap but also a better one. "Like Dell , l Wal-Mart , we've created a genuine business-model innovation," he says. "We've created a new way of organizing workers without regard to distance." Having firmly established Infosys's back-end credibility in code writing and system integration, Nilekani sees the front end -- consulting and services -- as its next frontier. "It's like Wal-Mart getting into groceries or Dell getting into printers," he says. "On top of our global delivery model, we're adding these new capabilities at the point of customer contact." On competition - The incumbent IT services giants face a rocky road themselves. "They have the relationships and domain knowledge," he says, "but their delivery models are obsolete. For them the challenge is to retool, to adapt to our model, to take costs out of their supply chains. And we think that transition will be more painful for them than ours will be for us." Nilekani may be right about that, but Infosys has more than one transition on its hands. In India, where the company has long had the pick of the litter when it comes to hiring engineers -- every year Infosys receives an astonishing 1 million job applications -- competition for talent is intensifying and wages are rising. At the same time, countries such as Russia and China are likely to emerge as players in the worldwide tech economy, undercutting India as a provider of low-cost engineering. Finally, there's the possibility that this year's outsourcing controversy in the United States was only a mild preview of a full-scale backlash to come -- one that could include protectionist measures designed to kneecap Infosys and its compatriots. Infosys's chances of turning into the kind of dynamo Nilekani has in mind looks high. It's not merely the company's history that makes me think so, or even its CEO's manifest strengths as strategist and leader. Instead it boils down to tidal forces that are destined to transform tech. With the cost of communications falling constantly, IT software and services will become truly global markets. (As Nilekani puts it, "We're on the verge of a global supply chain, whether it's for products or people.") And India, with its educated, English-speaking labor pool, will become one of the world's major IT powers. Given all this, it seems to me that Infosys is simply on the right side of history. I can't think of a company better situated to capitalize on these changes now unfolding. I would think that the same factors hold good for the other India based IT majors like TCS , Wipro and Satyam , as they have laid out distinctive plans to capitalize on the circumstances in India and the opportunities globally. Fortune's David Kirkpatrick covering Infosys and its CEO Nandan. Excerpts: Nilekani believes his company's move into consulting foreshadows a transformation that will remake the entire global industry. "We think the future is building a foundation of global delivery and combining that with world-class consulting skills," he says. The new consultants, for example, will work with customers to remake a company's supply chain with a more intelligent application of IT. "But because the execution is done in India they can spend more time and thought on the business problem," he says, referring to the much lower costs available to companies that take advantage of Indian programmers. "So we can deliver superior value." Nilekani has formulated a new acronym for what he thinks his company is practicing—the Global Delivery Model, or GDM, by which he means considering any country or region fair game for sourcing work. He explains: "People are realizing that outsourcing is a genuine business innovation. It's a smarter way of delivering value by leveraging workforces all over the world. Today, fine, this is predominantly in India. But it could be in any part of the world." "GDM has been made possible by technology and process. The world has gotten wired," he says. But he also notes that Indian outsourcing firms like his did something akin to what Japanese automakers did in the 1950s. While W. Edwards Deming developed his theories about manufacturing and quality in the U.S., it was companies such as Toyota that first took him seriously. Now look who leads the global industry. Nilekani says Infosys and several other Indian software firms similarly adopted U.S. ideas about how to write software of demonstrable quality consistently and with crystal-clear documentation. Many of these techniques had not received sufficient attention from American software and services companies. Nilekani concedes that Indian firms had to be better in order to get in the customer's door. "We have brought in superior predictability of output along with the cost benefits," he says. "We bring the project in on time. You can go to sleep at night." He claims Infosys already has more knowledge about business processes than any of its Indian competitors. "Operational excellence is not a commodity—it's a differentiator. Look at Dell, or Wal-Mart. Ten years ago they weren't into groceries, or gas. They have a business model which is efficient, to which they can add new product lines." "Incumbents like IBM or Accenture have all the consulting stuff but very little GDM," he explains. "Their challenge is to reach the same endgame. But think of the structural problems—they have to rebalance their entire global workforce, which causes intense conflict internally. The more they recruit in India the more disquiet it causes in their existing employee base. "It's not that I have to get that big. My customers just have to know that the opportunity exists. I have a lot of customers who also have long-standing relations with the incumbents. Now they're going back to them and saying you have to give me that same deal that Infosys is giving me." | India Inc. Is Growing Twice as Fast as Japan Inc.The US/IT Analyst View( Via AMR Research ) : India Inc. is Twice as Fast as Japan Inc - Erik Keller, Research Fellow, AMR Research and Ex Vice President, Gartner, Enterprise Software Group writes, Japan Inc. took almost 30 years to obtain a strong position in key U.S. industries, such as Automotive and Consumer Electronics. It will take half as long for India Inc. to do the same for service -oriented industries with IT leading the charge. The term India Inc.,an embodiment of the new competition arising from India in IT and other service areas. For manufacturers, this has a similar resonance of Japan Inc., a term that came about in the 1970s as Japan attacked key U.S. manufacturing industries, including Automotive, Steel, and Consumer Electronics. Many U.S. and European companies continue to underestimate the impact of India Inc. and have not made the needed changes to their business and employment models. The fastest change is occurring with the major software vendors that have moved much of their core product development to India. For example, nearly all of SAP’s BW product development and much of NetWeaver resides in India. Oracle and PeopleSoft have accelerated deployment of Research and Development (R&D) and support resources in India; Oracle has more than 6,400 people now employed in India and plans to have nearly 10,000 by the end of 2005. Some companies, such as Kana, have taken an extreme view and have sent all R&D to India. Venture capitalists require that any startup have a plan and capability to deploy R&D in India. While technology-oriented companies have embraced offshoring, most end-user organizations continue to be cautious about how much and how fast they can offshore IT operations. In the next few years, however, their internal IT cost models will prove too high and force them to change.Like Japan Inc., one of the initial attractions of India Inc. is low-cost labor. Ironically, India offers lower cost labor than Japan ever did, but higher quality than is delivered by many companies today. This paradox is not readily understood and is why many U.S. and European companies continue to ignore the potential of India Inc. Indian software companies hold the highest number of Level 4 and 5 Software Engineering Institute-Capability Maturity Model certifications, which is the software equivalent of Six Sigma certification for defects in manufacturing.Along with this enhanced quality comes enhanced delivery of value. The perception that India is only capable of low-cost, tactical work is as true as the false perception that the Japanese cars of the 1980s were cheap U.S. knockoffs. The establishment of low-cost offshore delivery centers in India for traditional IT service providers / Systems Integrators (SIs) is well underway, as are business processing outposts for all the services industries (Financial, Telecommunications, Legal, Engineering, etc.).And unlike many of their U.S. and European counterparts, upwards of 50% of all SI/ Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) jobs are profitably taken with a fixed price bid. The high stock price of many Indian offshoring companies, as well as pre-tax margins in excess of 20%, illustrate that these companies have management expertise and execution quality. The availability of inexpensive and reliable network and computing technology implies that any job or task that does not require the physical presence of a person can be sent offshore. India followed by others, is creating a sophisticated pool of highly specialized and educated workers who have shown the ability and willingness to deliver high-quality, low-cost work. Using many of Japan Inc.’s techniques of continuous improvement, quality circles, and process innovation, India Inc.’s 30% annual growth in IT services is being replicated in other service industries. U.S. and European companies need to reevaluate their worldwide employment models to ensure that they can benefit from India Inc. rather than be consumed by it. U.S. automakers and consumer electronics firms ignored Japan Inc. for decades until it was too late to recover; IT and other service providers do not have nearly as much time to recover from a similar misjudgment. The Indian industry view about this development:( Via The Hindu BusinessLine): Across every industry spectrum, there is potential for knowledge work to relocate to India - G.B.Prabhat of Satyam , argues that India would soon become a hot favourite work destination for foreigners. As India grows as a centre for knowledge work, exciting times are ahead, not only in terms of a broad spectrum of knowledge work coming here, but also in foreign nationals opting to work out of India. This trend is clearly visible across sectors, says G.B. Prabhat, Director, Enterprise Business Solutions, Satyam Computer Services. "Across every industry spectrum — pharmaceuticals, market research, IT, or even manufacturing — there is potential for knowledge work to relocate to India," he says. When knowledge work relocates in small chunks there is little attraction for a foreign workforce to relocate to India. But when this happens on a much larger scale, many foreigners will face the prospect of either relocating to India or losing their jobs. There are already foreigners who are specifically asking for positions in India "because they see the future being here. They know that eventually India will provide them with everything that the western world gives them now, plus more if they are lucky. So they're asking for jobs here," says Prabhat. On why foreign nationals would want to work out of India, Prabhat says, "The worldview they are all adopting is that all manufacturing will, in some manner or the other, eventually centre around China, and India will clearly take the lead in information flow. They believe there is a long-term future in industries relating to information flow, which will also involve knowledge work. Given our educational infrastructure, English-speaking ethos and the bias towards intellectual work in India, there is no choice but to relocate here." And in this phenomenon, clearly the early birds will derive a greater advantage. And, in many ways, foreigners opting to work out of India will also get a higher quality of life at a much lower price. "For one thing, they will not be spending much time on menial tasks of the day which can be done by domestic help here. They're also looking at larger, more spacious houses and increased material comforts in what they can buy. But what they cannot buy are the roads, electric supply, etc, but these will improve," he says. Indophiles, while getting ecstasic,about these developments need to be well prepared as Thomas Friedman pointed out in New York Times article, Making India Shine ,which we covered earlier. A few days back we covered in this blog, Offshoring in reverse saying, India Headquartered software companies are hiring US nationals for top jobs and how well the trend is entrenched and seen to be a success. The effects of globalisation beginning to touch professional lives is there for everyone to see. | RFID and Barcodes shall coexist !!This brief article in VNUNET says, Potential adopters of radio frequency identification (RFID) spend too much time speculating about the arrival of cheaper tags when they should be evaluating the business benefits of the technology, Gartner has warned."RFID technology holds exciting opportunities for almost every business, But rather than ask at what price does RFID become effective, retailers should identify if a specific business case exists for the technology in their business based on today's price."The use of RFID to improve efficiency of data flow across global supply chains could be one of the most significant developments in business strategy since companies first recognised the importance of information flow.Companies will go through a two-phase adoption of RFID, predicts Gartner. The first - the creation of RFID-enabled business processes, using RFID within the context of existing business processes - is expected to achieve only "marginal benefits".However, the second phase, when companies adopt RFID-centric business processes, involving a radical re-engineering of business processes, has the potential to deliver substantial enhancements, according to the analyst, Stephen Smith.A word of caution - "RFID technology and the business benefits it promises will not arrive with a big bang," "High capital costs, imperfect read rates, unproven systems and uncertainty around standards will all need to be addressed before retailers can adopt and benefit from the technology. This means that, over the next 10 years, retailers will continue to use barcodes and gradually introduce RFID tagging, creating an environment of co-existence."There are conflicting problems with assembling low-cost tags. Vendors are currently unable to resolve the paradox that they must work to reduce the size of the chip to reduce costs, when this process itself actually increases production expenses. Passive tags today cost from 40 cents to $10. Active tags usually start at $4 to $5, increasing to hundreds of dollars. By 2009 the most competitive RFID tags will cost 20 cents, predicts Gartner. Net-net, RFID and Barcodes shall co-exist for some more time. | Tuesday, October 26, 2004Google helps promote Windows XP via InfoworldJoris Evers of Infoworld writes, Google's Deskbar is included in Microsoft's Partner Pack for Windows, a collection of Microsoft and third-party products released last week that Microsoft describes on its Web site as "the ultimate application package" for a Windows XP PC. The Deskbar adds a search box to the Windows taskbar, allowing users to search the Web with Google without having to start a Web browser.Joris wanted to know how Microsoft could seemingly promote Google technology while competing against it. Joe Wilcox,Jupiter Research analyst offers this explanation. . Microsoft's biggest challenge right now is promoting Windows XP's capabilities. JupiterResearch views XP's adoption as modest, at best, with most businesses still running older versions of the operating system and most households running XP and/or another Windows version. Over the last couple months, Microsoft has stepped up XP evangelism, in part by showing the capability of partner products that extend the operating system’s capabilities. The products available with the Partner Pack are consistent with that approach.At the same time, the MSN division, which brings a fraction of what Windows Client contributes to Microsoft revenues, is looking to expand its search capabilities in competition to Google and Yahoo!. It makes sense that Microsoft would choose to promote competing Google technologies. After all, Windows is Microsoft’s cash cow and most valued asset. And like many other Microsoft competitors, Google also is a valued partner. Notice that Google’s recent desktop search utility, while competing with MSN search capabilities coming in the future, runs only on Windows. So, Microsoft has as much reason to promote Google technology as compete with it.The apparent contradictory behavior with respect to Google illustrates a much bigger Microsoft problem. The company has evolved from a strictly platform provider into one that also offers applications. Increasingly, the approach puts Microsoft in competition with partners providing valuable technologies for the Windows platform. Google is a classic example of a partner-competitor. While the MSN Search folks may be in hot competition with Google, for the Windows platform Google is a valuable partner. Hence, Microsoft’s apparent contradictory behavior, where executives publicly target Google as a search competitor, while the software giant promotes its competitors’ technology in the Partner Pack. The platforms and applications businesses as creating unnecessary conflict between Microsoft and its partners, a situation that makes Linux more appealing than Windows to some developers. Windows succeeded because third parties could make money on the platform. That is not as sure a prospect when Microsoft’s applications business competes with its platform developers’ products. | Depot Goes Digital - Bob Nardelli's Approach and VisionBob Nardelli is managing a $2 billion technology transformation of Home Depot. The transformation is so insightful and full of detail, we shall publish some selective excerpts that appeared in Chief Executive magazine in two parts. This is Part 1 of the series.On Understanding and High Level Technology Vision Push - When I got here, it was important to really be a dry sponge and kind of immerse myself into the business. You know what you know from a leadership standpoint. That’s probably 75 percent of the job. But the other 25 percent you’ve got to absorb. I always felt it’s incumbent on the CEO to be on a vertical learning curve. Bob Says, He saw a lot of labor, a lot of tasking going on. It was a little bit like the adage, “When in doubt, add a body.” The example I always use about the inability to do emails. I walked through the store and I saw people manually doing inventory, counting boxes.I walked into receiving and I saw data entry, bills of lading and invoices. So what I saw within the four walls of the business was a tremendous amount of human intervention. And I knew that it was ripe for the opportunity then to take that valuable resource through digitization, and reapply it to sales. This is not about digitization for elimination. This is about digitization for reapplication. I’m getting more pull than push through communication and demonstration that would ever be envisioned for pushing the technology. On self-checkout - That’s 40 to 60 hours that can be shifted to the selling floor, as opposed to tasking. We’ve gone out and done some benchmarking, for example, with UPS. And you look at finger bar code readers. And you look at the ability to get certified receiving. You look at bar coding for inventory taking, if you look at perpetual inventory replenishment. Those are all huge opportunities. Bob Nardelli says, For all the productivity we’ve delivered in the past three years, we have the ability to deliver that much more. So you should feel good about where we are positioned, relative to productivity and earnings per share and cost leverage, because we’ve got that much more opportunity in front of us.” We’re only touching the mega-platforms right now. We’ve implemented PeopleSoft, and I don’t know another company that flipped the switch like we did last month on SAP, on the full suite. We closed the (financials for the) month of June, right out of the box. We have an opportunity in logistics and in supply-chain management, we have the opportunity in merchandising. There hardly is a place in the business where we can’t use existing technology. I kind of kiddingly say we’re taking a major leap to the present. For some retailers, it’s old hat. For Wal-Mart to have point-of-sale, to be able then, at the register, to regenerate inventory replenishment, is something we’re moving to. On How the team was put together with the skill sets needed to undertake this technology revolution - A. It wasn’t like I showed up cold. I knew we had to change our approach to information technology. We were somewhat of a deli counter: first in, first out. We really didn’t prioritize the return on investment relative to our overall operating strategy. We needed some mega-platforms. At the same time, we needed some kind of quick hits, so that we could show the legitimacy of what we’re doing, because people had been disappointed here in what IT delivered. So we immediately said we need to get somebody best in class. We need somebody who’s been there, done that. We needed somebody with a lot of scar tissue, who had been seasoned, who was used to dealing with mega-volume, i.e., Bob DeRodes from Delta and Citibank. Sometimes you put people in a job to grow them. Sometimes you put people on the job to grow the job. Bob, in his own right had his own revolution going on at Delta, really changing the culture, changing the expectation, raising the bar on accountability and one creating business pull versus IT push. On The Approach: - Then what you want is somebody who can do architectural design at the mega-platform level, so the sum of the systems plug together, so that the sequence of implementation is right. It doesn’t do any good to create a system and then find out that the data flow that goes into it is not clean or is not automated. We did a lot of mapping on this.Then Bob started to very systematically bring in best in class again. We scoured the globe to bring in these individuals who have proven track records. In some cases, they were chief information officers themselves in smaller business but were excited about joining a bigger business whose leadership team embraced information technology. On getting straight answers: I hope we have created an environment here where the unvarnished truth can come out and we can deal with an issue honestly, up front and in a constructive manner. It’s only when you hide those things from each other and the business that you have these major conflicts. So I think this integrative process, these program reviews, these project reviews, the visibility to project status (red, yellow, green) not only from a financial standpoint, but from a tasking standpoint, has all been healthy for us. So the overall technological transformation is working?- A. I think it’s working extremely well. We have legitimatized technology at the Home Depot. If you read the book The Ten Deadly Sins of K-Mart, and I’m not pointing a finger, one of the biggest sins is technology aversion. To a certain degree, we had that within the company. We thought we didn’t need technology, we were better than that, we could overcome it with passion and energy.” What we’re finding is we want passion and energy and technology to really be competitive in today’s world. Is it without angst? Is it without moments of anxiety? Are there not moments of confrontation? No. But my business compass tells me we’re headed in the right direction, and that we are building credibility and capability as we go along. The issue now is, going faster. Customer survey data has shaped everything we have done. The customer said, “ we love Home Depot. You have more convenient locations by a factor of two than your nearest competitor. We love what you’re doing on store modernization—cleaner, brighter, more navigable stores. Get me out faster.” We now have over 800 stores plus with self-checkout, with over 30 percent customer utilization and 40-some percent reduction in queue time. Then we went to the cordless scan gun. You get the pro customer out faster, because you don’t have to unload the cart and reload the cart. The cashier is no longer tied to a cord, and it’s not only cordless scan guns, but it’s two-way. In other words, they can actually see on a screen what’s showing up on the cashier screen. It’s not a dumb trigger. So, No. 1, we get them out faster. No. 2, ergonomically, it’s a home run. Associates aren’t bending over, picking up bags of concrete. They’re not pulling off sheetrock. Third, it’s a big help on shrink (inventory loss). The accuracy of, you know, you got ten sheets of dry wall, two sheets of OBS, you’ve got two by fours … before, the cashier was kind of counting, running back, push it in. So our shrink has improved It was a lot of investment. We installed 5,000 miles of cable, 90,000 devices last year. Now we’re working our way from front to back, from customer to back room. So that’s why we’re working on back-end automation receiving, automated receiving. . Now what we want to do is digitize the internals of the store, introducing scanning into receiving, so that we can get certified receiving, so that we can get accuracy and speed. If I have certification on the back, I got POS on the front. I now can do automatic replenishment. We are aiming for the Wal-Mart model. On RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Devices): - Wal-Mart’s using, and I was thinking, Before I can use it, I have to have the store wired to be able to read the RFID. That’s an emerging technology. If it works, we shall be there. . Part II shall be published shortly. | Depot Goes Digital - Bob Nardelli's Approach and Vision -Part IIEarlier we published Part 1 of the excerpts from Chief Executive. Here is the second and final part:On Data Mining - Bob says, today’s retailers can tell you at five or six o’clock in the morning what they sold by department, by category, by class. I can’t get that right now. I can get it, I can’t get it as quickly as I may need it to make more timely decisions. And our merchants down there, are somewhat handicapped, that’s No. 1. No. 2 is that we are still doing our whiteboard “planograms” manually. It would not be uncommon to go into a store and they got 25 toilet seats, and then they’re looking at the price points, and they’re trying to do product line reviews, and pricing reviews. They’re way too manual there.So the next big megaplatform in this company is going to be a retail platform that’s going to give my merchants and my stores the ability to do this much more seamlessly and much more quickly and accurately. Price changes are still way too manual. Coming back to the technology, the data mining has the potential to tell you what to put on the shelves and how to price it, right -we tend to get macro numbers, and you’ve really got to drill down to get the store, the district and the region.This ability to do data mining will be an unbelievable tool for our merchants. It’s going to take a couple of years to get there. On new roles for people :- We’ll be able to reapply human capital to other areas. Just like we do in the store, we’ll be able to put more people on new categories, new trends, new marketing approaches, new merchandising presentation, and all that. The customer will see the benefit of this because we’ll continue to enrich the merchandising mix in the stores. If you looked at the facts, we went from $48 an average ticket (sales receipt) to $55 the end of the first quarter. That’s not an accident. That’s by bringing distinctive and innovative merchandising. We may be able to get innovative merchandise certified, answered, distributed, priced, shelved, much quicker, through automatic planogramming, through an overall merchandising program, so that we know what goes in and what goes out. Our strategy is pretty clear. What we’re trying to do with our technological innovation is to become much more market-focused and customer-centric. Efforts on inventory and supply chain management. Right now, it’s very manual. The model that was built was “full truck load to the store.” The more you brought, the more it would force you to sell, because you kind of get jammed. The old adage in the book was “stack it high and watch it fly.” But customers are looking for a different shopping experience. They’re looking for less intimidation. They’re looking for more orderliness. On Using technology to break the full-truckoad mentality down to less than a truckload? A Two things. We recently realigned our current logistics operation and took it from a function into the operations. So now our VP of operations runs the logistics centers we have today. Again, they were totally decentralized with different policies, different practices. We’re now bringing visibility to fill rates. We’re now bringing visibility to accuracy. We’re now bringing some order and accountability to our inventory. That’s Point 1. Part 2 is,we want to be $100 billion company. But it’s not a $100 billion company of the past, where you basically had a single channel to market, the orange box (Home Depot stores). Now we have Home Depot supply we’ve created. We’ve got at home services. We’ve got B to B. We’ve got government. We’ve got online. So what we’re seeing is a multi-dimensional logistic system that has to be in place to support, minimally, $100 billion plus business. I want to make sure that the systems I develop support the business I want to have when I get there. And that probably is going to be a combination of central distribution, probably have the ability to ship direct, to fulfill call, click or visit orders. On how getting logistics right would help the business - If we get the logistics thing right, The most precious thing in the world—additional square footage in the store can be optimally used. Today, I may have four faces. That means I may have four of the same items, because there is a minimum on reorder quantities. If I get efficiencies in the logistics system, I go to two faces. If you think about that collectively across the store, it’s like getting 10 percent more square footage for either more mix within the category, or new categories. That is a home run, to be able to bring new categories in the store, to be responsive with emerging megatrends. The technology piece of the logistics challenge - It’s sales times square footage, times margin. What you want to have is the ability to use a system almost as a rheostat (similar to a Humistat) and dial in market preferences, square footage, times sales, times margin. You bring a level of sophistication that we try to introduce now manually. I think we could do better because we’ll be able to do it faster, more accurately. We’ll take some emotion out of it, not all. Retail is emotion. But we’ll be able to get at it faster, a lot faster. I would say my goal is to be more on parity with technology evolution with some of these other guys like Target and Wal-Mart. But We've got some catching up to do. A very insightful, dynamic transformation story and provides a glimpse of the thinking pattern of this once top notch GE executive. | Firefox taking offI was pleasently surprised to see firefox at 30% browsershare in my log and IE 6 AT 60% and the remaining 5% taken by Mozilla,Netscape and Opera. In support of Firefox- Firefox seems to really taking off. This link is for the planned NYTimes Firefox campaign, co sponsored by 800ceoread Blog.| Asian Health Care's IT Injection Shows World Leadership In InnovationBusinessweek has come with an excellent article titled, Asian Health Care's IT Injection shows its potential to lead the world in such innovation . One of the big worries among American information-technology executives is that the U.S. is in danger of losing its edge as other countries, especially in Asia, build up their high-tech infrastructure and leapfrog past the West. Indeed, in some areas the question isn't whether the U.S. is going to fall behind, but whether it can catch up. In lecommunications. Measured in sheer number of cellular users, the U.S. lost its No.1 position years ago to China, which now has more than 300 million people chatting on their mobile phones. That's understandable. There are more than 1.3 billion Chinese, after all. But when it comes to cellular services, the U.S. also lags behind Japan and South Korea, both of which have operators that are quickly signing up new customers for third-generation cell service.US presidential debatae says,American health care is among the best in the world, its hospitals some of the most cutting edge, right?Not according to Mark N. Blatt, a former family physician who joined Intel (INTC ) in 2000. As the chipmaker's manager of health-care strategies, Blatt is in charge of efforts to make hospitals worldwide more IT-savvy. Blatt is stunned by the progress that some Asian countries are making in using IT to improve how doctors and nurses do their jobs. At Foshan, China - widely speculated to have been the home of China's first SARS case, back in 2002. The disease's outbreak spooked the Chinese government, making it realize that it had to invest in an IT infrastructure that would allow hospitals to monitor illnesses more easily. The aim would be to prevent major epidemics -- and also improve the quality of patient care. Blatt says,China's Center for Disease Control now has a system that allows daily updates from 16,000 hospitals nationwide, providing information on 32 different diseases. How does that compare the U.S.? "We have a paper-based system," says Blatt. It takes the U.S. CDC a month to get information that the Chinese can get in a day.In Foshan, the government can simply require all the hospitals to fall into line -- one of the advantages to having an authoritarian government. The city has a 10-gigabyte network connecting the 20 hospitals and two clinics taking part in the program. "For anyone who gets sick at any of the hospitals, the doctors can see the patients' lab values, medications, the entire health record from a health center," says Blatt. Given China's severe shortage of doctors -- it has about the same number as the U.S., yet four times the population -- the ability to share such information is especially important. Foshan's health-care IT hub even has a global positioning system that's hooked up to the police and the fire departments. If a traffic accident causes a backup, the dispatcher can alert the ambulance driver and send it on a different route.Large hospitals in China, South Korea, and Thailand regularly treat a million outpatients a year, twice as much as a large hospital in New York. Looks like Parts of Asia qould appear to be ahead of the western world shortly in most measurement indices and the other part( large though) would struggle and inch towards progress - May be a New Asia and An Old Asia. Very Interesting. | Clayton Christensen Explains Disruptive & Sustaining Innovation -Part II Via GartnerWe covered the first part of the clayton christensen gartner fellow interview few weeks back. The second part of the interview has been now made available. He explains how opportunity should be framed as threat, how data analysis can actually hamper the innovation process, and finally, how sustainable innovation works and how to foster disruptive innovation. Mr Christensen offers several insights while fielding questions from the interviewer, Howard Dresner. Some key points of the second part interview:- For an established organization, when constructing a business plan, they frame the opportunity initially as a threat, and then once they get the resources, to shift the focus to growth.The new game begins before the old game ends. The old game is generally still very profitable and successful during the time when the new one has to start, so the business almost has no appetite for opportunity when it's being fed. But if you frame it as a threat, which ultimately it will be, there's nothing dishonest about that at all. It's really the only way you can get a successful organization to be motivated. Then you just need to get it into an environment where the people in charge don't feel the threat. All they see is the opportunity. - In a typical company, 80 to 90% of its money ought to be spent executing sustaining innovations. Disruption, is spoken widely just because not much has to be said about sustaining innovation. The established leaders, they have a very good track record in doing that. - IT Org as an obstacle -Where the problem comes is, you generate data from the IT organization to measure performance in the past. Usually, that's a critical role. The data comes structured in a particular way, and almost always, it comes structured by product line and by business unit. All of this is good, but then the error comes, not necessarily from the IT organization, but from the executives who hire it. They come to think the market is structured along the lines in which the data are given to him. And so you start to measure market share by product category, because I have data by product category. It's that translation of measuring the performance of what we have, to now thinking the market is structured in the way we collect the data, and then using that to kind of drive your consumer understanding, at which you target the next markets. It's in those two translations the data becomes counter-productive in an organization. You're using it for things the IT organization did not generate it for. - On who wins - Amost always, a company starts out in a direction conceived by the founder, and in 93% of companies that ultimately end up being successful, they figure out the original strategy doesn't work. But by kind of thorough experimentation and trial-and-error in the market, they happen upon or iterate towards a strategy and a business model that really is viable. At that point, companies that continue to kind of flounder and experiment in the market place, kind of fade away. And the ones that know, really get ahead of the pack, because in a disruption, you're rarely the only one who's trying this. There are five to fifty of you, trying to swim upstream here, and the one that gets out ahead fastest, is the one that really emerges as the winner.At that point, we have to flip the business around and drive the implementation of a deliberate — of the strategy that you now know works; drive it from the top. There, the ability to measure how successful you're being, given you know what to do, is very critical. | Monday, October 25, 2004"The Right-Hand Turn." - Intel's Craig BarrettIntel has began steering away from its speed-fiend image and toward multicore and partitioned designs. Barrett says, "The whole world was blasting along in the gigahertz war. But the industry as a whole has recognized that with Moore's Law, you can't continue to run more transistors faster—the power [heat] dissipation just gets to be too great.We can continue to run more processors, but in a different fashion. That's the right-hand turn: using those transistors to create other technologies—whether it's virtualization, security, multiple cores or multiple threads—and to use those to bring more performance to the end user".He elaborates his focus for the next six months before stepping down as,"the growth of our communications business, the convergence of computing and wireless, expansion internationally, and process technology manufacturing leadership. The strengths of Intel are process technology, manufacturing, architecture, worldwide sales presence—brand—and Intel capital".| RFID cell phones take shape at NokiaNews.com writes, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a favorite of warehouse operators and some retailers because of how easy product information stored on the chip can be transferred. Nokia said delivering product information to a mobile device using RFID can extend the technology "beyond the supply chain, and into customer service, merchandizing, marketing and brand management."For instance, retailers could put RFID-embedded "touch phone here" signs on store shelves to send a coupon to the phone, or put the same sings at checkout stands to instantly transfer personal information stored on the phone in order to complete a warranty. Nokia demonstrated an early prototype that was built in collaboration with VeriSign, which is proposing a central repository for RFID data that companies can use to relay information about inventory and deliveries to customers and suppliers. The prototype was based on Nokia's 5140 model, with an RFID reader contained in a shell that attached to the phone.One snag facing RFID is privacy concerns. Consumer advocates say the unchecked spread of the devices in libraries and elsewhere could spell disaster for privacy. They envision a future in which a network of hidden RFID readers track consumers' every move, their belongings and their reading habits, though most agree that such a scenario is largely impossible today for technical reasons. RFID's addition to Nokia phones is inevitable, to some industry veterans. During the past few years, cell phones have been tricked out with any number of different wireless antennas--global positioning systems, Wi-Fi, infra red, Bluetooth and soon ultra wideband--in order to increase the phone's usefulness.| Eric Schmidt on Google StrategyFinancial Times reports that Mr Schmidt has ruled out embarking on a new instalment of the “browser wars” with Microsoft and that Google would not seek to turn its website into a broader internet portal, a move that would take it into more direct competition with Microsoft and Yahoo. Both ideas have been pushed as ways for Google to capitalise on its powerful online brand awareness while strengthening its defences against the new wave of competitors. Speculation about Google's strategy has intensified as Microsoft has moved closer to launching its own search engine and Yahoo has laid out a plan to integrate search into many of the features on its internet portal.With the search engine business still at a very early stage of development, Mr Schmidt said there was no need to shape Google's strategy around fending off new competitors.“It's very possible that Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and others can all do well,” he said. “At this stage, the focus has to be on your customers and your own strategy.” One widely rumoured defence against Microsoft has been a Google web browser potentially countering the software giant's ability to embed its own search engine into its operating system. This puts the speculation that Google could be buiding a browser to rest.| Connecting The Unconnected( Via Jim Downing) The inaugural Asian 3GSM congress event saw the head honchos of quite a few mobile companies discussing emerging trends, policies and strategies for the future . Some Key highlights.THE GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) world celebrated a huge milestone in February as it passed the one billionth subscriber mark. Four months after that amazing milestone, it continued to grow exponentially with an additional 100 million subscribers, bringing the latest audited figure to 1.16 billion. As a telecommunications technology, GSM accounts for 73% of the world’s digital mobile market and 72% of the world’s wireless market. Perhaps the popularity of GSM can be attributed to its tightly-defined standards that guide vendors and equipment manufacturers, mobile operators and handset makers to the path of success.“International roaming” – the ability to carry one’s phone into another country and use it – is a result of these defined standards. The next billionth subscriber would come from the under-served parts of the world. This covers Africa, South America and Asia. China and India, in particular, will be the focus because of the sheer number of people in those countries. There are 6.5 billion people in the world but only two billion have access to communications. Robert G. Conway, chief executive officer of GSMA, says, in the least penetrated countries, mobile communications accounts for 60% to 90% of connections. “To date, mobile users outnumber fixed-lines in more than 120 countries. This implies that the next billion customers will be dominated by mobile connections”. Lim Chuan Poh, CEO of SingTel Mobile said, that by 2008, the Asian market alone is expected to be three times the size of Europe’s. The GSMA is in a prime position to play an active part in aiding the vision of bringing basic communications services to the unreached, said Craig Ehrlich, chairman of the GSMA Board. “However, we are making every effort to reach the two billion mark by 2008 or 2009 and in doing so, show that there is so much of the world that has been left on the sidelines.” The cost of the Handset is the inhibitor to further growth in least developed countries and the GSMA board is coming with lighter specifications for low-cost handhelds, to facilitate the drop in prices of GSM handsets. | Efforts Are Under Way To Create A Computer The Size Of The World via EconomistThe Economist writes, the stated goal of grid computing is to create a worldwide network of computers interconnected so well and so fast that they act as one. This is mostly used to describe rather mundane improvements that allow companies to manage their workload more flexibly by tapping into idle time on their computers. Physicists' demand for computing power is being spurred by the flood of data that will pour out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the next-generation particle smasher due to start operation in 2007 at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. This machine will produce some 15 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) of data a year, or the equivalent of about 3m DVDs, which physicists will store and sift through for at least a couple of decades in search of those few rare collisions where exotic new particles are created. To put this in perspective, current estimates of the annual production of information on the planet are on the order of a few thousand petabytes, so the LHC will be producing nearly 1% of that total. Some 100,000 of today's fastest personal computers—with accompanying bits and bobs such as tape and disk storage and high-speed networking equipment—will be needed to analyse all this data.The decision to build a distributed computing system to deal with this deluge of data predates the hype about grid technology and is purely pragmatic: it would be difficult to fund the necessary computational power and storage capacity if it were concentrated on one site. If, on the other hand, the computations are distributed among the hundreds of institutes worldwide that are involved in the LHC, each institute can tap into national or regional funding sources to raise cash, spreading the pain. The LCG project now involves some 80 computing centres in 25 countries contributing over 7,000 computers, and is reckoned to be the biggest—and most global—computing grid around. Not all problems are best solved using the distributed clusters that underpin grids. True supercomputers are irreplaceable for some scientific problems, such as weather forecasting, where many processors must communicate frequently with one another. At the other extreme, scavenging spare computer power from personal computers on the internet is proving an increasingly effective approach for problems that can be split into a large number of small, independent parts. | The Open-Source Notion Is Moving Beyond Guerrilla SoftwareNewsweek writes that Linux's success is making freely revealed innovation a hot idea again. After decades in which patents closed off innovation, open source has caught the attention of businesses because "it so violated accepted wisdom and so clearly worked," says Yochai Benkler, a Yale scholar. Giants like IBM and HP, and newcomers like Red Hat, have made lots of money on Linux-based services and equipment.Pharmaceuticals represent one new and surprising area where freely shared innovation is catching on. Most industry profits have been made from expensive patented drugs. But now the BioBricks project at MIT is trying to establish standardized tools and processes for research. That way, researchers from everywhere can contribute. Open innovation also makes sense in industries where patents aren't relevant—for example, finding new uses for existing drugs. Eric Von Hippel, MIT's head of innovation and entrepreneurship, is studying FDA applications since 1998 for these so-called off-label uses of patented drugs to see whether, as he suspects, they come mostly from independent researchers rather than the big drugmakers holding the original patents. If they do, it means open-source innovation is already well underway.Tropical Disease Initiative that could give graduate students, for instance, a chance to work on finding drugs to help fight the likes of malaria. Because discoveries wouldn't be patented, contracts could be awarded to the lowest bidder. Manufacturing prices could be kept down, too, because generic-drug makers could compete as soon as a drug was ready.Plant genetics is another field showing the promise of open innovation. The basic tools for manipulating plant genes, and thereby modifying food, are protected by a thicket of patents largely controlled by multinationals, which means farmers in developing countries don't have access to the techniques. The BIOS Initiative, recently launched by Cambia, an Australian nonprofit, aims to make publicly available an alternative technology. One early aim has been to help farmers find a way to breed their own corn, so they don't need to buy expensive hybrid seeds each year. It's not yet clear just how far this kind of research can be democratized. But in many areas, the open-source option is becoming a serious one. | The Intersection of Media and TechnologySteve Neiderhauser covers the point spoken on The topic "The convergence of home entertainment and technology" by Michael Greeson, President of The Diffusion Group, about trends in digital entertainment - What's worked? What hasn't? Where is digital entertainment heading? Neiderhauser provides an outline of Micheal's speech .• Home entertainment and technology are converging. TVs and other home entertainment products are using CPUs, disk drives, and memory. • The PC is no longer in replacement mode -- today, when you buy a PC you're able to keep it for three or four years. So, how will PC companies grow revenues? New business models are needed. • Dell's supply chain is its business model. A model that will no longer produce additional revenues by itself. • HP is a company that creates products (it spends millions on R&D), and yet HP made a deal with Apple to resell the iPod. It takes a unique set of skills to make digital media products. What does this mean for companies that make PCs? They need to move to the intersection of media and technology if they wish to grow revenues. On examining the above points and the happenings in eht insdutry, the stars are starting to align in Apple's favor. The convergence of technology and media means that Apple will be creating product that are easier to see, touch, and hear. And, in turn, its products become more viral. No one ever walked down the streets of New York with a G5 tower tucked under his arm while calculating a return on investment; however, even the New York media comments about the number of people walking to work in Manhatten with white iPod earbuds plugged into their ears. As we move into the media-technology era, a larger percentage of Apple's vaunted design skills will be on display, and experienced through digital media products. With an iPod you can hold it in your hand, pass it around a party and add songs to a playlist. | A Roundup Of RFID Middleware and Web ServicesPeter Winer of Big Chief Partners , recently moderated a panel disscussion on RFID advances made by pureplay RFID players and generally better established but general IT players moving in from adjacent areas.The Pure Play Companies focus on: - Distributed networks connecting heterogeneous RFID readers and other collection devices; - Collect, correct, filter, aggregate large volumes of information; - Deliver upstream to middleware,applications and business processes. The presentation of such conpanies like Edgeware, OAT systems,Connectera, Blue Vector Systems is available here. Established Middleware and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) companies viewing - RFID as a future engine of growth; - Focused on server-based middleware; - Enhance, transform and translate,Apply business rules, provide message broker; - Portal solutions, development tools. The presentation of such companies like BEA, webMethods, Sun is available here. Very interesting presentations with fair amount of real life examples. | Sunday, October 24, 2004Satellite TV vs. Cable TV and the world of HDTVThomas Hawk points out an interesting article on the history of satellite and cable service and their respective inroads into the American living room and what we might expect from each in the future, published in Globetechnolgy available here. |Tough Time For Technology Via NYTimesThe NYTimes has published a good article about the state of the semiconductor industry and the challenges faced by them.Mr. Morris Chang speaks of the future of the chip business, he sounds somber. Like many global executives, perhaps his biggest long-run worry can be traced to China's rising industrial power. His immediate concern, however, is more basic."We're all going to see lower growth in the next 10 years," he said from his spartan office. Next year "will not be a very high-growth year, but it will be a positive year; beyond that I'm pessimistic."Investors seem to agree. After a yearlong boom in chip sales, orders have slowed since early summer. In recent weeks, many analysts have cut their projections for the fourth quarter and beyond, citing the damping effect of high oil prices and bulging inventories. Mr. Chang sees this looming downturn not simply as the latest plunge in the semiconductor industry's typical roller coaster progress, but as a more fundamental reordering of the business. Lower growth but greater outsourcing, rising competition from China and the spiraling cost of staying at the technological forefront, he says, are impelling industry leaders to reconsider their approach to the business. TSMC churns out chips with nodes 130 nanometers across, the smallest scale widely on offer, and is moving, not far behind the pacesetters, to production at 90 nanometers and ultimately even narrower. Mark Edelstone, a semiconductor industry analyst with Morgan Stanley, says, "We are in a new phase of lower growth, but the bigger factor is the trend towards outsourcing, which is going to accelerate."He estimated that about a fifth of the $210 billion semiconductor industry is outsourced to contractors like TSMC. By the end of the decade, he predicted, nearly a third of what should then be a $350 billion industry will be made by contract manufacturers. Their industry combines the high-wire risks of constantly advancing technology, opaque and often erratic market demand, and a voracious appetite for capital to pay for manufacturing equipment. Mr. Chang said that he expected growth over the next 10 years to average roughly 7 to 8 percent a year, well below the double-digit gains the industry has enjoyed for decades.His company has plowed billions of dollars into developing the next generation of chips to keep up with the industry maxim - first propounded by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel - that the capability of microchips can be expected to double every 18 to 24 months or so. But Mr. Chang warned that the market may soon be lagging behind the potential for innovation."If Moore's law has not slowed down in the lab,'' he said, "it will surely slow down in the marketplace, and that in turn will have an effect on foundries." |Microsoft - Where This Gaint Is Headed TowardsFormer Microsoft employee and software-development pundit Joel Spolsky spoke with Microsoft Watch Editor Mary Jo Foley. Earlier we covered Joel's excellent piece about How Microsoft Lost the API War. In this lengthy and insightful interview , he is saying that Microsoft is just performing incremental changes (trapped in the Office/Windows paradigm and in spite of the for-so-long-delayed Longhorn launch). A key point made with the technologies addresed to the extended enterprise - Suppply chain, CRM,B2B spaces: they're at competitive disadvantages by their marginal me-to presence or no presence as the case may be, in terms of mind share than something that gets sold to the whole world.Finally, about Google vs. Microsoft - "I think Google is orthogonal to Microsoft. Microsoft will be chasing their tail lights. I wouldn't say Google is really a challenge to Microsoft. Or maybe they are. Maybe Google is to Microsoft what Microsoft is to IBM. In the 1990s, Microsoft's nemesis was IBM. IBM was a boring, established company. (But then the PC revolution happened, and Microsoft sailed past IBM in that space.) Google is saying the Internet is the computer - it's the Internet computer in the sky. And Microsoft's not getting it." Microsoft - Not scary these days, where we wrote,"Computing power is shifting away from the desktop, where Microsoft still dominates. Business customers more and more treat software as a commodity and a service. The inability of Microsoft's own massive research efforts to divine the next big thing in IT also has left Redmond in no better position to capture the future than small startups or smaller competitors.As innovations in desktop and laptop PCs lag while innovations in smaller, yet increasingly powerful, handheld devices continues to flourish. While Microsoft remains a front-runner to provide software for those devices, it has failed to lock up the dominant market share in any category. Equally important in Redmond's waning influence has been the declining profitability and revenue growth of the software sector as a whole". Espen Andersen arrives at the same conclusion but by offering a different anaysis. He writes ," I think Microsoft needs to learn from IBM, and split itself into a collection of companies that cooperate with well-defined interfaces — technical, organizational and financial — between them. Look at what happened to Lexmark after IBM spun them off. Look at what happened to IBM when they finally got rid of the internecine strife that was the AS/400 people vs. mainframes. Microsoft can hold onto the integration between application and desktop, but I don't think they can hold onto the link between different markets — server and desktop, handheld and desktop, phone and desktop, just to mention a few. They can't because they are Microsoft, and the markets know it. American Airlines spun off SABRE when it became clear that the revenues of their IT division was hampered by the connection to one airline, and prospered for it. Middle age enters when it becomes clear to you that you are not the person that you want to be, when you realize that the skills that took you to where you are now will not take you further, when you need to switch from increasing your space to tending to what you have. I think Microsoft is entering middle age, whether it wants to or not (and who wants to, or even admit to it happening). Unlike people, however, companies can have youthful parts — and they need to be free to grow". Clearly Microsoft has a very tough environment moving forward. | Saturday, October 23, 2004Software And Payment Mechanisms( Via Techdirt ) The push towards "service-based" pricing for software looked like a clearly welcome development over the last few years, but that doesn't mean everyone's happy with it. Macrovision's recent study says, most companies still prefer traditional "perpetual" licensing, even though, other news articles focus more on the trend suggesting that most will move to service fees over licensing by 2006. Interestingly enterprises look favourably to paying subscription fees when the software is web-based -- and it feels more like a service. You know it's being updated and the company you're paying is actually doing something related to the software you're using. Where it seems to make people uncomfortable is when these "service fees" are really just "forced upgrade fees." This article points out that companies are increasingly tired of the forced enterprise software upgrade path, which only helps the enterprise software company. Enterprises are reaching a point where they're simply not going to accept it any more, and software vendors need to realize this -- or someone else is going to come along who does things better.| US Makes Downloads Illegal In SingaporeTechdirt highlights from the RIAA-making-laws dept- Graham writes "In Singapore, it will now be a crime to *download* music, movies and computer programs . This is a change from the usual 'crime' of file-sharing. The thing that I thought was really interesting about this is that "The change was inevitable as it was required under the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, said Mr Lau Kok Keng, head of intellectual property, technology, entertainment and communications practice at law firm Rajah and Tann." So, it sounds like the RIAA and MPAA are fighting their battles overseas through Free Trade Agreements rather than suing kids overseas... I've not had a chance to research this elsewhere to see if it is really downloading that will be the fine but the story was pretty clear that it is." This version of the same story clarifies that The laws specifically refer to people who break the law "to obtain a commercial advantage" or infringe significantly, meaning individuals who download a limited number of songs or movies off the Internet for personal use may be exempt.A spokeswoman for the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore said the courts would be left to interpret the definition of "significant". The tougher laws are part of Singapore's commitments to its free trade agreement signed with the United States that came into effect this year.Previously people who breached software and Internet copyright laws in Singapore were only subject to civil action.Tougher penalties for the illegal manufacturing, sale and distribution of software remain unaffacted by the new laws.| Microsoft's Worst Nightmare -FirefoxNetscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, boldly predicted in 1995 that his browser would make Windows obsolete. Of course, it didn't quite work out that way, and Microsoft used its lock on the operating system to crush the upstart.Om Malik writes with amazing insight here, "The Spawn of Mozilla/Firefox offers a valuable glimpse of what's in store. Firefox shall provide business opportunities for startups, established software companies, and Web giants alike. Firefox's open platform gives it enormous potential to hatch a new class of applications that live on the desktop but do business on the Web. Amazon (AMZN) could build a search application into the browser that lets users buy books without visiting its website. Google could make Web-based Gmail accounts behave like desktop applications such as Outlook. Word processing, calendar applications -- virtually anything could be programmed right into Firefox. This is a roundabout way to challenge Microsoft's Windows monopoly -- attempting to refashion the Web itself as an operating system where every bit of software is controlled through the browser. Companies around the world have also started using Firefox's technology to develop applications. They range from Edvisors Network, a Quincy, Mass., student loan company that developed an application for loan management, to TV New Zealand Interactive, which cobbled together a content management system.But the biggest opportunities reach far beyond the walls of corporate offices -- and most have yet to be discovered. That's why Firefox is likely to inspire countless startups selling programs based on it. One of those, called Cenzic, has built an entire business around Firefox, selling a tool that scans e-commerce and financial firms' networks for security threats. CTO Ambarish Malpani built the prototype on Internet Explorer, but found it hard to work with. "If you run into a problem with Explorer, you have no control," he says. Microsoft has promised that its next operating system, dubbed Longhorn, will include a framework that lets users build Web applications much the way Firefox does.But Longhorn doesn't hit shelves until 2006, and by then it may be too late. Among the key extensions to Mozilla are: FoxyTunes -Lets you control just about any media player (including iTunes) without ever leaving the browser. Googlebar - Zaps pop-ups and searches the Web with a click; an unofficial replica of the IE Google toolbar. Gmail Notifier - Alerts users when new Gmail messages arrive, using an icon on the status bar. Sage -Monitors and aggregates new headlines as they appear on your blog newsfeeds. As more upstarts like Cenzic flood the market with add-ons, Firefox will only grow more powerful. No wonder, Firefox is expected to touch the 10 million download mark shortly, even before its official release slated for November. | Technology Failue For US Military in Iraq & Future PerspectiveU.S. has come to rely on technology as a key to military advantage, but this article from the MIT Technology Review describes a "digital divide" in the battlefield:Once the invasion began, breakdowns quickly became the norm. For the movement of lots of data — such as satellite or spy-plane images — between high-level commanders and units in the field, the military employed a microwave-based communications system originally envisioned for war in Europe. This system relied on antenna relays carried by certain units in the advancing convoy. Critically, these relays — sometimes called "Ma Bell for the army" — needed to be stationary to function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to one another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too far, for the system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. "A lot of the guys said, 'Enough of this shit,' and turned it off," says Perry, flicking his wrist as if clicking off a radio. "'We can’t afford to wait for this.'" Fortunately for the U.S. troops, superior training and traditional equipment still provide the critical edge. The newest revolution is known to Pentagon planners as “force transformation.” The idea is that robotic planes and ground vehicles, empowered by an ever expanding range of sensing, targeting, imaging, and communications capabilities (new technologies), would support teams of networked soldiers (a new doctrine). According to its most expansive definition, force transformation is intended to solve the problem of “asymmetric warfare” in the 21st century, where U.S. forces are not directly confronted by conventional militaries but rather must quell insurgencies, destroy terrorist cells, or mitigate regional instability. Among other things, more nimble, networked forces could employ tactics like “swarming”—precise, coordinated strikes from many directions at once. The technologies driving force transformation are incredibly complicated. It will take at least 31 million lines of computer code to run something called Future Combat Systems, the centerpiece of the Pentagon’s transformation effort. An army-run program expected to cost more than $100 billion, it consists of a suite of new manned and unmanned machines, all loaded with the latest sensors, roaming the air and ground. Software will process sensor data, identify friend and foe, set targets, issue alerts, coordinate actions, and guide decisions. New kinds of wireless communications devices—controlled by yet more software and relaying communications via satellites—will allow seamless links between units. Currently, 23 partner companies, many with their own platoons of subcontractors, are building the systems; Boeing of Chicago and Science Applications International of San Diego are charged with tying them all together and crafting a “system of systems” by 2014. In this grand vision, information isn’t merely power. It’s armor, too. Tanks weighing 64 metric tons could be largely phased out, giving way to lightly armored vehicles—at first, the new 17-metric-ton Stryker troop carrier—that can avoid heavy enemy fire if need be. These lighter vehicles could ride to war inside cargo planes; today, transporting large numbers of the heaviest tanks requires weeks of transport via land and sea. “The basic notion behind military transformation is that information technologies allow you to substitute information for mass. If you buy into that, the whole force structure changes,” says Stuart Johnson, a research professor at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at National Defense University in Washington, DC. “But the vision of all this is totally dependent on information technologies and the network. If that part of the equation breaks down, what you have are small, less capable battle platforms that are more vulnerable.” | Friday, October 22, 2004These Days, Microsoft Isn't So Scary Via BweekFew analysts would have predicted that Microsoft might share the key computer code that powers its dominant Office productivity software with dozens of foreign governments and international agencies.A host of alternatives from StarOffice, OpenOffice, and other pretenders can do much of what Microsoft Office now does, and at a fraction of the price. Despite, Microsoft office's superiority ,enjoying a near monopoly on the desktop market for word processing, spread sheets, and other basic office software, the move to defend Office is one more sign that Microsoft is no longer an unstoppable force .Computing power is shifting away from the desktop, where Microsoft still dominates. Business customers more and more treat software as a commodity and a service. The inability of Microsoft's own massive research efforts to divine the next big thing in IT also has left Redmond in no better position to capture the future than small startups or smaller competitors.As innovations in desktop and laptop PCs lag while innovations in smaller, yet increasingly powerful, handheld devices continues to flourish. While Microsoft remains a front-runner to provide software for those devices, it has failed to lock up the dominant market share in any category. Equally important in Redmond's waning influence has been the declining profitability and revenue growth of the software sector as a whole. That's come courtesy of the creeping commoditization of a field where more and more companies are all too happy to give away their product in exchange for service deals down the road, and where the products themselves have become more interchangeable. Java and new emerging standards for mail communications are denting Microsoft's influence. Merrill's Maynard says, "Microsoft still has the critical mass and the franchise of Windows and Office, but there are fundamental changes going on in how we computer and how businesses get value out of IT.". He further points out that many of these trends, including the rise of on-demand computing models, and software as a service, putting more computing power into the networks, are somewhat antithetical to the Microsoft model. Tim O'Reily in the open source paradign shift writes, "The premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits. Most existing proprietary software vendors are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules are reshaping the industry around them". | Blogs Vs Email discussionsA Blogs Vs Email discussion is available as a blog here. |Metadata For The Masses Via Peter MerholzPeter Merholz writing on the topic Metadata for the masses Many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar waysBut what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them. He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of "ethnoclassification" (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star). (The branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us looks excellent - it can also be called "folksonomy.") He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we're making for ourselves. He adds,Ethnoclassification systems can similarly “emerge.” Once you have a preliminary system in place, you can use the most common tags to develop a controlled vocabulary that truly speaks the users’ language.Use the tags to understand how people consider the content at hand. Then you can “pave” the best paths to ensure findability — say, by explicitly linking “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.” These tags can be aligned with more formal schemes, thus enhancing the utility of both. | The Talent Myth by Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point writes a manifesto for ChangeThis on the seemingly paradoxical truth that talent is not a firm's greatest asset.The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organizations intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems. In a way, that’s understandable, because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don’t write great novels, and a committee didn’t come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coördinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star. At Enron, the needs of the customers and the shareholders were secondary to the needs of its stars. “What I.Q. doesn’t pick up is effectiveness at common-sense sorts of things,especially working with people.”| Offshoring in ReverseFastcompany writes about India Headquartered software companies hiring US nationals for top jobs and how well the trend is entrenched and seen to be a success. Indian software companies now employ multicultural people extensiviely and encourage diversity.According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies, India's IT chamber of commerce, 15,000 Americans are working in the U.S.-based arms of more than 200 Indian companies, which have invested $500 million in their American operations. No surprises here - as the global economy integrates, the se cross national executive appointments have to happen. |Build Is BackAMR research has come with an excellent article on how various factors are influencing building applications as a desirable option.Open source, new tools/technologies, and offshoring make building an application (rather than buying) an increasingly viable option. For sometime it appeared, it appeared that buy was the best option.Conventional wisdom states that the entire market for packaged applications will consolidate to a few mainstream players, such as SAP and Oracle.This appears to be an oversimplistic and often wrong view. There are many markets and submarkets that continue and will continue to fall under the radar (and market size) screen of major vendors and require buyers to build a software application. Building applications is an option that never really stopped: Nearly two-thirds of all software capital spending is used to either customize existing or build new applications. But three new factors are bringing build back as an option that should be considered.Factor 1 - Open Source - the main issue of open source is how fast it takes off. Smart users are looking at how far and fast they can take open source today. Smart buyers are looking at how to use open source to their benefit (as well as the detriment of competition). An example of a smart buyer is the use of open source by Google, which claims that it has the world’s largest running Linux cluster with more than 10,000 servers. An example of a smart seller is SAP’s gift of MaxDB to MySQL.com. Factor II - Offshoring - The next leg of the trend to build is offshoring. Ofshoring directly attaccks the notion that building applications is expensive an time consuming. The ability to significantly drop the labor cost of coding begins to remove one of the large impediments to looking to build and by resource scaling to an extent reduce time for development. It does not, however, remove the costs and burden of long-term support. Factor III - Web services technology promises to make customization even easier. An array of new tools has been introduced that is speeding development times. They range from delivering Web-service-based integration capabilities to composite application building tools that will assemble applications from a variety of customized and widely available application components. There are some significant challenges that these tools and Web services face before their reality matches their hype, but fast and easy-to-deploy applications are closer than ever. At the very least, Web services will make application creation and integration between business processes easier (and faster) than before. Recommendations -Building applications is a real option. Application packages can be overkill for the functionality required. Start to explore what open source has to offer. -Revisit application decision tree to build applications. It was never a no-brainer to buy rather than build applications. It is even less true now. Revisit old assumptions and economies of building applications. Don’t forget to include total cost of ownership analysis as well as support costs. -Investigate open source possibilities. While open source applications are in their infancy, the surrounding infrastructure and technology are coming up the maturity curve quickly. Look for opportunities to build uncommon applications around this technology base as well as to use open source applications for tactical, noncritical business processes. | Bluetooth a Mile AwayBluetooth is best known for short-range, low-bandwidth wireless jobs: connecting a cellphone with a headset or syncing a PDA with a nearby computer. An informative article is availablehere. | Thursday, October 21, 2004Flickr ArchitectureFlickr is one of the promising enteprise. Flickr uses PHP extensively and its architecture has been made public recently by Carl Handerson. Niall Kennedy recently posted the PDF version of carl's presentation, available here. Niall also points out some interesting statistics on Flickr as of September 2004:About 60,000 lines of PHP code. About 60,000 lines of templates. About 25,000 database transactions per second at peak. 13 selects per insert/update/delete. About 1,000 pages per second at peak. They use Java for their node service and as a FTP daemon. | GM CTO on software in cars and IT managementMore than one-third of the cost of GM's automobiles now involves software and electronic components, and the amount of software loaded into a typical automobile is skyrocketing, Scott said. Cars had approximately 1 million lines of software code in 1990, but this number will jump to 100 million by 2010, he predicted. The emergence of the automobile as a platform for software developers will mean that a much broader range of software will be used in tomorrow's cars. Remote diagnostics software, media players, even database software all will run on automobiles at some point, and adding that all types of software shall begin to get used in running the vehicle." But the growing quantity and diversity of automobile software will also present new challenges. "What that says to me is that GM is going to have a major software management problem between now and 2010."GM will be looking to the software industry to help with this software management problem, but also to assume greater responsibility for product liability and quality assurance, he said. Scott gave an insight into GM's outsourcing approach -GM expects to spend $15 billion on information technology operations between now and 2006 and is looking for simplicity in IT solutions.General Motors currently is winding down a 10-year "master services" agreement that saw Electronic Data Systems Corp., formerly a subsidiary of GM, operate the bulk of the company's IT services. As the contract expires, and GM's outsourced IT operations become open to bids from a wider array of companies, the auto giant will be looking to simplify the relationships it has with contractors. The approach to future - "What you're going to see is a focus from GM's perspective on reducing complexity," he said. GM will now expect its contractors, and not GM's IT department, to manage relationships with smaller contractors. "What will emerge is a model like what you'd see in the aerospace industry or large development contracts," he said.| Systinet CEO sees three phases for Web servicesThomas Erickson recently took over as president and CEO of Systinet Here in an interview with Infoworld Tom talks about three phases for webservices. Tom explains,"in the first phase people viewed web services as a means for rather than building this API and RPCs with some proprietary protocol, build it using Web services.In the second phase ,the business services phase, Web service moves to a business service. And the difference here is that people now are starting to say, well, rather than just build these interfaces onto existing applications, we’re actually going to design something from the ground up with a notion of reuse, with a notion of providing some real value. Web services management … is what we call the third phase, and that still needs some more standards to get into play. I mean that needs things like WS-Addressing. So the first phase has just really done Web services and then created some business services. But what they haven’t done is helped us with what an SOA’s supposed to really be about, which is interoperability between these endpoints or applications, if you want to call them that, to the extent that not everything has to be known by the person building the endpoint at the time they build it. Tom also explains on the possibility of getting bought out,"The motivation is to try to create some real value in the SOA space because we believe that there’s going to be a play, and we’re going to use [Systinet] as kind of the vehicle to achieve that. We believe that there’s an opportunity that when a paradigm shift happens there is an opportunity for a new company to emerge. If you go through time you can see this repeatedly again. There has been a new major player in the software industry appearing when there’s paradigm shifts because some of the older players fail to make the transition, whether it’s in the hardware transition from mainframes to [minicomputers] to micros, whether it’s been software transitions from mainframe to client/server to all along the way. Because [however] Pincus was involved in BEA, they’re the company that funded BEA, they have a similar vision -- [that] we can do this again. | A Funny Piece On Outsourcingbusiness2.O blog links to a funny piece on outsourcing Its not that bad guys - anycase service center response is to be benchmarked with Dell service centers operating in the western hemisphere. |Relief for Nokia and EricssonOm Malik writes that Finally, there might be some relief in sight for Nokia and Ericsson, and it's got nothing to do with handsets. Om Malik ads,In fact it is their infrastructure business which might ride to their rescue. Pyramid Research forecasts GSM will drive 60% of operator spending in 2004, with CDMA and WCDMA accounting for 22% and 18%, respectively. Lucent and Nortel are serious players in CDMA markets, though the Canadians do have a sizeable GSM presence. GSM will continue to make up a significant share of global infrastructure CAPEX through 2009, flattening at 50% of the total market beyond 2005, Pyramind predicts.This is a direct result of faster-than-expected GSM subscriber growth in Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe. Global CDMA spending, when expressed as a percentage of the total mobile infrastructure market, will remain relatively flat at 20% through 2009. However, the expansion of EVDO deployments worldwide (especially in the US) will lead to an increase in overall CDMA spending. Pyramid expects WCDMA spending to increase over the course of 2004-2005 and then remain relatively flat on a percentage basis. | Wednesday, October 20, 2004Customers cool on subscription softwareThe Paradox The software industry is rapidly moving to subscription-based billing, but corporate customers have not warmed up to the model yet, according to a new study. A survey of nearly 400 software companies and 100 enterprise executives responsible for software purchases found that more than half of software companies expect to offer subscription-based software licensing within two years--a practice used by only one-third of those companies now.However, the study found that corporate customers aren't buying into the change yet. Sixty-four percent of software buyers prefer buying a license upfront over a subscription model, the survey showed. The survey, released Monday, was sponsored by Macrovision, which sells software for electronically tracking software licenses; the Software & Information Industry Association; and the Centralized Electronic Licensing User Group. The results of the research were released at the SoftSummit industry conference on software purchasing in Santa Clara, Calif.The discrepancy between buyers and sellers on the question of subscription pricing could be a matter of awareness, the study's authors said. About 67 percent of software today is purchased through an upfront license with ongoing maintenance fees.| Vertical Integration in the Entertainment IndustryMark Cuban along with Todd Wagner believes that vertical integration and the ability to contol the supply chain are the vision for the entertainment properties and in the process put together various companies. Mark expands,"The goal in putting all of these companies together is to be able to control our own destiny. We want to be able to create films in HDTV format via HDNet Films and 2929, acquire them through Magnolia and then distribute them digitally to our Landmark Theaters. We also have the ability to sell, show and distribute them in whatever (DVD, HD, etc) format we think consumers want, rather than what Hollywood dictates . Our goal is to provide entertainment to consumers, how, where and when they want. As Todd says, “what a concept, give the consumer what they want, rather than have someone tell them what they want.”Things are going great, but there has been a side benefit that I had hoped for, but never really expected to happen so quickly. We are making and distributing movies that can truly impact peoples lives. HDNet Films is completely a documentary about the Enron debacle called Black Magic, which should be out this winter. Magnolia has taken the idea of movies that change peoples lives to an even greater level with the release of two movies: Woman Thou Art Loosed & Voices of Iraq.Production and Distribution - two important elements of the entertainment industry are making significant advances in their own ways. There may be a emerging technology in future which may bring these together. | EDS Agility AllianceBrad Feld beleives that by forging the EDS agility alliance , EDS had put a big stake in the ground by declaring friends and foes .Foes: IBM and HP. Friends: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Sun, Xerox (listed in alphabetical order presumably not to indicate any preference.) Feld adds, Charlie Feld on becoming EVP Portfolio Management - think of it as a role where the CTO and CIO report to him and he defines and builds both the product / service strategy and the internal systems to support the strategy (massive in EDS's case.) One of Charlie's classic moves whenever he becomes CIO somewhere is to lock down a finite set of well defined technology relationships to act as the backbone for all future buildout of technology. Feld recollects a few examples - he did this at Frito-Lay with IBM (At one point, Frito-Lay was one of the largest users of OS/2 in the world) and Delta with Tibco.Reading between the lines, EDS has decided enemy #1 and enemy #2 are IBM and HP respectively. The EDS Agility Alliance draws a line in the sand. If you add it up, you've got a "virtual company" that has $150 billion of combined annual revenue and $13.6 billion of annual R&D spending. There are lots of good nuggets in the press release , including the signalling that "EDS will announce its application, business process and industry alliance members in the coming months." (e.g. expect more to come.) If you are interested in the evolution of the high end of the IT services world, it's worth a look. EDS needs to do a lot more- the key to EDS success remains in how quickly they can begin to substantially leverage the offshore model,how they master global delivery and begin to resonate with customers as an agile and responsive organisation - they should win back/hold the GM business when GM's strategic outsourcing gets finalised to survive as a significant player in the industry. | Monday, October 18, 2004State Of The Blogosphere (Cont'd)We covered Dave sifry's earlier coverage of blogosphere. Dave has now published Part III and Part IV of the series. In part 3 of the series on the growth of the Blogosphere , Dave covers on blog's impact on individuals, corporations, media, politics, and technology. The number of people linking to you is a very powerful measurement of your influence or authority with those people - because if nothing else, those people are spending some attention on you. Documents are the exhaust of our attention streams - they are a tangible reflection on what we are spending our time and attention on. Negative attention “I hate such-and-such” runs counter to this theory, but empirical evidence shows that people overwhelmingly link to items and objects that they like or endorse, far more frequently than to things they disapprove of.Certainly, top-quality journalism, interesting articles, and consistency of quality show why the top big media sites are on top. But it also shows that a large number of people are getting news, information, and opinion from outside of the mainstream media, and that these sources are rivaling or exceeding the attention paid to smaller “professional” sites. Also important are the approximately 8000 blogs that have between 100-1000 inbound sources, which represent a set of people who are often writing about targeted or niche topics, like PVRBlog (158 sources), or Ross Mayfield (340 sources), and tens of thousands of blogs between 50-100 inbound sources, which represent smaller communities of conversations going on every day, on a wide range of topics. There is a lot of information and conversation in the tail of the media power curve that goes well beyond what is available from larger media organizations.In Part 4 of the series on the growth of the Blogosphere , Dave covers the blog's impact on individuals, corporations, media, politics, and technology.Corporate Bloggers. These are people who blog in an official or semi-official capacity at a company, or are so affiliated with the company where they work that even though they are not officially spokespeople for the company, they are clearly affiliated. For example, the folks in SAP's developers program get blogs if they want them, and are available to anyone who joins the (free) SAP developers network. This group also includes folks at Sun Microsystems and at Microsoft, Oraclewhere employees are actively encouraged to blog. Even though some of the largest technology companies are represented in this graph, to me this shows that we are still at the relative start of accepted use of blogging as a part of corporate policy - and that there is still a tremendous opportunity for forward-thinking companies and management to have a significant positive impact on their public perception by encouraging an enlightened blogging policy, encouraging openness both within and outside of the organization. This article analyzes a method of automatic collection and monitoring of weblogs, from a source different from Dave Sifry. Overall, Dave Sifry's excellent analysis of the state of the blogosphere. | The Incredible Shrinking Investment Banks( Via Senthil) An excellent article discussing the Financial Services market - How the Universal Banks (Commercial Banks acquiring Investment Banking expertise through organic growth or acquisitions - like Citibank and Bank One ) are beating the pure breed Investment Banks (like Merrill & Morgan Stanley.)Merrill Lynch has been shrinking, both in size and in market value. The firm has scaled back its global ambitions, shedding 23,000 jobs worldwide and pulling out of the retail brokerage business in Japan and Canada. At its peak, its total employment was 72,000.In the industry rankings known as league tables, Merrill has fallen in important categories, from stock underwriting in the United States to mergers and acquisitions advice. Universal banks like Citigroup and J. P. Morgan, with their swollen balance sheets and ripe ambitions, are encroaching more than ever on Merrill's and Morgan's turf. European banks like Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC are also looking to expand in the United States. Even onetime regional banks like Bank of America and Wachovia have been hiring droves of investment bankers and brokers.Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, in other words, are being squeezed on all sides. "The business models of these firms may not be sustainable" Inevitably, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch should align with the big balance-sheet providers. Morgan Stanley's market valuation, like that of Merrill Lynch, hovers close to $50 billion, a little more than a third that of J. P. Morgan and less than a quarter of Citigroup's. That is a far cry from the heady days of 2000, when the firm's market capitalization exceeded $100 billion. There was a time when Morgan Stanley and Merrill could punch above their own weight, given the stature of their brands and their tight-knit cultures.A Banker likened their plight to that of a competent but out-of-position tennis player: stuck in the middle of the court, and not making the put-away shots at the net or winning the deep rallies from the baseline. William B. Harrison, chief executive of J. P. Morgan, echoed that sentiment. "I think these broad-based platforms create a competitive advantage, and over time that will lead to further financial consolidation," Mr. Harrison said. "The trend is clear." |Moore's Law, RIP by Nicholas CarrWe covered the topic changing nature of Moore's law recently. Nicholas Carr, in his charecteristic style views this development in a more holistic way. Carr writes Moore’s Law may be expiring, less because of technical limitations than because of a simple lack of interest. Carr expands, "Rather than seek further boosts in CPU clock speed, Intel said it would improve processor performance by focusing on secondary factors: increasing bus speeds, enlarging memory caches, and ultimately producing dual-core microprocessors -chips with two processing engines.Intel is not alone in struggling to achieve further clock-speed gains. AMD, Motorola, and IBM, among others, are also having problems. In fact, the clock-speed curve, which shot breathtakingly upward during the nineties, has been flattening for some time now. The immediate cause is technical. As chip speeds accelerate, it becomes ever more difficult to keep power consumption and operating temperature under control; reliability and usability both begin to suffer. At the same time, the manufacturing margin of error narrows, and it becomes harder to keep the yield of good chips up. Carr reasons, that Intel and other chipmakers are nothing if not resourceful. They’ve faced and surmounted tough engineering problems before. What’s really holding up progress today is not so much technological issues as economic ones. The demand for higher clock speeds is fading. As demand for increased CPU power weakens, chipmakers’ incentive to invest in achieving higher clock speeds fades as well. It becomes ever more unlikely that they’ll earn enough new sales to reap any return on the investment required to achieve the next bump in speed. The economics just don’t work – and that’s the real reason Intel backed out of its 4 GHz promise. As this article puts it in commenting on the company’s announcement, “the cost [of crossing the 4 GHz barrier] would far outweigh any financial benefit.” If we take clock speed as a proxy for Moore’s Law – that microprocessor power goes up at an exponential rate, doubling every year or two – then the implication is clear: That most famous of all Computer Age prognostications is reaching its expiration .In the computer business today, the market places greater value on factors other than processor power – on things like battery life and portability and not having your laptop burn a hole through your trousers. As computing devices keep getting smaller, such secondary characteristics will continue to grow in relative importance.Here’s the so-what: Whether you’re talking about planes, trains, or microchips, the basic performance of all technologies eventually reaches the limits of market demand - and then progress shifts gear. Innovation begins to focus less on what might be called core functionality and more on a myriad of secondary traits. Boosting the capacity or security of a railcar, say, comes to have more market value than increasing locomotive speed. When that point arrives, the success of a vendor hinges more on its ability to foresee which factors customers will value than on its raw technical skill.In the end, it’s the customer, not the engineer, who determines the course of and the limits to technological progress. I may not agree with Nicholas Carr's viewpoints all times - but this time , Carr is completely right, except the games people and scientists, generally speaking no one needs more clock speed and new set of applications exploting the speed. Extremely well articulated by Carr and very important from the industry and business standpoint that this is understood well. |Sunday, October 17, 2004Ten Emerging Technologies That Can Change The World(Via ZapFuture) Technology Review sometimes back published top ten emerging technologies that will change the world. The technologies identified are:A. Universal Translation B. Synthetic Biology C. Nanowires D. Bayesian Machine Learning E. T-Rays F. Distributed Storage G. RNAi Therapy H. Powergrid Control I. Microfluidic Optical Fibres J. Personal Genomics The article from Technology Review elaborates these ideas, advances made in respect of these, key players working on the technology and the key challenges in the advancement of these technologies. Must read for all. | New Intelligent Shopping CartsA Massachusetts-based supermarket chain says it will roll out new intelligent shopping carts that, among other advances, will let shoppers email their shopping lists to the store and check prices on the spot. The carts, equipped by IBM and software company Cuesol, promise to make food shopping much more personalized and interactive. grocery shopper to have a personalized shopping assistant on his or her cart, and gives the shopper such features as:-- The shopper's buying history and favorites, as well as the shopping list that could have been created at home and emailed to the store; -- Notification of favorite items or other promotional items that are on sale, as the shopper approaches those items in the aisle; -- Personalized offers, including coupons, in the aisle as the shopper approaches an item; -- The ability to place a deli order from the cart, then picking up the order when the deli counter notifies the shopper on the cart's computer that it is ready; -- The ability to locate particular items in the store -- The shopper's loyalty program points and reward level; -- Price checks through use of the personal shopping assistant's scanner; -- The ability to keep a running total of items in the cart by scanning each item. The Shopping Buddy also shows total savings and allows for rapid self-checkout at the end of the shopping trip. -- The ability to show promotional material and advertisements on the cart. -- Stop & Shop also uses IBM Self Checkout systems to enable the self-checkout feature of the new Shopping Buddy once shoppers have completed their cart-based self-scan.In the future, these intelligent shopping carts could offer such personal shopping assistance as: meal planning, sorted by such things as category, favorites, sale items, diet type, and preparation time, with supporting content such as health notes, recipes from a meal plan and wine information. It also will be able to offer the shopper a guided shopping trip, showing a store map with shopper and product icons mapped by location. In addition, future features could include pharmacy favorites, ordering and notification, as well as product information that allows for comparison with similar items, consumer ratings and gift suggestions. Ultimately, the personal shopping assistants will allow shoppers to pay at the cart. Retail shall always be at the leading edge of absorbing technology and with time retail shops would begin to look like electronic emporiums also merchandising retail items. | Google's new desktop toolsGoogle has rolled out new tools for the desktop. First is Picasa, downloadable here. Upon installation,Picasa automatically finds and indexes all graphics file on your computer,picasa comes with limited editing capabilities and is very simple to use and intuitive. The next tool is Google Desktop, an extension of the Google search tool, downloadable here. Upon installation, Google Desktop will automatically find and keyword-index all documents, accessible from Google Desktop icon on the desktop. The access and results( Both the web and desktop can be searched) are rendered like in Google internet search, arrangeable by relevance and date. Desktop search covers all Microsoft office files but currently does not include - XML,PDF,Zipped Files. The next step would be including the ability to search all desktops/specified other computers in the LAN /WAN - Serving as a corporate information finder. Sean Daniel while finding Google Search to be faster points out the following issues :• You have to open IE to search your hard drive (why can't you just search from the task bar?) • The search doesn't span web and desktop, you can choose one or the other • Viewing mail changes the mail messages into web format, so you can't deal with it as a mail message anymore • Viewing docs is the same as above • It only searches your local machine, not the entire LAN, this is big for me, since I have a server to search! • Finally, the privacy statement about what they search on your hard drive is a little skimpy, what do they actually consider private? The Google Desktop search is definitely better than the Windows search and marks the beginning of Google's entry into the desktop. With speculation about google coming out with the Google Operating System, the beta launc of Picasa and Desktop Search assumes significance. | MP3 losing steam?Back when there were just MP3s, everything worked well. The quality was good enough for most, the compression was reasonable and everyone could make it work. The recording industry was ofcourse quite uposet.As technology has progressed, niw there are a mulittude of music standards, it does not surprise that the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months , down to about 72 percent of people's collections from about 82 percent a year ago.People are still getting MP3s and putting them on hard drives but are deleting them at a rate faster than they're acquiring them.The big winners over the past year have been the two formats backed by Microsoft and Apple,(WMA or AAC) each of which has gained about 5 percent "hard-drive share" in the past year, according to the ongoing study.The slow shift in MP3's role is part of an ongoing change in the digital-music industry, with the focus moving slowly away from the anarchic file-swapping networks and toward money-making stores and services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store. The bigger shift has come as more people have begun building their own digital-music collections by ripping their CDs into files on their computer, analysts say. Many mainstream users, who are less tech-savvy than the early adopters of digital music, use whatever format is built in as the default option in their music software, instead of selecting MP3. One thing remains clear, however: Even if its usage patterns are changing, MP3 remains the one necessary format for hardware and software companies. |Demographics And Indian AdvantageVijay Kelkar has been writing about India's potential for competitiveness and economic growth for sometime. In this article he elaborates about demographic advantage that India would have and identifes two major threats to an optimistic scenario. First the advantages -When a country gets more people in the working population, it tends to get high GDP growth. Young people are the ultimate fuel for growth. Countries go through a sequence where, at first, there are many young people, then incomes go up, then birth rates go down, and then there are few young people. Every country also goes through a “demographic transition” where old people live longer, and richer people have fewer children: which puts a squeeze on the working population. But that middle period — when there are many young people — is a powerful opportunity for growth.GDP is made by labour and capital. Not only do young people supply labour, but young people also tend to save. Children don’t save, and the elderly dissave. It is in their working years that people put aside savings. Hence, in the demographic transition, countries benefit from a double effect — of more people in the labour market and of more savings in the capital market.The “working age ratio” conveys the fraction of the population which is between age 15 and 64 — roughly the working years. As an example, Japan was at 70 per cent in 1990, has dropped to 66 per cent, and is likely to drop to 56 per cent in 2035.India was at a ratio of 57 per cent in 1980 (which is strikingly like Japan in 2035). The ratio has gone up to 63 per cent. This increase was one of the factors which gave us the acceleration of GDP growth from the early ’80s onwards. The ratio is projected to go all the way up to 68 per cent in 2035. Existing projections show that in 2035, India will have the highest proportion among all large countries. This will inexorably induce massive changes in global power equations, through the contrast between young India and aging world powers. From 2005 to 2035 is thus a historic opportunity for India to harness the demographic situation. India must get up to 8-10 per cent growth in this period, and decisively get away from mass poverty, as was done in miracle growth economies like Japan, South Korea and China. The two threats are India's Tax Structure and Healthcare concerns like HIV.Our tax system today hinders economic growth. India urgently needs to get a world class non-distortionary tax system that fosters growth and solve fiscal crisis. India development project will be ill served if, out of the coming 30 precious years, ten years are wasted in a fiscal crisis. Equally important is the task of refashioning government on the expenditure side. The task of government is to produce “public goods”: those which benefit everyone, such as law and order and the judiciary. Instead, most government expenditures today are a gift to one narrow constituency or the other. India faces a crisis in terms of inadequate quality and quantity of public goods.India needs a transformation so as to shift the focus away from handouts to this or that constituency, and instead devote money to providing public goods. The second major threat to the demographic story of the next 30 years is HIV. There are many situations where public health problems, like leprosy or malaria, are problems of health economics. HIV is different: it is a problem of “macro” economics. It is big enough that it can single-handedly torpedo India’s development project. HIV spares young people and old people. It hits at precisely the group — age 15-64 — that we are looking to for obtaining high economic growth in the coming 30 years. An explosive HIV epidemic will destroy our hopes of transforming ourselves in the coming 30 years. India has a per capita GDP of $650, one of the lowest in the world. If India plays its cards right, it can be at $10,000 per person in 2035, roughly 30 years from now. | Saturday, October 16, 2004Bruce Schneier on RFID PassportsBruce Schneier warns against using RFID chips in passports. Countries whose citizens currently do not have visa requirements to enter the United States will have to issue passports that conform to the standard or risk losing their nonvisa status.These future passports, currently being tested, will include an embedded computer chip. This chip will allow the passport to contain much more information than a simple machine-readable character font, and will allow passport officials to quickly and easily read that information. That is a reasonable requirement and a good idea for bringing passport technology into the 21st century. But the US goernment is advocating radio frequency identification (RFID) chips for both U.S. and foreign passports, and that's a very bad thing. Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that travelers carrying around RFID passports are broadcasting their identity. It means that passport holders are continuously broadcasting their name, nationality, age, address and whatever else is on the RFID chip. It means that anyone with a reader can learn that information, without the passport holder's knowledge or consent. Security is always a trade-off. If the benefits of RFID outweighed the risks, then maybe it would be worth it. Certainly, there isn't a significant benefit when people present their passport to a customs official. If that customs official is going to take the passport and bring it near a reader, why can't he go those extra few centimeters that a contact chip--one the reader must actually touch--would require?| The Changing Nature Of Moore's LawTim Oren points out to the changing nature of Moore's law.Intel has now officially pushed off the debut of the 4GHz flavor of Pentium. Though industry pundits have talked about this release as keeping processor speeds on the historical Moore's Law curve to the end of the decade. Intel is now focusing on other advances such as dual-core, which essentially puts two processors on one chip, enabling two processor-hungry applications to be run at the same time.Intel and other chipmakers pushed so-called clock-speeds as a measure of chip advancements but are now eager to have all aspects of a processor's performance taken into account.One reason that speed can be de-emphasized is that the rise of mobile PCs has made it easier to sell processors based on more than just sheer computing horsepower. "Speed is no longer the ultimate or only goal, users recognize the importance of battery life and portability and higher functionality." Still, the move had to be a difficult one for Intel to make because of its public stance that it would bring a 4 GHz chip to market early in 2005. It's one thing to talk about things other than speed but another to pull back this hard and late.The decision to change course only adds to the growing sense that Intel has hit some strategic speed-bumps.RF and hybrid, or low power, or reconfigurable processors - there are a number of learning curves whose proponents aspire to take part of the glory of Moore's Law in advancing silicon processing.| Ray Kurzweil about IT -- and our FutureRay Kurzweil helped invent the first optical character reading technology, the first text-to-voice synthesizer, computer-based musical instruments, and the first large-vocabulary speech-recognition system. His inventions have made him famous. He has founded several companies and written hundreds of articles. He has also authored and coauthored a number of books, including The Age of Spiritual Machines. In this interview with CIO magazine ,Ray Kurzweil says that one day, software and computers will reside inside us. He adds that by 2020, "we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots -- blood cell-size devices -- inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons.We will be extending our cognitive capability directly through this intimate merger of biology with machines. " He also says that if we're not enhanced by machines, they will surpass us. But he doesn't think it will happen. According to him, machines and humans will merge. In the mean time, he's pursuing his anti-aging quest and takes about 250 supplements to his diet every day! With this regime, he says his biological age is 40 while he's 56 years old. By 2030, there will be very little difference between 30-year-old and 120-year-old people, says Kurzweil. The broad history of automation shows that we have actually increased the number of jobs. One hundred years ago, we had about 30 percent of the potential workforce employed; we now have about 60 percent. Wages, in constant dollars, have increased by a factor of six to eight over the past century. On outsorcing, he says, In terms of the world economy, that's a positive thing. It's not a zero-sum game. Just because India and China benefit doesn't mean that's to our detriment. China is committed to building 50 MITs, as they put it. That's not an exaggeration. They're creating scores of world-class technology universities. But these people are going to create intellectual property from which we'll all benefit. If somebody creates a breakthrough in bioengineering, we all benefit. On ageing , he says that ultimately, there's going to be very little difference between a guy who's 120 and a guy who's 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we'll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It's not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we'll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.| Bloomberg view on Indian Manufacturing Potential( Via Reuben) Bloomberg's Andy Mukherjee writes,"A renewal of manufacturing in India has been long overdue. Like in most developing nations, the share of agriculture in the economy is shrinking, dropping to 22 percent last year from 28 percent in 1990. Factory production, however, hasn't picked up the slack. Excess rural labor has gotten pushed into low-productivity, unorganized businesses that cater to the needs of a domestic population, which has historically had very little purchasing power. Meanwhile, software and other ``knowledge'' industries failed to create jobs for less-educated workers". It's a development motto that has been fashionable in India in recent years -- software, not hardware, Deutsche Bank's Sanyal says. "We doubt that India will be the first country in human history to make the transition from agriculture to services without going through manufacturing development." A correction is under way. India's booming service industries have now begun to create a significant source of demand for manufactured goods. Software company executives now earn salaries that are on par with developed- country pay packages when adjusted for the purchasing power of the local currency. Deutsche Bank AG economists Michael Spencer and Sanjeev Sanyal said in December 2002 that for global manufacturers India may now be a more attractive destination than China was in 1990. Their thesis was received with skepticism, even disbelief.LG Electronics Inc.'s decision to set up a $43 million cellular phone factory near Mumbai signifies the growing appeal of India as a manufacturing location, complementing its already formidable reputation as a computer-software and call-center powerhouse. Beginning in 2003, Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea's biggest automaker, shifted its entire global production of the Santro compact car to its Indian unit. Unilever Plc's India unit said in May last year that it had been selected by its Anglo-Dutch parent to supply toothpaste to Europe after a study found that India was one of the cheapest places in the world to manufacture personal-care products. And now LG plans to spend $150 million in the country by 2007 and make India its second-largest overseas production base after China. Financial investors, who are usually one step ahead of direct investors, have already placed their bets on a manufacturing revival.``It is with some trepidation that we declare renewed enthusiasm for India, given our record here,'' James Alexandroff and his team at Arisaig Partners, which manages $927 million in Asian assets, wrote in their May 2003 investment diary. When Arisaig wrote that report, its $248 million India Fund had lost almost a fourth of its value in three years. Still, ``the fact that Hyundai Motors has declared India to be its global center for manufacturing cars tells a story,'' Arisaig said. That story, according to the fund manager, is one of ``new- found and well-based confidence in India's manufacturing sector.''The bet has paid off. The India Fund has returned 31 percent in the past year, compared with a 1.3 percent return on Arisaig's $385 million Greater China Fund.Infrastructure bottlenecks are clearing up, although slowly. It's possible now to call a small town in India from anywhere in the world, something that was unthinkable 10 years ago.A $12 billion highway project will, by 2007, cut down travel time by 25 percent and save companies $1.7 billion annually in transportation costs. The time taken to unload a ship at major ports has fallen 60 percent over 10 years to four days -- still a long way from the global benchmark of a few hours. Still, a long way to go, however the outlook is one of optimism| Stephen Roach On Manufacturing Potential Of IndiaStephen Roach after making a second trip to India this year and writes about potential for manufacturing in India, the state of the infrastructure and political developments in the country. Stephen writes,"The Indian manufacturing model, continues to suffer from three major deficiencies -- a lack of infrastructure, a low national saving rate (a little over 20%), and anemic inflows of foreign direct investment (barely US$4 billion in 2003). Of those constraints, the infrastructure gap is the most serious. Not only does it risk crimping the efficiencies of supply-chain management and nationwide delivery capabilities, but it raises serious questions about the transportation requirements of a dynamic export sector. Services, by contrast, need none of the above. Moreover, India’s new services dynamic plays to some of the nation’s greatest strengths -- education, entrepreneurial spirit, and IT literacy. Services also rest on a platform of e-based connectivity -- offering an important end run around a massive physical infrastructure deficiency". He adds,"The Indian manufacturing model, continues to suffer from three major deficiencies -- a lack of infrastructure, a low national saving rate (a little over 20%), and anemic inflows of foreign direct investment (barely US$4 billion in 2003). Of those constraints, the infrastructure gap is the most serious. Not only does it risk crimping the efficiencies of supply-chain management and nationwide delivery capabilities, but it raises serious questions about the transportation requirements of a dynamic export sector. Services, by contrast, need none of the above. Moreover, India’s new services dynamic plays to some of the nation’s greatest strengths -- education, entrepreneurial spirit, and IT literacy. Services also rest on a platform of e-based connectivity -- offering an important end run around a massive physical infrastructure deficiency". The approach for manufacturing fixation needs a reality check -- especially given the serious constraints on the infrastructure, FDI and saving fronts. Paradoxically, while India is very proud of its services-led progress, most seem to trivialize the potential macro implications of this trend. As I read Roach's writings, it is very difficult to think about huge number of Indians engaged in service economy alone. This approach might work for a smaller sized economy, but for a developing country with a huge sized economy, it is impossible to overlook investments in manufacturing - this only makes the job tougher for India - no escape from this. |Outsourcing, SOA, and the Industrialization of IT ZapFlashZapthink sees interesting interlinkages between industrialization, outsourcing and SOA. The greatest benefit of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the business value it offers via increased business agility.SOA helps companies outsource, because SOA provides an abstraction layer on top of existing technology resources, allowing third parties to provide those resources more easily, with business users ideally being none the wiser. SOA and outsourcing are actually both key aspects of the movement of IT towards an industrialized model. Industrialization embodies a number of major concepts: the mechanization of production so that the mass assembly of components provide significant improvements in efficiency and cost, the improvement of the infrastructure around such products to simplify how people build and sell them, and a fundamental change in the way that people buy and consume them.As companies grow and specialize, they no longer wish to maintain staff for many parts of their organization, such as accounting, product assembly and fulfillment, logistics, and sometimes even product design and development. Now there is also increased pressure to outsource various parts of the IT department as well, ranging from the data center to the application developer. At the same time, companies are also looking to gain the benefits of SOA. Companies desire the business agility that SOAs provide, especially in the face of IT heterogeneity. Specifically, the movement to SOA is actually a movement to create IT business process components that people can efficiently assemble to meet the specific requirements of a business. What gives SOA those capabilities are its loose coupling, coarse granularity, and a high degree of reusability in an environment of heterogeneity. Increasingly, companies desire the ability to source components from third-party suppliers that they can readily assemble into business processes themselves, or have third-parties assemble and deliver to them on a custom basis. So, while SOA provides the technological underpinnings to make the IT industrialization a possibility, it’s the economic movement to outsourcing that makes IT industrialization a reality. The combination of the SOA and outsourcing trends reflects the maturation of the IT industry. Before the industrial age, companies built products and tools on a one-off, customized basis, but with the emergence of powered machinery, improved technologies, and new methodologies, companies were now able to mass produce all manner of goods for the first time. The convergence of the outsourcing and SOA movements illustrate that IT is becoming industrialized as well. The combination of SOA and outsourcing will only get more established as the value proposition and technologies required to make SOA implementable continue to mature. As companies seek to gain the benefits of business agility, they will realize that the SOA/outsourcing combination provides options they may never have had before. For example, outsourcing business processes today means cutting off big, inflexible chunks of the business and simply handing them to third parties, but with SOA, businesses take a much more agile approach, outsourcing the components of greatest strategic value and slowly migrating over time to meet their ongoing business needs.| Clayton Christensen's Advice to Microsoft - Acquire RIMClayton Christensen says,open source is a clear disruption to Microsoft and the software industry in general."Where Linux takes root is in new applications, like Web servers and handheld devices. As those get better, applications will get sucked off the desktop onto the Internet, and that's what will undo Microsoft," he said.The software company can respond to this market disruption by setting up a separate business that will "kill Microsoft," Christensen said. If it doesn't react to the rise of Linux desktops on handheld computers, it will miss a coming wave of new applications and market opportunities, he said. Microsoft has already conceded that open-source software poses a significant challenge to its business. Christensen has observed that companies regularly stumble when they follow the well-established management practices of planning and listening to customers. To succeed, companies should not only cater to customers and continue improving their existing products, he argues. They should also set up separate business units to capitalize on new technologies, even though these may be poor-quality, low-margin products. Linux also provides a cheap, commoditylike alternative to Windows--the basis of Microsoft's business. Although Linux didn't use to be as functional as Windows or Unix, adoption of the operating system grew rapidly because it met the needs of simple applications and is relatively cheap. A similar dynamic is now occurring in the database market with open-source products such as MySQL. Christensen said that Microsoft should move progressively into Linux applications over the next six or seven years, because that sector will offer better opportunities for growth than operating systems or databases. He suggested that Microsoft acquire Research In Motion to accelerate the move, rather than continue to invest in making Windows run better on handheld devices. "As the BlackBerry becomes more capable, applications will get sucked onto it. Those are kind of places where growth is," he said. "If Microsoft catches it, they'll be all right." |Friday, October 15, 2004HP and managed SMB servicesInfoworld writes about HP's plans to begin selling managed IT and communications services next year to small and medium-size businesses in three continents, offering Internet access, servers, voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and help desk calls at fixed monthly rates.The service, called HP Ready Office, has been in pilot in France since May. It will be rolled out there in the first half of next year, in partnership with France Telecom SA, which provides the communications services, and Alcatel (Profile, Products, Articles) SA, which provides IP telephony equipment.HP is also signing telecom partners in Asia and the U.S., where it hopes to start implementing the service in the second half of 2005, said Francois Mateo, worldwide program director for Ready Office. Other European countries are also likely to follow. HP is betting that smaller businesses -- those with up to about 1,000 employees -- would prefer to "lease" servers and IP phones for a fixed fee, and have their equipment managed remotely by an experienced IT provider. Mateo cited having a single point of contact for all support calls as a key benefit. In France, France Telecom will receive the calls, with the IT queries handled by HP behind the scenes.The services will be offered in a variety of packages. A help desk component is €24.90 ($20.26) per employee per month. It includes support calls for desktop applications, as well as remote management and diagnostics of desktop PCs, including non-HP systems.For €48.50 per month, customers receive a HP Proliant Server with an 80GB hard drive running Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Corp.'s Windows Small Business Server 2003. The price includes the hardware itself and remote management services. Customers must sign up for a minimum of three years. A similar server with two hard drives and RAID is €62 per month, Mateo said. The VOIP component is €17 per line per month, with services hosted by France Telecom on Alcatel's PBX equipment. A DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) connection from France Telecom's Oléane business is €59 per month. Sign of things to come.| Google Launches Desktop SearchIt was widely expected that Google would launch it's own browser called Gbrowser anytime this year based on the Mozilla browser.Google has announced the launch of the Google Desktop Search. With this launch, Google is focusing on placing a desktop application on your computer that *makes your browser seem smarter.* The browser (IE only for now) becomes the interface front end to a major Google incursion into the PC hard drive, a space that heretofore has been owned by Microsoft. Om Malik reviews the product by installing and comparing with Blinkx and comes to the conclusion that . Blinkx is a Mercedes compared to Google which is like a yugo. Om Malik observes that Google needs to learn one thing: what works as a web interface doesn't necessarily work as a desktop UI. Secondly, the product should not have been rushed. Blinkx found music files, photos, and all sorts of things on this laptop. Google found limited stuff, mostly Microsoft mail and documents.There are a few interesting reviews available - Kottke, Danny Sullivan, Erik Speckman. |Thursday, October 14, 2004EPC Global Presentation MaterialThe complete set of presentations made at recent EPC global meet ismade available through this link.Indeed an impressive range of collection - best set of people and the top line organisations deploying RFID are sharing their perspective. Must read for all interested about deploying RFID solutions ( Via RFID weblog). | Microsoft -Where Is It HeadedWith more security advisories from Microsoft, business 2.0 blogs how fast can microsoft lose marketshare? Slow erosion of marketshare is likely to happen. Despite being such a strong company, we are now seeing the Mozilla Firefox browser gaining acceptance . Linux is a viable alternative in the backshop. Dell and many other computer vendors no longer ship Microsft Office with every PC, substituting WordPerfect, a perfectly dead brand only five years ago. Microsoft has to undertake onetime design cleanup to getover these - otherwise the future of Microsoft and to an extent even the expected growth of IT industry itself could be held to question. |The Seeds Of Innovation In AppleBusinessweek carries an interview with Steve Jobs on Apple's innovation wherein he says,"among other practices, it's "saying no to 1,000 things" so as to concentrate on the "really important" creations", is critical to Apple's success.In an era when most technology outfits have tightened their belts to adapt to a slower-growing market, one company stands out for forging ahead on innovation: Apple Computer (AAPL ). Apple has not slashed R&D and focused on incremental advances to existing product lines unlike others in the industry. By combining technical knowhow with a new concept for how to sell music online, Apple's iPod music player has become the most influential new tech product in years. At the same time, Apple has maintained its reputation for making the most elegant, easy-to-use desktop computers as well. On the lean period in apple, steve says,"You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn't add up to much". Steve's unique insight about the imperative to innovate inside a company,"Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.After that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into new territories. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. He cites the example of John Akers at IBM (IBM )as the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't".| Wednesday, October 13, 2004When Listening to Customers Makes Little Sense via FCJohn Bryne, recently wrote in a blog, it doesn't always make sense to listen to the customers particularly especially if innovation is more important for a business than linear product improvement. Juniper executive says,"Customers will take you down a status quo path every time. They are after linear improvements. Customers can help you do that. But if you want to hit an inflection point and get non-linear improvement, the worst thing you can do is listen to a customer about what they want. Customers can only think about solutions for problems they know about." In juniper,everybody's job here is to wake up every day and innovate because 100% of our revenues come from innovation. Five years from now 100% of our revenues will come from products that aren't here now. If we're not constantly innovating, our very survival is at stake." This is brilliant advice,if your strategy is pursuing breakthrough innovation! In practical life business may be focused on linear, incremental improvements in some areas while pursuing breakthrough innovations in other areas. Knowing when to decide and pursue your own ideas and solutions and when to talk to customers about their needs is a tough choice - but an important one at that!!| Bill Gates At Digitial Entertainment Anywhere EventBill Gates explains the vision of digital entertainment anywhere as, "the ability to have your music, your photos, your video wherever you go. And that means a lot of different places. It means having those media experiences on the phone in your pocket, having a portable device that kids can watch movies in the back of the car, being able to have these things anywhere in the home, whether it's a bedroom with a TV screen, a room that you've just got your great speakers in and you like to listen to music. And the experience should be unified. If you set up a playlist, it should be available everywhere. If you supply the music, all the devices should be able to play that music". He added,"This is where we see digital entertainment anywhere moving into the mainstream. This year we'll look back on as an inflection point for those media activities. Last month our announcements were about the music service, and the new music player, and the portable media device. That music player has gotten off to a very incredible start. It's called the Windows Media Player version 10, and we put that out just a month ago, and we've had over 17 million downloads of that. That's one every five seconds, and actually the rate of downloads is continuing to rise. So that's an enabling factor. That's the thing that exposes them all, and gets this all going. So you can see that when we talk about high volume we're talking about over time, over the years ahead, the majority of households having rich, multipurpose media experiences".The number of homes that have broadband, the power of that broadband connection is just going to go up all over the world. The ability to distribute media inside the house, you can do that on a wired basis, or more and more on a wireless basis, and making that easy to set up, and making it work, even with video, high definition video, that's just getting better and better. The music player devices, the digital cameras that acquire the photos. The phone, some of those phones will even have hard disks in them, and connect those things up, as well. So all these trends are coming together.| Telecom Costs Less But Consumes And Provides MoreThomas Malone argues that continuing reductions in the unit cost of communication are changing the face of business, leading to decentralization, innovative use of markets, and eventually, workplace democracy. This article in the MIT technology journal argues,if you’re a CFO, you may be thrilled that the cost of corporate voice and data services continues to plummet, but if you’re sitting at home, all you see is one communications bill after another. Twenty years ago, an average US household(after adjusting inflation)spent 80$ on an average every month as against $200 to $250 today.when challenged with this data Malone says,he was referring to the unit cost of communications dropping, not the total cost. “When the unit cost of something goes down, people usually buy more of it,” he said, going on to explain that this "elasticity of demand" is unusually high in today’s telecom market. It’s so high, in fact that “when the unit cost goes down, people buy so much more of it that their total cost actually increases.” Malone adds, that users of information in many cases, have access to better information than was available to the most senior managers of GM, IBM, and the U.S. government back in the ’80s.” |Tuesday, October 12, 2004State of the BlogosphereDave Sifry writes about the state of the blogsphere. In Part 1 of the article, Dave highlighted,tracking over 4 Million weblogs. Regular readers will remember that we tracked the 3 Millionth weblog on July 7th, just 3 months ago. In addition, the blogosphere has been doubling at a regular pace, and it is now more than 8 times as large as it was in June of 2003. In addition, the slowest rate at which the blogosphere has doubled in size is once every 5 months.In Part II,Dave writes about increase in the number of posts per day, also known as posting volume. This is an excellent proxy for the amount of time spent on blogging, because greater posting frequency means that more people are posting more often, and it also tends to validate the increased number of blogs that are out there. As of October 6, 2004, there are approximately 400,000 posts created every day in the blogosphere, which averages out to about 4.6 posts per second, or over 16,000 posts per hour. Truely phenomenal growth indeed. |RFID Tag Shortage Forecast In Coming Months(Via Informationweek) RFID tags may not be available in needed numbers to meet expected demand in the near future.The lengthy production cycle is probably the biggest culprit in the current shortage. It takes about 12 weeks to make the raw silicon, which is then sent to another company that sticks a tiny RFID antenna to it, adding four weeks to the process.Larger manufacturers such as EM Microelectronic, Philips Semiconductor, and Texas Instruments say they're waiting until EPCglobal Inc., the organization overseeing RFID standards called for in the mandates, finalizes the next-generation RFID chip specification.Shortages could drive tag prices up. Today, a tag costs 20 cents to 45 cents or more--a long way from the 5-cent tag many say is needed before RFID is widely adopted.But most agree the RFID shortage will work itself out.It would be just too embarrassing, after all, for a supply-chain problem to get in the way of a technology touted as transforming supply chains.| Streaming movies and online gaming shall popularise more broadband( Via Bweek) Telecom experts thought that all the networking problems in the world could be solved by letting users tap into the Internet at faster rates. Now, as broadband really catches on, they are discovering that it is not enough.In Japan, for example, consumers can access the Internet at an average speed of 11 megabits a second. That's at least five times as fast as the average U.S. Internet connection, yet Japanese consumers don't always get to take full advantage of that blazing speed. When they download movies from the Web, the video is often streamed to their computers at only 500 kilobits a second -- about the same as in the U.S.At that speed, video quality lags what's available on digital pay-TV systems. Faster video streaming would eliminate problems with dropped signals, pauses, and herky-jerky pictures.It could be an important turning point for telecom. The industry has been depressed for years because excess capacity led to a spiral of falling prices and financial ruin. The need to build out more broadband could be a very good thing for the industry's financial health. These upgrades will be as much about software as hardware. Application developers have to figure out how to better tailor services like video on demand, which originally wasn't designed for two-way broadband networks. Om Malik writes," unlike the last time around, the last mile would and should get more dollars this time."| Sustaining Entrepreneurship In A Growing CompanyTom Peters has come out with a brief presentation on sustaining entrepreneurship in a growing organisation. Renewing an organisation and keeping the entrepreneurship spirit in a growing organisation are the key challenges in front of top management in several organisations in the world today.Tom Peters offers his insights from successful living organisations as to how they have managed to maintain entrenepreneurship while growing. |Consumer-Oriented Technology Companies Will Outperform Enterprise-Oriented Technology Companies( Via Jeff Nolan ) Most technology investors focus on tech companies that sell to enterprises. The enterprise market, particularly if you include small businesses, is far larger than the consumer market. Companies' technology budgets are significantly greater than consumers', and enterprise-oriented technology has evolved more rapidly than consumer-oriented technology. But that's changing, saysDavid Johnson's article in Seeking Alpha. Over the next few years, growth in the market for enterprise technology will be disappointing. Start with software. Software revenue growth will be held back by two factors: First, the ASP model is slashing costs for both small and large companies. Eg - Salesforce.com, CyberU, UTILITY COMPUTING ASPs will slash the upfront cost of S/W and the recurring revenues from upgrades. Second, software revenue growth will be hampered by the growth of the open source software movement and the outsourcing of software development. The picture is not pretty with enterprise hardware. Utility computing and more efficient sharing of resources via virtualization will cut the growth in demand for processing and storage hardware. And standardization at the component level and new technologies like blade servers will cut the price of new technology. Add to the mix lower cost production (particularly in China), and it's clear that the current value proposition of the technology industry is that enterprises can get better technology with an overall lower price tag than previously. Bearing that in mind, it's hard to see how the enterprise hardware market can grow strongly over the next few years. Now consider the consumer technology market. Consumer technology is on the cusp of a dramatic upgrade cycle that will last a decade: - Video is going high-definition. That will involve upgrades in TVs, broadcasting technology and DVDs. - Audio is going digital. This means not just portable MP3 players, but an entire upgrade of home entertainment systems and, probably starting next year, car stereos. -BTW way - car "stereos" will be relics of the past, as CDs and digital broadcast radio will likely be in surround-sound. -Many consumers have already switched to digital cameras and camcorders, but there are many more to go. The editing and printing of photos at home is growing in popularity. Flat panels are replacing CRTs. Flat panel TVs are more attractive and take up less space; that means they'll be put in more places than before.Hard discs and software are replacing dumber recording technology. Tivos are just the start of this; soon we'll see hard disks in cars too. -Wireless is enabling home networking, aided by the spread of broadband Internet connections. -DVD players are now cheap and ubiquitous. The next large market is DVD recorders, and DVD and satellite video in the back of cars. -Cell phones will become multi-functional, used for photos, music, perhaps video and certainly for transactions. -Broadband to the home, wireless networking and the availability of digital content are changing the way people purchase music and video. True, consumer technology is suffering from some of the same deflationary forces hitting the enterprise technology market, particularly cheaper production in China. However, the price tag of new, mainstream consumer electronics goods is often higher than the old one. Flat panel TVs cost more than traditional CRT TVs, DVD recorders and PVRs cost more than VCRs (at least for another couple of months...), an iPod costs a lot more than a Sony Walkman, satellite radio costs more than free broadcast radio, six-speaker surround sound audio costs more than stereo, satellite navigation in cars costs more than a map book, a DVD player in the back of your car costs more than a plain seat back, and the price tag of cell phones is actually rising as they incorporate PDA functionality, WiFi, mobile email and web surfing. And people are paying more for printers and supplies now that they are printing photos at home.This is a dramatically different consumer electronics business compared to the recent past. Over the last 15 years, the most important technology changes excluding the shrinkage of cell phones have been the introduction of the CD and the Walman/Diskman. Neither were earth shattering. (The introduction of the CD benefitted the music companies more than the electronics industry.) TV hasn't changed for decades, analog cameras aren't much different from what they were 20 years ago, and the price of TVs and VCRs has been steadily falling. Now, all of a sudden, digitization of audio and video and the networking of consumer devices is shaking up the consumer market, and consumers' electronics budgets are rising. People are willing to pay more for consumer technology - $300 for an iPod versus $30 for a Diskman - because the improvements in functionality due to digitization are so significant. Perhaps this is a useful indicator: isn't it interesting that wireless networking has taken off faster in the home than the enterprise?Consumer technology will be the sweet spot of technology investing over the next five years, and will be far more attractive than investing in enterprise technology, with its shrinking dollar market size and less dramatic technology upgrades. My Take - Quite interesting indeed - Look at this Dell, HP, Intel are focussing at the home entertainment market seriously. while enterprise margins may look higher now, it has to be seen whether this would sustain in the future. | Portable Net - The Future Net( Via Rajesh.)Telecommunication networks have traditionally been characterized by long network planning cycles and high fixed investment costs. That makes the industry particularly vulnerable to disruptive or “subversive” technologies. Unlike the slow process of improving a product or service through incremental change, disruptive technologies threaten to tear up the page and start again. The “portable Internet” potentially offers us such technologies. The term “portable Internet”– is used here to describe a platform for high-speed data access using Internet Protocol (IP), which covers:• advanced wireless technologies like Wi-Fi,WiMax, IMT-2000, ultra wideband and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. These operate at long, medium and short ranges. Users accessing the Internet often face a trade-off between higher connection speeds and mobility .Fixed-line technologies generally offer higher speeds while IMT-2000 mobile phone networks offer greater mobility. Wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies fall in between, offering users limited mobility with only a small decrease in overall speeds. However, there is a wide gap between the amount of mobility offered by 3G and that of WLAN, and many see this as the prime market segment for new portable Internet technologies, especially in developing countries. The portable Internet, as defined here, comprises a wide range of technologies, each filling the need for a specific type of user access. These technologies can be categorized according to the geographical reach of their radio signals. Short-range technologies, such as Bluetooth, ZigBee and RFID allow low-power connectivity within a range of 30 metres. Medium-range technologies can communicate at least 150 metres from a hotspot (e.g. Wi-Fi, or IEEE 802.11b) and up to several kilometres, depending on environmental and regulatory factors. Finally, long-range technologies such as WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) and IMT-2000 (3G) have ranges that extend up to 50 kilometres from a base station, and to near-nationwide coverage when offered as a networked service. Also in this category fit solutions based on high- or low-altitude platform stations HAPS/LAPS) that can serve a whole town, and satellites that can serve a whole region.This is the Future Net and very important for all of us to understand how to leverage for our enterprise. A presentation about the report - ITU Internet Report 2004 is available here and a summary is available here. | Monday, October 11, 2004Broadband Content Delivery On Desktop( Via Paid Content )Broadband content technology and delivery vendor Maven Networks has released a survey on user behavior when it comes to video delivered to the desktop, using a standalone app.According to the survey, 71 percent of consumers would download a branded video channel to their desktop...70 percent of broadband users claim that they would use the service at least once a week, with 25 to 34 year olds being the most likely to use it that often.Concerns: The biggest concern broadband users have with the new service is the perception that it will use a lot of hard drive space. The length of time for the initial download of a channel also generates concern...Other concerns included the fear that the channel would be used to serve popup ads or that marketers would collect personal information about the consumers viewing habits.. Important survey result at a time when global broadband penetration is increasing significantly.| Microsoft loses the API war(Via Senthil) Joel Sposky writes about How Microsoft Lost The API War. Here's a theory you hear a lot these days: "Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empire will topple." We covered this topic recently. Although there is some truth to the fact that Linux is a huge threat to Microsoft, predictions of Microsft's demise are premature. Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger. In the early 90s everyone thought IBM was completely over: mainframes were history! Back then, Robert X. Cringely predicted that the era of the mainframe would end on January 1, 2000 when all the applications written in COBOL would seize up, and rather than fix those applications, for which, allegedly, the source code had long since been lost, everybody would rewrite those applications for client-server platforms.Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet. Microsoft grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, when the growth in personal computers was so dramatic that every year there were more new computers sold than the entire installed base. That meant that if you made a product that only worked on new computers, within a year or two it could take over the world even if nobody switched to your product. That was one of the reasons Word and Excel displaced WordPerfect and Lotus so thoroughly: Microsoft just waited for the next big wave of hardware upgrades and sold Windows, Word and Excel to corporations buying their next round of desktop computers (in some cases their first round). So in many ways Microsoft never needed to learn how to get an installed base to switch from product N to product N+1. When people get new computers, they're happy to get all the latest Microsoft stuff on the new computer, but they're far less likely to upgrade. This didn't matter when the PC industry was growing like wildfire, but now that the world is saturated with PCs most of which are Just Fine, Thank You, Microsoft is suddenly realizing that it takes much longer for the latest thing to get out there. When they tried to "End Of Life" Windows 98, it turned out there were still so many people using it they had to promise to support that old creaking grandma for a few more years.Unfortunately, these Brave New Strategies, things like .NET and Longhorn and Avalon, trying to create a new API to lock people into, can't work very well if everybody is still using their good-enough computers from 1998. Developers, developers, developers, and developers are not buying into Microsoft's multiple-personality-disordered suggestions for how we should develop software. Suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows. None of this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.None of this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing. This is where the real threat to Microsoft lay | web 2.0 - Event Ramblings by Ross MayfieldWeb 2.0 was truly wonderful in that it wasn't all company pitches or rock star panels, it brought in issues of the day that matter, says Ross Mayfield. The key happenings as Ross saw include:Larry Lessig, the only one to receive a standing ovation and backchanneling that he should run for President. His argument was media concentration combined with copyright regulation has led us to a permission culture instead of a free culture . Kim Polese's SpikeSource and its direct competitor SourceLabs provide a new category within the open source ecosystem that will help realize DIYIT. When industries commoditize, managing risk and reducing transaction costs is at a premium. Today open source is a volatile and liquid market. IT departments gain reduced upfront costs, but face market, portfolio (combinations) and operational risk that can be managed through certification, assembly and commodity management. If these businesses can get past the fact that you can't scale people and develop some technology-driven scalable processes, I think they have fantastic growth prospects. Social software demos of blogs, wikis, news aggregators, LinkedIn, Tribe, Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us and Podcasting. It was a blast.It is an interesting time for social software and social networking. Social networking has largely been funded and now needs to demonstrate services on top of their more mature and still growing networks, and deliver revenue. Social software has matured to the level where people don't talk of the category, but the products, newly funded companies and success stories. Pretty good praise for Rojo as a web-based aggregator with social sharing. Flickr was truly all the rage, while del.icio.us, Basecamp, Newsgator and Feedburner got great mentions. Wiki was word at Web 2.0, at least the new word.Markets evolve today through a combination of competition between vendors, cooperation in standards and open source, customer education through shared practices and in the end, customer requirements. How language evolves matters less for hype cycles. Words do matter for explaining trends and describing customer problems and solutions. | Sunday, October 10, 2004The Miracle Called ChinaThe world economy is cooking. Global output will expand 5% this year,the biggest rise in nearly three decades. The U.S. has pulled out of a slowdown earlier this year and looks set to post 4%-plus growth in the third quarter. China is likely to grow a sizzling 9% this year, and Japan is enjoying its best performance since 1990. Even long-lagging Europe is looking up. The US trade deficit is $600 billion and budget deficit is $400 billion,posing significant threat to the world economy.Over the past decade or so, the global economy has undergone fundamental changes that are conspiring to boost growth while keeping prices in check. These shifts include the continuing productivity revolution in the U.S. as well as the determination of the globe's central banks to keep prices under control. But the mother of all change agents is China -- a rising economic power whose soaring demand is fueling growth across the globe, even as its surge in low-cost manufacturing exports on the back of an undervalued currency is helping keep inflation in check. Credit largely goes to its massive investment in capacity. With investment running at some 45% of gross domestic product, China is adding capacity at a furious pace to make everything from steel to cell phones. Yes, its appetite for materials to fuel those factories is pushing up prices for oil and other commodities. But its exports of cheap consumer goods from those factories hold down inflation in the U.S. and elsewhere.So far, the reconfiguration of the world economy around the U.S. and China has proved to be a net plus. The change has helped hold down inflation levels even as it promotes global growth. But it has also spawned economic imbalances that will need to be dealt with if the good times are to continue. | RFIG - Tagged Contents and Virtual ProjectionFuture Now points out to Mitubistshi service in the area of Photosensing RFID in for location area services.Wireless tags such as RFID (radio frequency identification) are becoming ubiquitous in inventory management. However, it is difficult to precisely locate the tags using a handheld device. This problem by using a hybrid of radio frequency and optical communication with the tag.The handheld device consists of a RF reader plus a data projector. The Radio Frequency Identity and Geometry (RFIG) system consists of a hand-held projector that shines dynamic images onto physical objects of the user's preference, and radio frequency identification tags augmented with photosensors, which identify objects for the projector. Radio frequency identification tags contain tiny, inexpensive chips that are read using radio waves. Photosensors detect light intensity.The system can be used to find and track inventory, guide robots or precision handling systems on assembly lines, locate small instruments and track movement of items in health care settings, keep track of objects in homes, offices and libraries, and enable games to integrate real and virtual objects. A projector, say a hand-held device, detects tags in a box, then projects a picture of the contents of the box on its outside. This can have significant application value in the transportation and retails sectors. |Leaders must learn to confront reality.Ram Charan, has just written a new book with Larry Bossidy "Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right." The book is infused with the famo |
