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Tuesday, November 30, 2004eBay PulseeBay's just launched eBay Pulse, kinda similar to Google's Zeitgeist, but listing what particular kinds of trade eBay buyers/Sellers are getting into this holiday season. There's also some nice looks at the highest priced and most watched items. A good starting point to start trend-watching on eBay trades. |The Googlization Of Enterprise Software - Say Goodbye To OffshoringBusiness2 publishes an article by Erick Schonfeld wherein he says,on-demand enterprise software is ready to take its next step: Automating thorny business processes. Excerpts from the article( with minor edits and my views added.) As against outsourcing your business processes to offshore locations,soon enough you'll be outsourcing them to an on-demand software service instead. At least that's what Net mogul Halsey Minor is betting on with his personal $50 million On Demand Venture Fund. Minor, who was at the right place at the right time when he founded CNET Networksin the mid-1990s, is now a big believer in on-demand software that is delivered as a subscription service over the Web. Grand Central is a software-integration service that acts as a central hub for IT folks who want to connect different enterprise applications together without paying consultants millions of dollars to do so. Instead they pay Minor per megabyte of data that runs across Grand Central. Minor is also an investor in Salesforce.com, which offers customer-relationship management software as a service over the Web in much the same manner. What these two enterprise-software businesses have in common is that their customers incur no up-front costs and pay only for what they use. Minor likens it to a utility or a railroad, hence his company's name. While this notion of software delivered as a service is gaining in popularity, Minor's fund is focused on the next logical step: Web-based software that automates business processes. A business process can be anything from the way a company pays its bills to how it approves travel expenses to the procedures it follows for interacting with suppliers. Mundane stuff, maybe, but a multibillion-dollar industry of so-called business-process outsourcing has sprung up over the past few years to take these rote processes off the hands of corporate managers. These are tasks like processing insurance claims or expense accounts. Too often, though, these outsourcers are tempted to throw cheap, foreign labor at the problem instead of using technology to improve the way the processes are handled. Web-based software platforms can change all that. Instead of merely letting customers tap into some enterprise software over the Web, startups now have the opportunity to translate specific business rules into software and automate large swaths of the outsourcing industry. "I am just waiting for the entrepreneurs," Minor says. He has three rules for considering a business pitch: - The startup must aim to make companies or industries more efficient by automating a business process, - The software must work using Grand Central, and - The would-be founders must build a functioning prototype. (If Minor doesn't like your plan, one could try Emergence Capital Partners, another venture firm looking to invest $125 million in this area.) The resulting businesses, Minor believes, will lead to "the Googlization of enterprise software." He means that, just as Google only gets paid per click for ads that appear on its website, business-process software customers should only have to pay for each successful transaction. "Pay per success," he says, "lines up exactly with the way businesses want to buy. If I pick up the phone and the call doesn't go through, I don't pay. If the plane does not leave, I don't pay." Why should enterprise software or outsourcing services be any different? Software-based outsourcing services could be built for any noncore business process in practically any industry. (Consider the possibilities in accounting, human resources, legal documentation, and procurement, to name a few.) Anyone who has expertise in a widely applicable business process should be translating it into Web-accessible software and beating down Minor's door with business plan in hand. Outsourcing to India or China won't stop. But ultimately, technology arbitrage will trump labor arbitrage. And the days of throwing bodies at these problems, when bits can handle them much more effectively, will go the way of the abacus. | Intel At CrossRoadsNYTimes reports that Failed Hopes and Other Tales From Inside Intel has put Intel at crossroads. Excerpts:Intel recently admitted its failure to successful enter the digital television market and is withdrawing from this market segment. A.M.D. has been so successful in stealing the spotlight from Intel lately that Kevin B. Rollins, the president of one of Intel's biggest customers, Dell Computer, said at a financial conference call this month that Dell was considering adding computers with A.M.D. chips to its product line. For two decades, Intel has been the most sure-footed of Silicon Valley companies. But lately, it seems to have lost its way.This all portends an interesting inauguration for Intel's 50-year-old president, Paul S. Otellini, the longtime Intel marketing executive tapped by the board this month to become only the fourth chief executive in the company's history. Mr. Otellini will tell analysts that he plans to focus on four areas for growth: -international markets for desktop personal computers, - mobile and wireless applications, -the digital home, -as well as a new initiative aimed at large corporate computing markets that Intel is calling the Digital Office. The strategy is a significant shift - a "right-hand turn," as Mr. Otellini likes to say - from Intel's long-term obsession with making ever-faster computer chips. Instead, the company is now concentrating on what he calls platforms: complete systems aimed at both computing and consumer electronics markets.Mr. Otellini insists that the recent missteps, including the premature introduction he himself made of the digital project, are simply a result of over-optimistic marketing. Intel is still a technology giant, the global leader in semiconductors, with revenue last year of more than $30 billion. The company retains an unrivaled manufacturing capacity, control of a powerful desktop computing standard, and an enviable international growth rate which shows no sign of slowing anytime soon.But some of the company's marketing problems may become more acute before they are resolved. Until recently, selling Intel chips was easy: faster was better. Now, Mr. Otellini said, Intel intends to play the same game with the number of processor cores that can be embedded on a chip. The hope is that by breaking problems into parts that can be computed by separate cores simultaneously, chips will continue to offer better performance.The problem with the strategy is that so far Intel is trailing A.M.D., I.B.M. and Sun Microsystems, who all have their own aggressive multicore chip strategies. To combat the inroads in the microprocessor market being made by A.M.D. and other competitors, Intel is moving to add a growing array of functions to its microprocessor chips, a strategy that Mr. Otelleni refers to awkwardly as the "platformization" of Intel. Currently, the company has 10,000 software developers and its new chip sets each ship with over a million lines of software code, largely hidden from the user. The clearest example of that strategy to date is the Centrino microprocessor for portable computers, which comes bundled with wireless abilities. "We don't talk about the chip, but the collection of attributes that Intel brings," he said. "That's the footprint in the snow for Intel's future." The ability to add software functions to its chips is a genuine opportunity for Intel but it also raises the possibility that it will reignite some of the tensions the company has faced in its more than two-decade-old alliance with Microsoft, which has intensely resisted Intel's software efforts in the past. And the two companies are increasingly likely to compete both in Intel's efforts to enter the digital home and its new effort to embed software that provides greater manageability in systems sold to the corporate server market. Mr. Otellini said that despite the defeat in the digital television business, Intel still has some big bets that it hopes will pay off as lucratively as the PC industry once did. One of those big bets came into sharper focus last month when it announced it was investing in Clearwire, a digital wireless start-up being led by Craig McCaw, a cellular telephone pioneer. Clearwire hopes to capitalize on the unproven long-range version of the WiFi digital wireless standard called Wi-Max and Mr. Otellini clearly hopes the technology will be a disruptive one.If his vision is correct, the big losers will be today's voice telephone companies."Voice is going to be free as a result of all of this, which the carriers don't like to hear, but that's essentially where it's going," he said.What is in it for Intel? A cellphone-like wireless handset that works seamlessly both inside and outside the home throughout an urban area.That is a market that could easily mitigate any number of missteps and blunders - potentially a market that would remake the cellular phone world that so far has largely eluded Intel."Any market of 600 million small computers is not just important, but it's critical to us," Mr. Otellini said. Clearly , we shall witness the dawn of the New Intel shortly - in a much more competitive world - Intel has successfully weathered such challenges in the past and we have to see how it moves forward. | The Ralph Revolution @ General MotorsGeorge F.Colony writes,Believe it or not, General Motors is setting a revolutionary IT pace. Historically General Motors is perceived to be slow in its IT initiatives. Not any more. Excerpts from the article ( with slight edits with my added views) :In the 1980s, Roger Smith @ General Motors had the bright idea of buying EDS and outsourcing GM's information technology to the company. By 1996, the numbers had gone way off the tracks. GM had the highest IT costs in the car business and was behind in engineering and design technology. Enter Ralph Szygenda, former CIO at Texas Instruments and Bell Atlantic. Against much advice, Ralph took the CIO job at GM. Most predicted that Ralph would last a year at the most, suffocated by the bureaucracy of GM and stiff-armed by the all-powerful outsourcer (and corporate sister) EDS. We wrote about the changes happening in GM’s IT in JULY. Ralph staged a rebuild of GM that is just coming to fruition now. At the risk of oversimplifying what has been a large, complex effort, Ralph moved IT away from a technology focus to a process focus. If you think about it, the way companies make money is through process — simply stated, the way they do work. By focusing on process, Ralph got IT out of the technology-for-technology's-sake trap and into the business of using technology to improve how GM builds, markets, and finances vehicles. There was resistance from the GM culture. The company is organized into car brands — Buick, Chevrolet, et al. — and regions — Europe, Australia, etc. Since the time of Alfred Sloan, the way to the top of the company was to run one of these divisions and build an empire. So when Ralph said, "Hey, let's run a standard design process, manufacturing process, or supply chain across the company," the refrain was, "No, we do it differently at Cadillac or Saturn or in Europe." Ralph's comeback? "From where I sit, it looks like all of you are building cars and trucks — how different can the process be?" So the Ralph Revolution didn't take hold until Rick Wagoner, the company's present CEO, came on the scene in 2000. Rick embraced the process focus and has been a strong advocate and participant (he's even taken on the role of the exec in charge of standardizing sales and marketing process across the company). Unlike other CIOs who Rick had worked with, Ralph spoke the language of the business (e.g., better supply chain), rather than techie jargonese. FACTS on the impact: The company has taken $1 billion out of IT costs each year. It has taken significant cost out of its design process while doubling output. GM cars quality is not so bad anymore, with GM quality now exceeding DaimlerChrysler and Ford and rivaling Toyota and Nissan, according to J.D. Power. On the engineering front, the company recently designed a truck chassis completely in software (the company uses Unigraphics for CAD) and took it straight to production, without ever going through the expensive step of prototyping. The result: great ride, high crash-test scoring, low cost.Perhaps the biggest payoff has been enabling GM to be a truly global company, capable of quickly sharing design, process, and information across the world. While Toyota still has most of its design engineers in Japan, GM is able to get high output from its 19 design centers located all over the world. This capability enabled the company to transform its Daewoo product into the GM small car for all world markets. The process focus pervades all that Ralph touches. The EDS deal expires in 2006, so GM will be awarding outsourcing contracts worth $3 billion per year. To prepare for a new world of multiple outsourcers, GM is documenting 24 IT processes (e.g., change management and asset management) and will require all outsourcers to hew to these processes. This will make the outsourcers easier to manage, guarantee standard IT process across all of GM, and make it easier to plug-and-play outsourcers. Most important, it keeps GM in control. What It Means No. 1: IT in many companies has become mistrusted, expensive overhead that's disconnected from the business. A Ralph Revolution that reorients IT away from technology and toward process can reverse that trend. Trust will follow, as well as promotions and recognition. What It Means No. 2: Reality has caught up with the hype. As Ralph and team report, all of the promises of the Net revolution have finally been delivered, and they have made the revolution at GM possible. The Internet is not about selling books and CDs online — it's about making cars, pills, and jet engines more efficiently. What It Means No. 3: The vendors lose one of their favorite weapons. Vendor CEOs love to run into large user shops like GM and start screaming about the newest technology — VoIP!! RFID!! — in the hopes of extracting dollars. When companies have a strong process orientation, they can ask simple questions: Will this new technology improve how we do our work? Will it improve our product quality? Will it improve customer satisfaction? If so, how?The Ralph Revolution is not over, and it is not fully proven. If Szygenda walked out of GM today, there is some question as to whether the revolution would head forward with the energy and vigor that has propelled it to this point. And it's hard work — just ask one of the process information officers (PIOs) who are down in the trenches every day trying to keep GMers "on process." But get into a new Cadillac. The high quality and cool design have a lot to do with the IT organization and the revolution that Ralph has led at GM. | From Wikipedia To WikiNewsWired reports about the recent foray of wikipeia creators into creating a new wiki based news platform.After revolutionizing the way an encyclopedia can be built and maintained, the team behind Wikipedia is attempting to apply its collaborative information-gathering mode to journalism. Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia's encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded. The current rendition of Wikinews is an experimental version that, according to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, offers just a taste of what's to come when the news effort builds momentum. Although Wikipedia already posts entries tied to current events, Wales said the Wikinews effort employs a different writing style and approach. "Wikipedia has always been very strong for background articles on things that are in the news," Wales said. "But on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article." In an online vote that concluded Nov. 12, members of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, decided by a wide margin to support launching the news site, described on the project discussion board as an effort "to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view."Unlike Wikipedia, Wikinews will present original material rather than just compiling and summarizing information found elsewhere, according to the news site's organizers. For future submissions, organizers also want to set up a system for accrediting Wikinews reporters who have actively participated in the project. Both Wikinews and Wikipedia run on Wiki software, an application that allows users to collectively author web documents. Each page on the site contains an "edit" link, which users can click to edit passages created by other writers. Wales believes the process of collaborative editing has allowed Wikipedia -- which contains more than 1 million entries in more than 75 languages -- to maintain a neutral tone on a wide variety of controversial topics. He expects the same process to prevent bias in Wikinews coverage."The incentive for behavior in a wiki is to write in such a way that your writing can survive," he said. "The only way it can survive is if your writing is acceptable to an extremely wide audience." Alex Halavais, graduate director for the informatics school at the University at Buffalo, said that Wikinews has much in common with two other efforts at citizen journalism, Indymedia and South Korea's Ohmynews. | Monday, November 29, 2004RFID : Science Fiction Vision To RealityExpress Computers publishes an article by Dr.Sanjay Sarma CTO of OATsystems. Dr Sarma writes, what would have been the stuff of science fiction, RFID or radio frequency identification technology is swiftly turning this vision into reality. Excerpts:Imagine if your microwave oven could read the instructions on a packet of frozen food and cook it accordingly. Imagine sitting in your office and being able to track who is buying your product from the store, and even gauging the rate at which your product is selling. Once this would have been the stuff of science fiction, but RFID or radio frequency identification technology is swiftly turning this vision into reality. Although RFID technology has been around for at least three decades, it has come of age only in the last few years. New applications developed in American tech research labs, and supported by industry, have given RFID a new lease of life, spearheading a technology revolution that is changing the way global businesses monitor their supply chains and operations. RFID technology is used to track everything from pets to airline baggage. It is also used to prevent store theft and counterfeiting. Some of the world's largest businesses and multinational corporations, including Wal-Mart, Gillette, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, are developing plans to deploy solutions based on RFID to monitor their global supply chains. In fact Wal-Mart joined the Auto-ID Centre in 2001 in order to put industry's weight behind research. And last year the corporation mandated that its 100 top suppliers would have to send all products for RFID-tagging from 2005.As supply chains become global in nature'with materials being sourced in one country, manufactured in a second and sold in a third'time lags and distances often compound these inefficiencies. For instance, retail giants such as Wal-mart and Metro often have global supply chains, with the starting point in resource-rich developing countries like India. However, studies of the global retail industry have shown that up to 65 percent of inventory records in retail environments are wrong. In addition, products are out-of-stock approximately 10 percent of the time, resulting in 4-5 percent lost sales that's worth about $100 billion annually. On the other hand, too much inventory can result in billions of dollars of locked-up capital, high transportation costs, and other problems. RFID-EPC technology can dramatically improve supply chain management efficiencies by providing real-time visibility into what's on the store shelves. Because RFID tags are unique, a product can be individually tracked as it moves from location to location. The vision of the EPC movement is to create near-perfect supply chain visibility, where businesses have the ability to track every item anywhere in the world securely and in real time. Using RFID-EPC, one will be able to count how much inventory there is on the store shelf, and other information unique to each product, such as its expiration date. RFID can therefore be utilised to build faster supply chains and improve the planning and execution process, all of which provide financial pay-offs. | Comparing tool popularity on job search sites(Via Scoble) Joe Martini points out to portal tool poularity through notified requriements in job search sites - Surrogate indicator of popularity at best!!. Too Often, sharepoint portal is seen to be a non starter, while Steve ballmer claims revenue of US400 Million product for Microsoft and claims that Sharepoint is one of the fastest products ever to get to that point for the company. |Cyberport and Hong Kong's FutureDan Gilmor visits Hongkong and the much talked about Cyberport and files this interesting report. Excerpts(with slight edits and my comments at the end):Too bad John Chu, this city's king of movie special effects, can't actually clone himself and his company. If he could make his digital magic work in the real world, perhaps he could turn a high-profile development called Cyberport into a huge hit. Planned as a miniature version of Silicon Valley, the often-maligned project isn't the abject failure some had predicted. But it's clearly not matching its backers' early visions, either, at least not so far. There was always a certain amount of wishful thinking in the Cyberport vision -- or, if the cynics are right, a different intention all along.Cyberport was conceived back in 1999, shortly before the technology stock bubble started to deflate. Hong Kong's government announced its intention to create a tech hub on prime land nestled along Hong Kong island, a dream setting where tech companies would thrive and provide economic fuel for a city facing big challenges in a new century. Hong Kong is a cartel economy, where key industries are controlled or at least strongly guided by the Li family and a few others and awarding this project to the family was crticised at inception. The multibillion-dollar Cyberport was planned from the start as a combination of office space and high-end housing, plus some glitzy stores. The office space is renting slowly. The luxury housing is selling like hotcakes. The government will own the office space, which isn't close to breaking even yet. Li's company will make big profits from the residential part, according to published reports, though the government shares in some of the proceeds as well.Most of the space in the first two office buildings is under lease to several dozen companies. One tenant is Microsoft, which also has space in Hong Kong's downtown area, called Central. On a visit last week,to Cyberport 3, the third commercial phase of the project, one could find that most of the space is empty with silence in the middle of the day. But on the eighth floor of one part of the structure, the employees at Chu's Centro were working on a variety of special-effects and animation projects. The Plan is to move into new kinds of creative endeavors, including producing feature films entirely in-house rather than just working for others. Moving higher on the digital media value chain is what Hong Kong must do, said David Chung, Cyberport's senior manager for information technology operations, a few floors below in the Cyberport Digital Media Centre, a government-run operation that provides tools for developers working in audio, video, animation, games and other media. Cyberport has some serious regional competition for digital media production and other office space. Singapore's government has poured resources into a media center. South Korea is becoming a hotbed of digital development. Shanghai has designs on the field, too. The bigger question is whether a government-sponsored project of this nature -- a "build it and they will come" scheme -- is a fundamentally flawed notion at the outset. Malaysia's "Multimedia Super Corridor" outside Kuala Lumpur hasn't exactly set the region on fire economically.It's way too early to predict such a fate for Cyberport. But few here will be surprised if it's ultimately better known for its luxury housing than its commercial space. In Hong Kong, residential development has a way of overshadowing other economic activities.The units in Cyberport's initial residential tower, Bel-Air, are said to be stunning, not least in views of the water and nearby islands. Oh, and they have super-fast Internet connections. Asian countries are mostly driven by government vision and what one government does, the neighbouring country tries to imitate killing viability - the winner is always one with efficiency in execution and one showing true business friendliness. Currently China , and earlier Japan, Taiwan and Korea could plan bigger and show some sucess. The much talked about India has no such ambition and happy with its creeked roads, choked airports, poor infrastructure that could get more worse when monsoon comes everytime - The net result is the same - Govt funded/conceived/run initiatives in emerging areas fail over time - some may show early success - but thats it. In emerging high-tech areas, it is entrepreneurism, innovation and unconventional way of working often helps enteprises/industry to hit the sucess mark. On a related note, this story (though not directly related) makes interesting reading. | Sunday, November 28, 2004eWeek : 2004 explosive for VoIPIn a nice rounup the prima donna of VoIP, Ellen Muraskin of eWeek, has a fast read recap of 2004 and VoIP developments in 2004. Excerpts from her article:The major telecom vendors have pledged their compliance with the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling standard and continued on that road, with more and more beginning to implement the presence aspect of SIP into their phone systems. This meant that PBX players, large and small, either built or OEMed servers that integrated buddy-status-conscious instant messaging with voice and video calling.She calls into question the enterprise market and asks where the future lies drawing out the need for the ability to cross connect multiple networks. This would enable companies like Stealth Communications perfectly poised for this type of effort. It also means that technologies like MPLS from Cisco and others will be rolled out to maintain the QoS and deliver the services that already work in the PSTN/PBX world correctly. One example is Caller ID. When a call originates from CallVantage line from an SBC landline or T-Mobile mobile phone all works perfectly. However, there are issues about call origin location details.Something as simple as how the signaling data moves will be important. US enteprises and by extension the world shall begin to embrace VoIP as these things are put in order. | Israeli Intelligence And InnovationStacy Perman @800ceoread.com writes,Innovation is the lynchpin of business success. In the case of Israel, a nation that has been on a war-footing since it was established in 1948, it has also served as the foundation for its own defense and security. Here the military-intelligence complex plays a singularly exceptional role. With infinite challenges and threats and limited resources and manpower, Israel’s particular set of geopolitical and historical circumstances has shaped a very distinctive kind of innovative thinking and its military has in many respects become its most vivid expression. The Israel Defense Forces and a number of its elite technological intelligence units have become an enormous incubator for entrepreneurialsm, creativity and innovation. Daring missions of military and intelligence have become Israel’s calling card. Spilling over into the civilian world is the nation’s world-class high tech industry much of which was forged in Israeli’s unique military machinery. As the saying goes, business is like war and in Israel, that appears especially so. Excerpts from the book, Spies Inc.: Business Innovation from Israel's Masters of Espionage is available here . |Semantic Memory and Episodic Memory( Via NovaSpivack)An interesting new brain study reveals processing differences between Semantic Memory and Episodic Memory in human brains. Nature performs these functions differently, and there is probably a good reason why that is so. On the Web we don't really have an equivalent of Episodic Memory or Semantic Memory yet... but we're working on it!Excerpts from the interesting article :The Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care reports that, over a period of several months prior to the brain scan, volunteers documented dozens of unique events from their personal lives on a micro cassette recorder (episodic memories). At the same time, they recorded statements about personal facts of their lives (semantic memories). The researchers played these recordings back to the volunteers while their brains were being scanned with FMRI. A few brain imaging studies have already found differences in the brain between factual and episodic autobiographical memory. However, the participants in those studies were asked to recollect memories that were usually several years old, and it was impossible to tell how often they had been rehearsed over the years. This new study, on the other hand, used episodes from daily life that were only a few months old. The volunteers made dozens of event recordings within minutes or hours of the actual event. Only a fraction of these were selected at random for use in the study, so volunteers had no idea which ones they were until they heard them through the headphones in the scanner. The recordings created a very rich recollective experience, enabling scientists to tease out more easily the different brain regions associated with factual (semantic) and episodic autobiographical memories. | Saturday, November 27, 2004Legendary venture capitalist looks aheadNews.com interviews Don Valentine as the grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital.Since founding Sequoia Capital in 1972, he's helped nurture some of the Valley's biggest successes, including Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Electronic Arts and Oracle. In all Sequoia, which now manages a $3 billion fund, has helped start and finance more than 500 companies that include webvan and eToys. Excerpts from the interview:- Nanotech is overhyped,probably in part because of the huge amount of technology press coverage of what is sort of a lab fascination with the chemical process. People don't talk about particular applications, like making Pentium chips 50 times faster or curing diabetes. -What is phase two of Internet? - Phase II internet means - Now we're really into solid applications, problem solving and business. Look at how much advertising is moving to the Web portals. It's a reconstitution of the way Madison Avenue needs to play best. - Computer industry's greatest challenge in the next three to five years - If you look at the personal-computing industry, only a fraction of the world has participated in this arena. I think it's a huge, huge unit market. Companies like Dell, Microsoft and Intel--they're the primary members of that environment. It's an unfortunate situation that only Intel and Microsoft really make money. The rest, with Dell as an exception, don't make any money. I think the challenge for Intel and Microsoft is to find some other platform in which to grow, other than the personal computer. - VC view on the upheaval in the business-software industry - Things constantly evolve in capabilities and directions that didn't exist before. Why would software be any different? There will always be new ideas that large entrenched companies don't think of. - On the claim by (Oracle CEO) Larry Ellison that the industry will consolidate around a few big players, namely Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and SAP? I'm in the Marc Andreesen camp against the Larry Ellison-Hasso Plattner camp. If you look at their offerings, neither has a flagship product in the customer relationship management market--10 years later. So I think they are like all big companies, filled and riddled with not-invented-here. They are unable to recognize innovation and they are very late to do what they claim they're going to do. DiCarta, iMany--there are all these small, flourishing companies started in late '90s that are doing very fine, thank you very much. That said, Oracle is interesting and one of my favorite companies. . But also, I'm a great admirer of the kind of raw-boned entrepreneur that Larry Ellison is. He is willing to speak out even if he's wrong occasionally. - On SAP’s ability to dominate the global market - It's an interesting company, located intellectually in central Germany. It has the historic flexibility of the Teutonic character. They do it their way, and the customer has to do it and buy it the way they make it. They are a "do it my way or forget it" company and the prices are astronomically high. They're hard to do business with, and when in doubt they deal in FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). SAP is the noisiest non-participant in the business. However, the founders are largely out of that company. It will be interesting to see how or if they change with those guys gone. The same with Microsoft when Gates and Ballmer are gone. - Which technology CEO most respected - Steve Jobs. Steve has managed to simultaneously run two entirely dissimilar companies--Pixar, and he is also running the resurging Apple Computer. - Which company or technology is most underrated but has or will have a huge influence? - I've always been mystified by the critically important disc drive industry, without which the PC is a useless device. You have to be brilliant in electronics, you have to be brilliant in magnetics and you have to be brilliant in mechanics to get all that memory capacity in a very little place and do it for next to nothing. That market has never been rewarded financially for its brilliance. Yet the contribution is huge. Cell phones, handheld products, PCs...they all go nowhere without that fundamental storage capability. - Lessons learnt from the dot-com bubble - Will we make mistakes again? Yes. But we'll make different mistakes. The people that started all those dot-com companies? That's over. Most people will remember not to make that mistake again. Nothing in silicon vallwy is revolutionary; it's evolutionary. Look the sequence of Intel microprocessors. It's all predictable. The nature of silicon and software and storage go hand in hand. In the case of software, you just have to be more clever about the nature of the application. So all these things kind of tick along, feeding off each other. | SAP Shall Be The Next CISCO -SAP's Moment(Part II)In Part I , we saw that SAP is likely to dominate the enterprise software markets with a likely marketshare of around 70% shortly. In this second part of this series, The Road Ahead we shall see the actions to come form SAP and its future growth areas. Excerpts for the second part:SAP, WITH A MARKET VALUE of $55 billion, was founded in 1972 by five former IBM executives in Germany, including the legendary programmer Hasso Plattner, who stepped down as co-CEO in May 2003. Kagermann has been running day-to-day operations for several years, and Plattner has compared his stepping down to a similar move by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who relinquished his CEO title CEO to Steve Ballmer in 2000. Today, Plattner remains chairman of the supervisory board, a non-management advisory panel unique to German corporate structure. Kagermann, has certainly been taking notice of Ellison. In fact, Ellison's bold bid for PeopleSoft nearly pushed SAP into the arms of Microsoft. With consolidation suddenly a front-burner issue in software, it was only natural that SAP and Microsoft should consider hooking up. Both Kagermann and Ballmer acknowledged that the companies were in serious talks, but the SAP chief says those discussions have since gone cold."We...thought it was a good idea," Kagermann says of the proposed union. And it's easy to see why: With Microsoft dominating the desktop and creeping into the lower end of enterprise computing, and with SAP supplying the corporate behemoths, the two companies barely overlap and would have created an unfathomable force had they tied the knot.While SAP and Microsoft haven't gotten married, they appear to have moved in together, the two have tightened their business ties and increased their technical and product integrations. More than 60% of new SAP installations are on Microsoft's Windows operating system, and SAP supports certain Microsoft programming tools for developing next-generation applications. That adds up to some of the benefits of a merger without the disruption. SAP's greatest opportunity lies beyond Microsoft -- in a change taking place in the buying habits of corporate technology chiefs. Many of them no longer have the patience, or lavish budgets, for the costly wares of smaller, more specialized competitors. And they want "fewer necks to choke" when technology malfunctions. A report on tech spending released last week by Goldman Sachs noted that businesses are "still in the upswing part of the trend toward fewer, larger vendors." SAP has been able to gain market share by steadily increasing the breadth and depth of its offerings. That's attracted new customers and given existing ones reasons to order more software. Some companies have shown their allegiance by ripping out their specialized "best of breed" applications and replacing them with comparable SAP offerings. SAP has hired some 2,500 people this year to take advantage of the trend, boosting its total headcount by 9%, to more than 30,000. Although costly, larger sales teams could prompt customers to spend more. The company hopes to wean customers from its proprietary offering for clusters of linked personal computers, known as R3, and sell them on the benefits of its Web-enabled mySAP system -- which lets workers in different locations tap into their companies' various business-software applications via the Internet. By using mySAP, companies also can implement a larger assortment of SAP's latest business applications.The other big new product is NetWeaver, which is a stack of software built on an application server-plus, as Kagermann describes it. Application servers allow different applications, or software flavors, to talk to each other via the Internet. While most of SAP's products in the past were written in proprietary code, NetWeaver uses a more open code that works with software from other companies. For example, PeopleSoft human-resource applications can interact with SAP accounting software. NetWeaver also provides Internet portals for accessing information, and data-warehouse and "business-intelligence" capabilities for analyzing trends.The stronger sales from transitions to mySAP and installments of NetWeaver should lead to greater application sales to big corporations. SAP is also making inroads into the wide-open middle tier by launching more affordable solutions for small and mid-sized companies. In all, Goldman's Sherlund expects SAP to increase its global market share among the top five enterprise vendors to 64% by the end of this year. Other than Cisco in networking, the only tech outfit with that kind of market dominance is Microsoft. SAP harnessed the energy of the dot-com boom to improve its products and make them more user-friendly. SAP's e-business solutions weren't always as good as the others, but they were good enough -- and they continued to get better with every new version, at a methodical, steady pace that is a trademark of the German software maker. SAP kept plugging away through the technology downturn of 2000 through 2002, continuing to improve and market its new initiatives. Today, SAP's customer-relations management software outsells the products of Siebel Systems, which pioneered such software nearly a decade ago. SAP also has taken the lead in supply-chain management and other functional specializations once considered beyond its domain. Some analysts contend that SAP needs to go on an acquisition binge in order to expand into fertile new areas, such as business intelligence and perhaps even security. But SAP is likely to resist mergers, as it has in the past, and concentrate on internal growth. This is a key cultural trait that will be closely watched as the industry lurches toward consolidation. Jeff Nolan recently wrote after SAP announced its q3 results that SAP is one of the best managed technology companies in the world with over 128 quarters of financial results and only 1 of them in the red. Jeff adds, - The SAP market share is greater than Oracle, Peoplesoft, Microsoft, and Siebel combined. - The maintenance revenue, which is a staggering $907m for the quarter, up 10%. By the way, maintenance and license revenue don't necessarily move in lock step because not all maintenance agreements come due in the same period of time, so while license revenue was up 13% it should not be expected that maintenance rev would be up by the same amount. In fact, because of natural attrition with customers taking old products off maintenance, it's not unexpected to see maintance stay flat during a period. What the maintenance revenue indicates is that customers are seeing value in their maintenance relationship with SAP, and that the support products the company is providing are comprehensive. Too many software companies look at maintenance as the ATM of the business model, they just make sure they have telephone support covered and do a few patch releases to cover the bases and it's golden. - The product lines continue to fire well (especially in CRM where SAP has overtaken Siebel (rolling 4 quarter share is now at 135% of Siebel's revenue), vertical market focus is working well, and finally new markets in the SMB sector are showing results. Combine all of the above with expense containment and the results are going to be good, in fact the operating margin actually increased 1% to 26% Indeed an impressive juggernaut,that the SAP engine is. | SAP Shall Be The Next CISCO -SAP's Moment(Part I)Barrons magazine writes that SAP is likely to dominate the enteprise software market with a likely marketshare of around 70% shortly. Excerpts of the article to be published in two parts:Henning Kagermann, chief executive of the German software giant SAP, on industry domination: "I think it is always a good position to be in." Good, indeed. SAP, with annual sales of nearly $10 billion, now accounts for a stunning 56% of the worldwide revenues of the top five players in business software -- and that figure looks headed to 70%. SAP has been grabbing market share hand over fist for sometime. SAP has positioned itself to thrive in a new era of Web-based computing, where corporate workers can exchange data across departmental, physical and geographical barriers. SAP's successes have lifted its stock nicely. They now trade at about 30 times estimated earnings for 2005, a premium of more than 25% to Oracle, Microsoft and some other competitors. But SAP may well be worth it. The fact is, Kagermann & Co. soon could hold sway over the corporate-software market to the same degree that Cisco Systems came to rule the Internet- router business in the 1990s. Cisco, after realizing it had become the preferred supplier of the most vital picks and shovels of the Internet gold rush, unleashed a sales and marketing blitz like few others, crushing the competition and becoming the predominant provider of networking gear. The opportunity before SAP over the next two to three years is not very different. The overwhelming trend among corporations is to use fewer and fewer software providers to run all their main functions -- from payroll to manufacturing to customer relations. Once the client makes the decision that he has to consolidate with SAP or somebody else, 95% [of the time] we win," Kagermann says.As a result of such victories, SAP's licensing revenue, the key benchmark for software sales, jumped some 17% in the third quarter. And, even though the company has been spending heavily on product development, sales and marketing, profit margins are holding up well. Operating margins actually climbed in the third quarter, to 27% from 26% a year earlier. And SAP officials say 30% could be the norm in two or three years. Kagermann says,"The idea is first to look for market-share growth, And I think once we achieve this, [we'll] be sure to get a good margin." Margin growth, he added, "comes automatically" after market share, as incremental revenues pile up. Challenges to SAP :– Many, SAP is heavily dependent on corporate tech spending, and that has been tepid lately. Some surveys show that outlays for this year will be up only 3% or 4%, no more than the economy as a whole. And 2005 may not be much brighter. SAP also must contend with the ever-rising value of the euro, which hurts profits since customers in the huge U.S. market pay in dollars. Finally, the company must shake the vestiges of a reputation for creating overly complex, difficult-to-use software. That image dogged SAP for years, and may be tough to bury for good.Kagermann appears to be handling all this adroitly. The company has been making enormous strides with its technology, winning accolades throughout techdom. "They've done an incredible job," says Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, which competes with SAP at the lower end of the business market. He goes so far as to hail Kagermann as "the smartest guy in software, except perhaps Bill Gates." Though not nearly as well known as Microsoft, SAP is unquestionably the first name in business, or enterprise, software. More than 24,000 companies around the world, including 49 of the 50 largest, use SAP software to manage their bookkeeping, supply chains, customer relationships, product planning and more. By contrast, Oracle, the No. 2 player in the enterprise field, serves just 13,000 companies. SAP also provides specialized systems for companies in more than 25 industries, from the oil patch to banking to the auto market. Stacked up against the makers of all types of software, SAP ranks No. 3, after Microsoft and Oracle (counting the latter's core database business, which is distinct from the enterprise market). And SAP is by far the biggest software maker based in Europe. Right now, the company's most impressive growth is coming from the U.S. And SAP has told analysts it expects its U.S. share to surpass 50% reasonably soon and then head toward the company's global share. SAP may soon be the next Cisco, which now commands 70% to 80% of the router and switch businesses. Cisco split its shares eight times in the 'Nineties on the way to its current market capitalization of $130 billion. (Part II Shall follow). | Good News About PovertyNYTimes has come out with an article extolling the benefits of globalisation to the developing world -particularly in eradicating poverty, based on a recently releases WorldBank report. Excerpts from this well written article:we're in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history. Last week, the World Bank released a report showing that global growth "accelerated sharply" this year to a rate of about 4 percent. Best of all, the poorer nations are leading the way. Some rich countries, like the U.S. and Japan, are doing well, but the developing world is leading this economic surge. Developing countries are seeing their economies expand by 6.1 percent this year - an unprecedented rate - and, even if you take China, India and Russia out of the equation, developing world growth is still around 5 percent. As even the cautious folks at the World Bank note, all developing regions are growing faster this decade than they did in the 1980's and 90's. This is having a wonderful effect on world poverty, because when regions grow, that growth is shared up and down the income ladder. In its report, the World Bank notes that economic growth is producing a "spectacular" decline in poverty in East and South Asia. In 1990, there were roughly 472 million people in the East Asia and Pacific region living on less than $1 a day. By 2001, there were 271 million living in extreme poverty, and by 2015, at current projections, there will only be 19 million people living under those conditions. Less dramatic declines in extreme poverty have been noted around the developing world, with the vital exception of sub-Saharan Africa. It now seems quite possible that we will meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which were set a few years ago: the number of people living in extreme poverty will be cut in half by the year 2015. As Martin Wolf of The Financial Times wrote in his recent book, "Why Globalization Works": "Never before have so many people - or so large a proportion of the world's population - enjoyed such large rises in their standard of living." As other research confirms, these rapid improvements at the bottom of the income ladder are contributing to and correlating with declines in illiteracy, child labor rates and fertility rates. The growth in the world's poorer regions also supports the argument that we are seeing a drop in global inequality. Globalization explains the progress being made.. Over the past decades, many nations have undertaken structural reforms to lower trade barriers, shore up property rights and free economic activity. International trade is surging. The poor nations that opened themselves up to trade, investment and those evil multinational corporations saw the sharpest poverty declines. Free trade reduces world suffering. It's worth reminding ourselves that the key task ahead is spreading the benefits of globalization to Africa and the Middle East. It's worth noting this perhaps not too surprising phenomenon: As free trade improves the lives of people in poor countries, it is viewed with suspicion by more people in rich countries. | Predictions For The Integration Market For 2005Integration Consortium releases the Predictions for integration trends for year 2005. we recently covered the transition happening Move Over EAI, Move In WebServices, explaining the shift in trend from pure play EAI to webservices. Excerpts:Four key areas of focus for the year ahead feature in this forecast - Service oriented architecture (SOA), the battle for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) market share, the package vendors’ struggle with their integration strategies and the drawing together of business intelligence and business integration. Trend 1 - the move of service-oriented architecture (SOA) from concept to reality. SOAs demonstrate a method of building software infrastructures where IT components are gathered into ‘loosely-coupled’ business services that can be invoked without knowledge of where they will run or on what technology base. The value of an SOA stems from the fact that it enables reuse and introduces the ability to combine services together to underpin new business processes. The result is that business operations can be changed faster, more cheaply and with less risk. 2005 will see an increasing number of SOA deployments, as more and more companies start to comprehend an SOA’s impressive advantage. SOAs are not new – the basic concepts have been around for ten years. However a combination of technologies has added considerable momentum to SOAs, namely web services and the enterprise service bus (ESB). Trend 2 - 2005 will see package vendors struggling over their integration strategies. Web services was seen by many end users as the ideal interface to services offered by application packages, increasing the leverage from the investment in the package in question. There was a hope that package vendors would offer web service interfaces to all their processes, but this did not meet with overwhelming approval from the package vendor community. 2005 should see a lot more clarification in this area as key vendors announce their intentions. Trend 3 - the struggle between vendors of ESBs and those of traditional Enterprise Application Integration. The ESB concept has been widely accepted over this past year, with new ESB providers gaining traction within the industry. The battle will now take place between incumbent vendors in the space who will not give up any part of their market shares without a fight, and as a result the majority of these companies have now introduced their own ESB offerings. The outcome is an increase in market conflict which will become increasingly aggressive in 2005. Market churn may result, with some of the smaller members being acquired, but in the final analysis it is likely to be excellent news for integration software buyers – ESBs are typically cheaper than traditional EAI implementations and this will have the effect of bringing down prices in the industry. Trend 4 - 2005 shall see the worlds of business integration and business intelligence draw much closer together. Already the concept of BAM (Business Activity Management) allows key performance indicators to be set within integrated environments to give management some business performance-based control of operations, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. The market is now realising that by combining the sophisticated techniques of the business intelligence market with business process integration, it should become possible to build a new generation of ‘smart’ business services that become increasingly able to automatically and iteratively change the way that they operate based on business intelligence information. Vendors are working to bring these technologies together, and 2005 should see the emergence of early projects where this combination dramatically improves business agility and effectiveness against competition.” Michael Kuhbock, Founder and Co Chairman of the IC adds: “Key areas that will influence the integration industry in 2005 include; - a clearer understanding of Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and how integration facilitates compliance, - a broader adoption and the refinement of RFID technology, the evolution of business/IT alignment as it relates to enterprise integration strategy and communication, -the continued development of global integration standards, and the advancement of the Global Integration Framework (GIF).” The Integration Market shall see a huge surge in the Year 2005 - This shall assume centerstage in the IT Landscape in enteprises. | "The China Price"Businessweek writes, A massive shift in economic power is under way due to chinese manufacturing prowess affecting US industry competitiveness. Excerpts from a well written article:When the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission, a congressionally appointed panel, convened on Sept. 23, it was not to discuss power but decline. One after another, economists, union officials, and small manufacturers took the microphone to describe the devastation Chinese competitors are inflicting on U.S. industries, from kitchenware and car tires to electronic circuit boards.We have faced competition in the past. What is dramatically different about China is that they are about half the price. "The China price." They are the three scariest words in U.S. industry. In general, it means 30% to 50% less than what you can possibly make something for in the U.S. In the worst cases, it means below your cost of materials. Makers of apparel, footware, electric appliances, and plastics products, which have been shutting U.S. factories for decades, know well the futility of trying to match the China price. It has been a big factor in the loss of 2.7 million manufacturing jobs since 2000. Meanwhile, America's deficit with China keeps soaring to new records. It is likely to pass $150 billion this year. Now, manufacturers and workers who never thought they had to worry about the China price are confronting the new math of the mainland. These companies had once held their own against imports mostly because their businesses required advanced skills, heavy investment, and proximity to customers. Many of these companies are in the small-to-midsize sector, which makes up 37% of U.S. manufacturing. The China price is even being felt in high tech. Chinese exports of advanced networking gear, still at a low level, are already affecting prices. And there's talk by some that China could eventually become a major car exporter. Multinationals have accelerated the mainland's industrialization by shifting production there, and midsize companies that can are following suit. The alternative is to stay at home and fight -- and probably lose. Ohio State University business professor Oded Shenkar, author of the new book The Chinese Century, hears many war stories from local companies. He gives it to them straight: "If you still make anything labor intensive, get out now rather than bleed to death. Shaving 5% here and there won't work." Chinese producers can make the same adjustments. "You need an entirely new business model to compete." America has survived import waves before, from Japan, South Korea, and Mexico. And it has lived with China for two decades. But something very different is happening. The assumption has long been that the U.S. and other industrialized nations will keep leading in knowledge-intensive industries while developing nations focus on lower-skill sectors. That's now open to debate. "What is stunning about China is that for the first time we have a huge, poor country that can compete both with very low wages and in high tech," says Harvard University economist Richard B. Freeman. "Combine the two, and America has a problem." By outsourcing components and hardware from China, U.S. companies have sharply boosted their return on capital. China's trade barriers continue to come down, part of its agreement to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001. Big new opportunities will emerge for U.S. insurers, banks, and retailers. China's surging demand for raw materials and commodities has driven prices up worldwide, creating a windfall for U.S. steelmakers, miners, and lumber companies. The cheap cost of Chinese goods has kept inflation low in the U.S. and fueled a consumer boom that helped America weather a recession and kept global growth on track. But there's a huge cost to the China relationship, too. Foremost is the question of America's huge trade deficit, of which China is the largest and fastest-growing part. While U.S. consumers binge on Chinese-made goods, the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit is nearing a record 6% of gross domestic product. The trade shortfall -- coupled with the U.S. budget deficit -- is driving the dollar ever downward, raising fears that cracks will appear in the global financial system. We earlier wrote about this and its impact on the US economy in the article Stephen Roach Predicts Economic Armaggedon. By keeping its currency pegged to the greenback at a level analysts see as undervalued, China amplifies the problem. On a practical level the U.S. is now so dependent on Chinese suppliers that resurrecting trade barriers would just raise costs and diminish the real benefits that China trade confers. Also, unlike Japan 20 years ago, China is a much more open economy. It continues to lower tariffs and even runs a slight trade deficit with the whole world -- which makes the U.S.'s deficit with China all the more glaring. China's low wages are reflected in the entire supply chain -- components, office workers, cargo handling -- you name it. Can China dominate everything? Of course not. America remains the world's biggest manufacturer, producing 75% of what it consumes, though that's down from 90% in the mid-'90s. Industries requiring huge R&D budgets and capital investment, such as aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and cars, still have strong bases in the U.S. "I don't see China becoming a major car exporter in the foreseeable future," says GM China (GM ) Chairman Philip F. Murtaugh. "There is no economic rationale." Murtaugh cites high production costs and quality issues at Chinese car plants, as well as just-in-time delivery needs in the West, as impediments. | The eBay Way -On PhilantrophyBusinessweek writes about Pierre Omidyar unique approach towards philantrophy. We earlier covered in this blog -Paul Allens article on perptual philantrophists, where he wrote about,Pierre Omidyar,founder of eBay,who in 2002 publicly said he would give away 99% of his wealth over the next 20 years, much of it to the Omidyar Foundation. Excerpts from the Businessweek article :After becoming one of the richest 31-year-olds in history, eBay Inc founder Pierre Omidyar cleared out his cubicle, sold his modest home, and set off for his native Paris with his wife, Pam. It was a change born partly of the Omidyars' need to escape Silicon Valley's bubble frenzy of 1999, when they got mobbed at cocktail parties and endlessly hit on by business-plan-pushing MBAs. The Omidyars had already vowed to give away virtually all their wealth. The next part was harder: how to spend their billions and have an impact as immense as eBay's. Omidyar's thoughts about his philanthropy have matured , Just as his vision of the perfect marketplace revolutionized commerce, so too are his ideas about philanthropy likely to disrupt the rules of traditional giving. Omidyar is at the forefront of a new trend that is starting to blur the old church-state divisions between the for-profit and non-profit worlds, creating structural shifts that could lead to a new, hybrid philanthropy. The Omidyar Network would house both a foundation and an arm that would also invest in for-profit companies. All the money made from the stakes in those companies -- chosen by Omidyar and his team of due-diligence specialists for their emphasis on open information, giving power to the little guy, and fostering social capital -- would flow back into the investing arm to leverage into yet more charitable giving. In many ways, Omidyar is the anomaly among BusinessWeek's Top 50 givers. Philanthropists like Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, and Michael Dell went beyond old-school giving, where you give your money to a foundation, which then doles it out for you. Instead, the new superphilanthropists applied the same brilliance that built their businesses to their philanthropic causes. They are deep on vision and heavily hands-on. Omidyar is pioneering a third way, a philanthropy that's fanatically bottom-up. It's anti-vision. Anti-dictate. And, in a sense, Omidyar isn't even choosing how his $10 billion is given away -- or to what causes it goes. He wants you to do that. How? For starters, there's omidyar.net, where Pierre and Pam recently opened up a conversation with the world to discuss the direction of their philanthropy. People already engaged in solving social problems know a lot more about how to fix them, they figure, than a cloistered elite ever could.Secondly, the foundation arm of the Omidyar Network, which still hands out the vast bulk of the money, focuses on grants to individuals who are already creating social change through their nonprofits. The critical tool of these mostly smallish groups is the Internet, which enables people to take tiny ideas and give them a global launch, in much the same way Omidyar created what fans call the "first truly democratic marketplace" after selling, among other things, his broken laser pointer online. By taking out the middleman and shifting decision-making power from experts to practitioners, Omidyar believes something more efficient and innovative -- and with a far bigger impact -- will happen. With conventional giving, whether it be to the Red Cross, United Way, or small local charities -- once you write your check, you're often clueless as to any particular outcome achieved. What's unique about Omidyar's projects is that, like eBay, there's often a transparent system in place that allows donors to monitor where their money goes and who receives it. | Technology in TurmoilDavid Kirkpatrick , writes in Fortune that the Technology Industry Is In Turmoil. Excerpts from this interesting article:Microsoft and Sun face open source, Intel seems weakened, outsourcing threatens services players—these are just a few of the recent shifts in the firmament. The technology business is in a state of turmoil that was unimaginable just a couple of years ago. Industry icons are under threat, market leaders are at risk, and the whole pantheon of tech greats seems to be under renovation. Microsoft is struggling to justify its business model in the face of an open-source onslaught. The newly released open source Firefox shows continued signs of taking market share from Microsoft in the critical browser business - potentially the software giant's most valuable chokepoint. Firefox gained another couple points of market share just in the last few weeks—giving it something like 8% to 9% of the total market. Intel, the other duopoly partner at the top of the industry, also seems suddenly weakened. AMD stock has risen about 70% since it was published. Dell CEO Kevin Rollins has made unprecedentedly friendly remarks about the possibility the PC-maker may soon use AMD chips. And by inking a deal with giant chip-fabricator Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, AMD has ensured it will have enough of its impressive new 64-bit chips for almost any conceivable burst of demand. AMD has surged exactly as Intel has stumbled. Then look at Sun—it wasn't long ago that everyone assumed the company was toast. Now nobody seems sure either way. What does it mean that Sun is making its crown jewel, the Solaris operating system, open source? It could certainly make governments in the ever-more-important developing countries more amenable to using the software. They love Linux because they can see exactly what they're getting. Now with Solaris, they can get the same thing with an industrial-strength operating system. And Sun, which was a proprietary hardware company only yesterday it seems, is now one of AMD's most important allies. To complicate matters further, there's that fascinating and yet-unexplained Sun-Microsoft alliance. Then over in the enterprise software business, dogged little Salesforce.com continues to define an entirely new approach to using technology—so customers can merely think of what they're getting as functionality. Who cares if it's called software or not? Scores of other companies are more quietly proving the same thing.. But it's all bad news for the incumbents—Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and yes, even SAP. It lends additional surreality to the endless saga of PeopleSoft-Oracle. In services, the new globalized business model pursued by companies like Infosys pose gigantic threats to incumbent services players, particularly those that aren't sufficiently diversified, like Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young, EDS, and Accenture. As Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani asks, how will these players compete in a world where their customers have the option of vastly lower prices for comparable services from Indian companies? How quickly can they shift their own employee base to the lower-cost model? Sure, some long-time industry stars are unmoved, or even higher in the sky. Dell, for instance. Cisco, for another, even though smaller rivals Juniper and Huawei both look feisty. There's enough business in networking for everyone,perhaps. And IBM seems to be weathering the shifts fairly deftly, considering its vast scale. In many ways the changes we're seeing across the industry conform to one of the bedrock early assumptions of the Internet age—that power would flow from the big to the small. Tthe giants, can't be written off though. These companies have survived amazing trials before.The HighTech industry looking interesting! | Newspapers Should WorryAdam Penenberg writes in the Wired magazine that Newspapapers may not have any future in the emerging digital world. Excerpts:Publishers of newspapers and magazines like to corral readers when they're young. If you can shape kids' info-seeking habits when they're in their teens or twenties, so the thinking goes, you'll nab them for life. Because brand loyalty isn't just about offering the best product for the best price, as it is with, say, minivans or socket wrenches. It's also about image: Are you a New York Times guy or a Washington Post aficionado? Do you read The Wall Street Journal, The Economist or Fortune? Do you subscribe to Newsweek or Time? Is Wired more than the way you feel after a double espresso at Starbucks? Your choice says a lot about you. Young people reload various RSS subscriptions and spends a half-hour reading stories or blogging on their own, "so that people who use one as a content aggregator can get their news fix."As news-reader (programs) improve and become more widely used, adding the sort of auto-filtering and smart-sorting capabilities of a decent e-mail client, their popularity will snowball.It ia also predicted that print media, which the younger generation has largely rejected in favor of digital dissemination of news, will die off within 30 years, "when the dead-tree readers will die off." What this world will look like is anyone's guess, but it probably won't include The Washington Post thudding on anyone's doorstep at 5 in the morning. | Friday, November 26, 2004Outsourcers Lose Luster -Part IIInformationweek has published the annual outsourcing survey results. We covered in Part I the rankings of Delloite Consulting,IBM,EDS,HP etc. In this second part, we shall cover the role of India headquartered software companies besides other global big players. Excerpts from this important survey:It may be no coincidence that there's something of an inverse relationship between a service provider's market share and customer satisfaction. ACS is the fifth-largest U.S. outsourcer by revenue; IBM and EDS rank first and second. They simply may be getting too big. "Meeting service levels becomes a challenge as you get bigger," says Atul Vashistha, CEO of outsourcing advisory firm NeoIT. Part of the problem for the big vendors is finding enough qualified staffers to meet service obligations, Vashistha says. About a quarter of IT services spending among survey respondents went offshore to low-cost locations such as India, or near shore to Canada and Mexico. Some outsourcing business went to far-flung operations of U.S. companies. Accenture, for instance, provides Dynegy with application-development services in India. Moffitt likes the cost savings, but he concedes that the time and cultural differences present management challenges. "It does increase complexity," he says.Offshore providers hardly represent a panacea. The three Indian companies in our survey-Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro Technologies-all ranked in the lower half of the results. Offshore service providers are generally perceived as offering the best price because they can draw upon an inexpensive labor pool, but only Tata received a notably high score (7.0) for value. Outsourcing isn't always done at the expense of IT jobs. Nearly a third of the organizations surveyed increased IT jobs in the past year, even though they outsourced some work. Many businesses farm out technology work because their own staffs are working at full capacity. Ceridian Canada hasn't reduced its IT head count since striking its deal with IBM. Rather, the company turned to the service provider as a means to launch quickly a new project with skills it lacked in-house. "We wanted to get to market quickly because we knew a competitor was coming out with something similar," Clement says. Outsourcers Meeting Expectations - By far the largest number of survey respondents, 47%, pointed to operational expertise as one of the most important reasons to partner with an outsourcer. More people cited expertise over cost savings (35%), which could reflect a general upswing in the economy. In 2002, cost savings was the reason respondents most frequently cited for outsourcing. The shift means businesses may be thinking more strategically about IT. That a good outsourcing partner can deliver revenue-generating business enhancements, and not just cost savings, may partly explain why outsourcing spending is rising. In 2002, 51% of businesses InformationWeek surveyed spent $1 million or more on outsourcing, and only 20% allotted more than $10 million. Now, nearly 60% earmark $1 million or more, and 25% spend more than $10 million. | Outsourcers Lose Luster -Part IInformationweek has published the annual outsourcing survey results. Excerpts from this important survey:Two years ago, Dynegy Inc. debt was mounting, and the entire energy industry faced punishing scrutiny in the wake of Enron's blowup. Dynegy, with 2003 revenue of $5.8 billion, has since resolved most of its legal troubles, and it has cut debt by about two-thirds.Dynegy's decision last year to outsource the bulk of its IT operations to Accenture is a big contributor to the turnaround, says Steve Moffitt, Dynegy's CIO and a senior VP. "We were stuck with a technology infrastructure built to support a $40 billion company, and that's not where Dynegy was anymore," he says. Accenture has taken over systems management, help desk, application development, and most of Dynegy's other major IT operations. The result: The company has cut its IT costs by up to 30%. What's more, by outsourcing, Dynegy is better positioned to integrate operations from a recent $1 billion acquisition of Exelon Corp.'s power-generation plants. "We're shifting to a global model, and Accenture has the means to support that," Moffitt says. Worldwide spending on IT services increased 6.4% in 2003 to $570 billion, according to research firm Gartner. Despite that growth, IT executives aren't overly satisfied with their outsourcing partners. A recent InformationWeek Research survey of more than 300 business-technology professionals shows an average customer satisfaction rating of 6.4 on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "extremely satisfied." That's down from 7.1 in InformationWeek's last survey of outsourcing buyers two years ago. And nearly 30% say their outsourcer hasn't met their expectations. The survey also asked respondents what they seek in outsourcing providers, rating them in 10 categories, including reliability, reputation, cost/value, and vertical-industry knowledge. No. 1 outsourcer Deloitte Consulting, which scored 7.4, was the only provider to score above 7 in the satisfaction ranking. Deloitte also ranked No. 1 in nine out of the 10 categories. That's partly because some of the expertise and best practices housed in the auditing side spills over to its outsourcing business, says IDC analyst Alexander Motsenigos. The firm insists it doesn't pursue outsourcing engagements with its audit clients. Still, Deloitte's connection to a big auditing firm is "a differentiator that others in the market don't have," Motsenigos says.Deloitte also is the only outsourcer in the group that isn't publicly traded, and it attributes part of its success to the fact that it answers to customers, not Wall Street. "Outstanding," is how one customer describes Deloitte's reliability and responsiveness. Its revenue from systems integration, application outsourcing, and consulting increased 5% from 2002 to 2003 and now stands at $5 billion a year, Motsenigos estimates. Accenture and Capgemini tied for second in our ranking, with overall scores of 6.8. Accenture's flexibility is a strong trait, Dynegy's Moffitt says. Under the deal, the energy company owns its servers and software, and its employees have direct contact with Dynegy's internal IT staff when problems arise. "We wanted to maintain a lot of control internally, and they supported that," Moffitt says.In last and next to last place, respectively, are two of the industry's most dominant players, IBM Global Services and EDS. Respondents gave IBM a mediocre 5.3 out of 10 for reliability, and IBM and EDS landed at the low mark of 5.4 for innovation. IBM doesn't pay enough attention to its smaller contracts, says Brian Clement, delivery manager for human-resources and payroll-services firm Ceridian Canada. "They were being a bit lackadaisical and taking our business for granted," he adds. Ceridian has a multimillion-dollar contract with IBM to host its PowerPay payroll-management application from its data center in Toronto, which was recently renewed despite some performance setnacks.Nevertheless, Ceridian Canada wants to fix the relationship rather than ditch the vendor. Repairing the situation should be less of a hassle than engaging a new outsourcer, he says. While Nextel has been satisfied with EDS's service levels, there are concerns about its fiscal problems, CIO LeFave says. While Nextel has been satisfied with EDS's service levels, there are concerns about its fiscal problems, CIO LeFave says.EDS's poor showing illustrates that the onetime powerhouse may have to work harder and faster at making the organizational and management changes demanded by CEO Michael Jordan, and delivering on its new IT road map to provide customers with a utility computing and mainframe migration strategy, even as it continues to try to solve some challenging financial issues. Another prominent vendor, Hewlett-Packard, turned in a good performance, but its fifth-place tie with BearingPoint is a comedown from its first-place ranking two years ago. HP's professional-services revenue grew 13% year over year in the fourth quarter. The growth isn't coming at the expense of customer service, insists Joe Hogan, marketing VP for HP's outsourcing group. "You don't grow unless you have a high level of customer satisfaction," he says. (Part II shall be published shortly) | Stephen Roach Predicts Economic "Armageddon"Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley,has a public reputation for being bearish.But you should hear what he's saying in private, says Boston Herald.Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity, for a private meet.His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic ``armageddon.''Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that ``we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.'' The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe. In a nutshell, Roach's argument is that America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. To keep foreigners buying T-bills and prevent a resulting rise in inflation, Alan Greenspan will be forced to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants. The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded. Less a case of ``Armageddon,'' maybe, than of a ``Perfect Storm.''Roach marshalled alarming facts to support his argument. To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day. That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings, hardly sustainable. Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels. Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy.Today the figure is 85 percent.Nearly half of new mortgage borrowing is at flexible interest rates, leaving borrowers much more vulnerable to rate hikes. Americans are already spending a record share of disposable income paying their interest bills. And interest rates haven't even risen much yet. Recent events give it extra force - The dollar is hitting fresh lows against currencies from the yen to the euro. It has farther to fall, especially against Asian currencies, analysts agree. Analysts warn a "spectacular wave of bankruptcies" is possible. Smart people downtown agree with much of the analysis. It is undeniable that America is living in a ``debt bubble'' of record proportions. But they argue there may be an alternative scenario to Roach's. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today's consumer debts in real terms. Inflation of 7 percent a year halves "real" values in a decade.It may be the only way out of the trap. Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates. | Nice Guys Can Finish FirstFastcompany has published an excellent article written by Marshall Goldsmith titled Your people skills become more important the higher you go -- so behave yourself! Excerpts from this good article:Imagine a world where technical skills, educational pedigrees, even professional achievements and track records no longer matter. Everyone is blessed with equal brains and talent. Everyone is highly skilled, well educated at the same school, and locked in a dead heat of accomplishment, posting exactly the same "lifetime batting average." Now, imagine that you lead an organization in this world. How would you hire people? How would you decide whom to promote and whom to cast aside? Chances are you would start paying very close attention to how people behave -- how they treat colleagues and clients, how they speak and listen in meetings, how well they extend the minor courtesies that either lubricate daily work life or create friction. We apply these behavioral criteria to almost any successful person, whether it's our CEO or our plumbing contractor. But sometimes we forget to apply them to ourselves. And in turn, we forget that our behavior may be holding us back. All other things being equal, your people skills (or lack thereof) become more pronounced the higher up you go. In fact, even when all other things are not equal, your people skills often make the difference in how high you go. The candidate with superb people skills will win out every time, in large part because he will be able to hire people smarter than he is about money and he will be able to lead them. There's no guarantee that the brilliant number cruncher can do that now or any time in the foreseeable future.We all have certain attributes that helped us land our first job. These are the kinds of achievements that go on our resumes. But as we become more successful, those attributes recede into the background and more subtle traits emerge. It's not enough to be smart. You have to be smart -- and something else. At some point, you get the benefit of the doubt on skill issues. Not many people remember that Jack Welch has a PhD in chemical engineering. That's because none of the problems he encountered in his last 30 years at GE were in any way related to his skill at chemical titration or formulating plastics. When he was vying for the CEO job, the attributes holding him back were strictly behavioral: his brashness, his blunt language, his unwillingness to suffer fools. The soft behavioral skills came to the fore only after he delivered profits and ascended the GE ladder. That's when the GE board wanted to know if he could behave as a CEO.The data you can put on your resume are your interpersonal skills (which, for the purposes of this exercise, must be documented and authentic). What would they be? - To be able to listen? - To give proper recognition? - To share - whether it's information or credit for a success? - To stay calm when others panic? - To make midcourse corrections? - To accept responsibility? - To admit a mistake? - To defer to others, even (especially) those of lesser rank? - To let someone else be right some of the time? - To say thank you? - To resist playing favorites? | Wednesday, November 24, 2004RFID: Simple Concept Hobbled by Daunting ComplexityA well written article excerpted from NYTimes by CRM Buyerabout RFID - I would think that anyone knowing about RFID - observing at a distance RFID,- Simple Concept Hobbled By Daunting Complexity Excerpts:Like investing or hitting a tennis ball, using radio scanners to wirelessly identify consumer products seems simple in concept, but in reality, it is dauntingly complex.The biggest challenge for retailers and their suppliers has been melding the building blocks of RFID into systems that are reliable without being cumbersome or unduly expensive. Unlike the RFID systems that automatically collect tolls from motorists or control access to buildings, those designed for commerce call for disposable, batteryless tags that are tiny and unobtrusive. And since the tags are meant to be slapped on every pallet or carton or even on every item, they must be cheap enough for businesses to buy them by the hundreds of millions. | Giving Thanks for OffshoringChristopher Farrell, contributing editor Businessweek writes, in his thanksgiving day column that offshoring is the first thing to be thanked about. Excerpts from a thought provoking article:The No. 1 spot is reserved (for thanksgiving) for the offshoring of skilled-service jobs by American corporations. Americans should be deeply thankful for the emerging trend of American (and European) companies outsourcing software development and other skilled tasks to developing-world havens.Companies may have gone to India to save money on back-office operations, such as payroll, order fulfillment, and customer service. But they're continuing to do business with Indian high-tech companies because of the quality of the work being done. So, those jobs aren't coming back, and that means we have to create new ones here. Offshoring is a result of three simultaneous and independent events at this juncture in economic history. -First, education levels are rising throughout the developing world -- the payoff from decades of investment. -Second, many developing nations have been liberalizing their economies, especially after the collapse of communism toward the end of the 1980s. -Last is the information-technology revolution, which made it possible to link developed nations' companies with developing nations' workers -- and do it cheaply. WANTED: CREATIVE IMPULSE. In general, rising economic prospects in much of the developing world is good, a force for expanding opportunities and eliminating poverty. But the competition for investment money and corporate profits in the global economy is now growing faster than many economists thought possible even a few years ago. To be sure, the rapid integration into the developed-world labor market of some billion workers in China and India is opening up new opportunities to sell cars, washing machines, software, and many other commonplace goods made by American multinationals. while this may not fully provide reverse benefits to the US, the main reason is that the offshoring challenge focuses attention on what spurs job creation: The formation of new markets and the meeting of new wants. LEFT BEHIND : The long-run prosperity of the West depends on the capacity of its entrepreneurial individuals and firms to create and satisfy new consumer wants. That means the major institutions of society -- government, education, and business -- need to focus a lot more money and effort on educating the American workforce. CUT THE RED TAPE. As US makes progress on this,America should keep welcoming educated, skilled immigrants. The American economy is a major beneficiary of the entrepreneurship diaspora that has grown up between Silicon Valley and India, and between and Silicon Valley and Asia. It's getting harder and harder for skilled Chinese and Indian professionals to come here to work and study. While the current bias toward saying no is understandable, the economic price is too high.The way economists look at the world, the efficiency gains of offshoring free up resources in the U.S. The key question is what do we do with those resources. The offshoring challenge says invest in human capital and open borders. That's how we'll generate the good middle-class jobs of the future -- and give more people something to be thankful for. | The Business Impact Of Open Source SoftwareThe impact of open source on business is slowly getting to be understood where some data is beginning to be made avaiable in place of perceptions and assumptions.IT analyst Salvino Salvaggio sets out to quantify the magnitude of usage of open source software's impact on the financials of companies. After eight months of deep research and analysis, he emerged with a 200-page report called, Open source : a revolution in the software industry. Salvino Salvaggio writes, all of the analytical research protocols for the study point towards two main conclusions:-A.One, compared to 'closed source' or proprietary software, OSS brings huge IT investment savings, and the total return on investment, or ROI, is highly attractive regardless of the size of the IT infrastructure at the implementing company. B.OSS users are more empowered, because they do not depend anymore on vendors' strategies. These conclusions might seem obvious but now instead of just assuming they are right, we have crystal-clear evidence to support them! Salient findings: - Any software whose code is available for users to look at, modify, reuse and redistribute freely can be called "Open Source Software" (OSS). There are however some differences between OSS and free software regarding mostly users’ duties and intellectual property rules - The phenomenon of OSS is not new : at the beginning, programmers, not software, were core ; later on, rights of usage became a way to earn money ; however, some programmers called for a return to the public sharing of software ; then Linux came... - Production of OSS happens according to a self-regulated, decentralized organization that gave OSS development unique opportunities while a new approach of collaborative work improved the sustainability of the project and made it able to impact key economic levers - Linux hype cycle has been guided, among others, by perception of PROs and CONs. Recently, perceived benefits of OSS seem overtaking barriers and increase its appeal to businesses. As a matter of fact, global comparison highlights real advantage to OSS. It is therefore not a surprise that finding evidences of OSS as a technologically and financially viable solution is becoming quite easy - Compared to vendors’ closed source software OSS secures huge IT investment savings, and total Return On Investment is highly attractive. Additionally, OSS users are empowered, for they do not depend anymore on vendors’ decisons - OSS users' satisfaction is likely to foster a viral effect of adoption as evolution of OSS market share also shows - With OSS, the concept of vendors is disappearing. Shifts in vendors’ revenue streams trigger deep changes in the culture of software business as well as in the industry at large - Available OSS solutions already meet almost the whole range of companies' needs for any IT segment (core data center, server, office, iamge manipulation, content management system, etc.) - Migrating to OSS should follow a sharp process : analysis of the pros and cons, analysis of economic efficiency/impact, implementation of the migration itself according to a planned path - Several real-life cases show migrating to OSS is a winning move from both IT strategy point of view and, especially, business strategy point of view The analysis looks interesting, but more discussions need to be done. The TCO covering adminstration of the system- factoring downtime costs, learning time costs,costs of education, certification, maintenance of the certifications,upgrades etc. Salvaggio's report is a must read for those looking to make the business case for deploying open source software. | Move Over, EAI - Move In Web ServiceseWeek writes,"Web services continue making headway in the enterprise, particularly as integration solutions, where many believe Web services will lead to cost savings and efficiencies over older, more established technologies such as EAI". An Evans Data Corp survey released earlier this month reported that 40 percent of the developers surveyed said they believe Web services will reduce the need for enterprise application integration. Sixty percent said they believe Web services can significantly or somewhat lower the costs of EAI systems. Excerpts from the Findings Summary,based on survey among developers:- "EAI used to be a big-budget project that required the building of an entire middleware layer of composite applications that replicated legacy processes. With the standardization that Web Services brings, applications can be linked with fewer lines of code, and often within a much shorter time frame,and the savings potential of Web Services is enormous." - The top three types of services being developed for Web Services are: Business process management; Data management, cleansing and synchronization tools; and e-commerce applications. -Third party consulting usage to help with Web Services projects is limited. The Web Services areas in need of the most third party consulting help are: Security; Design and Development; and Interfacing to legacy systems. -Web service development budgets are growing. By next year one of five Web Services developers expect to be devoting most of their IT budgets to Web Services initiatives. eWeek reports that the trend isn't stopping such companies as Iona Technologiesone of the last traditional EAI vendors. It recently signed a deal with Deutsche Post AG on what is said to be one of the largest integration projects in the world. Deutsche Post, over the past two years, acquired DHL International Ltd. and Airborne Express Inc. and must integrate the companies' IT systems. It is building an SOA (service-oriented architecture) using Iona's Artix ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) as the core. Iona officials said traditional EAI is not the only solution for integration projects, but the company is preserving its EAI roots. Eric Newcomer, Iona's chief technology officer, said the traditional EAI is moving to SOAs and adds that the ability to deploy and manage integration capacity at the endpoints, rather than within the hub, is a big reason for this transition. IBM is also seeing a dramatic uptake in customers using Web services to create a flexible architecture that can address a wider range of business problems at a faster clip than proprietary EAI technologies," said Michael Liebow, vice president of Web services at IBM Global Services. "The traditional proprietary EAI model as we know it is dead and is giving way to service-oriented architectures—leveraging Web services and other open standards—that help customers create a more flexible IT system that maps more closely with business processes and adapts to rapidly changing business conditions". The transition would take place over time and EAI vendors feel that given their current levels of functional maturity, Web services still are not capable of meeting the broad array of interoperability requirements that are addressed by EAI. | Monday, November 22, 2004Firefox 1.0 - Quite CompellingInformationweek has published a very nice article analyzing Firefox browser and how this could potentially benefit the browser community at large. The article chronicels Internet Explorer features added over time and how Firefox is able to meet or beat Internet Explorer features. A solid article about Firefox. |Sunday, November 21, 2004IBM and BPO Strategy -Part IIKnowledge@wharton has published a detailed analytical article about IBM's BPO strategy with offshoring and new expertise acquisitions.In Part 1 of the article, we covered IBM focus on software services and recent wins that IBM has notched in the BPO space. This part focusses on BPO market segmentation, challenges and opportunities that lay ahead for IBM. Part II - Excerpts: Yanking a process out of a firm and delivering outcomes back to that company - in the form of services - is by no means a commodity business. Processes that can be outsourced into three categories: - First, some processes are "foundational in nature", i.e., they account for most of the man-hours and have relatively high volumes and low value (such as transaction processing, claims administration in life insurance etc.) - Second, some processes are "value originators", since they require expertise in process execution and managing complexity (such as research support in investment banking, F&A and invoice management for large supply chain firms, financial statement analysis and so on). - Finally, some processes are "value differentiators", i.e., they have considerable strategic importance. Such services can only be outsourced to specialist firms, and they include services such as market research, pricing and customer analytics, risk management etc. IBM faces competition from overseas firms such as Wipro and HCL. Research show that Wipro and HCL have been able to re-engineer processes and deliver 15% to 30% productivity gains (reduced headcount) and improved quality of execution within a year of taking over the processes from the client. In order to compete with them, "IBM will have to find ways of automating the processes and migrating at least some parts of the process execution to off-shore locations to remain competitive in these segments. This is where the Daksh acquisition gives IBM a way of leveraging its traditional strengths," says analysts . He adds that competition in this segment will heat up as firms with an off-shore delivery capacity acquire consulting capabilities or partner with firms in the U.S. and Europe. Companies such as Infosys , Wipro, Satyam and HCL are already making inroads into this segment in the U.S. and Europe by offering a combination of off-shore, on-shore and near shore facilities. Research also points out that when firms outsource the second kind of processes (value originators) they do not necessarily look to an IT behemoth as a potential provider.. Indeed, for such processes, it is not clear that buyers will turn to firms like IBM or Accenture." Firms like OfficeTiger have a clear edge in this business. What's In a Name -IBM insists that it isn't just targeting BPO deals, Instead, IBM says it is pursuing a market for more comprehensive services - what Palmisano called business process transformational services. "It's about increasing a business's effectiveness and strengthening core competencies, It's not just a question of taking the cost out. It's about transforming the process, embedding the technology and integrating." With increasing process complexity and its strategic value to a client increases, "it is not clear that the usual re-engineering and consulting techniques work. Industry specific expertise and process-level specialization are often required to create significant value, It is easy to underestimate the importance of execution and the challenge of managing complexity and scaling up simultaneously. Companies may enter this market thinking that there are cookie-cutter solutions that once perfected can be rolled out in scale across multiple clients. This is generally not the case." Pitfalls Ahead - IBM's size can get in its way as it pursues business services deals. With more than 300,000 employees, IBM is not as nimble as small outfits can be in serving customers. Then there's the issue of IBM stepping into unknown territory. The company now effectively competes with specialist services firms such as Hewitt Associates, which concentrates on human resources outsourcing and consulting. IBM is adding to its payroll hundreds if not thousands of workers not versed in computer technology per se but in tasks such as benefits administration and accounts payable. To IBM, though, the business process services arena is a logical extension of the old IT world. The company says the BPTS market stems partly from the rise of open technological standards that allow data to move easily within businesses. Also a catalyst, IBM says, is the "ubiquity of the Internet" and web technologies, which lower the cost of transactions within and among businesses. If nothing else, IBM under Palmisano is on the move, rather than resting on its laurels as the biggest IT services provider. | IBM and BPO Strategy -Part 1Knowledge@wharton has published a detailed analytical article about IBM's BPO strategy with offshoring and new expertise acquisitions.Excerpts: IBM and BPO Strategy - After decades of specializing as a computer manufacturer and provider of computer-related services, today's IBM processes thousands of insurance claims, ensures that Procter & Gamble employees get paid, and takes charge of repairing televisions and CD players sold by Philips Consumer Electronics. Taking on tasks such as customer service and human resources management is part of a broader shift among traditional information technology companies to get into what's often called business process outsourcing (BPO). BPO is a fertile market, expected to grow from about $405 billion last year to $682.5 billion in 2008, according to research firm IDC. Interest in such operations - and especially in their migration to countries such as India - continues to ride high. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano thinks the intersection of technology and business process services holds great promise. As he sees it, IBM is poised to help customers with a new set of services that includes technical assistance but adds strategic advice about business methods. Palmisano dubs the concept "business process transformational services," and claims it represents a massive market nearly a third as large as the $1.2 trillion spent annually on IT. "It is a $500 billion opportunity," he told analysts earlier this year. "We plan to exploit this opportunity to drive revenue and growth rates beyond those which are traditionally available in the information technology industry." In essence, the new IBM sees big bucks in focusing on the "B" in IBM. But the strategy carries some risks. They include competing against new foes, handling novel tasks and explaining a grandiose vision to customers. What's more, the business process push requires a thorough understanding of different industries. Staying on top of specific industries and their changing trends should be a challenge for IBM, says longtime industry analyst John Jones. "Historically, that's not been one of IBM's strengths," Jones notes. From Business Machines to Business Methods - IBM was behind the curve on the emergence of the personal computer, and was slow to adapt to the changes it brought in the marketplace. IBM grew from $8 billion loss in 1993, to a profitable organization today, by emphasizing services as a key to the company's turnaround with about 50% of of IBM's $89 billion in revenue in services. IBM became a leader in IT outsourcing, which refers to a company farming out work such as managing central computer centers or handling technical support calls. IBM began extending its services reach from the technology arena to business tasks about the time the company acquired the consulting wing of accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, in late 2002. The India Connection - A more recent acquisition further demonstrated IBM's commitment to business process services. Earlier this year Big Blue snapped up Daksh, an Indian BPO provider with 6,000 employees. Daksh, which also has a facility in the Philippines, gives IBM an army of lower-wage employees ready to handle services such as telemarketing and transaction processing. IBM is beginning to nab business process contracts. Recent Deals: - 300 Million $ - Philips Consumer Electronics – Ater-sales-service - 10 Yr 400 Million – Procter & Gamble deal for payroll & benefits administration. - 7 Yr 180 Million $ D& B deal for managing customer service (Part II shall follow) | Kmart's Acquisition of Sears: It Will Take More than Scale to Unseat Wal-MartNew entity will have $55 billion in combined revenue but must overcome significant barriers to succeed The rumored acquisition of Sears, Roebuck and Co. by Kmart Holding Corporation came to fruition today. The newly established entity, Sears Holding Corp.—the third-largest retailer in the United States—will trail only Home Depot and number-one retailer Wal-Mart Stores. On paper, the acquisition looks like an ideal marriage. By combining supply chains and aggregating its purchasing power, management estimates at least $300 million in savings. But this new scale would not be googd enough to unseat Walmart says this Yankee viewpoint. Excerpts:Scale Requires Alignment: With 3,500 stores, it’s easy to be blinded by the massive scale of the newly formed retailer. However, significant barriers must be overcome before this acquisition can be called a success. Sears Holding Corp. must align the capabilities and goals of merchandising, the supply chain and IT. Neither retailer has proven capable of doing it. Those failures don’t bode well for the future.The litmus test for effective alignment has to be Wal-Mart. With mostly organic growth and the constant Always low prices. Always. mantra, Wal-Mart has created and maintained a culture that eliminates business process ambiguity. One only has to look at how Wal-Mart introduces new technology to see the power in alignment of goals and objectives. New technology must meet the deceptively simple criteria of lowering cost and improving service. Once past that, every level of the organization the technology touches—from headquarters personnel to store associate—has the responsibility to test the technology in an applied setting. If approved, the technology is mainstreamed and use is mandatory. The newly created Sears Holding Corp. doesn’t have the common culture typical of an organically grown company. Store format, operating procedures and target demographics differ widely within the new entity, which makes swift and decisive action to align goals and capabilities all the more critical. Merchandising Is King :The decisions Sears Holding Corp. makes in this area will have a great effect on the performance of the supply chain.An integrated merchandising strategy—with goals based not only on revenue but also on margin—is essential to fast-tracking the alignment process and addressing the concerns of downstream business functions. Naturally enough, Sears Holding Corp. must build supply-chain capabilities around efficiency. However, those capabilities also must be responsive to the merchandiser’s ongoing need for speed and flexibility. Lastly, on the scale that Sears Holding Corp. will operate, technology is essential. The company must become more technically adventurous as it drives for differentiation. Unlike the direction that Kmart took 4 years ago—which almost resulted in the destruction of the company—technology must be viewed as the enabler for business success, not the cause. We think the odds are against Sears Holding Corp. working. One thing is certain: It’s time to challenge conventional retailing wisdom and start building an integrated blueprint for the future. | More People Shop Offline, Buy Online!!( Via Techdirt .) A new Atlas study reports that Mondays are the busiest online shopping day. The finding points to the fact that consumers shop in physical store locations during the weekend, then jump online on Mondays to comparison shop and Fridays, typically slow days for online shopping, are stronger than usual during the holidays. Atlas DMT anonymously analyzed holiday shopping behavior from November 23, 2003 to January 31, 2004 across 28 companies whose online campaigns are managed using the Atlas Digital Marketing Suite. A related article Two-thirds of online shoppers say they now buy over the Internet some of the things they used to get in store visits. Yet the percentage getting information or shopping online prior to visiting a regular store remains steady at 75%Other findings: -The most active online shopping day in 2003 was December 15, versus December 10, in 2002. Last December 15th posted a 140 percent increase in sales over an average holiday shopping day. - Apart from December, November and January are strong months for retail advertisers, showing an approximate 20 percent increase in sales, compared to September, October, and February. | The Excellence 100 - Leadership consultants -2005Executive Excellence PublishingExecutive Excellence Publishing is a leading source of knowledge on personal and organizational leadership development. For 20 years, EE has worked with the best minds in the business, the gurus of leadership, publishing timely and timeless articles on The Seven Dimensions of Excellence—Leadership, Management, People, Competence, Performance, Change and Ethics. Leadership consultants who make the top 100 possess a rare combination of both substance and presentation style, inspiring action and real world performance, while working tirelessly towards implementing change. EE has published the TOP 100 Leadership Consultants -2005 . Top 100 consultants excel in the areas of: credibility, relevance, originality, practicality ideas, presentation style, and their guru score (the influence of their work). Gary Hamel tops the list that includes famous names like Peter Drucker,Peter Drucker, Michael Hammer,Michael Porter, C.K. Prahalad,etc.. A very impressive list indeed.| Tracking Fashion With RFID @ DHLRFID Journal has published an excellent article about Global logistics service provider DHL Solutions Fashion offering the French fashion industry a way to test and facilitate shipments of individually tagged garments. Excerpts on this article on a noticeable RFID based solution:DHL Solutions Fashion, a global logistics service provider for clothing manufacturers and retailers, is offering the French fashion industry a way to test item-level RFID tagging of garments in order to help speed the delivery of their products as well as enable shipments to be tracked through the supply chain. RFID is well suited to reducing the complexity of the taking inventory as well as speeding up inventory and delivery checking involved in distribution in the garment supply chain. "The garment industry has unique requirements because retailers are locked in a battle to get key fashion trends from the design table to the shelves as quickly as possible, RFID technology offers the logistical advantages to respond to this challenge," says Christophe Cavailles, director of DHL Solutions Fashion. The Paris distribution center serves as a hub between a number of different fashion clothing suppliers, mostly in France, as well as boutique operators, also mostly in France. Each year, 70 million garments pass through the center on their way to wholesale suppliers. DHL's RFID-enabled room contains three ways to read garment tags. A portal equipped with two antennas reads tags on clothing shipped while hanging on a rail. For garments shipped in boxes, a tunnel reader with three antennas surround a conveyor and read tags as the boxes move along the conveyor. A mobile reading system with two antennas rides on ceiling-mounted rails and is pushed manually through the room to carry out full inventories and it takes 30 seconds for this mobile system to take an inventory of 20,000 hanging garments with facilities to search for a specific item. The trial at the distribution center in July tracked the new autumn/winter collection from Véronique Delachaux, a maternity clothing label that is part of Jacadi Group. In total, 30,000 Delachaux clothing items passed through the center en route to the Jacadi's 13 warehouses as well as to retailers. Véronique Delachaux paid for the tags, and DHL covered other costs. The credit-card-sized smart labels and hangtags were manually attached to boxes and to clothing items, respectively, at Véronique Delachaux warehouses prior to shipping to DHL. Each smart label or hangtag's embedded RFID tag was associated with the same data that was associated with a bar code also printed on that label or hangtag. The data includes the size of the garment, its color and a reference number. It was critical that the smart labels and hangtags carry both an RFID inlay and a bar code. "Retailers are not ready yet to get rid of the bar code system," says Bruno Favre, CEO of NBG-ID.The tagged garments were then shipped to DHL Fashion distribution center to be inventoried and redirected according to the shipping instructions from Véronique Delachaux. DHL Solutions Fashion claims that using of RFID tags dramatically reduced the time needed to unload a truck and check all the goods into the distribution center. A shipment of 450 tagged garments hanging on a rail with 450 clothing items was scanned in 2 minutes, while the same task with bar codes takes 8 minutes. DHL says the RFID-enabled facilities at its distribution center are now available for other clients looking to investigate and test potential RFID systems and then use DHL's facilities for RFID-enabled shipments. To ensure 100 percent reliability of the system, the number of garments in each box is limited to 40, although that will increase up to 100 garments by spring 2005, according to Favre. Jacadi says that it is convinced of the efficiency of the system in tracking garments and is seriously considering deploying item-level RFID tagging. DHL says it is ready to implement similar schemes for other clients and industries. | Relationship Between the PageRank and the Number of BacklinksPR Weaver's Blog publishes and interesting article about the pagerank computation. Excerpts:PRweaver writes, "On the forums or by email I am often asked the following sort of question: "How many Backlinks do I need to get in order to have PR5?". The answer is simple and always the same one: "This question cannot be answered because the PR doesn't only depend on the number of backlinks, it also and above all depends on the PR of each of those links...". Or to put it differently, a page can have PR5 with a single backlink whereas another one can have 3,000 backlinks and PR5 too. As a result it seems useless to carry out this type of analysis... Except if one is to compare the results in the long term. That's what I have been doing over the past eight months by analysing tens of thousands of pages. For each data I get the number of backlinks and the PR of the page with those links. The data do not come from a tool using a Google Toolbar crack but from the "MyWri" tools on WebRankInfo which enables each WebRrankInfo member to instantly get the PR and the number of backlinks of 10 chosen sites (many other free SEO tools are also freely provided)". Results: The results are presented as a table in the PRweaver blog. The conclusions drawn in the blog are: - With a few exceptions, whatever the PR is, more backlinks than the month before are required every month to get a given PR. - As expected, one needs far more backlinks in order to get a high PR than a low one. Even if there may be exceptions, because the study deals with a good number of data, it gives experimental support to the theoretical hypotheses or ideas never proved before but only discussed in forums. - During this summer (2004), Google changed the behaviour of the link: command which now includes low PR pages. Only PR4 or higher PR pages used to be listed by this command. Conversely since this summer you can also list the low PR pages backlinks, which you can see in the table. | Saturday, November 20, 2004E-Europe Status Check( Via Smartmobs . European nations are progressing at varying pace. A recent study has for the first time addressed and measured the “alignment” of the new EU Member States with the “old” ones with regard to the objectives set in the eEurope 2005 Action Plan.The Index is a composite of five key indicators: - General Internet indicators (citizens access to and use of the Internet, Enterprises access to and use of ICT, and Internet access costs), - modern online public services (e-government, e-learning, e-health), - dynamic e-business environment (buying and selling online, e-business readiness), - secure information infrastructure, and - broadband. | The Natural History Of Software PlatformsSynthesist writes about the history of platforms in a very interesting and provides an insightful perspective about the future of software platforms. Excerpts:The article starts with a discussion about Ray Ozzie's article titled 640KB ought to be enough for anyone , discussing about software integration, interoperability, and standards might be reconciled with my own beliefs about the inexorable commoditization of successful packaged software and the long, slow, decline of the packaged shrinkwrap software industry.Clay Christensen recently devoted a large part of a long lecture to his theory of "the conservation of attractive profits" (a phenomenon that he also calls "the conservation of modularity"). To me, this theory bears directly upon Ray's assertions about the business impact of software architecture, and more generally upon several "truths" that I've observed during my career in the software industry, but have never been able to explain succinctly. Clay Christensen recently devoted a large part of a long lecture to his theory of "the conservation of attractive profits" (a phenomenon that he also calls "the conservation of modularity"). This theory bears directly upon Ray's assertions about the business impact of software architecture, and more generally upon several "truths" observed in the software industry, but have never been able to explain succinctly. In Chrsitensen’s own words,:- "Products are most profitable when they are not "good enough" to satisfy customers' needs. This is because to make them performance competitive, engineers must use proprietary, dependent architectures. Use of such architectures makes product differentiation straightforward, because each company pieces its parts together in a unique way. Once a product's performance is good enough, companies must change the way that they compete. The innovations for which customers will pay premium prices become speed to market and the ability responsively and conveniently to give customers exactly what they need, when they need it. To compete in this way, companies are forced to employ modular architectures for products. Modularity causes the products to become undifferentiable and commoditized. Attractive profits don't evaporate, however... They move elsewhere in the value chain, often to subsystems from which the modular product is assembled. This is because it is improvements in the subsystems, rather than the modular product's architecture, that drives the assembler's ability to move upmarket towards more attractive profit margins. Hence, the subsystems become decommoditized and attractively profitable". It can be said that every "pure software" company that has had large-scale success first offered their customers enhanced productivity in the form of packaged proprietary software, followed later by a redefinition of that software as a platform to be used by customers for rapid customization and their extensibility needs. (Such platforms, besides solving customer problems, also have the salutary effect of ensnaring those same customers and extenders within their "ecosystems," slowly raising switching costs over time. Think of customers and small-scale participants in these ecosystems as boiled frogs...) Platforms exist at many layers of a software system, and slowly come and go as their usefulness waxes and wanes over many product cycles. Programs like Ozzie's Groove and Notes, Microsoft Office, or even Nullsoft's Winamp are application-level platforms. The Java API, coupled with a Java virtual machine, is a middleware platform, as is Microsoft's Common Language Runtime and its managed libraries. Windows and Linux, of course, are operating system platforms. Even low-level device subsystems can be platforms; stackable filesystems, "miniport drivers," and constellations of hardware devices that depend upon standardized interconnects such as IEEE 1394 or USB all rely upon platform-like dynamics to sustain their obscure (if not lively) ecosystems. Platform Gravity - Component marketplaces and integrated solutions built on the shifting sands of not-yet-commoditized software are seldom profitable, and always fraught with maintenance problems. Despite their flaws, software platforms such as application executables, virtual machines, operating systems, and driver subsystems, represent very real value to those who build and maintain them. Their impossible-to-reproduce code has almost always accreted over time into monolithic and monumental hairballs, crisscrossed with compromises and architectural peculiarities that reflect the history of adaptations to ship schedules, underlying infrastructure, bugfixes and patches, and changing customer requirements. Such vendors who build them invariably place themselves at risk of commoditization through cloning. Christensen refers to "modularity" as the necessary ingredient for customization, which ultimately leads to non-differentiability. Because of the monolithic nature of platforms, the emergence of modularity in software is not typically accomplished through retrofitting or platform rework. Instead, it occurs through a hardening of the external shell presented by the platform over time. As a platform succeeds in the marketplace, its APIs, UI, feature-set, file formats, and customization interfaces ossify and become more and more difficult to change. The process of ossification makes successful platforms easy targets for cloners, and cloning is what spells the beginning of the end for platform profit margins. Value Waves - Printer drivers were once commoditized by word processors, Microsoft Office is currently being commoditized by OpenOffice, Internet Explorer will eventually be commoditized by Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and other browsers, and the Unix API has nearly been completely commoditized by Linux. New platforms emerge above and below freshly commoditized layers, exploiting the standardized interfaces and newly "free" infrastructure. Attractive profits are conserved, not destroyed. Butler Lampson's presentation on components evolution,provides an excellent insight into how components can be built. Microsoft's heavily touted WinFS storage subsystem, represents an interesting new platform, useful and therefore support a large ecosystem. In the absence of commodity (replaceable) implementations, however, its schema-based extensibility will fail to become universal in the same way that Microsoft component models have failed to become drivers of commodity value. Microsoft is very unlikely to seek to erode their margins by "premature standardization." Profiting from Platforms -ossification, followed by cloning - is how Christensen-style modularity comes to exist in the software industry. What begins as a value-laden proprietary platform becomes a replaceable component over time, and the most successful of these components finally define the units of exchange that power commodity networks. There is huge value to be captured from commodity networks, but it is not to be found in the production of the underlying software resources. Instead, this value can be found in the distribution of platform-standardized information, and also in the form of political power. Microsoft, for example, recognizes that it is likely to accrue huge profits in the future by controlling distribution networks for digital media and web-published content; their pursuit of the search engine business and of DRM are both strategic moves in this direction that go beyond media players and productivity apps. In general, the owners and maintainers of mature software platforms should augment the production of packaged software with strategies that exploit distribution of the commodity by-products of their platforms. By doing this, they are likely to avoid the terminal side-effects of commoditization, while continuing to derive benefits from their platform assets. An excellent, must read article. | The Future As Per The TechEventSiliconbeat reports, Wireless, wireless, wireless, broadband, wireless, personalization and more wireless - this emerging trend clearly dominated the roundtable recently hosted innovation Summit John Chambers, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Terry Semel, Bill Joy, Carly Fiorna and many others met for the tech event on hand.The market caps for their respective companies. Total market cap on stage: $385 billion. Important Viewpoints and Challenges - Excerpts:Chambers: "The key to Cisco is how well do we transition...We'll be moving into storage networking. We'll be moving into wireless, we'll be moving into security. Hopefully, there'll be a Cisco phone on your desk." Schmidt on wireless: "It's by far the biggest leverage point in technology....Instead of people being paged, they'll be sent a message, "Where are you?' "Well I'm at this store," and then they'll send a map of where the store is to their friend. And the computers will automatically know that, if you want them to know where you are." Schmidt on a super iPod: "It's clear the killer application is information search. The next killer device is going to be a personal one. The one I personally favor is putting all the world's information into the equivalent of an iPod, which will be possible in the next five or ten years. And literally carrying it all with you. And if you can't quite do that, your wireless connection will allow you to get to everything else. So all of sudden, think about how different education is, how communication is. Someone will say something, and you'll say, "Well let me check that and see if it's true!"'' Otellini on wireless: "I really think the interesting thing about wireless is what it can do for bringing the rest of the world into the Web, into the connected world. Things like the WiMAX technology that allow you to basically put broadband coverage over an entire city is in trials. And you can start thinking about how you can take this into rural areas, or metropolitan areas and bring this capability to individuals who couldn't get it anytime soon. It could have a profound impact or implications for the United States.'' Schmidt on personalization: "Now is the time to make big bets on where technology is going to go...The biggest bet is trying to get more people to personalize local search, to get their local life integrated into their search and online experience. And it's a big bet because there's a lot of people in the world, especially with all the international components. So we think a lot about how much that will cost us (Google) and how important strategically it is for us. Because ultimately, the Internet is about people, the individual and the little world they live in, as opposed to the broad world we see. In that sense Terry (Semel) and I are in complete agreement that this is an end-user consumer-focused business." Chambers: "I think the biggest bet at Cisco is how broadly do we cast our net. Do we move beyond just providing the transport and intersection with the Internet and move onto storage and security and IP phones and wireless and the whole marketplace?" Bill Joy, on the personalized mobile web; "I'd like to know when I'm traveling to New York, which of my friends are there at the same time. Or if there's a concert I'd like to go to, I'd like to know when the band is coming to town. And I'd like these things presented to me in a way that's not too disruptive of my time. I get an email that says my son has to go to a class and I need to get it into my calendar, I'd like it to be a little more automated. I think it becomes a business opportunity. We need a hot device. For the pocket device, the Treo is roughly the first one that's hit the mass market, so that's why we're close...(What's holding us back, Rose asks.) "It's the price point. $600 is a lot.'' Clearly the techology innovation juggernut is unstoppable and gaining more momentum. | 2004 - World's Best Companies And Business LeadersMicrosoft again came second only to General Electric as the world's most respected company among chief executives. Bill Gates is considered the world's most respected business leader, for the third year, among business leaders surveyed in the latest edition of the Financial Times/PricewaterhouseCoopers World's Most Respected Companies study.IT and consumer electronics companies feature heavily in the list with 11 entries in the top 50 most admired corporations. HP made major strides up the "most respected" table, up 19 places to number 10. Meanwhile Carly Fiorina was the only woman to make the list, slotting in at number eight behind Gates and Michael Dell (number five). Fiorina is credited for successfully integrating Compaq into HP.Narayanamurthy (number thirty six) and Ratan Tata( number forty six) are among the other notable entries in the best business leaders category. Microsoft's domination of the IT market was respected by many of the 915 chief execs in 25 countries quizzed as part of the survey. "They [Microsoft] are so dominant and successful," one awe struck respondent said. The tactics that allowed Microsoft to dominate the software industry might be criticised elsewhere but not by business leaders, some of whom openly declared their admiration for Microsoft's "monopoly" status. Apart from HP and Microsoft other IT companies to make the list included: IBM (4), Dell (6), Sony Ericsson (21), Siemens (23), Canon (25), Nokia (26), Intel (38), Samsung (32) and Apple (42). In Innovation category, the ratings include Microsoft at number one while Dell, Nokia, Apple, Sony Ericsson, General Electric and IBM rated in the top 10 for innovation. | Ben and Jerry's vs. AmazonA friend of mine was narrating how he was getting torn apart at sometimes ( I told him that he just needs to be amused) as his recent jobs between varying degrees of corporate culture and asked some simple views - not the David Maister, Tom Peters, Jim Collins variety( No Pun Intended - I adore them). I was trying to first explain to him the extremes of corporate culture and this is the first of the series of articles that I want to point for getting a perspective. Joel Sposky needs no introduction. He has recently published this Strategy Letter , part of the change this manifesto. The Theme runs like this:Joining/ Building a new company/Division? You've got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you're in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or you're going to have a disaster on your hands. The decision? Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital. The organic model is to start small, with limited goals, and slowly build a business over a long period of time - let's call this the Ben and Jerry's model, because Ben and Jerry's fits this model pretty well. The other model, popularly called "Get Big Fast" (a.k.a. "Land Grab"), requires you to raise a lot of capital, and work as quickly as possible to get big fast without concern for profitability. Let's call this the Amazon model, because Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has practically become the celebrity spokesmodel for Get Big Fast. All these comparitive factors, i told my friend also applies to cultures that exist between divisions within the company. The differences between these models. A.The first thing to ask is: are you going into a business that has competition, or not?( You may also read this as - are you accountable individually or not -part of a huge gang/crowd/dignified gentlemen and women and generally live on others work.) - Ben and Jerry's - Lots of established competitors New technology - Amazon - no competition at first If you don't have any real competition, like Amazon, there is a chance that you can succeed at a "land grab", that is, get as many customers as quickly as possible, no matter who, where they come from, or how you get them, so that later competitors/peers will have a serious barrier to entry. But if you're going into an industry where there is already a well-established set of competitors, the land-grab idea doesn't make sense. You need to create your customer base by getting customers to switch over from competitors/ you need to find customers out of your defined landscape/customer space. B.Another question about displacing competitors has to do with network effects and lock-in: Ben and Jerry's - No network effect; weak customer lock-in Amazon - Strong network effect, strong customer lock-in A "network effect" is a situation where the more customers/patrons/friends/ego suckers you have, the more customers/previlages/customers that you will get. It's based on Metcalfe's Law : the value of a network is equal to the number of users squared. "Lock-in" is where there is something about the business that makes people not want to switch. Nobody wants to switch their Internet provider, even if the service isn't very good, because of the hassle of changing your email address and notifying everyone of the new email address. People don't want to switch word processors if their old files can't be read by the new word processor. People do not want to switch loyalties, Godfathers are always there for long - to support you in the swings and help one to trample on others - ofcourse the onus of responsibility lay on the trampled to wriggle out and behave as a "good corporate citizen".Even better than lock-in is the sneaky version - stealth lock-in: services which lock you in without your even realizing it in public life. In corporate life - it is stealth attack - no action from enteprises when you wnat response, trampler shall get additional horsepower. If you are going into a business that has natural network effects and lock-in, and there are no established competitors, then you better use the Amazon model, or somebody else will, and you simply won't be able to get a toehold. C. Ben and Jerry's - Little capital required; break even fast; (in corpurate life - play on an existing market - currency and local market conditions to one's benefit) Amazon - Outrageous amounts of capital/Efforts required; profitability can take years; (in corportate life -work four times more hard and show one seventh the result and still hope to be rewarded, of course count yourslef lucky if you get a kick.) D. Ben and Jerry's companies start on somebody's credit card. Amazon companies raise money practically as fast as anyone can spend it. There's a reason for this. They are in a terrible rush. If they are in a business with no competitors and network effects, they better get big super-fast. Every day matters. Ben and Jerry's companies just can't afford to do this, so they have to settle for growing slowly. E.Ben and Jerrys - Corporate culture is important Amazon - Corporate culture is impossible When you are growing faster than about 100% per year, it is simply impossible for mentors to transmit corporate values to new hires. Ben and Jerry's exists because of the values of the founders, who would not accept growing faster than the rate at which that culture can be promulgated. F. Ben and Jerry's - Mistakes become valuable lessons Amazon - Mistakes are not really noticed A company that is growing too fast will simply not notice when it makes a big mistake, especially of the spend-too-much-money kind. Amazon buys Junglee, a comparison shopping service, for around $180,000,000 in stock, and then suddenly realizes that comparison shopping services are not very good for their business, so they just shut it down. Having piles and piles of cash makes stupid mistakes easy to cover up.( In corporate life, so long as you have patrons, you can cover yourself with layers and layers of support as an insurance for all cultural and procedural violations - Godfathers are there - they have some jobs to do right!!) G. Ben and Jerry's - It takes a long time to get big Amazon - You get big very fast H. Ben and Jerry's - You'll probably succeed .. You certainly won't lose too much money Amazon - You have a tiny chance of becoming a billionaire, and a high chance of just failing. Read a couple of corporate histories - Ben and Jerry) and Ben and Jerry's for starters, echances of doing that make the lottery look like a good deal? Ben and Jerry's companies( Amazon ) are not going to do that for you. Probably the worst thing you can do is to decide that you have to be an Amazon company, and then act like a Ben and Jerry's company (while in denial all the time). Amazon companies absolutely must substitute cash for time whenever they can. (In corporate life -Ben and Jerry shall always substitute good work, procedures an adherence to corporate culture very scarosant). I told him, that both models work, but you've got to pick one and stick to it, or you'll find things mysteriously going wrong and you won't quite know why. Joel Sposky's really deserves all the pat for expressing himself so well and my intespersed thoughts are just ramblings of an unorganised mind. For good measure, I told my friend that I have published two articles on Professional Service Firms Excellence Part 1 and Part II - After all Tom Peters said that "The professional service firm is the best model for tomorrow's organization in any industry" | Friday, November 19, 2004UPS -Pioneering RFID worksInformationweek has published an excellent article about global logistics supplier UPS adoption of RFID technology Excerpts:United Parcel Service of America Inc. is closely monitoring radio-frequency identification technology. UPS has several tests under way and says its package-tracking processes will leverage RFID as soon as customers want it. The company's RFID efforts are part of a four-pronged strategy to be ready to lead as the technology moves into the mainstream in next few years. "We will be prepared as the adoption rate increases," says Albert L. Wright, VP of engineering for UPS. "Being ahead of the curve in planning and preparation is part of keeping the customer satisfied. It's the kind of thing that helps you be recognized as a leader--not just as a logistics or transportation company, but as a technology company as well." UPS plans to be: - provider of RFID systems and services for customers, - an internal user of RFID, - an investor in RFID technologies, - and an active participant in RFID standards bodies, he says. UPS has invested in two RFID companies: Impinj Inc,a fabless supplier of RFID chips and tags, and Savi Technology, a provider of software used in creating RFID supply-chain networks. UPS has also engaged in two RFID pilot programs at its facilities near Atlanta, an effort Wright says will help both UPS and its customers gain a better understanding of the potential benefits and limitations of the technology. - In the first pilot program, UPS placed RFID shipping tags on reusable containers the company uses to ship small or irregularly shaped items. Traditional bar-code labels used on these so-called tote boxes haven't been easy to read, and the labels often deteriorate before the end of the life of the reusable container. In tests in the second quarter of this year at its lab in Doraville, Ga., and then in a pilot implementation at its air hub in Louisville, Ky., in the third quarter, UPS found improvement in read rates using the RFID tags on the irregular packages, Wright says. - A second pilot program was recently conducted at its facility in Roswell, Ga., in which UPS put RFID tags on vehicles to monitor their activity at controlled access points as they enter or exit the UPS facility. The company believes the use of RFID-enabled package cars and tractor-trailers can improve dispatch and security processes. Among the information the company hopes to find out is how the RFID tags perform in various types of weather and the accuracy of information obtained related to the speed of the vehicles and the distance from readers. UPS is also evaluating how RFID can be incorporated into the basic package-tracking service used at its customers' facilities throughout the country. As a company that handles more than 13 million packages each day in the United States, UPS already maintains a sophisticated and reliable tracking system for the items it ships, Wright says. But RFID may improve the operations by providing more real-time, detailed information on where a package is at any given time.UPS has centers established in the warehouses of about 60,000 customer locations. The centers use on-floor computers to generate specialized shipping tags for products moving out of the warehouses. The UPS tracking tags utilize a UPC code and a UPS tracking code called a 1Z tracking number. The tags are printed on site for placement on the packages. "We have full visibility today of every package," Wright says. "Each package has a 1Z code that becomes the license plate to all pertinent information. We know where the package is, where it came from, where it's going, and how much it weighs." The next step in the process will be the introduction of RFID tags. All that's necessary, Wright says, is to install new printers and make some minor software upgrades. To date, UPS has received no customer requests to begin shipping with RFID tags, although Wright says demand will increase next year and beyond. "Right now it's strictly a value proposition," he says. "Bar codes are reliable and very inexpensive. It's going to be some time before the adoption rates of RFID can rival those of bar codes."UPS will offer customized RFID services so that customers' shipping centers can use RFID only to the extent they want, such as tagging a select set of products rather than using RFID companywide. "I think the adoption and the role [RFID] plays in the supply chain will be dependent on where you are in the chain," he says. "If you have very-high-value goods, the RFID proposition may come much sooner. For those shipping lower-value goods, there is probably not a good value at this time." Wright says companies considering RFID technology should move cautiously. "To say today that RFID is going to be an end-all solution to transform the logistics supply chain I think is a little premature," he says. "The value proposition for RFID has to be done by each industry, and each user, to determine if there is a return on invested capital." | Amazon as ArchitectureArtstechnica writes that Amazon is coming up with a sensational platform model. Excerpts:The Amazon Simple Queue Service offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components. The Amazon Simple Queue Service reduces the costs associated with resolving the producer-consumer problem that arises in distributed application development. Such costs include increased application development time, and potentially significant investment in server and network infrastructure to support distributed application messaging. Amazon has already invested in the large-scale computing infrastructure that runs the Queue Service, and since the Service's interface is exposed via Web services, integration with applications is fast and easy. Amazon is now going to host data structures for online applications of any type. These data structures are specifically designed for use in asynchronous communication, so that different parts of a distributed application can talk to each other. This makes Amazon sort of like a massive bank of DRAM, in the sense that a normal, multithreaded application that needs to pass messages between asynchronous threads usually allocates structures in main memory for this purpose. So if the Internet is an operating system, and a distributed, networked application is a multithreaded process, then Amazon is the main memory that the process's threads use to communicate. In other words, Amazon is developing a platform that anybody can use to write network applications, encompassing OS+ DRAM.Perhaps a better analogy than DRAM would be Federal Express. In this model, Amazon is a private third party messaging service that any type of business—from a flower shop to a automotive manufacturer—can use to send data between two locations. And like FedEx, Amazon's service solves a real problem, since distributed communication is an Increasingly important facet of networked computing. At some point, Amazon is going to want to charge fees for this that will scale with usage. Amazon seems to already have the foundation of a sort of "centralized Internet login" function, in the form of their "tip jar" application and affiliate program. In just a few clicks, I can use my Amazon account to send revenue to a 3rd party, with or without the purchase of a book. The next step for Amazon is an MS Passport competitor. Think about it. They've already got your credit card number, shipping address, etc. on file, and now they're trying to insinuate themselves into the architecture of the Internet by providing back-end services for distributed applications. | Investing in a public company in China? Think againSiliconbeat writes, now and then, Beijing goes to its cupboard, pulls out its big red communist flag, and waves it to remind people it can do anything it pleases. A few days ago, it did it again: It reshuffled the bosses of its three big state-owned telecom companies, all publicly traded: China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom. They're only the second, fourth and seventh largest Chinese companies in terms of market value -- a trifling $100 billion at stake. They're traded as New York ADRs. Economist Donald Straszheim has been following China closely recently. He summarizes ( Siliconbeat says -note, we think his word "retired" should be in quotation marks):- The #1 person at China Telecom retired. - The #1 at Mobile went to become #1 at Telecom. - The #1 at Unicom (the worst performing) went to #1 at Mobile (the best performing). The #2 at Unicom became #1 at Unicom. No official explanation is yet available. No such action has ever occurred since China’s SOEs have been traded as ADRs. Such bureaucratic shuffles still occur in the government, but the SOE carve-outs are supposed to be different. The lesson: Investing in State-Owned-Enterprises ain't worth it. "We are not interested in these SOEs at this time," Straszheim tells his clients. Nor should the world be. I agree with the gist of the comments posted on this topic – quite telling and a study in contrast : In contrast, indian enteprises like Infosys, Bharti Teleocm and Reliance Infocomm were created by entrepreneurs and grew with almost zero governemnt support .The indian counterparts of chinese SOE’s continue to operate without any undue influence/help from Indian governement. Huawei, however, has strong ties to the Chinese military/governemnt, and apparently is run by an ex-military individual. Not to forget the government's control on China Telecom, Netcom and Unicom, the subject of the original blog post.Behind the 'politicians' are the Éminence Grises, often in military uniform. Anything can happen and may of the possibilities are frightful. Taiwan, Tibet, plague, natural disaster, democracy... who knows?. Without doubt,Indian entrepreneurism, capital markets, regulatory environments, legal frameworks, free press, repatriation mechanisms all make India a much much better place to invest compared to china. | Adam Bosworth - At His BestAdam Bosworth at his best in the address that he made at the ICSOC04 . The theme was essentially a reminder to a group of very smart people that their intelligence should be used to accomodate really simple user and programmer models, not to build really complex ones. Excerpts from this wonderful address:KISS -keeping it simple and sloppy and its effect on computing on the internet is the need of the day. There is an eternal tension between that part of humanity which celebrates our diversity, imperfectability, and faults, as part of the rich tapestry of the human condition and that part which seeks to perfect itself, to control, to build complex codes and rules for conduct which if zealously adhered to, guarantee an orderly process. It is an ironic truth that those who seek to create systems which most assume the perfectibility of humans end up building the systems which are most soul destroying and most rigid, systems that rot from within until like great creaking rotten oak trees they collapse on top of themselves leaving a sour smell and decay. Conversely, those systems which best take into account the complex, frail, brilliance of human nature and build in flexibility, checks and balances, and tolerance tend to survive beyond all hopes. That software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion. Eg: - Spreadsheets : Consider the spreadsheet. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet. Lotus built Improv "to fix all this". It was an auditors dream. It provided rarified heights of abstraction, formalisms for rows and columns, and in short was truly comprehensible. It failed utterly, not because it failed in its ambitions but because it succeeded. Eg: - Search : This started with complex screens for entering search criteria and their ability to handle Boolean logic. Access had the seemingly easier Query by Example. Yet, today half a billion people search every day free text search. The engineering is hard, but the user model is simple and sloppy. Example -User interface. When HTML first came out it was unbelievably sloppy and forgiving, permissive and ambiguous - Microsoft Office people said in 1995that HTML would never succeed because it was so primitive .HTML is today the basic building block for huge swathes of human information. Eg: - XML This faced similar criticisms - slowly, but surely, we have seen the other older systems, collapse, crumple, and descend towards irrelevance. Two diametrically opposed tendencies in the model for exchanging information between programs today: On the one hand we have RSS 2.0 or Atom. The documents that are based on these formats are growing like a bay weed. Nobody really cares which one is used because they are largely interoperable. Both are essentially lists of links to content with interesting associated metadata. Both enable a model for capturing reputation, filtering, stand-off annotation, and so on. There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this community under the aegis of RDF and RSS 1.0. It failed. Instead RSS 2.0 and Atom have prevailed and are used these days to put together talk shows and play lists (podcasting) photo albums (Flickr), schedules for events, lists of interesting content, news, shopping specials, and so on. There is a killer app for it, Blogreaders/RSS Viewers. Anyone can play. It is becoming the easy sloppy lingua franca by which information flows over the web. On the one hand we have Blogs and Photo Albums and Event Schedules and Favorites and Ratings and News Feeds. On the other we have CRM and ERP and BPO and all sorts of enterprise oriented 3 letter acronyms.As I said earlier, I remember listening many years ago to someone saying contemptuously that HTML would never succeed because it was so primitive. It succeeded, of course, precisely because it was so primitive. Today, I listen to the same people at the same companies say that XML over HTTP can never succeed because it is so primitive. Only with SOAP and SCHEMA and so on can it succeed. But the real magic in XML is that it is self-describing. Eg:- RSS :RSS embodies a very simple proposition, namely that every piece of content can be addressed by a URL. In the language of RSS we call these “PermaLinks”. This idea has profound value. one of the values of being able to reference every element is that now comments about elements can be distributed over the web. The web becomes something like a giant room in which people comment on other people’s thought via posts in their own Web Logs. In so doing they put their reputation on the line. These are hardly cheap and anonymous posts. They take up real estate in a place that is associated with your own point of view and reputation. And thus the comments tend to be measured, thoughtful, and judicious. On Web 2.0:- Many seem to assume that the “second” web will be about rich intelligent clients who share information across the web and deal with richer media (photos, sound, video). There is no doubt that this is happening. Whether it is Skype or our product Hello, or iTunes, people are increasingly plugging into the web as a way to collaborate and share media. You want to see the future. Don’t look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. Look at BlogLines. What will be the big enabler? Will it be Attention.XML as Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry hope? Or something else less formal and more organic? It doesn’t matter. I find this deeply satisfying. It says that in the end the value is in our humanity, our diversity, our complexity, and our ability to learn to collaborate. It says that it is the human side, the flexible side, the organic side of the Web that is going to be important and not the dry and analytic and taxonomical side, not the systematized and rigid and stratified side that will matter. In the end, I am profoundly encouraged and hopeful that the growth on the web is one which is slowly improving the civility and tenor of discourse. Adam's conclusion is wonderful : -“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible”. I encourage all of you to act your dreams with open eyes. I encourage all of you to dream of an internet that enables people to work together, to communicate, to collaborate, and to discover. I encourage all of you to remember, that in the long run, we are all human and, as you add value, add it in ways that are simple, flexible, sloppy, and, in the end, everything that the Platonists in you abhor. Indeed, a powerful,insighful and well thought out address by Adam Bosworth. | Thursday, November 18, 2004Put it all online!!( Via Joi Ito's conversation with the living web). Ismail Seragaldin director of Library Of Alexandria He tells Joi about a fellow educator and librarian who was dismayed that students were only citing things that they could find on the Internet and were no longer using physical libraries. Ismail said that he disagreed. He told me that he felt that students using the Internet were correct and that it was the libraries that needed to make more material available online.(He also said he was a fan of Wikipedia . This looks attractive. A related newsitem 30 Million newspapers to be put online Great news for the public domain: The National Endowment for the Arts and the Library of Congress are putting 30 million newspaper pages online, dating from 1836 to 1922.. All these make interesting reading - visionary in its thinking - come to think of it- these type of audacious thoughts have historically helped in the advancement of society.| Dave Pollard on "The Wisdom Of Crowds" -Part IIDave Pollard writes , that James Surowiecki who writes the financial column in The New Yorker, was certainly expected to do good research even before his book The Wisdom Of Crowds got published. Dave writes that It is the best-written book that he has read in years - clear, clever, accessible, and jammed full of brilliant, original thinking and compelling, supporting stories and reference.In Part 1, we covered Surowiecki's views on types of problems,and Surowiecki's principal argument that all three types of problems are best solved by canvassing groups (the larger the better) of reasonably informed and engaged people. In this part we shall cover the areas of our daily life that this book can influence.This book forces you to rethink almost everything you believe. Here are a few of its implications for the things I particularly care about: • How to Save the World: • Innovation: • The Blogosphere: • Liberal vs. Conservative: • Expertise Finders • Knowledge Management. Ultimately, though, it's the well-picked and cleverly-told illustrations and examples, not the theory, that makes The Wisdom of Crowds such a joy to read. When he's describing the ability of a group to accurately pick the number of jellybeans in a jar, or explaining the instinctive coordination 'rules' that allow huge flocks of birds to sweep through the sky as if they were one huge organism, or describing examples of how large groups solve problems brilliantly even when they are not individually or collectively aware of the knowledge they are bringing to bear in doing so, or explaining why we begrudgingly pay taxes until we think the number of cheaters is too high, or why television shows are so awful and why traffic jams occur and how they might be eliminated without reducing the number of cars on the road, Surowiecki is at his best. Buy it, read it more than once, cherish it, think about all it means. This is a profoundly important book. Dave writes Here are the 25 business problems, any of which could be addressed using this model: 1. How can we improve employee productivity? 2. How can we reduce business/credit/security risk? 3. How can we become more innovative? 4. Should we outsource IT, KM, HR and/or marketing? 5. Which of these new product ideas will be successful? 6. What price should we sell this new or old product for? 7. How will sales/prices be affected by future innovations? 8. How will sales be affected by inflation, int. rates etc? 9. How will material & labour costs change in the future? 10. How can we reduce our fixed costs & overhead? 11. How can we increase our market or customer share? 12. How can we (a) find or (b) keep the best people? 13. Which acquisitions should we make, at what price? 14. How much is our company worth? 15. What service/community wraparounds would work? 16. How much should we be paying staff, management? 17. Which companies should we partner with? 18. Which functions should we centralize, decentralize? 19. How should we penetrate a new market/demographic? 20. How can we increase customer satisfaction/retention? 21. Which suppliers should we use? 22. How can we reduce employee theft, fraud, error? 23. Where are we paying more taxes than we have to? 24. How should we protect our intellectual property? 25. What new businesses should we start, or spin off? In all an excellent review by Dave about an excellent book exceedingly well written. Must read for all thinking people. | Dave Pollard on "The Wisdom Of Crowds" -Part IDave Pollard writes , that James Surowiecki who writes the financial column in The New Yorker, was certainly expected to do good research even before his book The Wisdom Of Crowds got published. Dave writes that It is the best-written book that he has read in years - clear, clever, accessible, and jammed full of brilliant, original thinking and compelling, supporting stories and reference. The book begins with a taxonomy of three types of problems that individuals and groups try to solve:• Cognition problems: Problems with one definitive answer that we try to accurately assess after considering available and missing information (e.g. what's a stock worth, who will win an election, or what caused a disaster), • Coordination problems: Where an optimal combined solution is needed for a problem that affects a whole group, and where this optimal solution is usually sought by having each individual act in personal self-interest (e.g. finding buyers and sellers for products, or determining the best route to work in traffic), and • Cooperation problems: Where an optimal combined solution is needed for a problem that affects a whole group, and where this optimal solution usually depends on individuals trusting each other and acting fairly and in what they perceive to be collective self-interest rather than just their own (e.g. how to deal with pollution, devise a tax system, or remunerate employees). One of Surowiecki's principal arguments is that all three types of problems are best solved by canvassing groups (the larger the better) of reasonably informed and engaged people. The group's answer, he shows, is almost invariably better than any expert's answer, even better than the best answer of the experts in the group. The group's answer is the collective answer, a term Surowiecki prefers to 'average' or 'consensus' answer, which aren't always the same thing. And the superiority of the collective answer depends importantly on the group's members having three qualities: • Intellectual diversity: Different opinions and perspectives (unlike most management teams and boards, who tend to select others who think the same way they do), • Independence: Freedom from the tendency to want to agree automatically with what one or more other group members says, and • Decentralization with Aggregation: Individual access to different, specialized knowledge, and a mechanism for effectively sharing that knowledge with the rest of the group. Much of the book describes the three types of problems, with copious examples (some of them quite entertaining), justifying the three conditions for collective wisdom, and drawing some remarkable inferences about what all this means to some important decision-making processes in our modern world. Surowiecki argues that too much communication can actually render a group dysfunctional, victims of 'analysis paralysis'. Likewise, he demonstrates, too much consensus or compromise produces weak, suboptimal solutions, since opposing views, which must have had some basis for belief, are not adequately aired and weighed. The book describes at length the phenomenon of groupthink and how it biases groups' decisions and gives collective wisdom a bad name. In fact there are four phenomena at work: -The tendency of groups to excessively rationalize away minority views as improbable, -the shyness of individuals to voice the first opposing view in the face of an apparent consensus, -the tendency to accept consensus of a small number as inherent 'proof' of that consensus' validity, and -the bandwagon tendency of groups to be infected by what Gladwell in The Tipping Point called an 'epidemic'. These are all subtly different phenomena, and they're natural behaviours, but they're irrational, and have led to great skepticism about collective wisdom. These phenomena show up in wild swings in popular opinion, in the inexplicable and transient popularity of crazes, in market 'bubbles', in mob violence, in our willingness to let one person dominate the discussion and bully us into accepting his view (even if he's not the most senior or eloquent person in the group), and in our ability to be brainwashed and engage in barbaric and irrational behaviours. No wonder, then, that so many view the wisdom of crowds as an oxymoron, and are so easily seduced by leaders and experts even when their records of decision-making have been deplorable. (Part II shall follow) | Mahesh Murthy Profile!!I always read with great interest MaheshMurthy's column in Businessworld. I got a little more curious about him when I read sometime back that he was involved in the creation of the Amazon.com campaign in its formative years and understood his background as a college dropout, code writer, worked as a door-to-door salesman, and been an advertising copywriter in India and Hong Kong. He also directed and produced a set of films that repositioned MTV as an Indian brand. Fascinated by the Internet since 1992, Mahesh moved to a Silicon Valley marketing consultancy in 1994, where he worked to design and launch some of the bellwether online brands. He also worked as head of marketing for e-commerce software vendor iCat, later acquired by Intel.I came across Mahesh Murthy's detailed profile - here - Very illustrious profile indeed - currently CEO of Passionfund and past associations with the likes of Yahoo, Amazon, MTV India, Channel V and also as a board member for TIE,Bombay ,business columnist etc etc.... Also noticed that his birthday is Sep 11... A very interesting nay inspiring profile indeed. | Crossing Two Million Subscribers-RIM Crosses A New MilestoneOm Malik writes, by announcing that number of BlackBerry subscribers has exceeded two million , doubling the number of active wireless subscribers in less than ten months, Blackberry has become a great force to reckon with in the market.We covered in this blog, few weeks back Clayton Christensen's Advice to Microsoft - Acquire RIM.We wrote then that, 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." | Microsoft's Plan to Take Over IP ApplicationsBusiness 2.0 has a good article saying that New software could transform the desktop giant into the behemoth of Internet-based communications. Microsoft might have been late to the voice-over-Internet-protocol party, but now the company has a plan to take over the world of IP-based communications. In the coming months, Microsoft will likely release a new version of its instant-messaging server, Live Communications Server, and a corporate IM client code-named Istanbul.Om Malik elaborates, by saying that the LCS/Istanbul combo is a way to cash in on the trend toward IP-based communications. Corporations are replacing old-fashioned phone systems with new VOIP systems, which treat e-mails, voice calls, and instant messages the same -- as streams of packets. LCS, though not a new product, has gone through a massive upgrade. The most significant change has been to overcome the lack of interoperability between various IM networks .This was a critical move because these are more than just IM applications that teens use. Built right into LCS is a SIP-based platform, which can be used to conduct VOIP calls. When combined with Microsoft's Istanbul, it allows users to send and receive e-mails, instant messages, and faxes, as well as control their desk phones, right from their PCs. Since LCS and Istanbul are tightly integrated with Microsoft's dominant messaging platform, Exchange, and its desktop sibling, Outlook, a user could call someone over the Internet by simply clicking on a phone number in the Outlook address book. This combo is comparable to RIM's BlackBerry . Turn on the device, and in one screen you see e-mail, phone and text messages, and future appointments. The coolest part about Microsoft's technology is that it enables you to define how you want to communicate with your colleagues. A simple rule for dinnertime would be to make sure all phone calls go to voice-mail -except, of course, the all-important call from the boss. During a meeting the system could refuse all calls and IMs, allowing only e-mails. Send a group mail to 20 people, and with one click you could be having a conference call. This has huge implications for burgeoning markets like VOIP. Some experts believe that Microsoft will provide millions of corporate workers with their first real Internet voice experience. Emerging services like Skype could find themselves left out in the cold. Avaya could find that no one wants its expensive PBX systems. Many beleive that Microsoft will be unsuccessful in its bid. Om Malik reminds them about the fate of Lotus Notes. Almost a lifetime ago, most corporations used Lotus for their e-mail; Microsoft's rival software was a joke. Using its operating system muscle, Microsoft proved the naysayers wrong. It will again | Service Oriented ArchitectureGrady Booch On SOA . Excerpts:Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are on the mind of all such enterprises - and rightly so - for services do offer a mechanism for transcending the multiplatform, multilingual, multisemantic underpinnings of most enterprises, which typically have grown organically and opportunistically over the years. That being said, I need to voice the dark side of SOA, the same things I've told these and other customers. - First, services are just a mechanism, a specific mechanism for allowing communication across standard Web protocols. As such, the best service-oriented architectures seem to come from good component-oriented architectures, meaning that the mere imposition of services does not an architecture make. - Second, services are a useful but insufficient mechanism for interconnection among systems of systems. It's a gross simplification, but services are most applicable to large grained/low frequency interactions, and one typically needs other mechanisms for fine-grained/high frequency flows. It's also the case that many legacy - sorry, heritage - systems are not already Web-centric, and thus using a services mechanism which assumes Web-centric transport introduces an impedence mismatch. - Third, simply defining services is only one part of establishing a unified architecture: one also needs shared semantics of messages and behavioral patterns for common synchronous and asynchronous messaging across services. In short, SOA is just one part of establishing an enterprise architecture, and those organizations who think that imposing an SOA alone will bring order out of chaos are sadly misguided. As I've said many times before and will say again, solid software engineering practices never go out of style (crisp abstractions, clear separation of concerns, balanced distribution of responsibilties) and while SOA supports such practices, SOA is not a sufficient architectural practice. | Finland most competitive economyFinland is the most competitive economy in the world, according to the World Economic Forum . The Fins beat the US to hold on to their top place in this year's Global Competitiveness Report 2004-2005. The top two were followed by Sweden, Taiwan, Denmark and Norway consecutively. The Nordic countries are characterized by excellent macroeconomic management overall – they are all running budget surpluses – they have extremely low levels of corruption, with their firms operating in a legal environment in which there is widespread respect for contracts and the rule of law, and their private sectors are on the forefront of technological innovation," said our chief economist, Augusto Lopez-Claros.See the competitiveness rankings in full, available here. Some interesting facts: 1. The UK moved up four places to 11th spot. 2. Estonia put in a stellar performance, ranking 20th. 3. Italy has dropped from 26th place in 2001 to 47. 4. At number 22, Chile is the most competitive economy in Latin America. 5. China had a mixed performance and was ranked 46th. | 62 and Still Raging, But Oh So Cool!(Via Manyworlds) writes about 62 and Still Raging, But Oh So Cool! . Excerpts:It is funny to see some authors are more than the sum of their parts (or books)? Blinding obvious thing to say, I know, but that's what happens when you're hit by the blinding obvious. Tom really has the knack of incising to the core of the issue, through humor and anecdotes, to leave your mind in both agony and ecstasy. Ecstatic from the delightful irony in humor and new knowledge and agonizing because his comments make you itch in your seat, desperate to act and live out your dreams. Half the people in the audience today really understood and will process what he said, but some of it is really shocking. Factoids (evidence of the weird world we live in) 1. Every 26 mins a new factory (foreign owned) appears in China 2. February 12 2001 - the human genome is decoded and publicly available 3. Wi=2XI - Wal-mart's 460 terabyte data warehouse contains twice the amount of information on the entire internet 4. 35/70 - The highest level of software system qualification is a level 5 from Carnegie-Mellon, its kind of like the Baldridge Award but for software. There have been 70 Level 5 awards, 35 to India... Key Messages: Learning is Not Imitation. Most benchmarking is bad. It engenders those behaviors you really don't want, i.e. striving to mediocrity, being ok with being 'industry average', and measuring yourself against an invisible and presumably finite yardstick. Tom hates the word 'best' because it implies there is a top spot, a king of the hill, that can be attained. Of course it isn't true, best is a relative and subjective word, but most companies don't seem to realize that. Learning means exploring, pioneering, discovering and internalizing your findings, and, guess what, improving and adapting (aka learning). Tom disagrees with deductive thinking of Michael Porter, on this ManyWorlds would be completely aligned - except that there are some corporate cultures that can't handle anything more... sadly... Unthinkable Change Will Happen - Tom shared an anecdote about his childhood, where he grew up in NY in the 1950s. Every night his boyhood room was illuminated by a glow that seemed to never diminish. The glow came from the largest steel making plant in the world (outside the then Soviet Union) owned by Bethlehem Steel. Rolling the clock forward 50 years, and there is no Bethlehem Steel, the steel industry is a shadow of what it was, and people of the 1950s would astonished that it has become such a commodity. Tom was asked to deliver this same message to the executive team at Wal-mart, which gives cause for thought... Who and what will be the icons of our decade, our time, our 'world' as we define it, and how will the unthinkable inevitably happen? Make A Difference, Personally - It's not all about companies, or competing strategies, its about changing the culture. And culture change starts with the person you look at in the mirror everyday. 'Did we make a dramatic, lasting, game-changing difference' to the world around us? How can you live on the fringe and make a real difference? Sometimes, as I have found, change can be achieved from within corporations and sometimes you can only help it from outside. In reality its probably a combination of both, that really makes change a reality. And that goes for each of us on a personal basis too. Often, as part of large organizations, we're put in this difficult situation where we must be both part of the system and confluent with its ways to keep our jobs and our credibility, and yet disruptive enough to make a difference. It's an incredibly hard balancing act, but by finding like-minds (or fringe dwelling freaks as Tom would probably put it), you can keep your sanity and effect change. Gary Hamel's famous quote about people working for causes not companies is so true, and that's what you're seeking to create - a common cause that many can act on. Challenge yourself to find a few words to describe yourself and how you are going to make a difference. And, please, act on it. Developing an adaptive knowledge network technology that will revolutionize the way that people learn, share and innovate.' Yes, that might be surprising, given my day job of being Executive Editor of a major business strategy and innovation site, and advising top echelons of Fortune 100 companies on their strategic direction, but what really turns me on is learning - and here at ManyWorlds, we are creating software that will help you learn in context without realizing you are learning, while you are helping the software to learn too, without realizing it. And my hope is that it will help you revolutionize what ever you are doing. | Wednesday, November 17, 2004Blog Of The Day At Blogstreet IndiaOur Blog is listed as the blog of the day at Blogstreet India today. BlogStreet India is a pioneering service for Indian blogs offering analytics and utilities such as BlogRank, BlogProfile, RSS Search Engine, Blog Directory and more. |Top Researchers Ask Web Users to Join Science GridIBM and top scientific research organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to tap the unused power of millions of computers and help solve complex social problems. The World Community Grid will seek to tap the vast underutilized power of computers belonging to individuals and businesses worldwide and channel it into selected medical and environmental research programs. Volunteers will be asked to download a program to their computers that runs when the machine is idle and reaches out to request data to contribute to research projects. Organizers say the Grid can help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS, HIV, Alzheimer's or cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and aid studies to protect the world's food and water supply. The massive volunteer project will be unveiled Tuesday by Sam Palmisano, CEO,IBM,the world's largest computer company, along with United Nations officials, researchers from the Mayo Clinic, Oxford University and South Africa, and others."This is not just a project for techno-geeks," said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with research firm Illuminata of Nashua, New Hampshire, who was briefed on the scope of the plan. The project is designed to handle up to 10 million participants, or more, if demand is greater, IBM said.| Infoworld 2004 -Top 100 IT Projects List ReleasedInfoworld has just published the 100 best projects completed in year 2004 - 2004 InfoWorld 100 Host of innovative new projects that highlight the resourcefulness of the IT community. Infoworld after detailed assessmet looks at the year ahead for IT projects - IT blueprint for 2005 Supply chain, content management, storage, and wireless poised for a big year. A detailed analysis of the projects is available here. We shall shortly follow this up with key highlights and discernible trends in computing for the near future.| Tuesday, November 16, 2004Dow Jones Buys MarketwatchFred Wilson spent two years as Chairman of TheStreet.com and was an investor in that company for about five years. Having watched the financial news and information business develop online and being in the middle of some of the biggest debates, he has some excellent insights into the deal. Excerpts:The three debates that I recall causing the most heartache were: Paid vs Free - Should this business be totally ad supported or should it be subscription based? News vs Analysis - Should this business focus on just reporting the news or should it focus an investment analysis? Content vs Data - Should this business be mostly a journalistic endeavor or should it be a data aggregation business (like My Yahoo)? Well it sure appears that Marketwatch got it right and TheStreet.com and Dow Jones got it wrong. - The first and most interesting observation is that instead of choosing to make the Wall Street Journal a free site, Dow Jones has chosen to add a free site to its portfolio. It would be interesting to see how they integrate this because if WSJ content starts appearing on Marketwatch, then what is going to keep subscribers paying for WSJ.com? - The second observation is that Marketwatch stuck to the basics of simply reporting the news for the most part. TheStreet.com has much better commentary and analysis and MyYahoo has much better data integration, but Marketwatch got the business model right (online advertising) and thus was able to monetize its site and build a valuable business. In the most recent quarter Marketwatch did $20mm of revenue and $2mm of EBITDA. On an annualized basis, that is $80mm of revenue and $8mm of EBITDA, about double what TheStreet.com is doing these days. - The third observation make is that Dow Jones paid a very big price for Marketwatch. As a multiple of enterprise value to annualized Q3 numbers, Dow Jones paid about 6 times revenues and about 60 times EBITDA. The strategic rationale for this deal was just higher at Dow Jones than for anyone else and that's why they paid more for it. In order to justify these kinds of numbers, Marketwatch and WSJ.com will have to be tightly integrated, both on the ad sales side and the content creation/journalism side. Maybe the long term plan is to use the free, ad supported Marketwatch business to wean WSJ.com off of the need for subscription revenue and eventuallly totally integrate the two businesses into the leading free ad supported financial news property online. That's a good plan and would justify the price. | Branding - RIPSeth Godin joins the debate on "Is The Branding Dead?" debate.Link : Wired 12.11: The Decline of Brands. Link :gapingvoid: why branding is dead. Link: PSFK: Long Live Branding . Seth Godin writes : 1. The data are irrefutable. The number of massive mega brands and their value (in terms of the premium consumers are willing to pay) is shrinking, and fast. You can't get as much extra for a Sony DVD player or a Marlboro cigarette as you used to. 2. The number of new micro-brands is exploding. Hugh (see gaving void above) is a brand now. If we define brand as a shortcut for a set of commercial attributes, emotions, stories, whatever, then any blogger with a following has a brand. 3. There's a difference between brands and branding. Brands exist whether you want them to or not. Brands aren't going to go away any time soon. Brands are a useful shorthand for a complicated asset within an organization. Branding, on the other hand, is a thing you do. And as an activity, branding is problematic. Branding is ill-defined, usually vacuous, often expensive and totally unpredictable. I'm happy to say that you shouldn't grow up to be someone who does branding. Doc Searls and company would have us believe that markets are conversations. This is a great conversation-starter and a useful piece of agit-prop. But the reality is that many many brands are actually monologues, not dialogues. That doesn't mean a conversation won't create a better, more robust, more useful brand. But, alas, most organizations can't handle that truth. So they do their best to do it the old way. - Big brands are dying. - Little brands are doing great. - Branding is a weird gig. Very insightul assessment from Seth Godin. | The Fabric of Creativity -Part IIFastcompany has come with an excellent article about W.L.Gore where,it notes that innovation is more than skin deep: The culture is as imaginative as the products. W.L.Gore & Associates ranks #12 Among Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”. In Part 1 we saw the core operating philosophy od Gore. In this part, we shall continue with excerpts from the article about how the process and people work together inside W.L.Gore :Leaders Are Talent Magnets - Gore's knack for innovation doesn't come from throwing money or bodies at a challenge, or from building a great ivory tower of an R&D lab. It springs from a culture where people feel free to pursue ideas on their own, communicate with one another, and collaborate out of self-motivation rather than a sense of duty. Gore enshrines the idea of "natural leadership." Leaders aren't designated from on high. People become leaders by actually leading, and if you want to be a leader there, you have to recruit followers. Since there's no chain of command, no one has to follow. In a sense, you become a talent magnet: You attract other talented people who want to work with you. You draw them with your passion for what you're working on and the credibility that you've built over . Gore puts its R&D technologists and its salespeople in the same building as its production workers, so the entire team can work together and roles can blend. The trio in Flagstaff persuaded a half-dozen colleagues to help with improving the strings. They all did it in their spare time. Finally, after three years of working entirely out of their own motivation -- three years without asking for anyone's permission or being subjected to any kind of oversight -- the team sought out the official support of the larger company, which they needed to actually take the product to market. Breakthrough Ideas Need Breakout Marketing -Longtime associates say Gore feels like a university as much as a corporation. And Gore's strategy still depends on its engineering prowess: The company insists that its new ideas have to be "unique and valuable" -- dramatic improvements, not me-too products. But since the 1980s, the company has learned that superior technology often isn't enough. You also need breakthrough marketing to push past entrenched but inferior market leaders.The company insists that its new ideas have to be "unique and valuable" -- not me-too products. Gore's first marketing coup came with Gore-Tex. For Gore, which in essence is a component manufacturer, the challenge was to find a way to outflank the middlemen and talk directly to potential consumers -- the people who buy clothing in retail stores. Gore simply sold the laminated fabrics to apparel manufacturers, which in turn relied on retailers. The solution: Gore created tags for the final garments that said "Gore-Tex: Guaranteed to Keep You Dry." This pathbreaking idea was later copied in the 1990s by Intel, with its "Intel Inside" ad campaign and its conspicuous stickers on personal computers. Since then, Gore has repeatedly broken through resistance from hidebound industries. For 20 years, it kept trying to interest consumer-products manufacturers in its technology for creating a better dental floss, but the industry resisted. In the early 1990s, Gore took Glide to market itself and built a following by giving out free samples to dentists and hygienists, who spread their enthusiasm to their patients. It was an early example of viral marketing -- Gore's decision to give away lots of Glide floss predates Netscape's move to give away its browser. Gore followed the same tactic with Elixir guitar strings, which retailed for $15 apiece, three to five times as much as other strings. The product was so expensive that merchants refused to carry it. But the Gore people figured that consumers would demand it when they realized how much better it sounded. They gave away 20,000 samples in the first year, sending the product to the subscriber lists of guitar magazines. The strategy worked brilliantly -- with a 35% share, Elixir now leads the market for acoustic guitar strings. Innovation for the Long Run - The Gore organization isn't as fanatically flat as some idealized accounts have made it out to be. There is indeed a president and CEO, Chuck Carroll, a quiet man who succeeded Bob four years ago. And the company necessarily has some structure. The four divisions (fabrics, medical, industrial, and electronic products) each have a recognized "leader," as do certain companywide support functions (human resources, information technology) and specific businesses and cells. But there is no codified set of ranks and positions as there is in the typical corporation. As a Gore "associate," you're supposed to morph your role over time to match your skills. You're not expected to fit into some preconceived box or standardized organizational niche. Your compensation is tied to your "contribution" and decided by a committee, much the way it's done in law firms. The company looks at your past and present performance as well as your future prospects, which takes away the potential disincentive for investing time and effort in speculative projects. Gore encourages risk taking. When Gore people pull the plug on a failing initiative, they'll still have a "celebration" with beer or champagne, just as they would if it had been a success. Even though Gore is private, it rewards its associates with stock, just as if it were a real startup. As you get to be a bigger and bigger company, it's hard to rely on one-person ideas," says Mongan, who's leading an effort to develop fuel cells to power cars. "Twenty years ago, a $10 million business was exciting. Now we need bigger ideas and bigger markets to keep us going." Fuel cells are a good example: It's a huge long-term opportunity, and already Gore is working with General Motors. It's not a spare-time side project the way that Elixir was. "Gore has immense patience about the time it takes to get it right and get it to market." "If there's a glimmer of hope, you're encouraged to keep a project going and see if it could become a big thing." But a $1.6 billion company can't run on hope. Gore's next big challenge is to keep up its double-digit growth rate even as it gets bigger. That means venturing into the hazards of the greater world, where Gore might find it difficult to safeguard its unusual culture. It means teaming up with giants like GM, the quintessential hierarchical organization. It means expanding overseas to tap new markets and new sources of talent. While the Gore culture is progressive for U.S. business, it's radical almost everywhere else. "Europeans generally like hierarchies, job specs, and knowing who the boss is," says Doak. Gore isn't a cult. But its culture is much like Gore-Tex, its most famous product. As Gore grows from nearly 7,000 employees to 14,000 and then 21,000, it must continue to invent ways to protect its people from the harsh outside elements, even as it lets their big and creative ideas breathe -- and prosper. | The Fabric of Creativity -Part IFastcompany has come with an excellent article about W.L.Gore where,it notes that innovation is more than skin deep: The culture is as imaginative as the products. W.L.Gore & Associates ranks #12 Among Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”. Excerpts from the article about how the process and people work together inside W.L.Gore :Using objective measurements, to identify creativity and innovation proved difficult Patents can be counted and discover that IBM is the leader, with a record 3,415 awarded in 2003. But patents have come to mean a lot less than they used to. The most creative companies of the Internet era -- Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay -- have only a few patents apiece. You can look at who spends the most on R&D, but a torrent of cash hardly guarantees breakthrough innovation. Over the past decade, Microsoft has poured $5 billion or more a year into research, but its vast expenditures still haven't yielded the next big thing. For starters, we looked for a company with a long history of innovation. We needed proof of sustained inventiveness through multiple waves of technological and economic change. That knocked out Amazon, Google, and the other Silicon Valley startups. We also wanted a company that is as adept at product innovation as it is at process innovation. That eliminated Dell, which is highly innovative at making its operations incredibly efficient -- but not at bringing original and inspiring offerings to consumers. Apple, on the other hand, keeps coming out with dazzling new technologies, but count it out for process: The company relies too much on the inscrutable instincts of one man. We wanted a company where innovation is resilient and doesn't depend on the ingenuity of a single individual or even a small cadre of geniuses. That led us to a few big operations that have hatched countless new products over the decades -- justly famous names such as 3M and General Electric. But then we found an outfit that does it all, without the overwhelming size and awesome resources of a GE. In other words, a company that proves that brains beat brawn. Pound for pound, the most innovative company in America is W.L. Gore & Associates.Its most famous product: Gore-Tex fabrics, which have a transparent plastic coating that makes them waterproof and windproof but keeps them breathable. Gore is big -- with $1.58 billion in annual revenues and 6,300 employees Still, Gore makes so many products that the total is hard to pin down -- with all the variations, the count rises above 1,000. Gore's medical products, such as heart patches and synthetic blood vessels, have been implanted in more than 7.5 million patients. Its cutting-edge fabrics are worn by astronauts and soldiers, as well as trekkers at the North and South Poles and on the world's highest mountains. It makes the number-one products in industrial and electronics niches ranging from filters for reducing air pollution at large factories to the assemblies for fuel cells that convert hydrogen to electricity. In many businesses, Gore has come out of nowhere and seized the market lead, as it did with its smooth Glide dental floss, the first floss that resisted shredding, and its Elixir guitar strings, which last three to five times longer than normal strings. When Gore's people think they can create a much better product, they're fearless about attacking new markets. Gore is a strikingly contradictory company: a place where nerds can be mavericks; a place that's impatient with the standard way of working, but more than patient with nurturing ideas and giving them time to flourish; a place that's humble in its origins, yet ravenous for breakthrough ideas and, ultimately, growth. Gore's uniqueness comes from being as innovative in its operating principles as it is in its diverse product lines. This is a company that has kicked over the rules that most other organizations live by. And in its quietly revolutionary way, it is doing something almost magical: fostering ongoing, consistent, breakthrough creativity. Epiphany in the Car Pool – What really distinguishes Gore is its culture, which goes back to 1958, when founder Bill Gore said"communication really happens in the car pool." At a hierarchical company, the car pool is the only place where people talk to one another freely without regard for the chain of command. He also observed that when there's a crisis, a company creates a task force and throws out the rules. That's when organizations take risks and make big breakthroughs. Why, he wondered, should you have to wait for a crisis? So Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication; anyone in the company could speak to anyone else. In essence, he organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams -- keeping even the manufacturing facilities to 150 to 200 people at most. That's small enough so that people can get to know one another and what everyone is working on, and who has the skills and knowledge they might tap to get something accomplished -- whether it's creating an innovative product or handling the everyday challenges of running a business. Gore doesn't have an impressive campus that proclaims the company's success. It consists of several dozen bland, low-rise buildings scattered near the Delaware-Maryland border. They're separated far enough from one another so that each can house a small, autonomous team. Diane Davidson, was hired to work on Citywear, an effort that has persuaded designers such as Prada, Hugo Boss, and Polo to use Gore-Tex fabrics in clothing that people can wear to the office or out to a party. Davidson's was surprised that there are no bosses and no clear-cut roles. "I came from a very traditional male-dominated business -- the men's shoe business," she recalls. "When I arrived at Gore, I didn't know who did what. I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy." Like all new hires, Davidson was given a "starting sponsor" at Gore -- a mentor, not a boss. As an experienced executive, Davidson assumed that Gore's talk was typical corporate euphemism rather than real practice. She eventually figured out that "your team is your boss, because you don't want to let them down. Everyone's your boss, and no one's your boss." Davidson saw that people didn't fit into standard job descriptions. They had all made different sets of "commitments" to their team, often combining roles that remained segregated in different fiefdoms at conventional companies, such as sales, marketing, and product design. It took a long time to get to know people and what they did -- and for them to get to know her and trust her with responsibilities. Eventually, Davidson went on to oversee the sales force and product development for Citywear. She describes herself as a "category champion." She's involved in marketing, sales, and sponsorship -- a good example of how Gore's associates create roles that aren't easily defined by traditional corporate departments. Her experience is commonplace. "You join a team and you're an idiot," says John Mongan, who has switched into new teams five times over a 20-year tenure. "It takes 18 months to build credibility. Early on, it's really frustrating. In hindsight, it makes sense. As a sponsor, I tell new hires, 'Your job for the first six months is to get to know the team.” (Part II Shall follow) | From cells to bells, 10 things the Chinese( The Thai !!) do far better than CanadaWe covered in this blog,almost ten days a visiting canadian - Jan Wong's perspective about how chinese facilities are better than canadian facilities commonly enjoyed by general public. The list ranges from cellphones, traffic lights, restaurant facilties to community gyms. My colleague, friend and Thailand/Bangkok resident expert, the ever enthusiastic Pritham Nambiar has this to say in respect of advancements made by Thailand in those areas highlighted by Jan Wong. Pritham writes:"I would like to point out the following points where the silent achiever,Bangkok, Thailand, if it can be called that, is pretty close behind". 1.) (On Cellphones) -Cellphones, - yes, Bangkok i think is one of the cheapest place to buy,use cellphones, from calls charged at 1 baht ( Conversion Rate - Approx IUS$ = 42 Bahts) a minute, to smses almost free. International, however is alltogether another ball game. 2.) (Informative stop lights) -ALL traffic lights in Bangkok, Phuket, Pattaya, Traat have "informative" stop lights, same as mentioned in china... im guessing that even Chiang Mai,Chang Rai, and the other decently established cities have the same. 3.) (On Transit debit cards) -Transit debit cards.... really a boon for the chinese... would do very well here... 4.) ( On Adult playgrounds) -Almost all the parks around bangkok have free aerobic lessons, yoga in some places, and some equipment for usage. 5.) (On Anti Theft Slip Covers) -This is quite intersting, but I think thailand scores because of the low crime rates leading to the fact that this facility is not required, and in fact one need not worry about theft in 99 % of the places. 6.) (On Daily banking) - Daily banking, 10 to around 4 p.m 7 days a week is quite common, even in a remote place like Kochang, an island 5 hours from bangkok and sparesly populated, i managed to exchange dollars from the bank on a sunday afternoon. 7.) ( On Wireless service bells) - The waiters here, are probably the worlds best..... the only issue however is language!!! so no points for thailand here. 8.) ( On Parking data) - Parking data - sounds high tech indeed... and again not available. 9.) (On Computer seating maps) - Computer seating maps - when were booking seats for a concert, i chose the tickets based on the seating arrangement, and had a map in my hand, and also many at the venue. 10.)( On Free hemming) - Free Hemming.. havent seen this anywhere, but have seen free eye check ups, got one yesterday and it was very very accurate. I have also seen free tasting sessions, free cooking classes in most home stores, free trial rooms for golfing equipment, free trial for even massage chairs. etc..now the only thing that i have noticed here that might cost money anywhere else are the free eye check ups... (Note : Pritham is on the mark on almost all the points - Bangkok city has five mobile service providers at the moment and the number is expected to grow. Thai economy may not be as strong as chinese, but looks very promising and is currently restructuring succesfully - No doubt Thailand is on a steep growing curve - a trend observed in the recent past years - notable after the perilous SE Asia currency crisis - that was trigerred by the collapse of the Thai Currency in 1997. I am planning a detailed 6 series article on why 21st century is the Asian Century and am hoping to publish between the coming new year day and second week of January, when this blogsite celebrates its first year anniversary - Having visited almost all the major asian capitals and cities in the recent past and based on my conversations with so many friends, colleagues, industry veterans and my own readings, I have some first hand/ acquired knowledge about commonly used facilities in these cities, their economic strcutures and the expected future scenaraios - pessimistic and optimistic.Hope I find time to keep up this promise. Pl do write to me, if this series would be any relevant to the general readership of this blogsite.) | Bootstrappers BibleSeth Godin needs no Introduction. In Free Prize Inside, his follow up to the best selling marketing book of 2003, Purple Cow, Seth helps you make your product remarkable with soft innovations. You need to make each of your employees idea champions so they can find the Free Prize. Godin is author of six books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. Seth, a renowed speakerwas recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses. The Stanford MBA was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Businessweek.Starting out in 1986 with practically nothing, book packager and cyberentrepreneur Seth Godin has created a new- and old-media business that now employs 40 and generates around $5 million in annual revenue. In The Bootstrapper's Bible: How to Start and Build a Business with a Great Idea and (Almost) No Money, Godin shows precisely how his own venture, and a slew of others like Dell Computer, Burton Snowboards, Bose Corporation, Starbucks, and many lesser-known companies, ultimately managed to turn that nothing into something quite substantial. "Bootstrappers built this country, and they continue to make it great," he writes. "Virtually every business--from IBM to the local dry-cleaner--was bootstrapped, usually by people with far less smarts, less money, fewer connections, and less vision than you have right now." He elaborates on specific practices that he believes are critical to entrepreneurs who may have great ideas and boundless enthusiasm but lack the financial resources to launch their businesses in the traditional way. Writing in a clear and straightforward manner, he lays out Nine Magical Rules (such as "Find people who care about cash less than you do"), Ten Commandments (including "Don't forget where you came from"), and lots of other helpful tips. The book is currently commercially available all over the world the entire 100 + pages book "Bootstrapper's Bible" is available for a free download here courtesy Changethis . | IBM -Innovation - Business Values and Company Values(Via James Wycoff) : Sam Palmisano, President & CEO of IBM has made the following announcement inside IBM yesterday:We've been spending a great deal of time thinking, debating and determining the fundamentals of this company. It has been important to do so. When IBMers have been crystal clear and united about our strategies and purpose, it's amazing what we've been able to create and accomplish. When we've been uncertain, conflicted or hesitant, we've squandered opportunities and even made blunders that would have sunk smaller companies. It may not surprise you, then, that last year we examined IBM's core values for the first time since the company's founding. In this time of great change, we needed to affirm IBM's reason for being, what sets the company apart and what should drive our actions as individual IBMers.Importantly, we needed to find a way to engage everyone in the company and get them to speak up on these important issues. Given the realities of a smart, global, independent-minded, 21st-century workforce like ours, I don't believe something as vital and personal as values could be dictated from the top. So, for 72 hours last summer, we invited all 319,000 IBMers around the world to engage in an open "values jam" on our global intranet. IBMers by the tens of thousands weighed in. They were thoughtful and passionate about the company they want to be a part of. They were also brutally honest. Some of what they wrote was painful to read, because they pointed out all the bureaucratic and dysfunctional things that get in the way of serving clients, working as a team or implementing new ideas. But we were resolute in keeping the dialog free-flowing and candid. And I don't think what resulted - broad, enthusiastic, grass-roots consensus - could have been obtained in any other way. In the end, IBMers determined that our actions will be driven by these values: - Dedication to every client's success - Innovation that matters, for our company and for the world - Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships I must tell you, this process has been very meaningful to me. We are getting back in touch with what IBM has always been about - and always will be about - in a very concrete way. And I feel that I've been handed something every CEO craves: a mandate, for exactly the right kinds of transformation, from an entire workforce. Where will this lead? It is a work in progress, and many of the implications remain to be discovered. What I can tell you is that we are rolling up our sleeves to bring IBM's values to life in our policies, procedures and daily operations.I've already touched on a number of things relating to clients and innovation, but our values of trust and personal responsibility are being managed just as seriously - from changes in how we measure and reward performance, to how we equip and support IBMers' community volunteerism. Our values underpin our relationships with investors, as well. In late February, the board of directors approved sweeping changes in executive compensation. They include innovative programs that ensure investors first receive meaningful returns - a 10 percent increase in the stock price - before IBM's top 300 executives can realize a penny of profit from their stock option grants. Putting that into perspective, IBM's market value would have to increase by $17 billion before executives saw any benefit from this year's option awards. In addition, these executives will be able to acquire market-priced stock options only if they first invest their own money in IBM stock. We believe these programs are unprecedented, certainly in our industry and perhaps in business. Clearly, leading by values is very different from some kinds of leadership demonstrated in the past by business. It is empowering, and I think that's much healthier. Rather than burden our people with excessive controls, we are trusting them to make decisions and to act based on values - values they themselves shaped.To me, it's also just common sense. In today's world, where everyone is so interconnected and interdependent, it is simply essential that we work for each other's success. If we're going to solve the biggest, thorniest and most widespread problems in business and society, we have to innovate in ways that truly matter. And we have to do all this by taking personal responsibility for all of our relationships - with clients, colleagues, partners, investors and the public at large. This is IBM's mission as an enterprise, and a goal toward which we hope to work with many others, in our industry and beyond. Samuel J. Palmisano Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer | Monday, November 15, 200410 Commandments For Building A Real-Time Enterprise( Via Kingsley Idehen) Well Known integration expert, Nigel Stokes ,CEO of DataMirror in the Business Integration Journal writes,"To successfully create a live, secure enterprise driven by effective, real-time data integration, organizations should follow 10 commandments that can significantly enhance the experiences and strategic advantages of operating in a live environment".Nigel's 10 commandments are listed below (do read the complete article for perspective): - Thou shalt establish clear leadership and ownership. - Thou shalt examine vertical and horizontal integration needs. - Thou shalt eliminate data silos for effective internal information sharing. - Thou shalt take a step-by-step approach to integration. - Thou shalt leverage existing investment wherever possible. - Thou shalt examine IT investments that support emerging technologies. - Thou shalt give high priority to system security. - Thou shalt conform to corporate and regulatory mandates. - Thou shalt provide partners with timely access to corporate data. - Thou shalt keep the customer in mind at all times. In the case of the Real-Time Enterprise,there is really only one commandment for the commercial enterprise (to be specific): Attain leadership in your chosen market place. If you understand that this is the basis of any commercial enterprise, since no CEO worth his/her salt aims to finish second in their market place. Then investments in IT would be increasingly oriented towards this goal. Thus, the items listed in the 10 commandments will simply become second nature en route to realization of the Real-Time Enterprise vision.( View Courtesy - Kingsley Idehen ) Enterprises are still in the stages of IT evolution with specificity that is perceived to be unavoidable across the following realms: - Application Architecture (Monolithic) - Database Management (proprietary as opposed to standards based data access) - Operating Systems (you should know this story by now) - Programming Languages (Java or nothing, C# or nothing etc..) - Technology Religion / Movement (e.g. Open Source, Free Software et al.) So maybe we do need the 10 commandments after all, as the message needs to be simpler in these primitive IT times :-) Looking forward,I see Web 1.0 (first coming of the Web) as duly placing the role of John the Baptist (we know what happened to him), and the real thing being Web 2.0+ (a web and internet specific spin on the Real-Time Enterprise vision), which is currently pretty much in its infancy. | Microsoft CEO Ballmer Opens New Software Development Unit In IndiaMicrosoft opened an expanded software development unit in Hyderadabad, India as an outsorcing hub in addition to Microsoft's existing facility in Bangalore . Chief Executive of the US-based software giant Steve Ballmer opened the new unit that can employ 1,600 people at the Microsoft India Development Centre, the first outside of the United States that began operations in 1988 and now has 420 employees.He added that Microsofts expansion in India would not result in a reduction in job opportunities at its US facilities."The nature of our business is such that there is enough potential for growth which allows us to hire both at our headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and here in India," Ballmer said. We covered in our blog sometime back India Inc. Is Growing Twice as Fast as Japan Inc where we noted,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. Technology-oriented companies have embraced offshoring to India in an aggressive and big way. We also highlighted thatSatyam and TCS Sweep Gartner Sourcing Summit AwardsGartner organised the First Global Sourcing Summit last week at Bonita Springs, Florida.The Global Sourcing Summit Awards honor Vendors for their solutions, programs, service and support, and design and delivery of presentations. The Global Sourcing Summit Awards are voted on solely by the attending Sourcing Executives and not by Gartner or any of its affiliates.Big global players like Infosys,TCS, wipro, Satyam, Cognizant, HCL,besides Softek, Netlink were among the major sponsors for this Gartner event.The awards selected by participant votes have been officially announced. The Results are full of surprises. Satyam seems to have walked away with the maximum glory as winner of one of the four category awards, joint winner in the second category and winning nomination for the third category. Innovation Award :Innovation in solving a client problem Demonstrates a vendor's thorough understanding of a client's IT or business challenge, and ability to propose a unique resolution and effectively deliver that solution. Nominees: HCL Technologies, Netlink, Softek Near Shore Winner: Netlink . Risk Management Award : Effectiveness in managing risk Demonstrates excellence, innovation, and creativity to resolve any aspect of data/IP security, business continuity, and disaster recovery in a GDM Nominees: HCL Technologies, Satyam Computer Services, Wipro Technologies Winner:Satyam Computer Services Limited . Vendor/Client Collaboration Award : Beneficial results of client/vendor partnership model Demonstrates the value achieved through close working relationship or collaboration of a vendor/client team approach Nominees: Kanbay, Satyam Computer Services, Tata Consultancy Services Winner: Tata Consultancy Services Solutions Delivery Award: Creativity to enhance or transform a client's business/competitiveness Focuses on the "cutting edge" of solutions delivery where a client has achieved new levels of competitiveness as a result of the vendor's GDM model to deliver a solution Nominees: Satyam Computer Services, Softtek Near Shore, Tata Consultancy Services Winner: 3 Way Tie - all three - joint Winners Being the first such global award from Gartner, expectations were high and the results show that while big player like Wipro could not win awards having atleast won a nomination, media savvy players like Infosys, Cognizant failed to even win a nomination - may be users out in the field think about service providing companies differently than arm chair analysts and mediapersons. Obviously consulting,professional services and outsourcing services are more intricate than it meets the common eyes!! | iPod Success and Microsoft Entertainment Industry Strategy -Part IIIn Part 1 of this article in this blog on this topic, we saw NYTimes has come out with a very detailed article titled Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch , the future of entertainment industry at stake. The article talks about the incredible ipod success and how microsoft is preparing and aligning with other players to compete in the home/individual user entertainment industry. In this concludng part, we shall see the challenges that lay ahead of Apple in maintaining leadership and the likely scenarios that Apple and Microsoft and other players may have to confront.Excerpts -Part II:Geoff Moore, who articulated the platform strategy in his 1999 book "Crossing the Chasm" , argues that Apple is the rare company that should not follow his advice. Mr. Jobs, he said, has built the company around idiosyncratic, premium-priced products that gain appeal in part from their splendid isolation.It's a risky strategy, Mr. Moore contends. "You are only as good as your latest hit," he said. "You know at some point you will miss a step." But he says Apple is better off rolling the dice than trying to try to emulate Microsoft. "It is hard to change the DNA of a company, even if you have a great hand," he said. "There are some times that you say, 'there is a great opportunity here, but it is not for us.' " There is no question that Apple has played the music business like a virtuoso, after ignoring the first several years of the online music boom. When Apple became interested in music players in 2001, it rejected the most common technology in the market, flash memory chips, which can make inexpensive players that can hold a few dozen songs. Rather, it latched onto an emerging design based on a hard drive that could hold thousands of songs. A few hard-drive players already existed, but they were bulky. For the iPod's introduction, Apple bought the entire inventory of a new generation of smaller drives from Toshiba , making the iPod the sleekest hard-drive player in the market. This prevented rivals from offering the smaller players for months. Since then, Apple has been quick to add new features. In the spring, it introduced the iPod Mini, based on 1-inch drives, and last month it introduced iPoargues that Apple is the rare company that should not follow his advice. Mr. Jobs, he said, has built the company around idiosyncratic, premium-priced products that gain appeal in part from their splendid isolation.It's a risky strategy, Mr. Moore contends. "You are only as good as your latest hit," he said. "You know at some point you will miss a step." But he says Apple is better off rolling the dice than trying to try to emulate Microsoft. "It is hard to change the DNA of a company, even if you have a great hand," he said. "There are some times that you say, 'there is a great opportunity here, but it is not for us. When apple launched IPhoto, with the ability to bore your friends with thousands of snapshots of your latest vacation on its small color screen. Each innovation was matched quickly by rivals, but Apple was able to cement its position in the minds of its consumers as the leader in online music. It was helped even more by competitors' missteps. Sony, in theory, would have been the strongest rival, but it tripped over its own conflicting agendas. Sony's biggest bet in digital music was the MiniDisc, a popular format in Japan that never took off in the United States. And because it owned a major record label, Sony manufactured players that made it difficult to play MP3 files, the sort that were traded freely on file-sharing services. The pioneers in the market were Rio (born as Diamond Multimedia) and Creative Technology, both makers of add-on sound cards for PC's. Neither had Apple's marketing savvy or budget. Samsung, for its part, chose to focus on the more lucrative cellphone and flat-panel television businesses, letting its MP3 business flounder. Indeed, Apple has been able to keep its leading share even though its products are priced above similar models from rivals. Judging by its latest crop of products, Apple seems to believe that its profit margins can grow. The U2 iPod, for example, is priced at $349, or $50 more than an identical model with a white case. Adding the photo features to an iPod costs less than $20, competitors say, but Apple has been able to charge $100 extra for iPod Photo, over the $399 price of the comparable, music-only player. "The iPod is an affordable luxury," said Michael Gartenberg, the research director of Jupiter Research. "It's not the cheapest player on the market, but you don't spend thousands of dollars extra to own one." While Apple has not opened the iPod to other music stores, it did make an important decision to go after the broader market by building a version for Windows computers. And it reached an agreement with Hewlett-Packard for H-P to resell iPods and install iTunes software on its computers. Microsoft has been developing the Windows Audio formats for nearly a decade as part of the media player built into Windows. It has long licensed these formats for use in portable players, and it recently added features for so-called digital rights management, which allow music labels to control who plays a song and under what circumstances. (Apple developed its own digital rights plan, called FairPlay, that also is intended to thwart digital piracy.) As the underdog in audio technology, Microsoft has marshaled its formidable resources to get others behind its standard. For example, the fee that electronics companies pay to license the Windows Media format is about half of what the owners of MP3 charge. And Microsoft has offered all sorts of engineering help and marketing muscle to electronics companies and music service purveyors in return for their adopting the Windows formats. Microsoft also raised hackles recently when it started its MSN Music Store to compete with companies like Napster that it had been courting for years. That isn't so unusual for Microsoft, its executives say. The company often finds itself both competing and cooperating, they say, with companies in the software business.For the most part, though, the music world, from the electronics companies to the music labels, has embraced Microsoft. "I never would have believed I would say this, but Microsoft has been easy to work with," said Ted Cohen, a senior vice president at EMI Recorded Music. One reason that Microsoft can be so accommodating is that it does not need to make money on media software, as RealNetworks does. It does sell operating systems for telephones, personal digital assistants and television set-top boxes. But all of these are meant first and foremost to encourage people to buy more and more powerful PC's, each with Windows."The key to all this is that in the end, the consumer gets a great experience with digital entertainment that the PC makes better," says Microsoft..Many other PC makers, like H-P, Dell and Gateway, see their futures in consumer electronics and have started making devices like cameras, flat-screen televisions and music players. They also hope to sell more computers, based on Microsoft's Media Center software, to power home entertainment systems. Apple's leading position with the iPod, marketing experts say, could give it a leg up in these other markets. That is why some analysts are puzzled that Apple's sleek new iMac, a computer built into a flat-panel display, does not record and play television shows the way a Media Center PC does.Mr. Jobs declines to discuss his product plans. He has been openly contemptuous of attempts to add video playback to hard-drive music players, as Microsoft has with its new design called Portable Media Center. And other Apple executives pointed out that the Media Center PC had not been a success in the market until recently, and that Apple tried to sell computers with TV tuners in them a few years ago, with disappointing results. Longtime Apple watchers say they recognize a pattern. In the past, they say, Mr. Jobs has often dismissed a market as irrelevant before introducing just such a product, with a great flourish. He then explains that he has solved the problems his lesser competitors couldn't. It worked stunningly well with music. And many expect that he will try again, with some products related to television. Microsoft, however, cares far less about music than it does about television, a much bigger market. It has attacked it from many sides - not only with the Media Center PC and Portable Media Center, but with software for cable boxes, WebTV and the Xbox video game system. None of these have left Microsoft with a position in television that is even slightly similar to its chokehold on computers. (And it's not clear that Hollywood and the cable companies would like that to happen.) But the company has patience that is almost as deep as its pocketbooks. So it is easy to imagine, a few years from now, that an elegant, hip Apple digital television product will be battling for the home entertainment market against a much larger army of rivals using various forms of Microsoft software. "It's a classic one," Mr. Gates said. "Apple has always been a hardware company. I think Apple will do things the Apple way, and Microsoft will do things the Microsoft way. I'd say the long-term factors all favor our approach." An excellent article giving a view about the way the SOHO/HOME entertainment industry is headed towards and the strengths and approach of the key players in this space. | iPod Success and Microsoft Entertainment Industry Strategy -Part 1NYTimes has come out with a very detailed article titled Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch , the future of entertainment industry at stake. The article talks about the incredible ipod success and how microsoft is preparing and aligning with other players to compete in the home/individual user entertainment industry. Excerpts -Part I:Late last month, Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chairman, rented an ornate theater here to promote Apple's latest advertisement for its iPod music player - a crisp psychedelic montage of the Irish pop band U2 playing "Vertigo," a song from its next album. Unlike the 1984 commercial, this one is intended to help Apple preserve a big, and growing, lead in the marketplace. Speaking just after the event, Bono, U2's lead singer, said the band was not charging Apple a penny to be in the ad. (The band says it had turned down as much as $23 million to use its music in other commercials.) In its three-year life, the iPod has achieved such "iconic value," Bono said, that U2 gets as much value as Apple does from the commercial, by promoting its music and the new Red and Black U2 edition of the iPod, for which the band gets royalties. The iPod, Mr. Jobs boasted at the event, has become the "Walkman of the 21st century." It dominates its market in a way that no Apple product has done in a generation, raising the possibility that the company is becoming more than just a purveyor of computers with high design and low market share. If Apple continues to ride the wave of digital consumer electronics products, it may become the Sony of the 21st century. For that to happen, however, Mr. Jobs must do what he failed to do last time: prevail over his old nemesis, Bill Gates, who sees entertainment as Microsoft's next great frontier. Microsoft is working hard to make sure that the iPod is less like the Walkman and more like the Betamax, Sony's videocassette format that was defeated in the marketplace by VHS.Microsoft is turning up the volume in the portable music business. And Mr. Gates makes no secret that he expects to beat Mr. Jobs in that market as convincingly as he did in personal computers.In many ways, the story sounds eerily familiar. As was the case in computers, Apple has sprinted ahead in the music market with an innovative product, elegant design and tight links between its hardware and software. Plodding along after it is a vast army, organized by Microsoft, of rivals that may be less skillful than Apple but offer a broader array of options and cheaper prices. IN music, Microsoft has rallied nearly every other manufacturer - like Dell, Samsung and Rio - to support a new version of Windows Media. That audio standard allows their gadgets to play songs bought from most music service companies, including America Online, Napster and RealNetworks, as well as its own new MSN Music store. Microsoft's campaign slogan for the services and players is "plays for sure." The iPod cannot play songs from most other stores, and Apple's iTunes store won't sell songs for other players. Mr. Gates argues that consumers ultimately will want more choices. "There's nothing unique about music in terms of, do people want variety of fashion, do people want low price, do they want many distribution channels?" he said. "This story has played out on the PC and worked very well for the choice approach there."Mr. Jobs rejects the comparison between the music players and computers. The Macintosh had an uphill battle, Apple says, because so many corporate customers already had applications based on Microsoft's operating system that they didn't want to abandon. By contrast, Apple's iTunes Music Store sells pretty much the same songs that the others do, but they cannot be moved onto non-Apple portable devices. Most important, he points out, Apple's market share has actually increased over the last year, despite increasing competition. "We offer customers choice," he said during a news conference after the U2 event, answering a question about Microsoft's strategy. "They don't like the choices our customers are making." Indeed, in the third quarter, some two million iPods were sold - more than all of its competitors combined, and more than double the pace of the second quarter. Market analysts and even rivals expect that Apple will sell more of them this Christmas season and continue to dominate the market into next year. What happens next Christmas and beyond, however, is a matter of considerable debate. Microsoft fans say that other music players will begin to match Apple's features and styling, and with lower prices. They suggest that consumers, meanwhile, will want to buy music from stores other than iTunes."Over time, proprietary standards always lose because industry standards always win because you get more for less," said Michael A. George, the general manager of Dell's consumer business. Dell has just introduced a 5-gigabyte music player, using the Windows standard, for $199, some $50 less than Apple's iPod Mini, which has 4 gigabytes.Microsoft is also betting that a new crop of subscription services, like Napster to Go, which let users fill up a music player with thousands of songs for a flat fee of $10 to $20 a month, will prove attractive to consumers. Mr. Jobs, by contrast, spent months convincing the record labels to allow Apple to sell songs one at a time for 99 cents each, and he argues that consumers prefer owning music to renting it. Still, dethroning the iPod won't be easy. One reason is that none of the rival electronics companies have made a player that is nearly as attractive and easy to use. "It is not an MP3 player; it is just an iPod, and it's only made by Apple," said Frank Sadowski, the head of Amazon.com's consumer electronics department. The proportion of Amazon.com customers who buy iPods continues to increase, he added. Again, Apple is bucking the trend. The classic Silicon Valley playbook calls for the company to try to turn its hit product into a broader "platform." And many people argue that Apple should open up both the iPod and iTunes to rivals, so as to establish itself in the center of the digital music world. | Connectedness - Social Network AnalaysisBruce Hoppe dedicated to the study and practice of effective collaboration introduces an interesting site called Touchgraph Given a URL, TouchGraph will draw you a nifty network of websites connected to it. On first try it appears as if it was drawing networks based on actual links from one page to another. TouchGraph draws not networks of Internet links but networks of "Google-related" web-pages - it is not clear how the Google-related function works, as based on the experience of trying some of the URL's that I tried, could not understand the patterns of relationships thrown out by the system. Bruce adds, From TouchGraph there is a link to Google Set Vista by Chris Langreiter, which does something similar, but starting with names rather than URLs. Chris encourages users to enter philosopher names and see what networks come up. Imagine for a moment how these kinds of tools will evolve, and how the blogosphere will grow, and it's easy to see that existing social network software is just scratching the surface, concludes Bruce.Touchgrpah says, User interest data is processed to create interest nodes, which connect to users sharing that interest. "unloaded" icons now appear over user nodes for which friendship data has not yet been retrieved. One builds up the graph by double clicking on unloaded user nodes. Mutually shared interests float over the user clusters. Moving the mouse over an interest highlights users sharing that interest, and moving a mouse over a user highlights the friends and interests of the user. By examining the interests above and between clusters one can see which subjects bring together individuals and communities. Sometime back, a beta search engine Kartoo similar in its approach - but essentially finding out all the related sites, based on results from various search engines was launched. while I am not clear about the exat difference between these two, based on descriptions given by respective tools and very limited period of trying out Touchgraph looks more sophisticated. Watch this blog for more updates on this topic in the next one week. | Sunday, November 14, 2004Walmart and IT usage for Business Success -Part IIThe New York Times has published a lengthy informative article about walmart's successful usage of IT for ensuring consistent business success. We covered in this blog earlier walmart's IT organisational philosophy and the speed and efficiency with which walmart CIO Linda Dillman drives thinsg within walmart. In Part 1, we saw how walmart collects data, uses data for forecast and improve sales and for supplier collabaration. In Part II, we shall get to see more related information. Excerpts:Suppliers are actively encouraged, so to speak, not to miss collabarative goals. A manufacturer that fails to meet its sales target - or has data-documented problems with orders, delivery, restocking or returns - can expect even tougher negotiations in the future from Wal-Mart, which is renowned for its steeliness in such situations. Still, achieving sleeker operations is not the whole story. In many ways, data are used to forecast and drive Wal-Mart's business. "We use it in real estate decisions, understanding what the draw is like and what the customers will be like," Ms. Dillman said, referring to the company's planning for new stores, including the number of shoppers it expects to attract to each. When it comes to Sam's Club, Wal-Mart's membership warehouse chain, "we know who every customer is," she added. So Wal-Mart does a kind of outreach, contacting nearby convenience store owners, for example, to let them know that "the items they buy, they could save money on by buying at Sam's." AT Wal-Mart, problems are referred to as "exceptions," and technology is essential for what Ms. Dillman calls "exception management." Within the company's empire, "we keep watching everything that just happened," she said. "We are pretty near real time. We can tell people that they need to go do something, and we are within hours, depending on the event."The "event" may be a truck's failure to drop off or pick up something, or the delivery of a load of shoes missing their mates. It could be the absence of an important product in a store's backroom, or in the distribution center that serves that store. Or it could be an act of nature like the hurricanes that descended, one after another, on Florida and other parts of the Southeast this year. Eventually, some experts say, Wal-Mart will use its technology to institute what is called scan-based trading, in which manufacturers own each product until it is sold. "Wal-Mart will never take those products onto its books," said Bruce Hudson, a retail analyst at the Meta Group, an information technology consulting firm in Stamford, Conn. "If you think of the impact of shedding $50 billion of inventory, that is huge."The impact will probably be felt by suppliers, he added, but none are likely to complain."You can see the pattern of Wal-Mart's mandates, and as Wal-Mart grows in power, it is getting more dictatorial," he said. "The suppliers shake their heads and say, 'I don't want to go this way, but they are so big.' Wal-Mart lives in a world of supply and command, instead of a world of supply and demand."On Privcay issues, walmart says their focus has been on the products it sells, not to whom it sells them. One of the most difficult pieces of information to harvest is which customer bought what. Such information is expensive, too. Wal-Mart has discovered the potential of its own Web site in learning more about customers. Ms. Dillman said the site was beginning to allow users to buy a product online and have it delivered to a store near them, an option that Sears, Roebuck and other retailers have had for years. But Wal-Mart executives tend to care more about how products sell as part of a larger basket. "Me knowing what you specifically buy is not necessarily going to help me get the right merchandise into the store," Ms. Dillman said. "Knowing collectively what goes into one shopping cart together tells us a lot more." Analyzing what ends up together in that cart drives Wal-Mart's pricing, other experts said. Shoppers might buy cold medicine along with chicken soup and orange juice during flu season, but not all of those products need to be priced at rock-bottom, said Ms. Overby, the Forrester analyst. "They might say, 'If we get really good at pricing the cold medicine and promoting it and letting people know that, hey, we have that product in stock and also at the best prices,' then they get people into the store," she said. "The other items in the basket might not be the lowest price in town, but the entire basket will be 10 to 20 percent less." Amazing - thats an understatement when trying to understand and analyze walmart's use of IT to ensure business competitiveness. No wonder Linda Dillman says "We'd be nuts to outsource" . | Walmart and IT usage for Business Success -Part 1The New York Times has published a lengthy informative article about walmart's successful usage of IT for ensuring consistent business success. We covered in this blog earlier walmart's IT organisational philosophy and the speed and efficiency with which walmart CIO Linda Dillman drives thinsg within walmart. Excerpts:When HURRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida's Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in walamrt headquarters, executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology. A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it. The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products - and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer." Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances. Most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly, the company said.Such knowledge, Wal-Mart has learned, is not only power. It is profit, too. Wal-Mart amasses more data about the products it sells and its shoppers' buying habits than anyone else, so much so that some privacy advocates worry about potential for abuse.With 3,600 stores in the United States and roughly 100 million customers walking through the doors each week, Wal-Mart has access to information about a broad slice of America - from individual Social Security and driver's license numbers to geographic proclivities for Mallomars, or lipsticks, or jugs of antifreeze. The data are gathered item by item at the checkout aisle, then recorded, mapped and updated by store, by state, by region. By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts. Information about products, and often about customers, is most often obtained at checkout scanners. Wireless hand-held units, operated by clerks and managers, gather more inventory data. In most cases, such detail is stored for indefinite lengths of time. Sometimes it is divided into categories or mapped across computer models, and it is increasingly being used to answer discount retailing's rabbinical questions, like how many cashiers are needed during certain hours at a particular store.All of the data are precious to Wal-Mart. The information forms the basis of the sales meetings the company holds every Saturday, and it is shot across desktops throughout its headquarters and into the places where it does business around the world. Wal-Mart shares some information with its suppliers - a company like Kraft, for example, can tap into a private extranet, called Retail Link, to see how well its products are selling. But for the most part, Wal-Mart hoards its information obsessively. Over the years,Wal-Mart executives have spent handsomely for their systems, paying $4 billion in 1991 to create Retail Link and signing onto innovations like bar codes and electronic data interchange, a forerunner of the Internet, well ahead of the pack. Wal-Mart is also driving manufacturers to invest in radio frequency identification. By next October, the company will require its biggest suppliers to tag shipments to some of its distribution centers with tiny transmitters that would eventually let Wal-Mart track every item it sells. WAL-MART uses its mountain of data to push for greater efficiency at all levels of its operations, from the front of the store, where products are stocked based on expected demand, to the back, where details about a manufacturer's punctuality, for example, are recorded for future use. The purpose is to protect Wal-Mart from a retailer's twin nightmares: too much inventory, or not enough. Armed with sales results from past weeks and months, Wal-Mart meets with each of its suppliers to establish sales goals for the coming year. (Part II of this article shall follow shortly) | The Economist On Outsourcing -Part IIEconomist's survey on outsourcing says," The global deployment of work has its critics, but it holds huge opportunities for rich and poor countries alike ". In Part 1, we covered the genesis of outsourcing, the anxieties felt in the western world about outsourcing, and more importantly in this age of globalisation,that the world's companies between them spend about $19 trillion each year on sales, general and administrative expenses. Only $1.4 trillion-worth of this is outsourced currently. Excerpts continued:Brillian obtains both the goods and the services it needs to put together its televisions from outsiders all over the world, which means each bit of work goes to whatever company or country is best suited to it. This opens up huge opportunities. Diana Farrell, the head of McKinsey's Global Institute, thinks that by reorganising production intelligently, a multinational firm can hope to lower its costs by as much as 50-70%. Such reorganisation takes two main forms. - First, thanks to the spread of the internet, along with cheap and abundant telecommunications bandwidth, businesses are able to hand over more white-collar work to specialist outside suppliers, in the same way as manufacturers are doing already. A growing number of specialists offer, say, corporate human-resources services, credit-card processing, debt collection or information-technology work. - Second, as transport costs fall, globalisation is beginning to separate the geography of production and consumption, with firms producing goods and services in one country and shipping them to their customers in another. Over the past ten years, countries such as Mexico, Brazil, the Czech Republic and, most notably, China have emerged as important manufacturing hubs for televisions, cars, computers and other goods which are then consumed in America, Japan and Europe. Such offshore production is central to the strategies of some of the world's most powerful businesses, including Wal-Mart and Dell. Over the next ten years, Russia, China and particularly India will emerge as important hubs for producing services such as software engineering, insurance underwriting and market research. These services will be consumed at the other end of a fibre-optic cable in America, Japan and Europe. Just as Dell and Wal-Mart are obtaining manufactured goods from low-cost countries, companies such as Wipro, TCS and Infosys, for instance, are already providing IT services from low-cost India. As businesses take advantage of declining shipping costs, abundant and cheap telecommunications bandwidth and the open standards of the internet, the reorganisation of work in each of these areas is likely to advance rapidly. IBM's figures suggest that companies have so far outsourced less than 8% of their administrative office work. Privately, some big companies say that they could outsource half or more of all the work they currently do in-house. Rich-country manufacturers have already invested hundreds of billions of dollars in building factories in China to make clothes, toys, computers and consumer goods. In the next few years, they may invest hundreds of billions more to shift the production of cars, chemicals, plastics, medical equipment and industrial goods. Yet the globalisation of white-collar work has only just begun. A forthcoming study by McKinsey looks at possible shifts in global employment patterns in various service industries, including software engineering, banking and IT services. Between them, these three industries employ more than 20m workers worldwide. The supply of IT services is the most global. Already, 16% of all the work done by the world's IT-services industry is carried out remotely, away from where these services are consumed, says McKinsey. In the software industry the proportion is 6%. The supply of banking services is the least global, with less than 1% delivered remotely. McKinsey reckons that in each of these industries, perhaps as much as half of the work could be moved abroad. But even a much smaller volume would represent a huge shift in the way that work in these industries is organised. There may be just as much potential in insurance, market research, legal services and other industries. Outsourcing inspires more fear about jobs than hope about growth. But the agents of change are the same as those that brought about the 1990s boom. New-economy communications and computer technologies are combining with globalisation to bring down costs, lift profits and boost growth. | The Economist On Outsourcing -Part IEconomist's survey on outsourcing says," The global deployment of work has its critics, but it holds huge opportunities for rich and poor countries alike ". Excerpts:A few years ago, the combination of technology and management know-how that makes this global network of relationships connecting US,India, Mexico, Singapore, China, Malaysia etc.. would have been celebrated as a wonder of the new economy. Today, the reaction tends to be less exuberant.The fibre-optic cable running between America and India that used to be hailed as futuristic transport for the digital economy is now seen as a giant pipe down which jobs are disappearing as fast as America's greedy and unpatriotic bosses can shovel them. These anxieties have crystallised into a perceived threat called “outsourcing”, a shorthand for the process by which good jobs in America, Britain or Germany become much lower-paying jobs in India, China or Mexico. Forrester, an American research firm, has estimated these future casualties down to the last poor soul. By 2015, America is expected to have lost 74,642 legal jobs to poorer countries, and Europe will have 118,712 fewer computer professionals. As Amar Bhide of Columbia University comments drily, “Graphs from a few years ago that used to predict explosive growth in e-commerce have apparently been re-labelled to show hyperbolic increases in the migration of professional jobs.” outsourcing means that companies hand work they used to perform in-house to outside firms. For example, Brillian is outsourcing the manufacture of its televisions to Flextronics or Solectron. Where that work should be done involves a separate decision. Flextronics might assemble bits of its televisions in Asia but put together the final products close to its customers in America. If it does, it will have moved part of its manufacturing “offshore”. Not all offshore production is outsourced, however: Brillian might one day open its own “captive” research-and-development facility in Bangalore, for instance. A well-established model : The age of mass mechanisation began with the rise of large, integrated assembly lines, such as the one Henry Ford built in 1913 to make the Model T. Over the course of the 20th century, companies reorganised industrial production into ever more intricate layers of designers, subcontractors, assemblers and logistics specialists, but by and large companies have mostly continued to manufacture close to where their goods are consumed. They have then grown internationally by producing overseas, for new customers, the same goods they produce and sell to their customers at home: 87% of foreign direct investment is made in search of local markets, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. Products and brands have become global, but production has not. Conversely, white-collar work continues to be produced in the same way that Ford produced the Model T: at home and in-house. Bruce Harreld, the head of strategy at IBM, reckons that the world's companies between them spend about $19 trillion each year on sales, general and administrative expenses. Only $1.4 trillion-worth of this, says Mr Harreld, has been outsourced to other firms. (Part II shall be published shortly.) | Technology - Twilight or Surge of Development(Via Zdnet Blog) recently published a blog about technology spending rate trends. Excerpts with my comments:The IT boom will never resume. In fact, we are at the twilight of IT – or, at least, IT as we’ve come to know it. Business historian Carlota Perez in the paper titled "The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages "argues that the frenetic and euphoric "installation" period of IT development is now passing as we enter the comparatively dull and mature "deployment" period. As the history of steam, the railways, steel, electricity and the automobile all suggest, this inevitable transition is good news for the customer, employment and the economy overall. The twilight must precede a new dawn. This is the period where we begin to extract real, higher level business value from technology. It all has happened before: New levels of commerce as well as new towns, suburbs and cities truly emerged only as transportation (whether the railroad or the automobile) and other technologies were quietly assimilated. Investors and research analaysts in Wall Street – which seemingly prays for manias, untamed bulls and new, new things – continues to be bullish about information technology "[R]ather than building on its momentum, as it has after past downturns, the [tech] recovery already is losing its steam," states the Wall Street Journal in a piece last week. "The growth in corporate technology spending slowed to 9% in the third quarter. The shift has big implications for the broader economy. It’s terrific news for corporate buyers but it is holding back a major driver of overall economic growth." We argue that this is completely wrong. Nothing is being held back. Corporate buyers are experiencing extraordinary productivity gains. They are now realizing the value of technologies they bought years before. As Erik Keller, AMR Research Fellow and author of Technology Paradise Lost, has brilliantly outlined, these trends are not temporary. "World-class leaders in IT spending have shown that budgets can be cut 20% to 50% without a negative impact on business processes," he argues. This is a great environment for the introduction of Web services and service-oriented architectures. Such approaches promise to further capitalize on the hidden value of existing technology. Beyond that, they lay the foundations for higher level business innovation. We can now concentrate on rethinking and refining business strategies, processes and operations – and let the changes ripple back through our IT systems. The economic gains to be realized – and the needless costs to be eliminated – through such efforts are truly enormous. As professor Perez suggests, a "great surge of development" remains ahead of us. After twilight comes the dawn. Paul Strassmann and Alinean research also support these ideas. | Pentagon - Global Information GridThe NYTimes writes, The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future. The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components. The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would be the infrastructure for realtime system covering all defence operations. Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the military's dream was realistic. "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination," Mr. Cerf said. "This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, 'Let's go out and build this system,' and technology lagged far behind,'' he said. "There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality." Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a global network - what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture. "Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections." Over all, $200 billion or more may go for the war net's hardware and software in the next decade or so. To realize this vision, the military must solve a persistent problem. It all boils down to bandwidth. Bandwidth measures how much data can flow between electronic devices. Too little for civilians means a Web page takes forever to load. Too little for soldiers means the war net will not work. The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates - enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second. In a net-centric world, "you would not have a Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines," but a unified force, said William Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | 7th Annual Top Ten Technology Trends - No Reference to India In Discussions!!Churchill Club last week organised the 7th Annual top ten technology trends This is one of the most important events predicting the tehcnology trends for the next 2-3 years. Excerpts:Speakers: John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Esther Dyson, Editor At Large, CNET Networks; Roger McNamee, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Silver Lake Partners & Integral Capital Partners; Joe Schoendorf, Partner, Accel Partners Moderator: Tony Perkins, Creator & Editor-in-Chief, AlwaysOn 1. The NextWeb. Ten years after the first web browser we’re witnessing incredible innovation and systemic rethinking/reinvention in important web services, e.g. google/search, commerce, personalization, even browsers. Has the internet been underhyped? (John) 2. The Personal Electronic Health Record will be a big deal, and a lot of business will coalesce around it. It will foment new apps for data-sharing and protection, domain-specific health-oriented search and the like. (Esther) 3. Enterprise. There will no major waves of enterprise technology spending equivalent to Windows (early 90s), ERP (mid-90s) or Y2K (late 90s) for at least five years. - The focus of enterprise technology spending over the next few years will be on operating cost savings, not competitive advantage - one of the biggest opportunities for near term cost savings will be technology spending itself (Roger) 4. China: The Next Global Innovation Leader. We tend to look at China today the same way we did Japan in the 50's 60's and early 70's - a great source of low cost labor. China, even more so than Japan is poised to become a global leader in inventing the next big thing. Why, what, when??? (Joe) 5. Mainstream media & entertainment will relent to the Open Source Media Revolution, and allow more online content participation (e.g. Blogging, uploading of music and video) and greater transparency and collaboration of members (i.e. online social networking). This will provide a mini-boom for new content creators and blogging and social networking tools and application developers. (Tony) 6. Stem Cells Rock. (and divide, and differentiate). California will lead the world with research into embryonic stem cells, eventually leading to new therapies for many diseases. We’ll learn the intricate networks and signaling involved in hundreds of cell types, with breakthroughs through exquisite drug intervention and cellular therapies for intractable diseases. (John) 7. Cell-Phone Text Messaging. Americans will start to use cell-phone text messaging for a variety of tasks, and vendors/service providers will jump into the game, for everything from personalized marketing to drug compliance ("did you remember to take your pill at 7 pm?") (Esther) 8. Consumer technology (and content) that targets people over 30 will be more successful than products targeting younger people. (Roger) 9. Digital Living. Everything you own at home is obsolete. Throw it all out. TV'S, Stereos, CD's, DVD and all your cables. Store content once - use anywhere. (Joe) 10. A cultural move to the IT as a “utility” model (e.g. NetSuite, Salesforce, Sun’s new push to run your server room) in computing which will help keep the IT business growing overall. This trend will be driven by the continued virtualization of the workforce; where workers require web access to all business processes from anywhere at anytime, and the cost savings value of this kind of arrangement. (Tony) Matt Marshall covering this event writes,Schoendorf stole the show. He's a zealot, for China. Japan, he said, may have reinvented manufacturing and emerged dominant in the automobile and electronics industries in the early 1980s. But China will pose the greatest challenge yet to America's standard of living. This is more than just the transfer of Silicon Valley technology to China's own huge internal market. China will emerge as an innovator in its own right. "China is poised to become a global leader in inventing the next big thing." Here are Schoendorf's other points: --First, plain hard work. Take Huawei, the Chinese network communications company. It has two groups of engineers, each working 13-hour shifts, so development continues around the clock. Schoendorf says: "They have a work ethic that may even shame our own." --Second, pride. Masses of Chinese obtaining electrical engineering degrees here are heading back to China to do their part in the national revival. McNamee interrupted to agree, saying the Patriot Act had accelerated the trend by making it harder for foreigners to stay in the U.S. He called China "a pure negative sum" equation for the U.S. Schoendorf, however, took issue with McNamee's suggestion that Chinese were getting forced to go back. "They went home voluntarily...because the opportunity was there." --Third, a tech-hungry population and largest market in the world. China has a market of over 300 million cellphones, more than the number of people living in the U.S., and it's growing. The surge in instant messaging and other services that come with such usage is pushing the Chinese to innovate and to set standards that the world will have to follow. Cellphones are just the beginning. --Stem-cells. This was a trend cited by John Doerr. But China, again, is looming, according to Schoendorf. This is among the most complex areas of work the world has ever taken on, Schoendorf said. California is slated to lead in this space. Where does China fit in? Well, Schoendorf warned that the leading work is being done today in China. Matt concludes by saying, We looked through our notebook of last night's hour-and-a-half debate for a mention of India. Didn't find a single reference. Perhaps those in attendance will correct me. Just saying | Saturday, November 13, 2004Wacky Results From MSN - Highly UninspiringThe search results thrown out by the New MSN search engine has become one of the most spoken thing in te net world. John Dvorak points out in his blog that new MSN really throws out Wacky Results . I tried and found what Dvorak says to be correct. In the Times Online test, In the 30 minutes spent test driving Microsoft's long-awaited search engine, launched today as a test site, it broke down eight times. Times writes, In the name of testing both sites to destruction, we opted to place ourselves in the shoes of a tourist planning to visit the place with the longest name in the British Isles, but was unsure of how to spell Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. A search for "Llanfair" on Google immediately brought up 94,800 websites, the second of which included the full name that we were looking for in the explanatory text below the link. A search for the full name then brought up more than 9,000 websites – again instantaneously. In stark contrast, searches for both the terms caused the Microsoft site to stall for a few seconds before the "search" engine announced: "This site is temporarily unavailable, please check back soon." We received the same advice when switching between the pages of those results that did appear and when searching for other words.So far so uninspiring. Deri Jones, the chief executive of SciVisum, the internet testing specialist, has predicted that Microsoft's search "robots" - the behind-the-scenes parts of a search engine that download pages - could slow down the whole internet."Problems in Microsoft robots could cause slow down for real users if they perform too aggressively, grabbing too many pages too quickly and thus inadvertently 'stress-testing' web sites," he told Times Online.This could also result in millions of users being asked to "try again later". | |
