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Sunday, October 31, 2004

Why Adam Kalsey Doesn't Recommend Firefox

Adam 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 Steel

Businessweek 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, 2004

ACM queue -special issue on RFID

ACMQueue 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 Issue

Fortune'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 Mobiles

Om 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 Complexity

The 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 Google

Russell 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 World

Businessweek 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, 2004

Ram Shriram Talks About - "The Google Story"

Matt Marshall blogs about angel investor
Ram 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 Data

Here'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 enterprise

Few 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, 2004

Adapt Your Supply Chain—or Die Via HBSWK

Unless 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 Content

Richard 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 spending

Ed 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 online
payment 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. staffers

Infoworld 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 2004

Nominations 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, 2004

The Rise & Fall Of A Dot Com Pioneer

In 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 Whining

Edward 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 Frontiers

John 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 y