(via Silicon valley watcher) Human stories illustrate the economic disparities that characterize Silicon Valley as the region struggles to bounce back By the numbers, the economy is getting better and worse -- depending on who you are. Silicon Valley has developed two separate economies that have drifted further apart ever since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.In the valley's technology economy, profits, revenues and average pay are up dramatically. But fewer people are sharing in the good fortune because tech companies are doing more with less - they have cut tens of thousands of jobs and continue to do so, boosting the productivity of their remaining workers. Guys - Generally speaking -isn't this true of all places?
Eric Pfanner visualizes a future in which media consumers, empowered by new technology, demand everything for free - New technologies offer more opportunities than threats. The spread of broadband, for instance, provides video and interactive experiences of a quality unimagined a few years ago. Digital distribution of music and other media via the Internet creates a whole new business model, not just a vehicle for runaway piracy. Excerpts from various leaders views:
- Richard Gelfond , co-chairman and CEO of Imax : Imax licenses the technology for movie theaters with giant, wraparound screens and 3-D effects and provides films to show in them. In the past, these theaters tended to be housed in museums and were filled with schoolchildren awed at seeing wild animals seeming to bound forth from the screen. But with new technology, Imax is changing from the stuff of Tuesday morning field trips to Saturday night datesAn Imax theater used to cost about $5 million, Gelfond said. But a lower-cost system called MPX has cut the cost to as little as $1.6 million, allowing multiplex cinemas to upgrade their offerings. Another technology lets the company convert standard studio releases into Imax format, allowing theaters, on average, to charge a 30 percent premium.
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- The Media Owner: Hubert Burda, publisher and CEO, Munich-based Hubert Burda Media: "The traditional magazine business will be flat from last year ... so we will have to take advantage of new advertising models." He says the company has seen rapid growth in keyword advertising on its news magazine site.
- The Middleman: Brian Wood, president of Columbia House: Owned by private investment firm Blackstone Partners, music seller Columbia House so far has avoided the online download business; the implication is there's no guarantee of profitability and no Apple-like hardware rationale. Says Wood, "The tricky thing is coming up with a sustainable business model at a time when everything is changing."
- The Futurist: John Battelle, author, He runs several Web sites, including a blog, and he plans to start a business that will sell advertising for other blogs : "Big media's revenue premise is based on the delivery of advertising on a platform that's no longer necessary." He thinks blogs can benefit from pooling ad sales by retaining editorial independence while offering target audiences for advertisers.
- The Investor:Glenn Hutchins, managing member, Silver Lake Partners, and stakeholder in Thomson: "Just as the DVD didn't ruin the content industries, neither will broadband.
Om Malik made the famous statement sometime back ,"The axis Of technology has shifted to south china sea" and here he writes about the reach of internet in asia and predicts the internet traffic in asia to further improve. Om Malik writes,"Japan’s influence on mobility, South Korea’s leadership in broadband deployment, China’s growing influence in manufacturing and net-enabled economy, and India’s services sector are creating a whole new set of dynamics for technology industry". He quotes,Telegeography’s Global Internet Report ( Aug 2004), and spots that the international IP Traffic Grew 115 percent between 2003 and 2004, outpacing the underlying capacity growth of 46 percent. But the most surprising number is the sharp increase in the traffic between Asian countries - 434 percent between 2003 and 2004, compared to 82 percent between European countries. However, one could easily discount that because after all it is coming off a smaller base. But the number to watch is the traffic growth between US and Europe and US and Asia. Average Internet traffic across the Atlantic and Pacific grew 110 and 119 percent, respectively, between 2003 and 2004. It used to be exactly the opposite a few years ago. Unscientifically speaking, the following stat shows that US is conducting more "net" business with Asia and expects this to increase further. As India, Singapore and other new hubs become more and more fiber-enabled there will be a growth in the traffic and hence contact between US and Asia, concludes Om Malik.
Smalla.Net points to this paper Breaking the Ice- Rethinking the telecommunications law for the the digital agetalking about the changes that beed to take place in the telecom environment. The paper notes," Telecommunications is a trillion-dollar industry undergoing a massivetransformation. As technology and market developments undermine long-standing business models and value chains, existing legal frameworks are failing" and is recommending a few ideas to facilitate the transformation.
I was wondering, as Asia is really moving fast in this space, we should be seeing a lot of IP based phones and related enteprises -IP Telephone services providing flat rate services springing out of Asia - I keep visiting all Asian capitals regularly and could not find asia headquartered one across shanghai,seoul,singapore and chennai.
As James Seng points out, there are several hurdles in making this happen.
- The first and foremost problem is the lack of harmonization of regulatory framework across Asia. This means licensing, getting phone numbers, negotiate interconnections, implementing emergency services, wiretapping, universal service obligation would be very different across each economy where unlike US or EU. Poor understanding of regulators and lack of open market are issues.
-In many countries, providing Internet is a job for the incumbent with very few alternatives. Even in countries which is supposingly wired up, issues like poor quality of copper wires or lack of maintenance are issues to be grappled.
-Backbone would also be a nightmare if you are gung ho to "give better voice quality" via your own network. Due to close-market regulation and competitions on other routes, a STM-1 from neighbouring countries would cost several times compared to Singapore to US rates. (sea routes are often cheaper then land even at greater distance).
Asia also have some highest Broadband pentration countries in the world. Broadband is one of the basic requirement for IP Telephony service to boom and so this represent an immediate market for one willing to explore. Asia also represent 250M Internet Users or 32% of the internet population with huge room for growth with 60% of the world population. This means a huge long-term potential for a pan-asia player.
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( Via Om Malik) Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp. The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software.AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution.An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year’s end and real production around 18 months from now, he said. The portable PCs will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list. Only orders of 1 million or more units will be accepted.Mr. Negroponte’s idea is to develop educational software and have the portable personal computer replace textbooks in schools.Major companies from Hewlett-Packard to Microsoft to Dupont, facing saturated markets in the richest industrial countries, have shown an interest in developing less expensive products to sell in low-income countries in south Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
My Take:Throw in some communication capabilities and some more open source desktop tools to run on top of Linux - this would serve multiple objectives - reaching to new set of masses, having a larger pool of computer literates and ofcourse sowing seeds for deploying alternates to monopolies in desktop segments to provide true options to end consumers. With saturated markets in the west and the potentially mindboggling latent demand in emerging markets, and in the context of mobile reaching almost 25% of world's population - the personal computer's reach and penetration need to be enhanced quite significantly and initiatives like this would go a long way. In anycase servicing the the bottom of the pyramid is the way to go - Courtesy C.K.Prahalad - even in seemingly different high tech industry
Modern day writers would often ask the question –How did yesteryear writers manage to publish with the help of typewriters. Today, word processors let us create sentences easily our hard drives are better suited for storing and retrieving documents than file cabinets. But writers don't normally rely on the computer for the more subtle arts of inspiration and association.. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think. Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries like Vannevar Bush and Howard Rheingold.
2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in a few seconds. Together there comes a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did. Steven Johnson writes,"The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me. Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I'm trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it's now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I've forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn't know I was looking for. In practice this works like this - I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head - I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me"
In the traditional way of exploring your files, the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: the evolution is from searching to exploring or brainstorming . The fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful. These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for "dog"and missing all the articles that have only "canine" in them. Modern indexing software learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas . They're associative tools ultimately. They don't do cause-and-effect as well.So they're ideally suited for books organized around ideas rather than single narrative threads: There's a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated - particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them - there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking.
Simson bought 235 used hard drives between 11/2000 and 1/2003 from eBay, computer stores, and swap meets. He set up a technical infrastructure to mount the drives, image them (using FreeBSD), store the images on a RAID server, store the metadata in a MySQL database, and then mine the data. Simson Garfinel found a huge amount of data, including confidential information such as medical records, HR correspondence, and financial data including a hardidsk from an ATM.It contained one year’s worth of transactions, including over 3,000 card numbers. In this case, the drives weren’t sanitized correctly and the data was still on them for Simson to play around with.
In addition to explaining the problem and substantiating it with real data, Simson makes a number of suggestions for how to address the issue. Two of his more severe (but logical) suggestions for cleaning all the data off of used drives are :
(a) to degauss them with a Type 1 or Type II degausser or
(b) destroy, disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or melt the drive. For less than $1,000 and working part time, he was able to collect thousands of credit cards, detailed financial records on hundreds of people, and confidential corporate files. He concludes by asking – "who else is doing this?". Simson's presentation is available here. Every system administrator, IS security expert, CIO's and business manager must read this excellent presentation.
- Half of the three million increase in global industry output since 2000 came from Toyota.
- Toyota will soon be making more cars abroad than at home. It has overtaken Ford in global production terms and is set to pass Chrysler in sales to become one of America's Big Three. - In an industry , where hardly any volume producer makes a real return on its capital, Toyota is exceptional in that it consistently makes good returns.
- Market capitalisation says it all. Toyota is worth more than the American Big Three put together, and more than the combination of its successful Japanese rivals, Nissan and Honda- Toyota taught the modern car industry how to make cars properly. At the core of TPS is elimination of waste and absolute concentration on consistent high quality by a process of continuous improvement (kaizen). The catchy just-in-time aspect of bringing parts together just as they are needed on the line is only the clearest manifestation of the relentless drive to eliminate muda (waste) from the manufacturing process. The world's motor industry, and many other branches of manufacturing, rushed to embrace and adopt the principles of TPS .
- Toyota's success starts with its brilliant production engineering, which puts quality control in the hands of the line workers who have the power to stop the line or summon help the moment something goes wrong. Walk into a Toyota factory in Japan or America, Derby in Britain or Valenciennes in France and you will see the same visual displays telling you everything that is going on. You will also hear the same jingles at the various work stations telling you a model is being changed, an operation has been completed or a brief halt called.Everything is minutely synchronised; the work goes at the same steady cadence of one car a minute rolling off the final assembly line. Each operation along the way takes that time. No one rushes and there are cute slings and swivelling loaders to take the heavy lifting out of the work. But there is much more to the soul of the Toyota machine than a dour, relentless pursuit of perfection in its car factories.
- Spend some time with Toyota people- there is something different about them. The rest of the car industry raves about engines, gearboxes, acceleration, fuel economy, handling, ride quality and sexy design. Toyota's people talk about “The Toyota Way” and about customers. - There is one more ingredient that adds zest to all these. Toyota people always put themselves “outside the comfort zone”: whenever they hit one target, they set another, more demanding one. That relentless pursuit of excellence certainly explains much of what has been happening to the company in recent years, at home and abroad.
- In 1980 Toyota had 11 factories in nine countries; in 1990 it had 20 in 14 countries; today it has 46 plants in 26 countries. In addition, it has design centres in California and in France on the Côte d'Azur, and engineering centres in the Detroit area and in Belgium and Thailand.Such international growth and globalisation is the biggest change happening to the company.
- The greatest challenge is maintaining Toyota's high standards in such areas as quality while it grows so fast across the globe. For Toyota has only recently started to transform the way it is run to make itself a truly global company rather than a big exporter with a string of overseas plants.
As GM's bonds sink towards junk status, and as Japanese carmakers steadily overhaul America's Big Three, it must be a chilling thought that Detroit's nemesis is working on ways to improve its performance.
Jeremy Wagstaff's blog LOOSE wire has this interesting post covered from a BBC report regarding Lucian George, a young british kid who discovered not one but five errors in this year's edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Lucian whose favourite subjects are history and nature,found inaccuracies regarding eastern European. Lucian wrote to the Enyclopedia Brittanica editor, after examination, admitted the errors and said they are grateful to Lucian and promised to have the mistaks rectified. Jermey also points to this link listing other known errors in Enyclopedia Brittanica.
Jeremy writes in defence of Wikipedia on criticisms for inaccuracies saying these overlook its mindboggline advance and its inestimable value as a reference when the most revered encyclopedia in the world can be just as prone to inaccuracies. The key difference Jeremy says, is Encyloepedia Brittanics is a printed volume and prone to be preserved in its form for sometime and revisions would have to wait for the subsequent reprint. Needlesss to say, someboby having an older version may choose not to look at the latest release.In the case of Wikipedia such issues can be immediately rectified and there would be one current version available to all at the sametime.
My Take :Recently,wikipedia said they are in the process of complete revision of content by baselining existing content. Technology has hit Enclopedia Brittanica with a very hot blast - may be Encyclopedia may have to start a wiki lisitng errors and revisions – that may be the solution in this instant spot-rectify-upgrade-review world.
We recently covered discussions onwill mobiles displace laptops wherein we coveres Mike Masnick as saying,"If things do move towards this world where the components separate and shrink, in order to make them more portable, but still productive, defining the devices as "phones" or "laptops" will no longer make sense". We also covered Signal Lost - The Age Of The Telephone As We Know Is Over!! where we assessed the survival opportunities for the the telephone industries and covered the emergence of the internet telephone and assesses its impact on consumers and service providers.
Mark Cuban now blogs about his expectations of tommmorw's mobile phone capabilities. Excerpts with edits:
Despite the technical advances, cellphone/PDA won’t allow one to run life. It does a nice job of helping manage things. One can do email, which untethers one from the desk. One can take, send, watch and listen to movies and audio. It’s the next generation or two that is more exciting and makes one curious - the expectations from the next generation phone/PDA would be:
1. At least 1gb of storage via flash memory, or 5gbs through a miniature drive.
2. A standard USB port to enable copying any standardized files to or from an external storage device
3. The ability to recognize that storage device as a drive accessible to phone apps.
4. The ability to call a number or us bluetooth to replace credit or debit cards and automatically record the transaction in a money management program
5. The ability to watch videos in Mpeg4/VC1/Divx format. Its going to come in handy when the car manual is in the glove compartment on a USB flashdrive and one can just watch the video on how to fix what breaks. Should be able to use phone to watch directions on whatever complex operations one may come in touch with.
5a. A home /kitchen operating manual that can be plugged into the USB or via bluetooth, see a demo of it on the y phone while one is in the store.
5b. Being able to Froogle it for pricing based on the bar code would help as well, as would knowing if they have it in stock without having to get a clerk, placing my order and picking it up or having it shipped to my house.Naturally, storing all receipts in the phone in case there is a problem
6. Able to save and store my IMs and Text Messages
7. Able to download tickets to events and just let them scan my phone rather than having a ticket.
I may call it my phone, but in reality, it’s my portable transaction device. Anything I can collect, create, transact or transmit digitally, I want the ability to do through my phone. It’s a digital world, why not? Same applies to being able to plug in the USB wire hanging from the ATM terminal with instructions.
The key trends here are effectively leveraging communication technologies, advances in storage and tons of mobile apps.
Businessweek publishes an interview with Bill Gates where he shares Microsoft's vision about the IPTV business.Excerpts with edits:
Microsoft first invested in TV technology more than a decade ago but found little success over the years. Now it seems the market that Microsoft and others first envisioned is close to become a reality. Soon, channel surfers will get vast new choices in programming and the ability to customize their selections. And Microsoft's decade long pursuit gives it much experience to draw on. Bill Gates explains,"TV started as analog, went to digital broadcast, but now is making the evolution to IPTV [Internet protocol TV, which uses Web technology to deliver programming]. And when you go to that generation, you can do something dramatic. We believe that software can improve the TV experience".
One of the important changes is that Microsoft's set-top box software no longer needs to run on Windows. TV viewers care about the TV viewing experience. If you can really make it better, then it's a very profound impact. Whether it's game shows or sports or news or advertising...you should have a show that fits what you're interested in., and it's only when you get that IPTV framework that you get the chance for that kind of innovation. Microsoft is a believer in the power of software. Anywhere we see a chance for great software, we're going to invest in it - and we're going to just stick with it. It's very important for us to have gotten in early to do a TV platform.
Microsoft believes that that it could win a substantial number of the cable and telecom deals around the world, and could see a pretty good-sized business. Not a Windows-sized business, but a very, very good-sized business. And that is reinforcing other related works - media [compression technology], digital rights management. It's a great thing for getting other efforts around the company to critical mass. Gates concludes by saying that "We see this [Microsoft TV] as being quite a profitable business".
My Take:It is clear that Microsoft has strategised well about its moves in the consumer electronics sector. We covered recently digital convergence in living room wherein we covered, Inspired by a residential consumer electronics market that is potentially several times larger and more lucrative than the PC business, armies from at least ten different tech-related industries—including PC makers, CE makers, cable companies, telcos, utilities, media companies and software developers—have amassed here in the desert to plan their assaults on the living rooms of the world. We also covered Russell Beatties viewpoint that Its game over for microsoft's competitors in the consumer electronics sector where we concluded,"Hats off to Microsoft - despite several criticisms on multiple fronts, they are repeatedly exhibiting ability to innovate( in some case immitate) and execute well". Microsoft's recent deals in IPTV market further fortifies its advances in the consumer electronics sector.
More than a century ago, King Gillette invented both the safety razor and a new way of marketing consumer goods. Before Gillette, men shaved with straight razors, which required skill to both make and use, and lasted almost forever. Gillette's safety razor was mass-produced and required little skill to make OR use, but couldn't be re-sharpened, so the removable blades had to be discarded when they became dull. His marketing breakthrough was selling the razor handles at little or no profit while making huge profits on the consumable - the blades. This same technique is used today to promote mobile phones and inkjet printers. And it is supposedly behind Apple's success with the iPod music player.
But in the case of Apple, is the iPod a razor or a blade? In other words, is Apple a hardware company or a media company? Cringley while holding the view that Apple is a hardware company also examines the well articulated alternate perspective.
It’s the classical distribution vs production issue rearing its head again. The razor vs blades iPod argument is founded on the premise that distribution is the bottleneck for the media industry.Churn across content devices may become low due to changing technologies at the physical level, there will be a small number of key conduits from content generation to media distribution technology enterprises such as (wireless, fibre, terrestrial waves, cable etc). A similar trend is observed at the enabling software layer owing to evolving frameworks by DRM etc.
A chemical company with small suppliers can’t push B2B integration like Walmart’s –" Only My Way" integration.The expectations of using standards like CIDX and Web services to ease B2B integration are high, but reality is several steps away.
The general expectation is that Web services and adoption of standard business document formats based on UN/CEFACT Core Componentswill make the problem go away. With WSDL definitions for your Web services and give them to the company that you want to connect with and they can bind their solution to the WSDL and there comes connectivity and a simple solution. The issues are:
- Firstly, the company you want to connect to must also provide you with a WSDL definition for their Web services ... if they have them.
- Secondly,eCommerce connections using Web services, need to use multiple different specifications, e.g. Do you use WS Addressing or WS Context to describe the metadata about your service? Do you use WS Reliability or WS Reliable Messaging to make sure your message is delivered? How do you do message security? Do you use HTTP/S or XML Signature and WS Security. You might agree to using WS Security but which of the signature algorithms do you use for generating your signatures?
The key point is that any variability requires additional effort when building your solution. So even if you are using WSDL to define your connections, there is potentially still a lot of work to do before you can implement that connection. A small business can't afford to do this, of if they do, they will only do it for their major customers. If you are not one of their major customers then you are stuck. So the less variability the better. Ideally you probably want to get to the point where the only variability you have to support is the URL used for receiving messages and the digital certificate to use for encrypting messages and validating signatures. If everything else is standardized then you stand a much better chance of being able to add connections to new partners quickly and easily. So really, for interoperability "less is more"! The solution: - Firstly, some of the Web services standards need to mature - standards such as WS Addressing are still in development. Debates over competing standards such as WS Reliability and WS Reliable Messaging need to be resolved.
- We also need to develop a profile of how all the different web services standards are used together so that the amount of variability that small organizations have to handle is significantly reduced. While groups such as WS-I are working on this,we're not there yet,but we're getting there.
Google is now indexing more than 8 billion Web pages, against 2 billion three years ago and 3 billion two years ago.That's a lot of pages. As David Weinberger of Harvard University's Berkman Center puts it: "We've been struggling for several years with the Internet's size and complexity." So is there a better way of finding stuff?. Google, after all, merely indexes the words it finds on a Web page, and those on pages linked to it. But Google doesn't try to figure out what the words actually mean, or what the pages are about.In short, using Google is like going into a library and hiring a very fast runner, who isn't smart but happens to a be a very fast reader, to sprint around finding all the books that have the word xxxxx in them. It would be better to just wander over to the catalog and look up the subject of searched item. It would, but so far there's no catalog like this. But there's an idea of one. It's called the "semantic Web", and it's simple enough: To categorize information on the Web by adding tags to Web pages. But with billions of pages out there, and thousands more added every day, this is not a task that anyone is volunteering to do. Last year a couple of free Internet services started doing something interesting, entirely independently of each other. Flickris a Web site for storing photographs; del.icio.us lets you store bookmarks to your favorite Web pages. They share two features: Both let users add tags to what they are storing, and by default share that data with any other user.So, say you upload a photo to Flickr, you might add a word or two to categorize it - say, scuba, or marzipan. The same applies if you add a Web page to your del.icio.us bookmarks. But because both of these tools are public, it also means that you can see what other pictures, in the case of Flickr, or Web page links in the case of del.icio.us, have the same tags. Tags are a good way to keep your bookmarks (what Microsoft calls "favorites") in a place you can find them. And there are alternative sites that offer this service like Simpy, Powermarks,and Spurl. All of these solve two basic problems:
- how to keep tabs on your bookmarks if you use more than one browser, or more than one computer, and,
- second, how to find them again easily.
Still, tagging is the future and once you see it in one place you see it, and its potential, everywhere. The beauty of labels, or tags, is that you can assign more than one.
We recently covered Peter Merholz view on building Metadata for the masses, where we noted, many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways -But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification -how people classify and categorize the world around them. Instead of a committee sitting down and deciding on some hierarchical system of categorizing stuff,it was ordinary people adding whatever tags sprang to mind, on the fly. A sort of "egalitarian taxonomy" - which is why some people are calling it "folksonomy", which may or may not catch on Imagine that you're interested in scuba diving. You add a few relevant Web sites to del.icio.us and tag them "scuba." Suddenly, on your del.icio.us bookmark page, you can see not only all your tags, but how many others have tagged the same pages. And you can see what other pages have also been tagged "scuba."You've not only stored your bookmark somewhere you can find later, but you've helped point others to the same page. And, most important, you can then see a whole library of pages others have considered worth bookmarking. Suddenly tagging becomes something simple, social - and useful. This month, Technorati started using tags from Flickr and del.icio.us to categorize the millions of blogs, or online journals, that it indexes. That turns Technorati into a kind of homepage of every conceivable topic you can imagine people writing about: Most important, this social tagging thing, if it takes off, could make finding information much easier. Instead of relying on search engines, we can rely on other surfers submitting interesting sites as they find them. A bit like having some seriously fast, smart speed-readers running around the Internet on our behalf armed with piles of index cards. Jeremy provides a directory of bookmark managers here.
Tim Oren writes with a lot of insight about approach for entrepreneurs wanting to build value in software startups, and venture funders requiring both defensibility and eventual liquidity, respond to the rise of open standards, open source, and offshoring. Here he provides an excellent outline of a practical approach that would help stakeholders take decision in terms of funding. Excerpts with edits:
The shape of response is emerging from the fog - perhaps an early indicator of the shape of symbiosis between community and commercial processes - the two stage software startup. Unlike a two-staged rocket, the first stage is light and runs on little fuel, it's the second stage that has the big burn, if it ignites.The first stage of the new model software venture builds a useful product as cheaply as possible. Actual engineering is focused ruthlessly on the unique value and differentiating features. In most cases, open standards are exploited to address as large a market as possible using off-the-shelf APIs and libraries. In many cases, the software is written on top of open source platforms, such as LAMP, to keep down development and initial customer costs. Code is usually written to published interfaces, rather than integrated into the open source itself, to avoid 'contamination' by GPL and other OS licenses. Often, a portion of the development will be sent offshore, particularly if the founders have prior experience or cultural connections with a reliable venue. Build as little as possible, as fast and cheaply as possible, while demonstrating some unique value.
Many of these efforts will result in a product, or even a feature, rather than a sustainable company. But that may be OK for the first stage, because the development time and expense are small enough to be funded by the founders, friends and family, or a few angels. The go-to-market is similarly light. Rather than a sales channel, the venture will buy ad words on Google, promote itself via word of mouth on blogs and via user communities, and penetrate enterprises by pricing low enough to fall within the purchasing power of a department, or even an individual. Being in early and continuous touch with its market, the venture can course correct early and often.The time value of having a functioning product with newly proven value may be sufficient for a quick sale to a larger company which has sales channel synergy, or products in a touching function which can quickly integrate the new functionality. While the sale may result in only a few million dollars, that outcome may be quite profitable to the founders and the individual backers. This may even be true on a risk adjusted basis, and that may be a new thing.
Second stage activities will consume cash in advance of the sales to fund them, as they must occur before imitators arrive. They may include adding functionality to meet customer requests, rebuilding parts of the product for greater efficiency and defensibility, adding the necessary sales force, scalability, and system integration to be able to sell to a higher end market, such as the CXO enterprise level, or carriers. At the point of making the second stage decision, the technology risks have been greatly reduced, and a portion of market risk eliminated. The company has already been learning from the market, though it will undoubtedly need to relearn some things as it shifts focus. Entrepreneurs who choose to enter this stage will receive valuations well above what they would have commanded before achieving a first stage takeoff, though perhaps not as much as they might hope - The PC movement almost followed a similar approach for geting funded several years back.
WiMax, an emerging wireless-broadband technology is akin to a long-range version of the popular Wi-Fi technology that allows computers close to a small base-station to surf the internet without wires.Whereas Wi-Fi's range is limited to a few tens of metres, WiMax can, in theory, work over tens of kilometres, allowing huge areas to be blanketed with wireless coverage. Hence the claims that WiMax will bring internet access to the 5 billion people who currently lack it, or that it will render expensive "third-generation" (3G) mobile networks redundant.The reality, is that WiMax has been hugely overhyped. Today, the actual number of WiMax devices on the market is precisely zero. The hype is now giving way to much scepticism about the technology's prospects.WiMax, may be used by telecoms firms in rural areas, to plug holes in their broadband coverage. In urban areas WiMax does not make sense, since it will be uneconomic compared with cable and DSL. It is also too expensive for use in the developing world, since early WiMax access devices (which must be fixed to the outside of a building) will cost around $500; other forms of wireless link, such as mobile-phone networks, will remain a cheaper way to connect up remote villages.
Intel regards WiMax as a promising source of future growth. Intel plans to establish a franchise similar to its hold on desktops in mobile devices through WiMax, a far larger market. Equipment-makers, for their part, are counting on Intel to deliver: WiMax will become widespread only if the price of access devices falls, which in turn depends on the availability of cheap, mass-produced WiMax chips.
In today’s world of tight IT budgets, increased regulation, global competition, and accelerating change, companies (and governments) require quantifiable results from their investments in technology. No executive will sign off on any investment in new technology without a solid expectation for how it will deliver value to the business. When people understand an established technology and how it will provide value over time, calculating the return on investment (ROI) for an IT expenditure will often be a straightforward process. Calculating ROI on projects involving new technologies or emerging IT approaches like Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is frequently more of an art than a science. What makes calculating the ROI of SOA even more challenging is that architecture, by itself, doesn’t offer specific features that companies can readily identify with some particular return. Only by understanding the full range of SOA value propositions can companies begin to get a handle on calculating the ROI of SOA, and even then, it may be impossible to understand SOA’s true ROI before the project is completed, because SOA addresses issues of fundamentally unpredictable business change.
SOA provides benefits in four basic categories: reducing integration expense, increasing asset reuse, increasing business agility, and reduction of business risk. These four core benefits actually offer return at many different levels and parts of the organization, depending on which set of business problems the company is applying SOA to. First, implementing loosely-coupled integration approaches can reduce the complexity and hence the cost of integrating and managing distributed computing environments. While moving to standards-based interfaces such as Web Services reduces integration cost somewhat, the real win with SOA is in replacing multiple function calls at a fine level of granularity with coarser-grained, loosely coupled Services that can handle a wider range of interactions in a more flexible manner than API-based integration.
Companies can compare their investment in Web Services-based SOA to an equivalent traditional integration middleware approach and then compare both the immediate licensing and configuration cost reductions as well as the longer term maintenance and change costs. As detailed in Understanding the Real Costs of Integration, companies can realize significant and immediate ROI from simply moving from tightly-coupled forms of integration to loosely-coupled ones. Eventually, companies can phase out their more expensive integration approaches altogether, without suffering from the traditional pain associated with "ripping" out the infrastructure. Companies are now implementing SOA side-by-side with their existing EAI and ETL projects, providing immediate cost reduction, while over the long term, SOA can lead to significant complexity reduction, as companies gradually replace their legacy middleware technologies.
Increased business visibility in the face of changing regulations is a concrete instance of the business agility benefit that SOA can provide. Implementing SOA for the purpose of controlling business processes, establishing corporate-wide security, privacy, and implementation policies, and providing auditable information trails, are all examples of ways that SOA can reduce several of the risks facing companies today. While the reduction in risk that SOA provides is tangible, it is difficult to quantify the true ROI of an SOA implementation where risk reduction is a primary benefit. Companies will find value in implementing SOA to reduce risk to some arbitrarily acceptable level, and base the ROI of that implementation on the perceived avoidance of loss that the implementation addresses. Because of the multi-faceted nature of the SOA value proposition, ROI calculations for SOA projects can vary greatly from one project to another. Rather than seeking a single ROI goal for an SOA implementation, companies should take the same iterative, composite approach to ROI that they take for SOA implementation itself. For example, every time they define a Service as part of a company’s Service model, they should also define a corresponding ROI objective for that Service.
- How much will they spend on this Service?
- What direct and indirect returns can they realize from this Service’s implementation, in terms of reduced integration costs, improved asset reuse, or greater business agility?
- How will the composition of the Services into processes realize additional ROI for the business?
Ronald Schmelzer concludes,"In many cases, SOA implementations can provide a clear, positive ROI from the first day a Service goes live. However, it is more likely that ROI expectations, like SOA implementations, should be iterative in nature, frequently assessed, and composite. In doing so, users can not only quantify, but also realize, the return on investment of their SOA implementations".
(Via zdnet) Software as a service, a corner of the computing industry is seeing faster growth than traditional software sales. The creation of an IBM-hosted application bundle is one of several initiatives at IBM to promote the notion of software as a service, or having applications delivered over the Internet. This model for buying software "on demand" is taking hold after years of missteps and failures, which were due to both technical challenges and faulty business models. IBM recently acquired Corio,an application service provider serving medium-size businesses. IBM also has programs to encourage independent software vendors, or ISVs, to convert their applications to run effectively over the Internet. IBM's growing interest in hosted services reflects a belief among software companies that spending on hosted applications offers brighter growth prospects than traditional software sales. Latest convert is Siebel Systems. Others include the likes of PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, Epiphany and Ariba
Now IBM is working with a variety of software companies so that it can offer hosted software bundles -horizontal and vertical on demand building blocks on its hardware and software infrastructure. This may be viewed as infrastructure-as-a-service, creating huge data centers running pre-configured applications, tuned to its middleware and hardware, and delivered over high bandwidth Net.
Rather than purchase a license and spend months installing software, a hosted offering lets people get started immediately with applications delivered via a Web browser. The purchasing model is different as well, with customers paying a monthly fee for a specified number of users. This is particularly attractive to smaller companies wary of large up-front costs. virtualization software lets a data center operator partition off dedicated portions of a single large server to separate customers. Also, software companies are increasingly building their applications in a more modular form around standardized protocols, such as Web services, which greatly simplifies the task of moving data between different applications. The services themselves are getting more mature as well, with better management tools and even the option to have applications run in-house while being remotely managed by a third-party service provider. A preconfigured combination of different applications, will help drive the market for hosted applications from one-off purchases for an individual department to broader usage, said analysts.
"It's becoming less and less one-item shopping, Providers are combining elements into a broader solution." Over the next few years--as enterprises get past capital expenditures off their books the concept of owning your own (infrastructure) for basic applications should appear ridiculous and preposterous when telcom, server, storage and application capabilties have improved several times. This can possibly facilitate birth of several new specialised applcations as well - as entry barriers and distribution costs can come down dramatically - what impact this can have on the maintenance revenue of established while Jeff Nolan says he is non plussed as the thing enterprise software companies lust for is not license revenue, it's the maintenance base. In fact,he argues, mature software companies will almost always generate more revenue from maintenance than they will from new license sales, because an enterprise license contract is a form of annuity. With green flag from all enteprise majors and enteprises seriously considering on-demand this movement can only go from strength to strength.
Update: Joe Wilcox adds,If uptake for Outlook Live meets Microsoft expectations, more software-rentals-with-attached-services offerings is a distinct possibility. In a sense, some of the software features packed into MSN, like those from Money or Picture It, already are there. With consumers, small and medium businesses and enterprises slowing down software upgrades in many categories, Microsoft needs to find new ways to entice adoption of newer products. Since some of those products have reached the perceived "good enough" threshold, the services approach would act as a carrot encouraging newer version adoption. Microsoft also would benefit from any shift to reoccurring revenue, as it does with enterprise contractual licensing.
In Part I of this article, we covered IBM's Paul Horns perspective about the emerging discipline -"Service Science".In this part,we shall look at this from a different viewglass - My Take on his view: Tom Peters once said, "The professional service firm is the best model for tomorrow's organization in any industry".The Logic of Paul Horn is right. But the approach is debatable. Service companies in existence for several decades should have this knowledge codified in their repositories. To me it seems that big service organisations candidly admitting that they are not able to train their consultants appropriately in their " Solidified Propreitary Methodologies!!" I would think that precisely for the reasons advanced in Paul's article -these courseware must be made open source – we should experiment this idea with a new wiki like technology and not make this available just in elite institutions – in order to ensure that this rolls out to professionals who can stabilize the price equation in labour markets, a key concern for Paul. Care should be taken to ensure that we produce in good numbers and make sure that these are not hijacked by bug entrenched players. However, I firmly beleive, this intersection is better understood with more real life experience – precisely why in house programs, repositories and coffee cooler talks happen on this and can provide inarguably better results. We have published on this topic in greater length Managing the professional service firms where we covered Tom Peters outline of ideas that with a simplified list of 25+ themes along three dimensions that professional firms and consultants need to embrace/master. We also covered in a follow up post David Maister's view that two aspects of professional work create the special management challenges of the professional service firm.
- First, professional services involve a high degree of customization in their work. Professional firms must manage customized activities where little, even management information, can be reliably made routine. Management principles and approaches from the industrial or mass-consumer sectors, based as they are on the standardization, supervision, and marketing of repetitive tasks and products, are not only inapplicable in the professional sector but may be dangerously wrong.
- Second, most professional services have a strong component of face-to-face interaction with the client. This implies that definitions of quality and service take on special meanings and must be managed carefully, and that very special skills are required of top performers.
This is also very important for emerging IT technology majors. Similarly most of the emerging consulting houses today have skewed levels of distribution between technology people and business people ( I for one beleive that these are intertwined and cannot be separated in respect of service consultants) – there are technology ascetics and business dumboes - the problem is making both this lot leverage each other very well in a modulated manner - this process and framework would determine the enduring success or eventual failure of consulting houses - not academic courses but mindful creation of business values through well thought out and executed methodologies
( Via Businessweek) Paul Horn of IBM writes Services Science, a melding of technology with an understanding of business processes and organization is crucial to the economy's next wave. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
It's a melding of technology with an understanding of business processes and organization - and it's crucial to the economy's next wave. Services have come to represent more than 75% of the U.S. economy( may be 2/3rdsof global economy),and the field is growing rapidly. In the information-technology business, services have become even more important. But there's a shortage of skills where they're needed most - at the intersection of business and IT. As companies build more efficient IT systems, streamline operations, and embrace the Internet through wholesales changes in business processes, a huge opportunity exists. Nonetheless, little or no focused efforts are preparing people for this new environment or to even to thoroughly understand it. The IT-services sector is in dire need of people who are talented in the application of technologies to help businesses, governments, and other organizations improve what they do now - plus tap into totally new areas. The complex issues surrounding the transformation of businesses at such a fundamental level require the simultaneous development of both business methods and the technology that supports those methods. This is the seedbed for a new discipline that industry and academia are coming to call "services science." Services science would merge technology with an understanding of business processes and organization, a combination of recognizing a company's pain points and the tools that can be applied to correct them. To thrive in this environment, an IT-services expert will need to understand how that capability can be delivered in an efficient and profitable way, how the services should be designed, and how to measure their effectiveness. This discipline would bring together ongoing work in the more established fields of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, management sciences, and social and legal sciences, in order to develop the skills required in a services-led economy.
Today, IT-services training is mostly accomplished through individual companies' on-the-job programs. This may have been adequate before, but it's not any longer, especially with increasing globalization We're now entering a new phase where value will be found in what we do with information to improve business, government, and people's lives. Call it an innovation-based economy, where profits and jobs will go to those who have the skills to capitalize on the explosion of new opportunities at the intersection of business and technology.
Part II with my views on this topic shall be published shortly.
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Peter Drucker gave the cadre of professionals like doctors, lwayers. Engineers etc. an enduring name: knowledge workers. These are, he wrote, "people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical strength or manual skill." What distinguished members of this group and enabled them to reap society's greatest rewards, was their "ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge." The world has changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going on. And it's right brain. The Information Age that Americans prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind. This shift - from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds delightful.. The causes: Asia, Automation,& Abundance. The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking.
Asia : Those squadrons of white-collar workers in Asia are scaring the jobs across North America and Europe. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And it's not just tech work,but extends to chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US hospitals. Outsourcing to Asia is overhyped in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. American’s are not going to lose jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the US labor force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go. But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also why plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less routine work - programmers who can design entire systems, accountants who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the intricacies of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that Asians can do left-brain work cheaper, the US must do right-brain work better.
Automation :Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle. This century, technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains - they can execute sequential, reductive, computational work better, faster, and more accurately than even those with the highest IQs. Stockbrokers, lawyers , financial agents all are feeling the heat of automation.Consequently, legal abilities that can't be digitized - convincing a jury or understanding the subtleties of a negotiation - become more valuable. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over to machines." The result: As the scut work gets offloaded, engineers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than competence. Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere skills, american’s have to rely ever more on right hemispheres.
Abundance :Left brains have made Americans rich. The Information Age has unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less rational sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and entrepreneurs, it's no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of everyday life. This will only intensify as the first children of abundance, the baby boomers, realize that they have more of their lives behind them than ahead. In both business and personal life, left-brain needs have largely been sated, the right-brain yearnings will demand to be fed.
As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. The Americans have progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now the next level of progress - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. To flourish in this age, the Americans need to supplement the well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning. Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy for everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Forget what your parents told young americans in the past. Instead, do something Asian’s can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right. Indeed an excellent, thought provoking article - an elaboration of the future path for abundance and survival for western society would make this article fullsome - This is indeed one of the finest piece published in this year.
We recently covered about the spectacular growth of china and also covered Om Malik's famous line - "The axis of technology has shifted somewhere to South china sea". It is obvious,The size of the china market is a major pull says this article.The sale of IBM's PC division to Chinese giant Lenovo was not the only sign of an ominous shift of the IT industry's centre of gravity towards the emerging economic superpower and its neighbours. Networking giant Cisco, blaming increasing competition from asian manufacturers, announced that it is to move from selling individual devices to becoming a systems provider providing solutions rather than products. This will put it into direct competition with IBM, whose China deal reflects a similar shift. The software industry, itself moving towards providing services rather than products, is also feeling the eastern wind of change. Palmsource, the software spin-off from Palm, announced that it is buying China Mobilesoft , a developer of software for mobile phones. The deal gives Palmsource an entry into the Chinese market; but more significantly from the West's point of view, the company also announced that it is to implement the PalmOS interface, its biggest asset, on the Linux operating system.
China is already a big Linux user and may provide a critical mass of applications and users that could make open source a major player in the mobile and desktop markets. Microsoft meanwhile faces a separate threat from clones of its Office products. A Chinese company called Evermore launched what it called an advanced English-language edition of its Evermore Integrated Office (EIS) into the US, Japanese and Chinese markets.written in Java, this runs under both Windows and Linux and claims to be more tightly integrated than the Microsoft product. The spreadsheet, word processing, and business-graphics functions are accessible from a single module rather than being separate programs; and linked data is more easily synchronised in EIS than Office - changes to a spreadsheet, say, can easily be reflected in a table in a word processor document. EIS can also create pdf files natively, whereas in Microsoft Office they require a plug-in. Sometime back the west was worried that china may be pursuing its own standards in communications including mobile technology, chip standards and in emerging technologies like RFID. Now signs of this getting repeated in the software product market as well.The size of the market, the fast growth and the determination to exhibit might makes the difference.
We had covered recent advances in search technology through a number of posts in the recent past. In Advances in video and multimedia search wherein,covering the plans of major search engines and research groups, we wrote "With Broadband, content explosion, increasing use of the internet for day-to-day activities, using search technologies that were developed for searching flat HTML files would not be sufficient to meet current day requirements. Special technologies are needed to search multimedia files, provide non linear search capabilities, find patterns and provide search results by factoring multidimensional attributes are the focal area of the search industry for now and the near future". We also covered the picture search tool Montage, we initiated coverage of IBM's IBM's plan for corporate search market. Ramesh Jain's insightful perspective on search questioning the need for using yesteryear search mechanisms and his views on advancing search technology was also covered in this blog recently. Jeff Nolan points out this interesting article about the advances that are happening in the search technology . Excerpts with edits:
"Googling" has become synonymous with doing research, online search engines are poised for a series of upgrades that promise to further enhance how we find what we need. New search engines are improving the quality of results by delving deeper into the storehouse of materials available online, by sorting and presenting those results better, and by tracking your long-term interests so that they can refine their handling of new information requests. In the future, search engines will broaden content horizons as well, doing more than simply processing keyword queries typed into a text box. They will be able to automatically take into account your location--letting your wireless PDA, for instance, pinpoint the nearest restaurant when you are traveling. New systems will also find just the right picture faster by matching your sketches to similar shapes. They will even be able to name that half-remembered tune if you hum a few bars.
Much of the digital content today remains inaccessible because many systems hosting (holding and handling) that material do not store Web pages as users normally view them. These resources generate Web pages on demand as users interact with them. Typical crawlers are stumped by these resources and fail to retrieve any content. This keeps a huge amount of information - approximately 500 times the size of the conventional Web, according to some estimates - concealed from users. Efforts are under way to make it as easy to search the “hidden Web" as the visible one. Some search engines attempt to identify patterns among those pages that most closely match the query and group the results into smaller sets. These patterns may include common words, synonyms, related words or even high-level conceptual themes that are identified using special rules. Eg Northern light and Clusty.Another way computer tools will simplify searches is by looking through your hard drive as well as the Web. " Implicit search" capabilities can retrieve relevant information without the user having to specify queries. The implicit search feature reportedly harvests keywords from textual information recently manipulated by the user, such as e-mail or Word documents, to locate and present related content from files stored on a user's hard drive. Microsoft may extend the search function to Web content and enable users to transform any text content displayed on screens into queries more conveniently. Sophisticated software will collect interaction data over time and then generate and maintain a user profile to predict future interests. . Another class of context-aware search systems would take into account a person's location. GPS and RFID may be integrated with search. A key problem in finding a specific tune is how to best formulate the search query. One type of solution is to use musical notation or a musical transcription-based query language that permits a user to specify a tune by keying in alphanumeric characters to represent musical notes. string-matching function must accommodate a certain amount of " noise."
- Future search services will not be restricted to conventional computing platforms,but could be extended to systems like telematics systems, also embedding search capabilities into entertainment equipment such as game stations, televisions and high-end stereo systems.
- Search technologies will play unseen ancillary roles, often via intelligent Web services, in activities such as driving vehicles, listening to music and designing products.
- Another big change in Web searching will revolve around new business deals that greatly expand the online coverage of the huge amount of published materials, including text, video and audio, that computer users cannot currently access.
- Next-generation search technologies will become both more and less visible as they perform their increasingly sophisticated jobs. The visible role will be represented by more powerful tools that combine search functions with data-mining operations-specialized systems that look for trends or anomalies in databases without actually knowing the meaning of the data. The unseen role will involve developing myriad intelligent search operations as back-end services for diverse applications and platforms. Advances in both data-mining and user-interface technologies will make it possible for a single system to provide a continuum of sophisticated search services automatically that are integrated seamlessly with interactive visual functions. Eventually it will be difficult for computer users to determine where searching starts and understanding begins.
The global service economy is in a state of upheaval and transformation. He expects to see a wider – and more widely distributed – array of services available via networked technology in the coming years. That will prove to be a threat to some as it was in the recent debate over outsourcing and offshoring. As Accenture’s Anatole Gershman has written, the challenge for business leaders "is not tracking the technology or making sense of the standards behind Web services. It is understanding the opportunities that lie ahead. When Web services reach their full potential, they will change the way we do business." Web Services have the potential to redefine and radically grow our modern service economy. The services could be advanced one linking processes virtually like the dynamic, real-time matching of supply and demand for high value services – much as Commodore Vanderbilt’s railroads and long distance communication made it possible to build national and global markets for a "product economy" of manufactured goods in the late 19th century. Many organisations like Fedex are also trying to exploit web services potential in a fundamentally business transforming manner.
This is significant as the potential reach of the web services movement is mindboggling - approximately at 2/3 rd the GDP of advanced countries are driven by services led economy,where webservices can play a dominant role by unbundling and aggregating, liberate and extend the reach of today’s services . As he puts it, "More and more, products will become a channel for service, and customer relationships will change because many newly possible services will be delivered dynamically…Existing suppliers will be able to deliver highly personalized services and maintain continuous customer interaction. Some may join the ranks of intermediaries who emerge to broker web services." There are limitless opportunities waiting to unfold - in the virtual world, eBay, Amazon, Google, Microsoft have shown how new business can be built using web services. Read our recent coverage on Giving Away The Store Through Amazon Web Services.
Any movement would require lots and lots of interventions and accelarators - we recently covered IBM's recent announcement anyone developing open source software will be allowed to make royalty-free use of 500 IBM patents with IBM’s full consent. The scope of the patents is expansive, covering areas as diverse as Web services, e-mail, message queuing, Web browsers, parallel processing, database storage, encryption, voicemail systems, and even systems designed to prevent motorists from falling asleep.. AMRresearch writes,IBM’s promise makes it harder for Microsoft and Sun to monetize Web services transactions. It is also a further signal that anyone wanting to handicap open source through litigation will have to get through IBM first.The patent pledge makes it harder to monetize Web services transactions - The 500 patents include several related to IBM’s approach to Web services. Although many vendors are signing up to provide a Web services platform, they have been relatively quiet about how they would charge for it. Customers are concerned that vendors want to push demand-based pricing too far, actually charging for each business transaction that gets passed through Web services. By making these particular patents available for free use through open source, IBM is suggesting its answer: Web services transactions should be free. This aligns closely with the position of the primary Web standards body, the W3C consortium, which has a preference for royalty-free use of technology. If the W3C finds favor with IBM’s plan, it will be much harder for others to pick the other side..
My Take :While I certainly agree with the humongous potential of web services to create new business value, as we recently covered Do web services matter, Nicholas Carr's point of view -"Web services will play a key role in overcoming incompatibilities between information systems, helping create a more standardized and productive IT infrastructure for business. But they’re not going to usher in an age of protean value chains. And they're not going to usurp the place of managers in negotiating, overseeing and modifying complex partnerships. Machines matter, but people matter more" is equally valid and therefore conclude that the role of IT/Web Services as enabler shall remain only at that and together with powerful strategies, new business models and process transformation, webservices can play a significant role in creating a new service world for the future.
Mike adds, "This may seem like a "threat" for laptop makers, efforts are on to continually shrink the overall size of the laptop, without destroying its ability to be a productive work tool. Since the basic components are all the same, the laptop providers can take the same approach, just coming from the other direction? If they detach the screens and the keyboards, shrink the process and the hard drive, keep the wireless connectivity and sell the input mechanism and display as portable add-ons as well. Since they come from the PC world, there's also less difficulty in needing to be tied to a particular network type. Laptop makers could make these new devices with a variety of wireless radios (or, perhaps, software defined radio, to make it adjustable). Corporate buyers tend to already have stronger relationships with PC makers than handset makers". He brilliantly concludes,"If things do move towards this world where the components separate and shrink, in order to make them more portable, but still productive, defining the devices as "phones" or "laptops" will no longer make sense. If either side wants to really take over this market, in fact, they're probably better off thinking about things with a clean slate. It's not about how to make a phone competitive with a laptop, or shrinking a laptop to make it competitive with the phone - but figuring out what combination of portability and productivity makes the most sense for users, no matter what the device is called. The key would be to figure out the best combination of portability and productivity that can be achieved with the technology available".
DRMs that can be created with the new development tools will all be compliant with and ready to interoperate through the Coral interoperability standard. These moves were made by the Intertrust–Sony–Philips Samsung, Matshusita DRM and co-opts HP and 20th century fox. In effect, the Marlin JDA is proposing a set of specifications that will help companies, create their own DRM systems which are automatically compliant with the Coral Interoperability standardwhen it comes out. Coral is expected to be based on Intertrust’s NEMO architecture for DRM service orchestration which will have the capability built in to work with existing DRM systems such as Microsoft’s Media DRM and Apple’s Fairplay and Sony’s MagicGate, but in order to do so, each DRM owner would have to agree to “open” their DRM to the interoperability standard.Coral competes head-on with the Content Reference Forum that was put together a year ago, lead by Microsoft and ContentGuard.Talal Shamoon, CEO of Intertrust says, "Think of Coral and Marlin as two planes, one on top of the other. Whenever a DRM system, whether it is one built to the Marlin specs or an existing DRM, finds that it needs help interoperating with another DRM, it will just turn to Coral for help.Coral is being written in XML and according to web service standards, so it can run as a remote service or it can run on a nearby server, for instance a Home Network media hub," Shamoon added. Most DRM systems, such as Apple’s Fairplay used in its iTunes service and on the iPod, prevent consumers from playing content packaged and distributed using one DRM technology on a device that supports a different DRM technology.Coral’s answer is to separate content interoperability from choice of DRM technology by developing and standardizing a set of specifications focused on interoperability between different DRM technologies rather than specifying DRM technologies.The resulting interoperability layer supports the coexistence of multiple DRM systems and permits devices to find appropriately formatted content, hopefully in the time it takes to press the play button, without consumer awareness of any disparity in format or DRM technology.
Given the similar parallel arrangements between the Microsoft camp, led by the Content Reference Forum and ContentGuard, which also preached web services and DRM interoperability, then it seems likely that there will eventually be a web service that will orchestrate movement in and out of the Coral environment to Microsoft’s and vice versa. In Nemo there are a defined set of roles of client, authorizer, gateway and orchestrator, and it assumes that they talk to each other over an IP network. Work is allocated to each of them such as authorization, peer discovery, notification, service discovery, provisioning, licensing and membership creation.
The consumer electronics companies had better get a move on, because Microsoft is gaining allies in CE which are prepared to put Windows Media DRM on devices such as DVD players, DVRs and Home media servers, and these, mostly small Chinese players, will begin to eat into Sony, Philips, Matsushita’s and Samsung’s markets if they cannot offer in return a standardized DRM approach, and so on.Refer our recent coverage on Russell Beattie's view - Its game over for microsoft's competitors in the CE sectorIn the digital media world that is coming, all future entertainment players will need to have a processor and an operating environment (most will chose CE Linux), and the commonality between platforms will not reside in the operating system but in the file types, the digital identifiers and an interoperability layer for the DRM systems which are most likely to be orchestrated by web services. This in a way vindicates the expectations set when Coral was formed - Viz. "the best news about Coral is not only that it benefits both content providers and consumers, but also, unlike many other DRM technology scenarios, that we can see where the money may come from to pay for it: it's architected so that network service providers can offer DRM interoperability as a differentiating service."
Ray Ozzie in the gartner fellow interview provides deep insights into issues facing enterprises today and his vision for Groove, the product that he architected and heavily promoting now. Excerpts with edits:
There's a bifurcation happening right now, and we're in the early stages of it. Five to ten years from now, it will be so obvious that, looking back, you'll never see the industry the same way. Many years ago, information technology started in the IT department of major corporations and bled out to the rest of the enterprise. It seeped out to the users, and never made it to the home. These days, the leading edge of technology has shifted into the hands of the consumer and small business-person, in the form of the TiVo, the iPod, and even the software they download and use. This is also echoed in our recent coverage of Rich Karlgaards three technological trends where he says of late new products directly reach the masses cutting the elitist advantage hithertho enjoyed only by the rich.
On one side of the bifurcation is the big organization, the government and the big enterprise. On the opposite side are small business and individuals. To define which side you're on, answer the question: are your technology decisions gated by an IT organization? The people in one camp buy their computers pre-loaded from Dell. They download what they need. They don't worry about expensive, complex things like VPNs. They grab tools that say they solve problems they have. They use them, deal with spam and viruses in various ways and they get their jobs done. In the other camp, you have enterprise architectures and well-defined processes and procedures. You're focused on issues of compliance, leverage and cost reduction. But you're years behind in the OSs that you've chosen. You've implemented lockdown, and you have intentionally limited choices in messaging and in most all forms of software.
The gap is growing; the sides are not coming together. The benefits of innovation are accruing to the little guys, not the big organizations. Many new innovations aren't burdened by things such as auditing and monitoring and enterprise controls. But they work. They're effective for the little guys. The tables have turned, and enterprises have become the laggards. Collaboration in general has never been an easy sell, but it is so very much worth the effort. Truly effective collaboration lives at the intersection of technology, organizational dynamics, and social dynamics. If you only do two of the three right, it won't achieve the desired objectives. But when you can get it right, it just works
On Microsoft - Ozzie says,"There's the conventional wisdom that Microsoft's control of the operating environment puts other people at a disadvantage. I don't buy that. Microsoft's most significant advantage — and a huge advantage it is — is in their distribution muscle, not necessarily in the technological control of their operating environment. I believe that Microsoft is actually more constrained by their own operating environment than any other software vendor. For strategic reasons, Microsoft generally introduces innovations that are tied exclusively to their latest operating environment. This puts them more-or-less out of lockstep with their customers, who run a broad mix of prior versions".
Other vendors have a strategic advantage in that they can create middleware that operates on a variety of operating environments. Middleware enables significantly more rapid innovation and adaptation to customer environments — particularly in the collaboration realm, where people who work with one another may not have control of what software each other are running.
Sean Mcgrath writes,concurrent programs are hard to write, hard to read and hard to debug. Although developers dislike the complexity of concurrency, they are very, very fond of getting the most out of their CPUs. Historically, writing your program down at the machine code level was all you needed to do to ensure that you had maximum access to your processing power. Excerpts with edits:
However, recent developments in processor architectures such as hyper-threading are set to break this simple relationship between access to processing power and machine code programming. Processor makers are starting to put multiple classical 'CPUs' on a single chunk of silicon. Consequently, in order to best use the available power, it is no longer sufficient to program at a machine code level. The key to true performance maximization is now concurrency - getting those logically separate CPUs doing useful things at the same time.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, concurrency is hard. Very hard. It will be interesting to see how the tools of the trade change at a software level as a result of this change at the hardware level. Concurrent programming with languages/tools that do not help you and protect you from underlying complexity of concurrency is a recipe for hypertension. Yet more layers of tool support on top of 'classical' single-CPU languages is one possibility. A quantum leap into the limelight for languages like Erlang [2] is another. whatever happens, it is going to become increasingly difficult for developers to avoid the complex and subtle issues that are associated with concurrency.
Rich Karlgaard, writes brilliantly,Big trends have a way of sneaking past us. Consider the Web. In just ten years the Web has altered the way we grab information, manage our firms and organize our lives. China likely will surpass the U.S. this year in the number of Web surfers, a development few saw in 1995. Still, the day is young!..This year video Weblogs are sure to be the "it" thing. Excerpts with edits:
Technology products now enter the market differently from the past. It used to be that the coolest products (i.e., the most expensive) were those sold to businesses or to rich people who could afford them. Copiers, personal computers and cell phones entered the market that way. It would then take a few years for unit volume to kick up and prices to fall. Eventually the masses could afford to buy these products. But now the coolest products are being aimed at the masses from the get-go--iPods, DVDs and gigabyte memory sticks, not to mention terabytes of Google-accessible free content. Even software is following this trend. A generation ago the Sabre airline-seat yield management system, written for a few dozen carriers, was the neatest trick in the travel industry. Now it's Orbitz, aimed at billions of consumers. Google saves tens of millions of dollars by using cheap.consumer-class servers--more than 100,000 of them, actually--to power its search algorithm.
Another reason for a new golden age of small companies is that size and incumbency breed inertia, faster than ever even in the best of companies. Anybody who spent time on Microsoft's campus between the 1980s and the mid-1990s would find it a grayer place today. Though profitable as ever, Microsoft has warned it will slip to single-digit growth, and it no longer crackles with the same manic energy. Inside its fabled two-story white buildings there is much muted gossip about budgets and meetings and the like. Venture capitalist McNamee writes, "In the new normal, neither big businesses nor IPOs will get all the glory. Today, size matters less than at any other time in the past 50 years. Thanks to technology, even small businesses can have a global footprint if they leverage the Internet and available tools that are dropping in price even as capabilities increase."
Lastly, in one of those unintended consequences that governments create, Sarbanes-Oxley and the grand inquisitions of Eliot Spitzer are gifts to startups. Smaller companies can focus. Brain cycles in large public companies go to waste attending to compliance issues and other cover-your-rear work.
V-blogs, cheap technology ably performing business chores and a new golden era for startups- rich rewards await the entrepreneurs who knit these trends together.
Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. His website, got 3.7 million page views in 2004.Americans make the best software and films and the Japanese, the best cars and consumer electronics. Paul Graham believes Americans make the best software and films and the Japanese, the best cars and consumer electronics. Paul Graham believes it has to do with who's in charge Excerpts form the manifesto with edits and comments added:
Americans are good at some things and bad at others. Americans are good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. he adds,"And I think we may be good at what were good at for the same reason were bad at what were bad at. We.re impatient. In America, if you want to do something, you dont worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think youre getting above yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, just do it".
In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very new implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowly and meticulously is premature optimization. Better to get a prototype done fast, and see what new ideas it gives you. Apple is an interesting counterexample to the general American trend. If you want to buy a nice CD player, you.ll probably buy a Japanese one. But if you want to buy an MP3 player, you.ll probably buy an iPod. What happened? Why doesn.t Sony dominate MP3 players? Because Apple is in the consumer electronics business now, and unlike other American companies, they.re obsessed with good design. Or, more precisely, their CEO is.
Perhaps the most successful countries, in the future, will be those most willing to ignore what are now considered national characters, and do each kind of work in the way that works best. Race you.
Such offensive and defensive military systems are typically hard or near real-time (rebooting in the middle of a fire fight is a wee bit embarrassing), cannot fail (otherwise people will die or opportunities to get the bad guys will be lost), exhibit bursty behavior (war is generally characterized by long periods of boredom interspersed with brief episodes of intense panic), are not so much applications as they are systems of systems (with lots of legacy and lots of impedance mismatches between systems within which one must stuff people), are warped by historical, organizational, national, and geo-political forces, and are constantly changing (yet individually have incredible inertia and thus resistance to change). Grady introduces,The DoDAF, intended to ensure that the architecture descriptions developed by the Commands, Services, and Agencies are interrelatable between and among each organization’s operational, systems, and technical architecture views and are comparable and integrable across Joint and combined organizational boundaries. The framework provides rules and guidance for developing and presenting architecture descriptions. The products defined by the framework are the work products of architecture development, the descriptive artifacts that communicate the architecture. The framework provides direction on how to describe architectures; it does not provide guidance in how to construct or implement a specific architecture or how to develop and acquire systems or systems-of-systems.
The framework's architectural descriptions require the use of multiple views, each of which conveys different aspects of the architecture in several products (descriptive artifacts or models). The DoDAF defines the following views:
- Operational View depicts what is going on in the real world that is to be supported or enabled by systems represented in the architecture. Activities performed as parts of DoD missions and the associated information exchanges among personnel or organizations are the primary items modeled in operational views.
-Operational view reveals requirements for capabilities and interoperability.
-Systems View describes existing and future systems and physical interconnections that support the DoD needs documented in the operational view.
-Technical Standards View catalogs standard (COTS, GOTS) system parts or components and their interconnections. More details are available in this case study. Operational View, Systems View, and Technical View and views and major linkages are presented here. To make this frameowrk more complete, the DOD architects have tried to map this to Zachman Framework and the cross reference is available here. Overall a very comprehensive framework and Grady's introduction and his final comments make this an important approach that all major system architects may need to study closely.
We recently covered Russell Beattie's view that Its game over for microsoft's competitors in the consumer electronics space. Bill Gates in this interview with BBC provides aditional perspective about the digital lifestyle and Microsoft's vision about the digital lifestyle. Excerpts with edits:
Three years ago we were talking about the idea of the digital lifestyle - That your music, your photos, your TV, your communications would all be very different. And over these last three years these really are coming into the mainstream. The vision is that people should have the ultimate in convenience. Being able to get the things they care about on the appropriate device. The Media Center PC shows how with a single remote control you can get at all these capabilities and then we are making sure that it connects up to everything else. Whether it's a phone, a music player, audio receiver and we have an increasing number of partnerships. Simple user interface, demands that we have a richness of software that's there and available and you have to bring together all the elements. Communication because you want to send photos around, the TV guide because you care about watching that, the latest interactive games that are always improving in very dramatic ways, you want this to be very holistic.Shifting gears, he adds, "Media Center have had double the sales we had last year in holiday season. We're at about 1.4 million units. People don't want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video But as these devices come out, we will be able to double the sales of that every year for a number of years. And you always want to get in to avant-garde households and then start the word of mouth, where people can come and see that just this one remote control can teach somebody how to use the simple menus. The PC has more software, more competition, more richness than anything else. So making it simple and rich, that means the PC will be the key device".
1. Getting my 5 star Windows Media Player mp3s from my home office PC to my laptop (simple solution, create a mechanism for a laptop to be treated as a portable device).
2. Getting my 5 star Windows Media Player mp3s from my home office to my car mp3 player (simple solution, create a mechanism for a car mp3 player to be treated as a portable device, wirelessly).
3. Getting all voicemail messaging and telephone record functionality where it belongs, on my MCE machine. Both for archival purposes as well as for easy retrieval, you should own this feature and effectively kill both the answering machine and voicemail service from the telcos.
4. Getting HDTV off my satellite receiver and on to your Media Center PC.
5. Getting my radio off of my satellite and fm signal and into my MCE machine. "My Podcasts."
As we wrote earlier, Microsoft is definitely trying to get into the centerstage of the digital lifestyle market - with Bill Gates personally pushing it - things can only get better - a glorious space is getting opened in the digital lifestlyle segment - Have no doubts about that.
eBay's stock fall in the market has triggered a series of negative reactions, with several voicing concerns about sustainable valuation norms for the technology companies.Michael Moe, Chairman and CEO of Thinkequity Partners provides his perspective couched in common sensical way. Excerpts with edits:
Last week, the Houston Astros paid $18 million to have 42 year old – 7 time Cy Young winner – Roger Clemens pitch one more season. This equates to a P/W ratio of $1 million. ($18 million salary / 18 wins last year).Early in a pro athlete’s career, performance can be sensational but sporadic – the potential is exciting, but the predictability often lacks. An athlete is at his peak when they have gained enough experience to "know how to win" (as well as how not to lose) but also has not lost any of their physical ability. Jocks that are "over-the-hill" often know what they want to do, but their body just won’t do it. Similarly, a small emerging company can get investors excited by the growth and potential. There are numerous $50 million to $200 million companies that are growing at 30-40% per year. The problem is that most of these companies are immature and less predictable. Often by the time a company achieves a level of predictability to its business, it is at a size that makes it impossible to sustain high growth because of the "law of large numbers." Ebay’s last week’s 18% correction (or $12 billion) seems silly given that the company only missed Wall Street estimates by a penny, and earnings still rose a sensational 44%; investors still need to acknowledge that future growth won’t be as spectacular as the past. Hence, the appropriate P/E multiple for future earnings is a serious issue.Qualcomm, another market leader and a company we hold in similar esteem to eBay was “shot” as well last week, despite great growth. The market is in desperate need of "new leaders".
Themes we like that will be good opportunities to find the stars of tomorrow are:
Offline Advertising Moving Online. Refer our coverage onPew Study on Search Engine Users:Currently just 3% of ad dollars are online. With networks being "Tivo’d" and people spending more and more time online – online advertising will continue to boom - online advertising is expected to reach $22 billion by 2008, from the current $10 billion.
Technology Dislocation and Disintermediation: This will continue to take place in fragmented markets and where the Internet can create efficiencies and insurmountable advantages to the leader.
Convergence in Media: Interactive media is being catalyzed by growth in broadband, powerful but cheap consumer electronics, user-created content (blogs) and innovative online business models.
(Via Damon Darlin) Business 2 publishes the first SmartList. It's a neat compilation of the smartest things companies did last year, based on some good research. Business 2.0 lists bold thinkers,brilliant ideas,clever strategies,savvy execution that characterize the list. Toyota is listed as the smartest company.The article says this smartest company certainly delivered. After leapfrogging Ford to become the No. 2 automaker worldwide, Toyota (TM) saw profits soar to a record $11.1 billion. Behind the numbers were intelligent moves in every corner of the operation, from product design and marketing to manufacturing and leadership. Please note that almost all listed here barring a few are heavily IT dependent and if you had been following these companies - you would note that some of them have deployed IT applications quite uniquely woven around well designed processes like the case of Toyota,P&G and Mcdonalds.
Users broadly search the internet about the following:
1. People, places or things
2. Commerce, travel, employment, or economy
3. Computers or internet or technology items
4. Health or sciences
5. Education or humanities
6. Entertainment or recreation
7. Sex or pornography
8. Society, culture, ethnicity or religion
9. Government (or military)
10.Performing or fine arts
Internet users are very comfortable in their role as searchers. Some 92% of those who use search engines say they are confident about their searching abilities, with over half, 52%,of that group saying they’re “very confident” in their abilities, and 48% saying they’re somewhat confident. Only 8% of searchers say they lack confidence in their searching.Search engines offer users vast and impressive amounts of information, available with a speed and convenience few people could have imagined one decade ago. Their capabilities are expanding practically by the day. Soon it will seem routine to be able to search the contents of vast libraries of books; to find selected portions of video streams or audio recordings; to benefit from personalized searches that remember a user’s preferences and keep track of changing geographical locations. Audio searching and search results will be available for the blind; “implicit searching” will anticipate users’ queries and have answers ready. The full report is available here.
On a related note,we covered that Music industry is converting threat into an opporuntity by embracing the digital world faster whereby, we noted that music on the internet and mobile phones is moving into the mainstream of consumer life, with legal download sites spreading internationally, more users buying songs in digital format and record companies achieving their first significant revenues from online sales
• Legal music sites quadrupled to over 230 in 2004
• Available music catalogue has doubled in 12 months to 1 million songs
• Paid-for downloads up more than tenfold to over 200 million
• Consumer attitudes more favourable to buying music online
Ask jeeves is considering rolling out music search services, saying the current challenge in the digital music market is resolving users desires to have flexibility and not be tied to a specific device, application, or service with the vendors' attempts to keep users in one place.
Businessweek in a very insightful article writes, "Little understood by the outside world, the community of Linux programmers has evolved in recent years into something much more mature, organized, and efficient". Excerpts with edits:
Linux has turned pro. Tech giants such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard , and Intel are clustered around Linux , contributing technology, marketing muscle, and thousands of professional programmers. IBM alone has 600 programmers dedicated to Linux, up from two in 1999. There's even a board of directors that helps set the priorities for Linux development.The result is a much more powerful Linux. The software is making its way into everything from Motorola cellphones and Mitsubishi robots to eBay servers and the NASA supercomputers that run space-shuttle simulations. Its growing might is shaking up the technology industry, challenging Microsoft Corp.'s dominance and offering up a new model for creating software. Indeed, Torvalds' onetime hobby has become Linux Inc.
For Linux Inc., there's no headquarters, no CEO, and no annual report. And it's not a single company. Rather, it's a cooperative venture in which employees at about two dozen companies, along with thousands of individuals, work together to improve Linux software. The tech companies contribute sweat equity to the project, largely by paying programmers' salaries, and then make money by selling products and services around the Linux operating system. They don't charge for Linux itself, since under the cooperative's rules the software is available to all comers for free. Distributors, including Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc, package Linux with helpful user manuals, regular updates, and customer service, and then charge customers annual subscription fees for all the extras.IBM, HP, and others capitalize on the ability to sell machines without any up-front charge for an operating-system license, which can range up to several thousand dollars for some versions of Windows and Unix. At HP, sales of servers that run the Linux operating system hit nearly $3 billion during the past fiscal year, almost double the tally three years ago.
Put it all together, and Linux has become the strongest rival that Microsoft has ever faced. In servers, researcher IDC predicts Linux' market share based on unit sales will rise from 24% today to 33% in 2007, compared with 59% for Windows Forrester Research Inc. 52% said they are now replacing Windows servers with Linux. On the desktop side, IDC sees Linux' share more than doubling, from 3% today to 6% in 2007, while Windows loses a bit of ground. IDC expects the total market for Linux devices and software to jump from $11 billion last year to $35.7 billion by 2008.Ofcourse,Microsoft says for the record, "Linux shall go the unix way".
The industry collaborations are turning Linux into an all-purpose operating system. It's secure enough that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory loads it not only on desktop and server computers but also on supercomputers it uses to simulate the aging of nuclear materials. "Linux is definitely more secure than Windows," says Mark Seager, the lab's assistant department head for advanced technology. "There aren't as many ways to break the system." With the latest improvements, Linux now works on servers with more than 128 processors and can run the largest databases. The newest versions also have features, such as power management, that make them more suitable for laptop PCs. Cost isn't the only reason that companies are switching to Linux. Linux] has an innate guarantee that you won't be held hostage," says an user.Indeed, Linux Inc. has emerged as a model for collaborating in a new way on software development, which could have reverberations throughout the business world. Its essence is captured in one of the mottoes of the open-source world: Give a little, take a lot. In a business environment where efficiency rules, that's a potent formula - maybe even strong enough to knock mighty Microsoft down a peg.
There is heavy speculation in the market about potential takeover of RIM. RIM continued to attract share buyers after talk started swirling round the market when banker Goldman Sachs suggested the company could attract a bid from either Motorola or Nokia. Another source suggests, that Hewlett-Packard Co would be a far more likely suitor because it would give it a user base in the carrier market, where Nokia and Motorola are already well established. RIM is by far the most successful handheld device maker, and constantly turns in financial results that its rivals can only envy. In its last quarter to November 30, it increased net income by 453% to $90.4m on revenue 138% higher at $365m.With the BlackBerry device now dominant among executives who need email on the move, Goldman Sachs said it is the only player with a technology stronghold in the corporate arena, making it a very attractive take-out candidate.
It said 2005 will be the first full year when major carriers promote RIM and the addition of 20 to 30 carriers a quarter will further drive demand. Moreover, applications beyond email that give users fuller access to information on corporate networks will be in the spotlight this year as RIM looks to entrench its position with corporations, consumers, and carriers. RIM is walking a tightrope because over 70% of its revenue comes from hardware. However, in order to fend off competition from companies such as Extended Systems and Good Technology, it has been forced to license its software to rival hardware makers. A price tag of more than $20bn will deter all but the most determined buyer.The Register also reports about speculation to buy RIM.
My Take:This may not be the best development - RIM is a category killer device and is the most successful one at that - seeing this being taken over by a handset manufacturer , who despite having time and tons of money either did not share RIM’s vision in its early days or could not execute very well to compete with RIM in its space is not a cherishable development –In general any takeover should see a synergistic value not only in terms of market offering fitment, but also alignment in technological ethos, vision and execution capabilities. The issue with RIM’s current management is not being able to articulate its vision and future positioning very well to solidify it current runaway success For all its success – RIM’s marketing mechanism does not seem to be powerful enough – RIM is perceived to be a staid company – but no doubt a strong company.In a way this development is good as it would force RIM to shell out its vision and make it open up and talk. RIM has to go beyond mouthing platitudes,saying "we want to be see more revenue from software stream" as it does here to remain HOT enterprise for times to come.
Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati writes,Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy outperforms more structured approches to classification, as Clay Shirky points out:
"This is something the ‘well-designed metadata’ crowd has never understood – just because it’s better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture".
Technorati now supports Tag Search across leading Social software sites. Users can now search across user-generated tags and categories (for example "tsunami") across major weblog platforms like Blogger or Typepad, photoshare in Flickr, social bookmark in del.icio.us, and Socialtext wikis. By bridging islands of text, images, and social networks through the words they use, users are making the world live web even smaller. Meta keywords were only meant for search engines; they had no transparency, and no community. They were useful back when the web was a collection of pages, instead of a living place. Besides using technical methods to curb tag spam (like clustering), the implicit social network represented in Technorati's link-based authority and other techniques based on the intelligence provided by people offers alternatives. Content and metadata always had problems with people - with exploding content, this elegant solution should be found to bevery useful and indeed timely.
By most measures American companies are having it easy. The country’s economy is growing at a healthy pace — around 4% a year—and consumer spending is holding up. Although the interest rates are moving up and set to increase further, borrowing is still cheap. And a weak dollar makes America’s exports all the more alluring to buyers abroad, who currently account for almost a quarter of American firms’ profits. No wonder, then, that American companies' profits as a share of GDP are close to an all-time record, or that the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovers around 10,500, over 40% higher than where it stood in late 2002.
Some firms business is less bright. – eBay, Qualcomm, Motorola, Continental, Delta Airlines, General Motors, etc. These point to a wider truth: the days of vast and ever-growing profits may be coming to an end for the time being. The specific travails of individual companies offer only a partial explanation for the slew of disappointing earnings news in recent days. More generally, the high oil price has hit profits and may also contribute to slowing economic growth and hence further depress earnings. Other corporate costs have also escalated. For example, America’s car companies have had to endure big rises in steel prices.
However, another factor lies behind the slowing growth of profits: productivity growth. Between 1995 and 2000 output per man hour grew by around 2.5% a year; between 2001 and 2003 it jumped to 4.2%. The cause of this sudden burst lies in the reaction of firms in the aftermath of the bursting of the technology bubble and subsequent recession. As the recession hit, firms shed labour. As the economy recovered, slimmed-down companies squeezed more out of workers who responded favourably while labour markets remained slack, boosting productivity. As a result, hiring stagnated, unit labour costs fell and profits rose, resulting in America’s much-discussed “jobless recovery”.The boom in technology spending during the bubble created a “backlog of unexploited capabilities”. It is generally accepted that a period of reorganisation is required to exploit fully the benefits of new technology. The round of corporate cutbacks in the recession afforded just such an opportunity for workers to make the most of new technology.The problem that faces America’s companies is that productivity growth of 4% is unsustainable. The measure slumped to 1.8% at an annualised rate in the third quarter of 2004 and could continue. US corporations have accrued more than their fair share of the fruits of a growing economy, by extracting extra productivity from their employees over the past three years, and that a period of rebalance between profits and wages (and jobs) is due. My Take: The Hidden hand of technology is in a way contributing to lower profits - there is a timelag for enteprises to begin to realise the returns on new technology investments - for sometime, fresh investments were put on hold and now, there are broad indications that technology spending is improving and before too long hopefully this may begin to provide benefits - either way - the consumer on the whole shall benefit significantly and technology shall once again begin to be revered- as results begin to show up- till then the likes of Nicholas Carr shall begin to deride technology. The impact of technology shall be felt a lot more with good progress in deployments in areas likeRFID, Grid Computing etc..
The Annual Online Media Outlook -2005 compiled by Avenue Razorfish is out. Excerpts:
Among publishers, Yahoo! is in the best position to capitalize on the convergence of search and display media, as they enter 2005 with the most complete product package in digital marketing.Their combination of brand advertising, performance media and paid search is impressive. With Google’s focus on image ads and MSN’s presumed introduction of their own paid search product, two familiar competitors will be right behind Yahoo!.
On Local Search: 1. Search Engines – Google and Overture both made considerable progress with their local search products in 2004. The challenge remains getting searchers to seek local search information (or for the engines to know when it is most relevant), and then having those results supported by a broad array of local advertisers.
2. Yellow Pages – The large Internet Yellow Page providers have the requisite local sales force, as well as a large existing client base. However, at this time online consumers are more likely to turn to the search engines to find information.
3. City Guides – Sites like CitySearch provide a depth of information in larger urban areas,including reviews of local restaurants and businesses. They don’t have the coverage of the Yellow Page providers, nor are they near the volume of traffic that the search engines see.
In an increasingly intense competitive environment, marketers should incorporate the following best practices into their digital efforts:
1. Integrate digital strategies and data –
2. Have consistency in messaging across media
3. Insist on measurement and accountability in every campaign –
4. Invest in targeting
5. Understand ALL the drivers of performance
6. Be willing to test new opportunities
7. Understand the full impact of search
8. Invest in creative
We recently covered The TV Is Not A PC .The CSMonitor writes, Convergence - It's been the mantra of the electronics industry since the 1990s- But despite words of support from nearly every quarter, it remains elusive. Electronic devices that ought to be able to talk to each other stay stubbornly silent - or turn consumers into hardworking digital diplomats before they intercommunicate.
Video coming into your home via a television ought to be transferrable to a PC or any portable video device. Photos should travel easily and directly from camera to TV or printer then back to the computer or online. Those handy little flash-drive storage devices, such as the memory cards in digital cameras, should work in any camera or computer, not just one brand. Phones should transfer easily between landline, cellular, or Internet-based calls. Consumers will "choose from a vast array of devices and services that work together seamlessly and suit the way they live," But even the leader of the digital world saw his media center lock up - twice - when he tried to demonstrate at the show how various "The next wave of home network consumers is increasingly eager to share content among devices in the home," says Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for The NPD Group. While PC users know all about finicky computer programs and fickle Internet connections, consumer products such as TVs and stereos, let alone refrigerators and toasters, are expected to work flawlessly and with a minimum of fuss. Today's DVDs have that kind of flexibility: They'll play on any brand of player (unless you burn them at home, in which case you may run into problems with incompatible formats). But the next generation, rather than being more compatible, is caught in battle between Blu-ray discs vs. HD-DVD. Another key convergence issue: How to let audio and video files travel freely between devices and still maintain digital rights and copyright protections for originators. Organisations like The Digital Living Network Alliance, , a consortium of consumer-electronics, computer, and mobile-phone companies, are trying to sort out the issues. One strategy is to allow products to use their own proprietary formats internally but insist that they have the ability to translate them into a common format for interconnection purposes - if copyright limits permit. Om Malik writes,"Most companies are trying to impose the PC on the other two screens. But altering the form and function of these devices is just not going to work. Television has had more than half a century to hook us on blissful passivity. The remote control has made that passivity more clickable, but we still remain swallowed up in our Barcaloungers as we thumb our remotes. Then there's the movement to impose television on the cell phone ignoring the fact that wireless networks need content that's made specifically for mobile platforms".
My Take :The topic of convergence is again taking centerstage.. part of a seasonal cycle. The serious impediment to making this happen may not be technology but control on standards. There is an ongoing ward between Japanese and Korean companies about contolling 4g phone communication ( Read Nextgen wireless – Asia sets the standards )_standards. The whole focus in the industry seems to be keeping more control As techdirt points out,more adaptation of open systems, fresh business models are needed to take convergence forward.
Research by the Standish Group, a software research and consulting firm, illustrates the troubled fates of most big software initiatives. In 1994, researchers found, only 16 percent were completed on time, on budget and fulfilling the original specifications. Nearly a third were canceled outright, and the remainder fell short of their objectives. More than half of the cost overruns amounted to at least 50 percent of the original budget. Of the projects that went off schedule, almost half took more than twice as long as originally planned. A follow-up survey in 2003, however, showed that corporate software projects were doing better; researchers found that the percentage of successful projects had risen to 34 percent. Between 1994 and 2003 - The Internet boom went bust. Stung by wasted investments in complicated software systems, business executives began taking a more skeptical view of such projects. They scaled back their expectations, pursuing more modest software enhancements with narrower goals - and far higher chances of success.
Equally important, they stopped trying to be creative. Rather than try to customize their software, they began looking for cheaper, off-the-shelf programs that would get the job done with a minimum of fuss. When necessary, they changed their own procedures to fit the available software. Old, generic technology may not be glamorous, but it has an important advantage: it works.Mr. Carr also pints out to scrapped custom built initiatives in support of this viewpoint.
My Take:The key question that enterprises should think about before deciding to develop software rather than purchase it,is: Is our organization a software company? If you aren't a software company, think twice before assuming the ability to successfully develop and deploy a software project? ( Some exceptions could be like scale of operations, security concerns or an history like that of Walmart where there is a full fledged inhouse team)I feel that unless there is a overriding compulsive value, an enterprise should not work on developing custom applications in-house. The options for them are:
A.outsourcing from well established softwared development houses
B. Buy COTS application and adapt your processes to be aligned with the application. Focussing on core business would help enterprises to be better off. Enteprises need to be convinced, if software development is not core to them, it is highly unlikey that they can develop, deliver, deploy software on their own within reasonable measures on time, quality and cost. Most of the times,bean counters come in the way saying light custom apps serving needs of the dya would suit the enterprise rather than buying an extensible software pacakages. There is an issue here however - even so called fully evolved pacakge applications need armies of programmers to extend, configure, integrate their solutions - the COTS industry has to critically focus on simplifying this aspect of customisation and deployment and increasingly make this look non-technical.Typically a COTS package deployment should be like manning a cockpit in an aircraft where through parameter controls, one should be able to guide the direction, distance and speed factoring in all relevant issues - though this example may look a little far fetched - I firmly believe that this is what is needed to expedite the inevitable - embracing the COTS world in droves and significantly enhancing the returns on IT investments..
Bob Cringley writes, Everyone seems to think the Mini is a media PC, and it has the basic characteristics of one. Cringley adds, "Though the box has no TV tuner, Apple does offer an analog adapter. And you can burn DVDs with it if you get the optional DVD burner. It is simple to say that Apple hopes to repeat with video the success it already has with iPod and iTunes.It means selling hardware devices and proprietary content to play on those devices.The first such hardware device is probably the Mini. And the proprietary content will be video encoded in AVC H.264, which will be supported first in OS X 10.4, promised for the second quarter of this year. So Apple can't announce that it is in the movie distribution business until 10.4 (code-named Tiger) is available".Steve said this is the Year of HD. So one could expect that any video sold by Apple would be in high definition format. That gets around the supposed cable monopoly (there is no HD monopoly) and is suitably proprietary that Apple ought to be able to enforce its Digital Rights Management system.When OS X 10.4 ships, the Mini will suddenly become Apple's version of a media PC. Like the iPod, it will be a simple device that serves proprietary content, in this case HD video. Just like Gateway, HP, and Dell before it, Apple will start selling in its stores HDTVs, only they'll carry the Sony brand. Do you want to buy a Gateway TV or a Sony TV? There are two competing standards for High Definition DVDs - Blu-Ray and HD-DVD - but that H.264 is a constant on both systems. With movie studios divided between the two standards, Apple and the Mac Mini, supports every part of HD except a DVD standard, because one isn't needed. The Mini will download its HD video over broadband Internet connections so no optical component is required. The result is that Apple once again gets to market early and has a chance to become the de facto standard, just like iTunes did.
The correlation of HDTV ownership and broadband penetration is very high. People who own HD TVs for the most part don't have HD movies. Movies are the key here, much more than HDTV, which is available for free over air (hence the lack of a tuner in the Mac Mini. Besides, viewers will tolerate non-real-time movie downloads -- as long as they take less time than driving to Blockbuster and back Iflix and Iflickscould be the core of a new Apple movie service. one or both have been or are about to be - purchased by Apple. Cringley's take - Mac Mini + iFlicks shall be positioned as the integrated digital distribution framework of video, similar to iTunes and iPod – Just like iTunes is where Apple really stands to capture massive long-term value, iFlicks + iTunes may position Apple as the digital media distribution pioneer with potential domination in this space. Impeccable logic and insightful reasoning.
We recently coveredPhotosites - Revenue and BusinessModels where we covered the wired magazines review of various photosites. David Pogue writes, Digital darkrooms make working with shots a snap - In 2004, Kodak stopped making film cameras and the year that digital cameras were even more popular holiday gifts than DVD players. And if this month is any indication, 2005 will be the Year of the Software to Organize the Pictures You Took With Your Digital Camera. Excerpts with edits:
This week,two companies are releasing new versions of popular photo-organizing programs: from Apple comes iPhoto 5 for the Macintosh. And from Google, comes Picasa 2, for Windows 98 and later versions. These programs are very similar in design, features, visual effects and a bend-over-backward effort to keep things simple.
IPhoto is part of Apple's new iLife '05 suite, which also includes iMovie (for video editing), GarageBand (recording studio in a box), iDVD (designing DVD menu screens and burning discs) and iTunes (a music jukebox, which is still a free download). The whole package costs $80 (even if, alas, you bought the previous version). ILife also comes free with every new Mac. Picasa 2, on the other hand, is completely free, downloadable from www.picasa.com. Iphoto and Picasa are elegant, visual, nearly effortless programs. The photos appear like slides on a giant scrolling light table, at any size you like. Both programs handle every conceivable photo file format. .
You double-click on a photo to edit it, and to find out where the programmers have been putting much of their effort. Both programs let you turn photos into slide shows or desktop pictures, export them as Web-page galleries, send them in scaled-down form by e-mail, order prints by mail, and so on. Picasa's sharing tools go the extra mile by providing tight integration with Google's other recent software acquisitions, like Blogger (a Web-log kit) and Hello (instant photo sharing). And Picasa lets you order your prints from a choice of companies (Kodak, Wal-Mart and so on). IPhoto 5, on the other hand, expands what was already a blockbuster feature: the ability to design and order a gorgeous, hardbound coffee-table gift book with just a couple of clicks ($30 for 20 pages). You can specify double-sided pages, softcover books and a choice of three sizes. For example, the little wallet-size booklets (3.5 by 2.6 inches, or 9 by 6.5 centimeters; $12 for a matching set of three) are fun to carry around, give as party favors or drop in the mail.
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Picasa's standout features are its simplicity, smoothness and speed. Whereas iPhoto 5 can accommodate about 20,000 photos per library before it starts bogging down, Picasa handily juggles 250,000 photos without breaking a sweat. Now, Picasa 2 and iPhoto 5 do not really compete with each other, since each requires a different operating system. Adobe, whose Photoshop Elements 3.0 (for Mac and Windows) is only a few months old. It, too, is a terrific piece of software, but it is much bigger, more powerful and more complex; in addition to all the iPhoto-Picasa-type features, it can do things like keep track of offline photos (those on your CDs, not on the computer), superimpose text on your photos, stitch together pictures into a panorama, and so on.
Michael stonebraker, the legend in the database world, - The former computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley having created two well-known relational database systems, Ingres and Postgres. Ingres, the company Stonebraker founded, is now part of Computer Associates now says,” "Relational databases are one to two orders of magnitude too slow,big customers have already tried to use relational databases for streaming data and dismissed them. Those products are non-starters in this market.In a recent pilot program, StreamBase, is reading TCP/IP streams and using asynchronous messaging. Streaming data without storing it on disk as are doing other relational database software gives them a tremendous speed advantage. The company claims it can process 140,000 messages per second on a $1,500 PC, when its competitors can only deal with 900 messages per second. Streambase has 12 customers now testing its software, all of them financial services companies that need to analyze rapid-fire ticker feeds and other streaming data.
Stonebraker calls his product a stream processing engine. with realtime analytics built in. On top of that engine, customers write applications to handle specific tasks, using a version of Structured Query Language that traditional database programs use. Streambase's version is called StreamSQL and is designed to handle data on the fly. Unlike traditional database programs, Streambase analyzes data without storing it to disk, performing queries on data as it flows. Traditional systems bog down because they first store data on hard drives or in main memory and then query it, Stonebraker says. The company's approach to making sales is pretty simple: "We ask big customers to point us to their hardest problems. Then we say go home and write the application on our own nickel and come back in a week with it running," Stonebraker says.
Streambase charges customers annual subscriptions for its software, setting prices based on how many CPUs a customer uses to power the software. Typical deals so far have ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 a year, -Infoworld indicated a lower price though.currently, Streambase is focusing attention on financial services companies, which hope to do things like track how well traders are performing on a real-time basis, rather than aggregating trades at the end of the day and analyzing them overnight. A bigger opportunity involves processing real-time data feeds generated by sensor networks and RFID tags creating potentially huge opportunitiesThis shall count to be an important development in the IT world and results need to be tracked regularly.
Targeted at SMBs and consumers, Outlook Live gives users a single place to view and manage e-mail accounts, contacts, and calendars, along with more advanced e-mail tools provided by Office Outlook. Outlook Live marks the first time a Microsoft Office product has been made available as a downloadable subscription service.Joe Wilcox comes again with an incisive analysis on microsoft's recent moves and concludes "Microsoft repositions office as a development platform". Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
Microsoft announced release of Office Outlook Live, a subscription service developed jointly between the MSN and Office groups. Outlook Live shadows some of the proposed services planned for HailStorm, which Microsoft abandoned some years ago. Consumers signing up for Outlook Live pay an annual subscription fee and get access to the broader Hotmail features,including beefy 2GB storage, and a big bonus: A copy of trimmed down Outlook 2003 for fairly low cost. Users would then have offline access to e-mail, calendars and contacts, in addition to Hotmail's online benefits.Microsoft has repositioned Office as a development platform like Windows and would like to encourage developers to extend the applications' utility. Since its inception, Outlook has been a development environment, particularly through forms and similar capabilities. But providing capability doesn't mean that hordes of developers harnessed the platform potential, which is now more important than ever to Microsoft's long-term product strategy.
To achieve it's strategic goals, Microsoft needs to encourage more Outlook adoption. While Microsoft offers legitimate benefits to Live subscribers, the program also could be viewed as an Outlook 2003 seeding program, which would benefit some of Microsoft's long-term platform development objectives. Scenario: Home users like outlook and ask them to be installed at work and office workers liking outlook installing outlook at home.
MSN desktop search. Desktop search's real value is e-mail-and instant messaging, for those who archive. Microsoft's MSN Search beta plugs into Outlook, where it offers fairly rapid results. And what happens when-not if-Microsoft offers more unified desktop and Web search? Outlook/Hotmail are in place.Related is Google e-mail competition. Already, MSN upped its storage capacity to counter GMail. One of GMail's perceived benefits is search, using Google capabilities to comb through e-mail. Through Outlook Live, Microsoft can bring similar benefits to paid-Hotmail subscribers-but on desktop. Users get the Web-based utility of a HotMail or GMail, plus offline access to e-mail, calendars and contacts and the ability to search Outlook via MSN desktop search tool. Granted, other desktop search utilities comb through Outlook, too, but it's a fair bet Microsoft will offer extensible capabilities. Instant messaging and smartphones are areas microdoft want to have abig presence through windows/office platform. .
Greg Linden counters by saying.One may want to search every website one has ever seen. Very useful when one know he saw something on the web before but can't remember where. This is where desktop search needs to go to bring real value. One should be able to search and easily find again anything one ever saw on my computer before.Google Desktop Search does search browsing history (unfortunately only for IE), and Microsoft's Stuff seen project suggests we'll be seeing steps in this direction from MSN soon too.
As other Microsoft products or services extend Outlook's utility beyond businesses, the need increases to get more consumers using the software. Outlook Live accomplishes this goal, while, of course, bringing legitimate user benefits Very valid login , reasoning and slowly microsoft plans are coming out one after another.
IBM's decision not to test, certify and support its enterprise software applications on Solaris 10 for x86 platforms has angered Sun Microsystems Inc. officials, who say the move smacks of monopolistic behavior. Sun is piling on IBM, with an open letter from Jonathan Schwartz to IBM CEO Sam Palmisanocalling IBM to serve its customers by porting its applications to Sun's Solaris for x86 systems.Sun is using blogs, open letters, Web sites, and customer testimonials to demand suitable response from IBM and using all these channels to force IBM to respond suitably. As Dan Farber writes in Zdnet,"It's becoming totally embarrassing for IBM. It's hard to imagine how IBM can come up with any reasonable excuse that the IT community (customers) would accept and save face at this point. Given the public forum and the support Sun has built up among customers and other vendors for its request, IBM should just bite the bullet and port the apps".
I like Jonathan - He is really whipping up things for Sun. Definitely a man to watch - and by the way telling people do not write sun off.
At the end of the open letter, Schwartz says, "We stand at the ready to help you tear down this wall." It's not an epic battle of communism (Berlin Wall) versus democracy, but we can expect to see more companies using a similar tactic--using public forums rather than just backrooms to alter the course of business.
Jonathan starts by recollecting successful co-operation between Sun and IBM in forging theLiberty Alliance benefiting customers and adds that Sun is about to roll out the newest release of Solaris operating system, Solaris 10. Jonathan claims,It's the most secure OS the world has ever seen - bringing mainframe features, like logical partitioning, to every platform on which it runs. Solaris is now available on over 300 systems, from vendors such as IBM, Dell, HP and of course Sun's SPARC and Opteron systems. We've made Solaris into a truly vendor neutral OS.
Customers and partners have noticed. From Federal Express to Verisign, SAP and Oracle to Siebel, Veritas and BEA - from across the globe and marketplace - there is tremendous demand and support. They love that we're open sourcing Solaris, and that we'll be the first open source vendor to offer a commercial version of our product with indemnification against intellectual property lawsuits. They love that we can run linux apps unmodified and draws his attention to comments fromT ony Scott, CTO, General Motors,on this issue.
Jonathan claims that Sun has repeatedly passed along customer interest in having IBM support Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. Customers have made repeated calls to you and your staff. Those same customers have now asked me to begin communicating with you in a more public and visible way - they'd like the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10, and they're feeling that your withholding support is part of a vendor lock-in strategy. A strategy to trap them into IBM's proprietary Power5 platform only. Jonathan also writes,"Sun has made sure IBM engineers know that moving from Solaris 8 or 9 to Solaris 10 takes no work, given that there is true binary compatibility. If you're on SPARC, and you'd like to take advantage of a world of x86 systems, it's a simple recompile. There's no recoding at all. Same applies to scaling up from Intel or Opteron to SPARC. No recoding". Jonathan concludes"So the technology is there, and so are the customers, partners and opportunities. But it's more evident by the day, the only vendors that fear choice are those trying to block it. We stand at the ready to help you tear down this wall". Very honest,logical and direct to the point view expressed by Sun.
Google is about to announce technology that will allow its advertisers unprecedented levels of control over when, where, and who can view their advertising on Google search pages and those of Google partner web sites.For the first time, the search giant will provide its advertisers with an application programming interface (API), which will enable them link their computer systems with Google and control parts of the mammoth Google ad delivery system. The API will allow advertisers to self administer the delivery, the timing and the price they will pay for their text ads.
This raises the bar in the online advertising market as Google turns to technology to try and outwit and pull ahead of media savvy competitors. The release of the API marks a transition for Google, from an online services company towards that of an IT platform for global ad delivery. The types of sophisticated management tools that will be available from Google and third parties, should also help tie advertisers into its ad network. It is but a short step from the global delivery of simple text ads, to carrying commercial transactions also. This would pitch it against companies such as Ebay and other online retailers. The Google API is only available to advertisers and not to online publishers carrying Google ads.
For portable music players, 2004 was a watershed year all over the world, and Japan was no exception. There's a big jump in the number of people using iPods and other players. With the introduction of full-song master-ringtones the mobile phone moved one step closer to competing with devices such as the iPod in the portable music player space. As phones with hard disks begin to enter the market in 2005, it's only a matter of time before the mobile phone will have the capacity to store the thousands of songs that most portable music players are able to hold now.It will be at least a year, probably two or more before a mobile phone comes out with enough storage space to mount a serious challenge as a stand-alone music player.A more immediate threat to the iPod comes from the full-song master-ringtone service being offered. It took the service provider only 48 days to achieve 1 million full-song downloads, despite being available on only four handset models. As with polyphonic MIDI-based ringtones, the key to success for master-ringtones has been the ease with which songs can be downloaded straight to the phone.
Another big factor working in favor of the mobile phone as a music download platform is the rate of subscriber growth. There are presently over 25.6 million 3G subscribers in Japan, and the number has been growing at a rate of nearly 1 million per month since January 2004. Contrast this with the present number of Japanese broadband subscribers (around 15 million)and the future for digital music on the
mobile phone begins to look even brighter still. Given the choice of using a PC/player combination versus downloading songs straight to the phone, the average Japanese consumer is more likely to go for the latter, even if it means having
fewer songs on the player.Incredible!!.
Delloite which has no set schedule by which it releases predictions and reports, felt that 2005 was a "turning point" in technological innovation, and has released the predictions for the year 2005. A summary of the report:
This new study ranks 10 trends critical to the global technology industry in 2005. This year will see a number of important advances in technology, along with some major challenges, opportunities and threats. Mesh networks, nanotechnology, fuel cells, robots and quantum computing are just some of the key trends from the Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) industry group and Deloitte Research.
-Internet: As internet use continues to proliferate the web browser will become an increasingly important part of our lives — providing a standard interface for a whole host of business and consumer applications.
-Mesh Networks: Wireless mesh networks will appear in several of the world’s major urban centers, helping local authorities track equipment and assets, and allowing transportation companies to streamline services, check traffic flows and update schedules in real time.
-Nanotechnology: Technologies that enables manipulation of structures and processes at the atomic level will become increasingly mainstream, leading to a wide range of new and dramatically improved products.
-Fuel cells: Ethanol-based fuel cells will launch commercially, potentially transforming the way people use portable devices by providing flexible power that lasts for days, weeks or even months.
-Security: Electronic forms of personal identification will proliferate, mainly for security reasons, yet identify theft and other digital crimes will continue to wreak havoc. Growth in connected devices will lead to corresponding growth in computer viruses, worms and other malware. This will frustrate users and cost companies billions in downtime and lost data.
-Robots: Robots will start to become an accepted part of our daily lives, particularly for household chores and other highly specific, practical tasks. Technology development for space exploration will probably continue its shift to the private sector, providing the foundation for a new era of advancement and discovery.
-Quantum Computing: Quantum computers, which are expected to be many orders of magnitude faster than today’s fastest supercomputers, will take a few important steps closer to commercial reality. Quantum computing is still a long way off, but is almost certain to happen. And when it does, it will change everything. The full report is available here.
India has always been a bundle of contradictions.For those who monitor the progress within India, they are certain that India is moving - moving at a good pace - some declare that India is all set to conquer the world; some write indian technology related services will sweep the world etc. euphoria ad infiniteum..I beleive that while we have indeed progressed, we have a long long way to go. The national ethos for building a super economic power and concerted actions - covering all interlinkages within the system in a time bound manner is completly missing. I can go on and on.. that can perhaps wait for another occassion. Here are three distinct but interrelated view on India's development - both and outside in, in between and inside out perspectives that appeared recently. Fareed Zakaria, Editor of Newsweek magazine recently wrote after a visit to India, "What has changed between Gujarat earthquake and Tsunami in these four years is the most important new reality about India: the growing wealth, strength and confidence of Indian society. He ends the analysis saying,” China is following the East Asian model, with a strong government promoting and regulating capitalist growth. Historically, this has been the most effective way out of poverty. But India might well be forging a new path, of necessity, with society making up for the deficiencies of the state. Actually, this is not entirely new. In some ways India's messy development resembles that of another large, energetic, chaotic country where society has tended to loom larger than the state—the United States of America. It is a parallel to keep in mind”.
The view from the Wharton Indian economic forum is :On the surface,India looks like a winning emerging-market investment play,with its populous middle class, robust multinational presence, and relatively stable democratic government. Dig a little deeper, however, and myriad risks start coming to light - a slow-moving commitment to building infrastructure; a need for structural reform in the financial markets; and a legacy of super-protectionist policies. The challenges were numerous but felt that the latest investments - especially in sectors such as manufacturing and real estate - signaled that interest in the country is broadening rapidly.
There are hidden jewels in the manufacturing sector as well." Manufacturing is growing in part because the Indian consumer market is becoming increasingly robust. During the past few years, the middle class has begun to play an increasingly active role in the Indian economy. Tax reforms have made manufacturers to become more competitive, people are beginning to take more and more credits are making India to move form a supply driven to demand driven economy. India has stood by as tens of billions of dollars in foreign direct investment have flowed to other asian countries Once the manufacturing sector has more confidence in India's abilities, the country should attract major FDI inflows. "China offers more cooperation from its government. Execution of reform in India is very important for the country to able to compete for investment." "Indian companies are also more ROI-focused than Chinese companies. While China has great macroeconomics, growth, and government policies, India has good companies that are focused on cost. But the country's low FDI is a function of poor infrastructure; there are delays at many levels, for instance in shipping."The nature of businesses in China and India were different. "India has knowledge businesses, which do not require as much capital investment, unlike the businesses going into China."
"Since India has enormous human talent, services and IT should continue to be the focus of investment. The manufacturing sector just doesn't offer similar opportunities, and Indians may already have lost that battle." “The entrepreneurial nature of Indian companies has allowed many to succeed despite the government, so the manufacturing sector should survive and grow effectively - and we should see years of growth ahead."
Vivek Bharati writes that Inequities abound as India develops and calls for an incubator for social innovation. Vivek writes, "By 2010 or thereabouts, India may displace Japan to emerge as the world’s third largest economy. While all this may sound heady, it is of little comfort to those who exist at the bottom of the social pyramid. The fact is that even well beyond 2010, a good mass of our people would remain five to seven decades behind their Japanese counterparts. A cursory look at our current social indicators should have a sobering effect on our ambitions to emerge as a hub of global economic activity.Current trends in the economy suggest that the trickle-down effect would continue to remain tardy and income growth of the lowest three deciles of the population would be much slower than the national average. This is because the service sector would continue to lead economic growth in the foreseeable future. Apart from IT and BPO, new segments in services are now acquiring momentum and would continue to create opportunities for the educated middle-class. For instance, the surge in auto retailing, restaurants and hospitality services in urban areas, the retailing boom, to be now joined by civil aviation would increasingly reduce unemployment among the educated youth. Indeed, in some areas such as BPO, construction, civil aviation etc, there is already a shortage of trained people and new facilities for education and training need to be created. What we need today is an institution that can “incubate” new ideas that stimulate social innovation for transforming the lives of the poor in our country, just like there are incubators for nurturing scientists and technologists with ideas for new products and services and turn them into entrepreneurs".But all converge on one theme - while growth is seen centered on india, the country has indeed a long way to go - far longer than what is internally visualised let alone being planned. This has to be in the minds of all concerned about india.
It is well known to people in the industry that the airbus maintenance facility in the changi airport is RFID enabled for quite some time. Now Airbus is taking to RFID to the skies.
Airbus A380 double-decker aircraft,the world's largest and seats 555 passengers, will have passive RFID chips on removable parts such as life vests to help ease maintenance processes.
Informationweek reports,10,000 radio-frequency identification tags will take to the skies, affixed to everything from airline seats to brakes. The tags will contain serial numbers, codes, and maintenance history that should make it easier to track, fix, and replace parts.The jet is equipped with radio-frequency identification chips and was built using Carbon Fibre Manufacturing technologies to reduce aircraft weight, ultrasonic scanning systems, and a combination of other technologies. The benefits of RFID-tagging airplane parts include reducting the time it takes to generate aircraft-inspection reports, which still require a lot of paperwork "RFID could be used to do routine checks before a flight, for example, making sure that a lifejacket is under each seat," Airbus began RFID-tagging its ground equipment and tools four years ago and plans to implement similar RFID technology for maintenance and identification of removable parts on the A400M military transport aircraft. Singapore Airlines will be the first airline to accept the A380 for commercial service in 2006. The all-cargo version of the aircraft, the A380-800F, will be delivered to FedExin 2008. Boeing has a similar commercial jet project in the works. Last April, Boeing launched the 7E7 Dreamliner program, where time-controlled, limited-lifetime parts, and replaceable units have been identified with RFID "smart labels," consisting of a microchip and an antenna and store maintenance and inspection data. This information is useful in maintaining airplanes because the service history of a part is stored on the RFID label as it goes thorough different stages of its life cycle. From the ground to the sky, RFID is poised to make a revolution - making remarkable change in supply chain efficiencies and in the process transforming performances in time, cost, quality dimensions as more and more implementation begin to demonstrate.. RFID shall be one of the top three technologies that would make a difference to business in the next three to five years..
We just finished publishing, Digitial Music - Threat Becomes An Opportunity wherein we covered,"The record industry's priority now is to licence music - to as many services, for as many consumers, on as many formats and devices for use in as many places and countries as it can. The straightforward conditions are that the business must be legitimate, the music must be correctly licensed, and record companies and other rights holders must get properly paid." Taijen pointed out the Slashot news thatCinema On Web Partners With DivXNetworks to Protect Bollywood from Piracy and Generate New Revenue. Excerpts with edits and comments:
The new service from Cinema on Web is amongst the first to deliver and broadcast cinema quality, licensed Bollywood film content to Internet users. All content available through the system is duly encrypted & licensed, protected from piracy and available at the highest level of visual quality. Titles include pay-per-view sports, feature films, first run and simultaneous release Bollywood & independent films available to global audiences through COW's worldwide content delivery networks with a choice of wireless, dial up, mobile and broadband capability. "Each new Bollywood film is released on the public Internet a day before or on the same day of its theatrical release, through piracy on multiple illegal movie download web sites," said Al Mason, CEO of Cinema on Web. "Our partnership with DivXNetworks represents the future of entertainment on the Internet. Soon virtually all new major Bollywood and Hollywood movies, including entertainment will be distributed digitally with secure VOD solutions like the one created by DivXNetworks, simultaneously defeating piracy and generating additional revenue for film studios and producers." Cinema on Web's technical partner DivXNetworks offers a complete Video-on-Demand (VOD) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) platform to address widespread piracy. DivX DRM makes it easy for users to find and purchase legal and protected content over the Internet. This content can be viewed on PCs as well as on all DivX® Certified consumer electronics (CE) devices without compromising security. An estimated 20 million DRM enabled DivX Certified CE devices are expected to ship this year and millions are already installed in consumers' homes, waiting to securely play the very Hollywood content that has become a favorite target of pirates.
Rapid changes with still more rapidly changing technologies!!
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• Legal music sites quadrupled to over 230 in 2004
• Available music catalogue has doubled in 12 months to 1 million songs
• Paid-for downloads up more than tenfold to over 200 million
• Consumer attitudes more favourable to buying music online
Music on the internet and mobile phones is moving into the mainstream of consumer life, with legal download sites spreading internationally, more users buying songs in digital format and record companies achieving their first significant revenues from online sales. Music fans downloaded well over 200 million tracks in 2004 in the US and Europe - up from about 20 million in 2003. This helped bring record companies their first year of significant revenues from digital sales, running into several hundred million dollars. Analyst Jupiter estimates that the digital music market was worth US$330 million in 2004, and is expecting it to double in value in 2005. The supply of music available digitally is proliferating. The number of online sites where consumers can buy music legally has now hit more than 230, up from 50 a year ago, with record companies licensing the bulk of their active catalogue for download, totalling over one million songs - more than doubling the amount of available repertoire within one year. Services like iTunes and Napster have become household names internationally, and many other national sites are specialising in local repertoire.
Portable players, led by the hugely successful iPod, and mobile phones, are helping transform the consumer experience of enjoying music and creating new revenue opportunities. There are estimates that 50% of mobile content revenues will be from music. It indicates that consumer attitudes to digital music are changing, with a new survey in six European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, UK) showing that nearly one in three music downloaders intend to buy from legal music services in the coming months (31% compared to 22% currently).
In twelve months' time the digital music market will have grown very significantly around the world. A sector that now accounts for a very small percentage of the industry's revenues is poised for take-off in the next few years. At long last “the threat has become the opportunity."
"The record industry's priority now is to licence music - to as many services, for as many consumers, on as many formats and devices for use in as many places and countries as it can. The straightforward conditions are that the business must be legitimate, the music must be correctly licensed, and record companies and other rights holders must get properly paid."
Tom Peters oflate is advocatng the professional service firm model as the dominant business model of the future for most of the enteprises.Tom sees "The Professional Service Firm Model" as a way to save one's job in the face of the upcoming White Collar Revolution.Every "white collar activity" performed in the corporation today is performed on the outside FOR PROFIT by some flavor of professional service firm and visulaises a world where PSFs create, in effect, ALL the Value Added? Here Tom Peters writes about the,equivalent to the Pine & Gilmore "experience ladder"—namely, the "PSF Ladder." Tom says adding "Lovemark Leadership" as the BASE makes this more rich and communicates much better. Can't agree more.
PCs dispersed the power of computing to individuals, spurred ingenuity, and boosted personal productivity. They made companies leaner and smarter and they sped the development of networks, leading ultimately to the establishment of the Internet as a thoroughfare of commerce. But the rise of robust, high-capacity networks has also made the desktop PC less essential. Computing resources - from processing power to storage capacity to applications can increasingly be provisioned to users from afar.To gain economies of scale, companies are consolidating their hardware and software assets in central data centers or even renting the capabilities they need from far-flung utility suppliers. Unlike in the home, where the PC is the engine of computing, in business it's just a cog and not even a particularly important one anymore.
Most workers employ their desktops for a few routine tasks -- typing reports, creating presentations, running spreadsheets, checking e-mail, browsing the Web. These aren't exactly the kind of applications that require the latest Intel or AMD chips. Most of those uses matured years ago. With each new upgrade, the gap between the capacity of PCs and the needs of average business users yawns wider. IBM estimates that about 95% of the average desktop's available computing cycles go untapped. Storage has a similar story. PC’s may be cheap but factor in the considerable labor and other costs that go into maintaining and updating fleets of workstations and all the software that runs on them. Then there's the fact that PCs often represent the biggest security hole in today's companies, a gateway for the evil-minded hacker and a repository of ready evidence for the litigious. It's getting harder to look at a business PC and not see an anachronism waiting to happen. Today companies like Sun are offering cheap, durable desktop terminals that draw all their power, storage, and applications from central servers. They don't even have their own operating systems. On the software side, Web-based and -hosted applications, which users can tap into through a simple browser interface, are proliferating. As the utility-computing model takes hold, the case for keeping desktop computers in companies will only grow more tenuous.
My Take: Nicholas is right in his logic - but there are four problems with this theme:
- First is the reliability of the network and significance of local content.
- Second - the additional "spare" cycles on these desktops actually represent not "wasted" computing power for companies, but more of an "untapped resource available on the fly." Distributed applications are becoming more common, and not all of them are completely server-based - they can also leverage on untapped desktop power.
- The change management issues associated with millions and millions of users - this would make a huge impact in any consideration towards newer form of computing.
- Migration to a newer platform from an almost ubiquitiously available system would prove to be one of the major endeavours ever attempted in the new economy.
CEO’s define "values" more broadly than politicians to mean the beliefs and principles that govern their business practices - how they do what they do, in essence. And, despite Enron and other scandals, the truth is that many of America's big companies are becoming more socially responsible, more green, more diverse, more transparent and more committed to serving the common good -as well as the bottom line. On worker rights: Hewlett Packard, Dell and IBM have agreed on a far-reaching code of conduct to protect the health, safety, labor and human rights of people who work for their suppliers in the developing world. Their suppliers, who make electronics in Mexico, China and Southeast Asia, will be audited to ensure compliance. Factories that fail the tests will have to reform or lose business. Social activists praised the computer makers, ordinarily arch rivals, for joining together to protect workers' rights. No law requires them to do so.
On affirmative action : Corporate America also finds itself to the left of Washington. When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of affirmative action last year, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Intel and Microsoft filed briefs supporting the University of Michigan, which considers race as one factor in its admissions decisions.
On Environemnt:Home Depot and Lowe's have pledged to stop buying wood from endangered forests in such places as Indonesia and Brazil. Staples opposed the Bush administration's decision to permit commercial logging in roadless areas of the Alaskan national forest. UPS operates more than 1,800 vehicles that use "alternative fuels" rather than gasoline, including electric-powered vans in New York City. Sustainability has become a buzzword in corporate circles. Climate Change: DuPont, once labeled America's worst polluter, is remaking itself from an oil-and-chemicals company into an environmentally friendly life sciences firm; it has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent since 1990. American Electric Power, the biggest coal-burning utility, has voluntarily agreed to reduce its carbon emissions; it is investing in renewable energy and planting trees, to offset its contribution to global warming, in Louisiana, Bolivia and Brazil. Environmentalists aren't satisfied, but they do see progress.
Openness :Leading companies are becoming more open. Gap Inc. issued a warts-and-all report this year, acknowledging that some overseas workers who make its clothes have been mistreated; the company vowed to do better. When it comes to the daunting problem of global poverty, influential business thinkers C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart have persuaded Unilever, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and others to explore ways to profitably serve the world's 4 billion poor and promote economic development by making businesses out of manufacturing low-cost utilitarian products such as water purification pills.
These companies are mainstays of the Fortune 500, This liberal tilt of big business has not generated much press attention as much as buisness scandals.
"If you want to be a great company today," Jeff Immelt, GE's CEO, likes to say, "you have to be a good company." When asked why GE has begun to talk more openly about corporate citizenship, he said: "The reason why people come to work for GE is that they want to be about something that is bigger than themselves." As Immelt suggests, the biggest driver of corporate reform is the desire of companies to attract people who seek meaning as well as money from their work. Few of us go to our jobs every day to enhance shareholder value. Younger people, especially, want to work for companies with a mission that goes beyond the bottom line. To be sure, there are plenty of corporations indifferent to to the rights and wrongs of corporate behavior. But, the bottom line is that a growing number of companies have come to believe that moral values, broadly and liberally defined, can help drive shareholder values. And that is a case study from which everyone could learn. Interesting perspective and an interesting read too.
(Via Spy.org) UK newspapers report that a night club in Glasgow is following similar night clubs in Barcelona and Rotterdam by offering to implant VeriChip RFID chips under their loyal customers' skin.This has many advantages for the bar or night club, by allowing them to extract money from customers who have decided that even credit cards are too bulky or inconvenient to carry, or who cannot even remember their own names whilst high on drugs or drink.They are treating their loyal customers like animals such as cattle or pet cats or dogs, where identical technology is used. The same hype tactics of promoting the VeriChips as a status symbol "allowing" a customer easier access to the "VIP" lounge/party/promoted event are evident in Glasgow as in the other European trials of the technology. Almost all of these VeriChip "trials" involve free or subsidised equipment and/or implants, and are publicity stunts aimed at supporting the share price of the chip manufacturer. The bar/night club owner/promoter also benefits from the media hype and publicity that VericChip implants in humans always generates ("no such thing as bad publicity")
Implanting sub-dermal tracking devices in humans is wrong, and should be illegal.VeriChips are too electronically unsophisticated to contain any encryption technology, and they can therefore be read and abused remotely by radio, using the 125KHz ISM licence free frequency band, by malicious third parties. This is not being made clear to the "customers" in Glasgow.Unlike a bracelet or badge with an optical barcode or even an embedded RFID chip, a VeriChip involves minor surgery to implant it, and more serious surgery to remove it.
(ViaBTOB Magazine)Led by Time Inc.’s Business 2.0, business publications in 2004 turned in their best year since 2000, according to Publishers Information Bureau figures released by the Magazine Publishers of America.With the exception of Fast Company, every major business publication posted gains in ad pages in 2004 over 2003, according to PIB. Business 2.0 posted the highest percentage gain in ad pages, a jump of 23.8%. Other so-called "new economy" or technology-oriented publications turned in strong performances, with Wired up 15.5% in ad pages and PC Magazine growing 1.4%. Fast Company, however, saw its ad pages dwindle by 12.3%. The big three business books each posted gains: Fortune was up 11.5%, followed by Forbes (11.3%) and BusinessWeek (4.2%). Other business publications also increased their ad pages, with Inc. up 14.5%; Barron’s, 8.4%; and The Economist, 2.6%.
The PIB data showed that consumer publications overall posted a 3.8% gain in ad pages in 2004 compared with 2003. A pessimist could point to the ad-page growth in 2004 as being of questionable strength because it built on several down years. For instance, Forbes had 6,083 ad pages in 2000 but only 3,470 in 2004. Similarly, BusinessWeek had $573.3 million in revenue in 2000 but just $365.6 million in 2004. The category as a whole is a shadow of what it once was.However, an optimist could argue that the ad page growth is just one indicator of a publishing brand’s overall health. Web advertising has skyrocketed for these publications, and it is an often hidden indicator of just how strong a publishing brand is. At Ziff Davis Media’s PC Magazine, for instance, online revenue leaped 86.2% in 2004 compared with 2003. "We look at the brand of PC Magazine holistically, as both a print and Web entity," said Tim Castelli, senior VP-group publisher.With growth on the Web and in print, business media executives are optimistic for 2005.
These days, nearly everyone has a digital camera or camera phone. And many new online services offer varying features for people who want to share their pictures, post them to blogs, or tag or comment on others' photos. Wired reviews the photo sites.By the way whats the business model and revenue model for these companies and what would be their next strategic steps to grow these companies over and above the normal growth rates??
( Via Thefeature) There is heavy speculation about Siemens exiting mobile business as its Fix it,close-it, sell-it deadline of Jan 27 approaches.The company overall has been going through a long restructuring process, and its CEO is stepping down in January after 12 years, so any move involving the handset unit wouldn't be a total shock, though the company's brand is still one of the most recognizable in the market. The unit's been under pressure to meet performance and profit goals as the Siemens has said it will close or sell underperforming businesses it can't fix.Siemens' exit would throw nearly 8 points of market share up for grabs, and wouldn't offer much of a return to shareholders. Some analysts are maintaining that because of this, and some similar moves in the company's past, a joint venture remains the most likely option. French manufacturer Alcatel combined its handset business with China's biggest manufacturer, TCL, earlier in the year in a joint venture assumed by many to be a precursor to Alcatel's pulling out of the market. A deal between Ningbo Bird and Siemens could take a similar shape, particularly as Siemens would like to grow its handset sales in China, and Ningbo Bird wants to boost its sales outside the country. The two companies would make a good fit, given Siemens' strength in R&D and software, and Ningbo's manufacturing heft in China. A Ningbo purchase of the Siemens unit, and its brand, would mirror Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business: a Chinese company buying a well-known Western brand to support its overseas expansion.There is now heavy fight for marketshare grab in the mobile market.
Although some estimates are saying the number of mobile-phone users could hit 2 billion by year's end, most predictions see handset sales growing by 10 percent or less. In 2004, the market grew by around a third, with the final tally being something like 630-670 million, depending on which analyst you like. Toss in Siemens' possible exit from the market with that slowdown, and there could be a lot of movement in the market in terms of share this year.
Businessweek writes after reviewing recent financial results that Sun may have some more glow. Sun is just now starting to get traction with new products such as Solaris 10, the flagship operating system, and low-price computer servers based on Advanced Micro Device's Opteron computer chip. Building those products into strong revenue drivers is going to take quarters, if not years. Also, CEO Scott McNealy's plans to move toward a more subscription-based business model means some sales will be reflected over the life of a contract, rather than in an up-front payment. That, however, makes Sun a much more interesting proposition over the long term. This is still a company with $7.5 billion in cash and short-term investments, and McNealy hinted in the earnings call that Sun is finally thinking about doing something with that massive war chest, either by making significant acquisitions or buying back shares. "We're going to continue to explore what we can do and how we can put that to work," McNealy told analysts. Jim Grizansio says, Sun's newly announced a new business model and is also expecting Open Solaris to swing things in Sun's favour.
People already use their cellphones to read e-mail messages, take pictures and play video games. Before long, they may use them in place of their wallets.By embedding in the cellphone a computer chip or other type of memory device, a phone can double as a credit card. The chip performs the same function as the magnetic strip on the back of a credit card, storing account information and other data necessary to make a purchase.The new handsets could become "a major form of payment, because cellphones are the most ubiquitous device in the world." But,"cash will never go away." Consumers will readily embrace the technology as a way to pay for even small purchases, because it is less bother than taking a credit card out of a purse or parting with cash.
The impending changes to the cellphone happen to coincide with major shifts taking place in the banking industry. Since credit cards are still considered somewhat inconvenient, particularly for quick, small purchases, major credit card companies have developed "contactless payment" technologies for checkout counters that allow customers to wave their cards near an electronic reader without having to swipe the card or sign their name. MasterCard, for example, has introduced a system called PayPass that lets cardholders wave a card in front of a reader to initiate a payment, much as motorists use E-ZPass and similar systems to pay tolls and ExxonMobil customers use SpeedPass to buy gas. Several major credit card companies issue PayPass cards; McDonald's has agreed to accept them at some restaurants.And American Express announced late last year that it would have its system, ExpressPay, in more than 5,000 CVS drugstores by the middle of this year.
Cellphone makers are hoping these new payment systems will also make it easier to market handsets with credit card functions, although they could just as easily represent competition for the practice of paying by cellphone.The marriage of cellphone and charge card poses some significant challenges, including security problems. To reduce fraud from stolen phones, consumers may be required to punch an authorization code into their phone each time a charge is made. For more than a year, phone makers, software companies and computer chip manufacturers have been working to develop secure and reliable payment technology for cellphones. After the phone's chip is recognized by the electronic reader, the credit card account number will be verified, as it is now, and the price of the purchase will be added to the consumer's credit card bill. The new phones may also be capable of being programmed for a prepaid sum from which payments could be deducted.
In seoul from where, I am posting this , cellphones are becoming mainstream payment devices . In Japan, NTT DoCoMo, the mobile phone operator, said that it had already sold more than a million phones equipped with chips that include the payment function.More than 13,000 Japanese shops have electronic readers capable of communicating with the phones. For now, the phones are used mostly to debit a prepaid amount, which is deposited by plugging the phone into a machine similar to an A.T.M. that takes cash and credits the handset. In South Korea, people are already using cellphones as credit cards.
An excellent overview of what lays ahead for the mobile and we shall begin to see more and more impact that mobile technology makes on various industries.
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Jonathan Schwartz predicts more and more blogging to happen in the coming days. He says,On the one hand, and at the risk of offending some blogomaniacal friends, he feels blogs are a tad overhyped. But only in the sense that blog content isn't all that different from the content that preceded the blog's building blocks. What is underhyped,is the impact of blogs on the advancement of simplicity and convenience. The most powerful weapons known to this industry. Simplicity changes the world. Convenience is a force multiplier. Simplicity drives ubiquity (and you know how I feel about volume). How many people use search software today, vs. 10 years ago? If you Google, you're a searcher, and I'd say the ratio of internet users to Google users is pretty impressive. The number's large partially because the price is right, and partially because it's so simple. Google has hundreds of millions of users, driven by simplicity and convenience. Just as there are hundreds of millions of cell phone users now using camera phones. Now how does any of this relate to intelligence and the tsunami?
The diversity of content sources is beginning to grow. Mblogs and vlogs are emerging around the world, pointing to an even more interesting future. The common wisdom is that mobile devices are insufficient for the demands of content creators - who must therefore default to a PC. The simplicity of blogs, the convenience of pervasive networks, and an explosion of new content sources - as a combined force, is radically underestimated. And not for its impact on the publishing industry, in specific, but on any industry that finds competitive advantage in the latency of information, or in complexity. From national security to the whole IT industry. Simplicity can be a sustainable competitive advantage. It's becoming more obvious by the day.
Science Daily reports, Gronas, an Assistant Professor of Russian Language and Literature, wants to know why people read certain books, what drives those reading decisions, and what lies behind readers' reactions. Sociological surveys are fine, he says, but the answers are shaped by the questions. With online book reviews, like those at Amazon.com, he can begin to get a quantitative measure of taste (from the number of stars assigned by readers to a book) along with a qualitative assessment (from the personal commentary provided by readers). "Amazon.com book reviews are not based on literary theory," he says. "They are written by everyday readers, not scholars, who bring a new perspective to the topic of taste. Since online reviews are voluntary, they offer honest opinions that aren't prompted by specific questions."The second part of Gronas' work involves digging deeper into the reviews to understand the more qualitative or subjective elements of literary taste. "It's generally believed that people with emotional tastes are separate from people with intellectual tastes, that these two characteristics can't reside in the same person," he says. "In the Amazon.com book reviews, I often saw both of these elements of taste illustrated in the same commentary of a reviewer. One person can exhibit a hybrid of tastes." Gronas says that the online review community is a virtually untapped wealth of information that provides insight into what shapes opinions and cultural preferences. Individual choices and judgments have been studied by economists and social scientists. Amazon.com adds another dimension to this field by providing a new pool of data to examine."I am introducing a palpable, probabilistic approach to literary criticism. That's what makes it fun." My TAKE:Cool .. The time for using online community data for secondary and tertiary analysis has come.. Ultimaltely online analysis range and coverage shall encompass the complete scope in brick and mortar world and provide many more patterns based operational data and historical data.
Simon Angel from SAP says, the demand for mobilizing SAP users represents a major opportunity for the German application giant to grow seats. But the failure of ISVs, mobile operators, device manufacturers, and systems integrators to present a cohesive front to customers is affecting the ability of the mobile industry to capitalize. On analyzing the SAP customerbase,it is found less than 10% of employees of SAP customers are currently real users of their system. and the utility of providing remote access to the masses of mobile blue- and gray-collar workers has been overlooked by most organizations. SAP believes that there's a very significant gap between licenses sold and the SAP software installed base. Even in the worst case scenario, SAP beleives that it can double the number of seats. The license price is less [than for a desktop SAP client] but it's still a very significant part of revenue or SAP AG. Simon adds,"The biggest obstacle is that SAP as provider of software and business processes can't do it alone and seesthe need as a group to solve this problem."O2's head of mobile data products and services, Hugh Griffiths, backed Angel's stance. "If you approach any one participant in the value chain, they should be able to bring together those pieces. It's dependent on operators to create the right environment for that to take place."
My Take : While the concern of SAP is quite valid - I have some fundamental doubts: A.Traditionally the pull factor of powerful technologies should force all players to extend their range of services- with mobile's pervasiveness, it should have happened by now - if it is not happenning, all in the chain including ERP players like SAP need to take responsibility.
B.Second, am not seing determined push by traditional software players to make consumers embrace mobile in a big way - would like to know which user organisation as an enteprisewide initiative owing to the need to put mobile to critical use in terms of real time information system based data sharing ( except may be some part of sales arms of an enterprise) has forced mobile usage on their employees.
C.Am also curious to know just as in the case of early stages of internet, big ERP players were the laggards in moving into the internet space and offering web centric solutions, the mobile space is as well suffering from a similar lack of thrust by dominant software players.
Jeff Pulver has come out with an excellent presentation on the emergence of VoIP and the future directions and potential applications that can make use of internet telephony. Pulver presents 2004 shall be cllaed the year of VoIP as severl important advancements centered on VoIP happened in the year 2004. Pulver writes,"VoIP drives Broadband which drives IP communications which drives Broadband which drives IP Communications …", Landline replacement snowballing – wireless is not yet a regulatory replacement of Wireline,in 2005, every telephone carrier in the developed world shall offer internet telephony services and everyone can become a "roadband Parasite"-This should be happening on global basis and commercialising presence is the next billion dollar opportunity. The full presentation is available here.
David Jackson, raises a query Yahoo to acquire Six Apart? and concludes, this is possible.Excerpts with edits from an impressive analysis . My comments added in the bottom:
Six Apart, the owner of hosted blogging service TypePad and publisher of blogging software Movable Type, just acquired LiveJournal. Within six months Six Apart itself will be acquired by Yahoo!. Prices for Pay -Per-Click(PPC) ads are rising. Google and Yahoo! like that, but they realize they could make a lot more money if the opportunity for PPC ads wasn't limited to search. What is the fastest area of growth in Web content? Blogs. Blogging services, whether hosted or downloaded, are not just about blogs as we know them now - personal online journals. They're about something broader: cutting the cost of, and simplifying the process of publishing content to the Web.Because the blogging platforms are the largest generators of new Web content, they are a natural target for the providers of PPC ads. Many bloggers dislike the notion of advertising on blogs, but they're in for a shock. Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and the other blogging platforms will make it much easier for Web publishers to profit from ads. They'll build contextual ads into Web site templates, and use the publishers' sign-up information to open simultaneous advertising accounts. TypePad has already integrated the Amazon.com associates program into its TypeLists, and announced in November that it was partnering with contextual ad provider Kanoodle. It's only a matter of time before Google does the same with Blogger. This is why it's so remarkable that Yahoo! has no blogging platform. Yahoo! owns Overture, the main competitor to Google's keyword ad business. Ad inventory is in short supply, Web content is the greatest source of untapped inventory, and blogs are the fastest growing area of Web content. Google owns Blogger, Microsoft quietly announced recently that its blogging platform, MSN Spaces, just passed the 1.5 million user mark, and Yahoo! has... nothing
My Take: Impeccable Logic.. Yahoo definitely needs a blogging platform to sell as business and six apart also needs to make a move either become public or get acquired. There may be action centered around bloglines as well. Incidentally,Yahoo missed being the first in providing rss feeds of queries while searching.
Yet as Samsung was closing the books on a triumphant 2004, its future was looking less certain. The Korean won soared to a seven0year high against the dollar, reducing the value of much of its overseas earnings. While electronic gadgets such as digital cameras, mobile phones and flat-screen televisions remain as popular as ever, prices are falling. That cuts Samsung's profit margins.Samsung tends to make most of its own components or buy them from within group companies. Samsung is part of a Chabeol, one of the giant family controlled conglomerate – Samsung firms do everything from running hotels to providing insurance, building apartments and are held together by a complex web of cross shareholdings. Today most manufacturers take a different route,preferring to buy components and services from outside suppliers But Samsung executives argue that being more vertically integrated ,supplying its own needs or buying from close associate group firms has become enormously useful as digital convergence has blurred product categories.
Samsung electronics is investing heavily... Research and development accounted for $2.9bn in 2003, around 8% of revenue. and more money will be spent on brand-building. A decade ago, Samsung was mostly seen as a producer of cheap televisions and microwave ovens. Today Samsung dominates in most of the areas it operates in: Memory chips- DRAM (Mkt share -31.4%), Memory chips –flash(Mkt share 21%),Flat panels (TFT-LCD)(Mkt share23.3%) and in mobiles next only to Nokia (Mkt share -13.8%) Samsung is among the most widely held emerging market shares, with a market cap of 62 billion USD; by that measure it is already worth far more than Sony.
And all this despite its low cut image as, well, a cheap alternative to Sony and the other big players. The technology market is no longer a reserved niche market , and if Samsung continues to build on its strengths and repeats past success , the downcast image shall be gone .. forever. Businessweek has published this story about LG, another rising korean star. South Korean story itself is very inspiring. Like most other modern cities in Asia, I had been to Seoul and Busan several times and only find the Koreans becoming more and more competitive - at the moment the Korean economy is a little dull, but shall pick up shortly. For those who think that the chinese would dominate all sorts of manufaturing, my answer is a BIG NO..Korean enteprises amidst others shall be the key players that china should be wary off.
By the way , I compiled this article while travelling inside a wifi enabled vehicle moving from the airport towards the hotel!! Thats Korea. |
We recently covered The Goal of SOA is managing complexity, wherein we covered the perspective of Mike "Wolf" Gilbert.
(Via Nicholas Carr)Web services,in simple terms, comprise a set of software tools and standards that allow diverse applications to talk to each other over the Internet. At a technical level, they’re an exciting and important development. As with middleware and read-anywhere programming languages like Java, web services help managers escape the maddening incompatibilities of legacy systems.
At the business level,software is used to automatically and seamlessly connect the processes of different companies, allowing the quick assembly and disassembly of entire value chains reaching from the supply of components to the delivery of finished goods. In turn, businesses evolve into increasingly specialized modules that can be easily plugged into these flexible new enterprise networks. Joined in a "service-oriented architecture," companies themselves begin to look and act like loosely coupled software applications. In an article by Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor, in the new issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review. In Will Web Services Really Transform Collaboration?, McAfee takes a scalpel to the common wisdom about web services. "If information systems could look for and find each other, share data and execute business processes, all with no (or very little) human involvement, we would probably find ourselves in a very different business world," he writes. "Web services, however, will not create this world, nor will any technology on the horizon." McAfee explains that computer-mediated collaboration between companies requires three very different kinds of agreements.
-The first and simplest are agreements on "transport"—the networking protocols that allow applications to connect.
-The second are agreements on "payload"—the data standards that allow applications to share information.
-The third and most complicated are agreements on "process"—the sequence of activities in a work flow and the allocation of responsibility for them. The problem, McAfee points out, is that web services only really automate transport agreements: "They make it possible for two applications to talk to each other[i.e., transport], but they don’t specify what conversations they should have [process] or what words they should use [payload]."
It’s possible for two or more companies to negotiate agreements about payload and process but, as always, that takes a lot of human interaction and a lot of time. McAfee describes how it took more than a year for IBM and one of its distributors to hash out the shared protocols necessary to create an automatic, computer-to-computer ordering system. Such efforts will be worthwhile for automating stable, high-value connections between the processes of large companies—the kinds of processes that used to be linked through electronic data interchange, for instance—but otherwise they’ll rarely be worth the hassle. Nicholas Carr adds, this is evidence of technologist’s fallacy. Computing professionals and pundits sometimes exhibit a tendency "to confuse business with information processing, to want to see companies as, in essence, computers. They overlook, or give short shrift to, the physical and human characteristics of commercial organizations—to all the things that can’t be reduced to digital code, that can’t be ‘exposed’ or ‘made transparent’ through networks. This skewed perception leads them to conclude that companies, like computers, can and should become components, or modules, in broad and flexible networks." Web services will play a key role in overcoming incompatibilities between information systems, helping create a more standardized and productive IT infrastructure for business. But they’re not going to usher in an age of protean value chains. And they're not going to usurp the place of managers in negotiating, overseeing and modifying complex partnerships. Machines matter, but people matter more.
( Via Scobleizer ). Alan Williamson reports about the speech at the BayCHI lecture at PARC given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google) adding, Marissa took the audience through a presentation geared around the user experience at Google and the efforts/lengths they go to. Alan reports some interesting facts that came out. Every one of the 16 note points look neat and cool and am therefore republishing here ( with due courtesies to Alan Williamson) -Please do visit Allan's site for extensive comments on this post:
1.The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
2.Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked 'Whats up?' to which they replied "We are waiting for the rest of it". To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
3.One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the "Did you mean..." feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area.
4.The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
5.Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn't look or feel like a Google application.
6.Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren't told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
7.Google has the largest network of translators in the world
8.They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.
9.They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
10.The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'
11.Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
12.They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn't emailing a blackhole.
13.Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
14.This wasn't a technical talk so no information regarding any infrastructure was presented however they did note that they have a mantra of aiming to give back each page with in 500ms, rendered.
15.Quote: Give Users What They Want When They Want It
16.Quote: Integrate Sensibly.
Howard Rheingold writes about The Omidyar Network reputation system saying,The Omidyar Network reputation system is a new experiment in designing the social architecture of an online social network. Howard adds,something tells me that the $25,000 offered by the network to its members, to do whatever they agree to do, will energize the experiment.When you join omidyar.net, you start with a feedback bank of 10 points. Your feedback bank can be transferred , one point at a time, as either positive feedback or negative feedback to any member, workspace or discussion. As you use omidyar.net, your feedback bank will increase, based on your usage pattern inside the omidyar.net, and what you do. You earn more "credit" in your feedback bank the more you contribute. If you simply visit and not actively contribute to the body of knowledge i.e you do not initiate a discussion, post discussions etc., your feedback bank will grow far more slowly. If you are an active discussion participant, and you contribute to a group's workspace, your feedback bank will grow more quickly. If someone gives you positive feedback, both your score and your feedback bank will increase by one.
I am curious to explore and find out to see if the eBay like reputation system codification works in this situation. However there are some queries based on posts around various places in the web about the framework - some of those that i find very interesting and relevant:
- How this incentive for gaming the system will be diferent from it has been in the SNSs like Friendster.
- Some of the potential downsides include - Users would create multiple accounts to give themselves higher positive points, and other users negative points. Gangs of users may choose to work with each other to give each other points and to take points away from others - essentially to prevent suituations like this. In Omidayar's system this could be dangerous because negative ratings curtail a user's operation of the system.
- In Ebay the feedback level is a function of the number of succesful paid transactions it costs to leave feedback. In this system since there is no cost incurred when leaving feedback so it may end up as mob rule. It's probably best to separate and disengage user ratings from system access previlages.
- For feedback mechanisms and for original content , great people can make one or two contributions and hundreds of contributions from averagers may not match it – we need an approach to differentiate this.
Internet telephony—digitally transmitted phone calls—could be the next big thing. Internet calling is a classic disruptive technology—a simple idea that fundamentally changes the premise of an entire industry. The notion of a dedicated telephone circuit for each voice call has been the telephone industry's chief paradigm. Internet voice technology is the biggest threat to their businesses in a century.
Internet voice technology could bring about the much-heralded—and long-awaited—convergence of digital media. With telephone companies adopting Internet protocols, the union of phones with televisions, computers and any other digital doohickey will become easier. The race among firms like Samsung, Sony and Apple to invent the next top-selling gadget could soon get chaotic. Analysts are already speculating about the bizarre merger-and-acquisition possibilities—imagine Microsoft, Sony or Nokia buying a telephone company.In hindsight, cell phones now don't seem all that revolutionary after all, at least compared with VoIP. Like old-fashioned telephones, mobiles are a "walled garden" business, in which the telephone companies use their own networks and retain control over all aspects of the voice data. Personalized features that would allow you to choose one answering message for your personal relationships and another for your boss will become standard. But beyond this is an even more exciting world of convergence: for teens, always-connected mobiles;families could hold Sunday teleconferences via televisions that double as phones. Singles bars might have matchmaking computer data-bases that automatically place a call to a potential sweetheart. Phone calls could be made from just about any device —an iPod, a laptop or a refrigerator.
And who will be the big winners? Internet voice technology is about to crack open the entire industry. In the United States, the big cable companies may take the majority of the pie because they have the fastest data pipes, the most broadband connections to the home and fewer regulatory issues than the telephone companies. The big phone and cable companies are not likely to go out of business any time soon, which gives them an edge with corporate customers. Since cheap phone calls will likely become a hook for selling digital content and services, cable and media companies already in those businesses will probably have a leg up. Firms that have a deep understanding of the digital lifestyle, like Microsoft or Apple, or consumer behavior, like Wal-Mart, could hold the trump cards. The age of the telephone, as we know it, is over. Jeff Pulver here provides information about the trends in downloading intenet telephony software -pulver communicator - Notice the consistent upward trend in the downloads. PCMagazine provides a review of major VoIP offerings in the US market and notes,"For Voice over IP, 2004 was a trailblazing year, as consumers got a first peek at home broadband's next big thing. Promising lower phone bills and enhanced phone features, the technology caught on quickly, garnering close to 1 million paid subscribers in the U.S. by 2004 year end.
We recently covered a series of developments in the computing environment and assessed the progress made by various players with emphasis on Microsoft. Amongst others, we covered,Firefox is to internet explorer what internet explore was to netscape emphasising the growth of Firefox browser and the importance of browser as an important platform component. We extended our coverage to examine microsoft's readiness to leverage bandwidth in the articleBandwidth is Microsoft's enemy and how this may influence the computing environment of future and how Microsoft is underprepared to face the emerging future. We also covered Russell Beattie's perspective after the recent CES event at Vega, saying Its game over for Microsoft's competitors and we also examined Microsoft's readiness to capture the mobile marketspace in the article The Coming Mobile War : Microsoft Vs.Nokia and in general through a series of coverage Microsoft's approach in maintaining desktop marketshare and preparedness in all the proximate areas.We also covered setback to Microsoft's passport framework in the article eBay Says Bye Bye Passport, Microsoft Calls It Quits and we also covered how the consumer electronics sector may not be all that covergent TV Is Not PC.
Bill Gates took on a new role as chief software architect,five years ago with the idea to concentrate full-time on new technology. The business was changing, and Microsoft, no longer a start-up, needed to chart new directions in the face of challenges in the post-dot-com era. Microsoft has always been touchy about suggestions that it is less of a technology innovator than a technology follower.
Bill Gates is evidently the greatest business mogul of the last 50 years. An assessment of his tenure as chief software architect may not be that attractive.Microsofts progress in key areas in the last five years/preparation for future :
Internet Explorer - IE ruled the roost in the 90's after surpassing Netscape. With the game over, Microsoft also lost any incentive to make the product substantively better. And after the U.S. Department of Justice failed in its bid to break IE off of Windows, Microsoft had even less motivation to get cracking. But the technology business doesn't stand still for long. If Microsoft needed a wake-up call, the rapid emergence of Mozilla's Firefox browser in 2004 was it. If Microsoft dawdles much longer, the number of users downloading IE alternatives in 2005 will turn into a stampede.
.Net My Services - This was a grab bag of cool-sounding Internet-based services that Microsoft likened to a digital safe deposit box to host personal information. This was a complicated idea that was surrounded by confusion right from the get-go. The project, slated to debut in 2002, has since been shelved.
Longhorn :Microsoft originally planned to ship this next major version of Windows by 2004. Now the company says it will ship Longhorn sometime late in 2006. Even more embarrassing, Microsoft won't be able to implement its highly touted WinFS file system with the release of the operating system. Microsoft poured an enormous amount of resources into shipping its SP2 security patch. Microsoft has let this project sprawl out of control. Meanwhile, the Macintosh operating system and Linux continue to advance apace.
Security :Even after the release of SP2, problems continue to surface. All this raises inevitable questions about process and oversight. How can a company look a customer in the eye if it can't vouch for the security of its products? Microsoft's glass half-full argument that things are far better still doesn't cut it.
Search :Years after Google soared to supremacy, Microsoft has a beta version of the Web search technology it will ultimately offer-sometime, originally should have been widely available by 2004. Even when it comes to desktop search, terrain where Microsoft should dominate, Google and Yahoo are way ahead. Cooper concludes that Gates tenure as chief software architect for microsoft has not
been all that attractive.
My Take: Microsoft now is in a very tough suituation in its lifetime more than ever in the past- It is beyond doubt that Microsft is getting weakened on most of the fronts, but one needs to give credit to Microsoft for pushing the innovation engine and making bold moves in the consumer electronics sector and in the digital convergence space.Almost all analysts hold the view that the microsoft media player shall be a runaway success in 2005 .
It's no secret the telecom business remains in the midst of a "perfect storm" that has already capsized—or at least badly shaken—many of the sector's stalwarts. New competitive challenges, technological developments, deregulation, and the commoditization of offerings once considered value-added propositions have converged with a poor economic climate to transform the entire industry.For years IT has been relegated to performing tactically important, but strategically neutral, operational, back-office functions. Most innovations came from external business partners, while IT dutifully processed orders, largely detached from corporate planning and product-development. If IT is merely a back-office function, it can easily be viewed as a nondifferentiating commodity. It's not hard to understand why outsourcing, as a way to optimize cost alone, has become a topic of keen interest in boardrooms across America. Sprint has successfully demonstrated that IT can be a catalyst for positive strategic change. In so doing, we've transformed both the form and role of IT at Sprint. For the company in general, and specific lines of business in particular, IT now plays a leading role in changing the way the company deals with customers and partners as well as how we work internally to develop, sell, and service offerings. Complexity has grown exponentially—more technology, more applications, and more users—while the business cycle has shortened. The world is becoming increasingly connected, while most enterprises now operate around the clock. Coupled with advances in technologies that enable clients to be more self-sufficient and mobile, these dynamics will fundamentally change the relationship between IT and business. The business is challenged by increasing competition, often from unexpected, nontraditional sources. Communications services, once the domain of a handful of incumbent carriers, are now offered by cable companies, Internet service providers, and wireless providers.
Commoditization and the ensuing pricing pressures have eroded many traditional lines of business. In this climate, allocating IT resources to existing operations will merely support the disintegration of the organization. But with creativity and leadership, software know-how can be used to translate technological innovation into business opportunities. At Sprint, we follow a three-pronged value-creation strategy that helps us identify such opportunities:
- Run the business: We actively look for opportunities to invest in cost optimization that can drive continuous bottom-line improvements. by encouraging the IT team to look at business processes with fresh eyes and identify how we can eliminate as many moving parts as possible without affecting performance. Reductions in complexity often translate into lower IT costs. This can free up resources to invest in the "grow" and "transform" strategies
- Grow the business: IT can uncover nontraditional opportunities by simply looking at ways to harness available resources and offer them to customers more conveniently and cost-effectively. For instance, when a customer purchases a new ring tone using his or her Sprint PCS handset, the transaction spans—in real time—network and IT systems. By creating an infrastructure that enables software-based value-added services and dynamic multichannel partnerships, IT can drive innovation that generates revenue.
- Transform the business: Slow-moving companies will be overtaken by the challenges that rapid change poses.. IT can digitize the enterprise to support constant improvements in business processes from the inside out to benefit both the enterprise and our customers. The Web is a facade; sustainable E-business enablement relies on the digitization of core enterprise processes. IT must facilitate business-process reengineering to be more efficient and customer-centric.
Leadership is required to help an IT organization make changes to become a source of technological innovation for business growth.
- First, IT must earn the trust of the business:Trust begins with executing responsibilities well. Few peer organizations will welcome expanded IT participation in new roles if they believe core operational tasks are being mishandled.
- Next, IT must develop the business acumen and relationships to work side-by-side with the business : Establishing understanding and trust requires more than occasional dialogue; it requires a fully collaborative process for making strategic decisions on technology investments that will drive business innovation.
On Outsourcing :Effective delegation is a byproduct of good leadership. To that end, Sprint has outsourced many IT activities. It turns out that partnering and outsourcing with good technology players has elevated IT's strategic profile. Off-loading software development and maintenance also helps free up cycles so we can focus beyond tactical projects.But outsourcing doesn't excuse the IT organization from strenuous oversight and management responsibilities. The ability to model and simulate activities before they go live provides the mechanism for controlling your destiny and maintaining accountability. Sprint's IT-productivity index is defined as = EVA/SG&A .Leveraging IT as a strategic asset isn't an intuitive exercise. It's a major shift that results in significant culture change and requires a keen focus on communication and paying close attention to the voices of business partners. Previous worldviews must be updated. My Take :Many CIO's are facing tough moments with changing technology landscape, Increased business competition,Expectations of higher ROI from IT, Offshoring etc. This excerpt elegantly articulates a disctinct approach towards making IT more and more strategic to entperprise. Excellent read -pregnant with definitive wisdom.
We covered recenty, the deep impact that RFID may make across the enterprise. Now more research seems to support this perspective.
( Via ITFacts) Most of the companies that undertook to meet RFID mandates during 2004 did get involved with the technology to a greater or lesser degree. But many started small, allocating much lower budgets to the effort than the $2-3 million some analysts had predicted. In 2005 these companies are increasing their investment, to scale up and integrate RFID into their normal operations. The ABI Research team dissects the RFID industry using a three-tiered approach that encapsulates a deep understanding of the relationship between technologies, markets and competition.
Analysis Highlights:
• Due to increased market activity, shipments, and mandates, ABI Research estimates the RFID hardware and software market will surpass $4.6 billion by 2008.
• Supply chain retail, consumer goods, and defense activity continue to fuel growth, along with increased innovation in homeland security and smart payment markets.
• Supply chain management RFID technology innovation continues but shortcomings persist.
• New mandates from global retail giants reinforce RFID market growth.
We have always maintained that 2005 shall see substantial investment in RFID related technologies,in areas where it shall be directly felt- in the next 2/3years, we believe that the usage of RFID technologies would be prevalent all across the extended enteprise, significantly affecting the processes.
( Via Ross Mayfield ) Social networking sites have been derided as a fad without a business model. But professional networking sites need to be looked at very differently. Network members clearly see and demonstrate unique value in networking sites focused on sow and harvest professional contacts.
Ross Mayfield writes, referring to Joi pointing out an amazing causal statistic on LinkedIn:
"If you search for PeopleSoft employees who have joined in the last 30 days, you get over 3,700 results. There are 5,500 or so employees listed in total which is around half of their employees. It probably has something to do with the fact that 6,000 PeopleSoft employees are supposed to got the the axe recently". Ross adds,Socialtext is looking for good people and asking aspirants to raeach him.
I also noticed Jeff Nolan and Brad Feld also requesting peoplesoft ex employees to contact them for potential opps. Someone said that Oracle is firing 40% of peoplesoft employees while promising to maintain support for more than 90% of the peoplesoft.
(Via The Register) Shahin Khan of AzulSystems writes, a major shift is coming whereby applications will be able to tap into systems with, say, 7,000 CPUs, 50 tera bytes of memory, and 20 peta bytes of storage. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
For more than two decades we have assumed that memory, disk and the processor - all cannot scale up the same way. If all these three can scale up massively and work in a synchronous manner, that would be a game changing innovation, one that would spawn a new age for business applications and raise the bar on IT productivity and business efficiency.In 2005, Azul Systems will ship compute pools with as many as 1,200 CPUs per a single standard rack (1.2 kilo cores!). What would change about application design if you could do this? Well, think back to what applications were like when you had just 128K of memory in your PC and a 512KB hard drive. The difference between the capabilities and flexibility of applications in those days and now is the level of improvement that we are talking about.
If you had hundreds of CPUs in a miniaturized “big-iron” system that were available to your applications, you could adopt the same strategy for applications. No need to plan capacity for each individual application. Let all of your users share a huge compute pool and plan capacity across many applications. In the process, you also fundamentally change the economics of computing. This is a whole new way of looking at the CPU, and therefore, the function of “compute.” This approach is gaining mainstream acceptance. Azul has already set the bar much higher. Get ready for an era when you can order CPUs by the thousands. And get ready for the new language of that era: 2.5 kilo CPUs, kilo core?, or mega core processing? ,multi-core technology, poly-core technology?. It is exciting to note that virtual machines such as the JVM and CLR are enablers of this large-scale parallelism. We are seeing the synchronus advantages in processing power, storage power and application power - add that to the tremendous advances in the communication arena - both within the PC and the world at large - A fascinating change is on the anvil.
We recently covered,No escaping from blog as a key trend for 2005. We also covered, the reach of the blogs in the modern world. David Kirkpatrick writes about a quote from legendary ad-man Steve Hayden, vice chairman of New York-based Ogilvy & Mather and quotes him as saying,"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie. The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug". For bloggers, Hayden's quote touched upon an underlying and not well-understood beauty of blogs: That their communal nature pushes them toward total honesty. Excerpts with edits and my comments added from David's article:
Hayden says, a growing number of consumers, turn to blogs to get the unvarnished scoop on products. Marketers can use blogs to their advantage, Hayden says, but he stresses that they have to cautiously tread into this new medium. Hayden, who oversees IBM's ad account at Ogilvy & Mather, says that the tech giant monitors blogs to find out what open-source software programmers think about the Linux operating system, which IBM supports. Here are some of his insights into how blogs are changing the relationship between consumers, corporations and advertisers:
• Blogs can serve as a trusted source.
• They can provide companies with reliable feedback
• They provide an outlet for happy and unhappy customers. .
• They can serve as a reality check. "Nobody has 100% positive information about any program, product or service. It simply isn’t possible". Blogs pay a role in filling this gap.
• They can help companies reach an influential audience. "What the bloggers say is pretty significant to us as a research tool. Many manufacturers check the blogs every day.. The blog commentary we got about the sincerity of IBM’s efforts in promoting linux just went on and on—it’s how we knew we were winning. It’s an example of mass advertising intended to reach a tiny but highly influential audience."
Microsoft, continues to break new ground. For instance, as of January 11, 1.5 million new bloggers had signed up on MSN Spaces, a self-publishing service launched in early December. And during the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Bill Gates gave his first interview ever to a blog,the Gizmodo site. We earlier covered, Scobeleizer saying Executives Could Get Fired For Not Blogging. We also wrote recently only the PC received more attention than the blog during its early days.David concludes the piece by asking has your chief executive started blogging. Blogging is indeed inescapable and in the current convergent world, blogging shall only go from strength to strength.
Cisco has already set up a special software group to develop middleware, Web applications, and services products, says one reliable source who is close to the company but asked to remained unnamed. Other sources say Cisco has indeed set up a new software group but that it may have less dramatic goals.
Cisco's goal with the new software group is to create "application-aware" networks, a move that could tread on the turf of partners IBM and Microsoft Corp. "This has been kept totally quiet by Cisco because they do not want Microsoft to get mad enough to hurt other lines of business," the source says. With networking technology becoming increasingly commoditized - and with a looming fret from low-cost hardware competitors in China, Cisco could help insulate itself from these trends by moving up the software stack and marketing consulting services and developing more sophisticated software. "They're going to need something like [a software group] to bulk up those consulting services. It's part of their move to quietly become more like IBM". Other sources believe the group's task is less grand, possibly relatEd to future developments with XML and Layer 7 traffic engineering. At Cisco's analyst meeting in December, John Chambers outlined a strategy to make Cisco more of a consultant, showing customers how to change their business processes to take advantage of new capabilities in the network. Cisco's new Integrated Service Router (ISR) product line reflects that thinking by making routers to become the roosting place for network applications such as voice over IP (VOIP).Cisco's superpowers in routing could prove useless in the software dimension. "It's a different set of rules and a different set of customers. The buyer [of applications software] is not the one that buys the routers,". "No one would believe you're talking about putting your crown jewels in the hands of a communications company." It's more likely the new software group targets "higher-order Layer 7 things like XML." Crucial adjustment needed include that in services - network designing help, for example - aren't supposed to be free any more. "That can be a tough transition" for a sales force that's given away services "all their lives," Given the company's dominance in routers, something like consulting might be Cisco's best way to create new revenue streams.
We earlier covered that dominant acquisitions made by Cisco in 2004 were software enterprises.An important development in the more and more convergent world and moving forward Cisco has serious challenges to create new revenue streams and maintain its marketcap and image as a dominant player in the communications and information technology sector.
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Om Malik brilliantly wrote in his book Broadbandits about Jack Grubman, telecom analyst at Solomon Smith Barney,who pocketed $100 million touting overpriced broadband stocks. I read in my saturday morning flight to Singapore this piece in Newsweek - excerpts from Charles Gasparino latest book - "Blood on the Street" revealing just how rigged the game was centered around Jack Grubman. Jack Grubman consistenly took a position that AT&T may not be able to withstand competition from the then emerging enterprise like Global Crossing and Worldcom in the lat 90's.The allegation is Jack helped companies like Global Crossing to raise billions of dollars by consistently maintaining a bearish stance on AT&T, citing inability of the giants to compete in the emerging areas.
I was wondering what would be the impact for the biggies as seen by the analysts in the emerging VoIP market with daily announcements by various players and so much attention in the media for the likes of Vonage. I came across this piece by Wolfgang Gruener of Toms Hardware saying Traditional phone companies to dominate VoIP. Excerpts:
Broadband phone companies such as Vonage grow fast and point out a new direction how phones will work in the future. IDC analyst William Stofega however believes that the incumbents are on their way to grab the lion's share of the Voice-over-IP (VoIP) market. VoIP is sending shockwaves through the telephone market offering companies and private households to slash their phone expenses. Vonage, one of the pioneers in this field, already claims more than 400,000 customers, with almost 30,000 new users joining the service every month. However, some analysts believe that relatively new VoIP firms may have just leveled the ground and the traditional phone companies will launch a major effort to fetch market share this year. 2005 is likely to become the year of the private consumer, with pricing to continue to lure new customers. Incumbents will be able to offer higher quality VoIP calls by controlling the infrastructure data packets are routed and will leverage their existing customer base to gain VoIP market share. "Traditional phone companies usually offer already broadband and phone services and own an enormous installed base of customers. This clearly provides them with an advantage to bring services together with the goal to convert all customers at some point", he said. The challenge for the incumbents however remains to find the price point for their IP offering and not jeopardize current revenue streams at the same time.
I can't agree more. Traditional telecom companies, so long as they are able to come with new service offerings would gain substantial marketshare. |
According to the latest Quarterly Index from outsourcing advisory firm TPI,Europe accounted for just under half of the value of major outsourcing contracts (those worth over €40m) awarded worldwide in 2004. The US came in second at 44 per cent, with Asia Pacific trailing at just seven per cent.The €28bn of contracts awarded by European companies last year is more than double the value in 2002, TPI reported.
Duncan Aitchison, international managing director at TPI, said: "The equalisation between the European and US outsourcing markets comes through dramatic growth in Europe, not any significant decline in outsourcing in the Americas."European companies realise that they cannot continue to compete effectively on a global scale without utilising the increased efficiency and flexibility they can gain through outsourcing." The report also found that the value of major outsourcing contracts awarded last year was a record €58bn worldwide.Over two thirds of this was IT outsourcing and a third business process outsourcing, whereby companies engage third parties to perform functions such as finance, accounting"More and more companies, particularly the larger companies, are moving towards what we term 'global service delivery' in which they buy services provided in several different locations internationally through a single contract," said Aitchison., procurement and human resources processing.
In many ways business process is by far the most important and valuable form of collaboration since while e-mail, instant messaging, and shared workspaces facilitate communication, business process achieves business goals. When a customer buys something on the web site, a process is set in motion which at its conclusion results in the customer receiving goods and the enterprise, money. Where the eighties were known as the decade of productivity applications - spreadsheets, word processors, and so on, the nineties as the decade of email and the Internet, this decade, starting now (isn't it interesting that software waves start around the middle of the chronological decade), will be the Decade of Process. In the last generation there have been two other revolutions in the way we think about and manage information.
The first is the relational database with which we can query, track, analyze, and report upon enormous volumes of data in ways unimaginable two decades back. The value of the relational database is underscored by the fact that relational technology is at the heart of every major business application shipped today. But for all their power, the DBMS does not represent data in a way intuitively consumed by humans. Only the worst client-server applications would show table upon table. We humans think in document terms: we like text, we like annotations, we like personalization: we rely on the DBMS for structure and integrity, but for human renditions of the data, we prefer the age-old notion of documents.
And that leaves us with a gap: how do we move information from databases to humans and back again, how do we render data in useful ways, through multiple steps in a process and to multiple channels? We need a malleable, infinitely transformable intermediate form for data; and that, of course, is XML. we have only begun to truly appreciate the power and value of XML. It allows applications to easily read relational data and render it in ways appropriate to the human, be it on browser, electronic form, PDA or cell phone. From the neutral XML we can generate any number of types of documents, as appropriate: the order becomes a shipping form becomes an invoice, all from the same neutral data, depending upon the state of the process. XML makes information fluid.
It's trite, but true to say that business runs on business process. Order processing, supply replenishment, human-resources management, and so on and so on: the way we accomplish these goals in a manageable, trackable, and measurable way is through the institution of business process. As we examine business processes, it's obvious that there are many different kinds. Highly deterministic, automated processes control real-time scenarios like electronic funds transfer: People-driven processes by contrast enables the interoperation, the collaboration, of a company's most valuable asset, its employees. Employee performances reviews present an illustrative example: an employee creates a self-appraisal, which is forwarded to the manager, who comments and forwards it further, perhaps to the next-level manager. The review has salary and (perhaps) legal implications, and individuals in those departments are also therefore involved.
And there other types of process: there are document-centric processes, where people, sometimes very large numbers of people, collaborate on a document such as a New Drug Application or merger and acquisition disclosures. There are business-to-business processes; and so on. You can slice the categories of process in many ways. Years back,we in the software industry thought of enterprise application integration (EAI), human workflow, business-to-business communications, and business process management as separate product categories. Today, we do not. Today we think of them as aspects or facets of the same problem, of business process. Any reasonable business process today will have elements of human workflows and backend application integration. How have these notions of process now affected our view of documents? Yes: and in a very, very profound way. In business, documents rarely stand alone; they are manifestations of a greater process; in fact, I claim that business documents are projections of the state of business processes. We are reaching a stage in which the document as a thing-in-itself no longer exists; but different viewers and editors can be instantiated to manipulate process context. Indeed, I have seen examples of business processes in which at appropriate points documents are created from scratch, from nothing, by creating an instance of an XML schema, populated from information in the process -- and then show up as Microsoft Word attachments in end users' email inboxes. This is why it is good to say that this decade of Process will again revolutionize business, as productivity applications and the Internet did in past decades. Building on such crucial advances in technology as relational databases and that marvelously fluid intermediate format XML, we can drive business process to new heights of efficiency and productivity - and this will be essential as the world's business continues to globalize, as even the smallest enterprises run 24 by 7. Illuminating speech - more so at a time when everyone is so focussed on technology exclusively, Barry brings the process perspective.
We recently covered in our blog the nominations for the Indiblog awards Nominated For The Indiblog Awards wherein we mentioned that this blog has been nominated for the Indibloggies 2004 awards in the Best Science/Technology Category and requested readers to go ahead and vote and also pointed outthere are some very good blogs listed there as well, that includes some of my favourites as well. As voting is now on , we again request our readers to read the nominated blogs, assess the value add and relevance, look at those blogs whic have won the awards last time and make an informed choice and judgement. Please note the organisers suggestion - to view all the blogs and read the jurors comments before voting. It might help you in arriving at the best decision.
Andrew Chen in her brief article titled,"5 Reasons Why Feedster and Technorati will Die" questions the future of Technorati and Feedster. In a nutshell,Andrew writes,with Microsoft announced that they are supporting RSS search. The future of Technorati and Feedster is a discount acquisition by one of the portals, maybe at the end of this year.
First - MS,GG,YAHOO business model is ad supported
Second- the technology is not significantly different than traditional search
Third - their function puts them straight on the traintracks of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft - Sites like Technorati/Feedster connect people with information, except the information is on blogs and pages.
Fourth - there isn't a first-mover, platform-like advtantage. Though technorati has API’s available and if Google decides to support RSS search and opens up their own APIs,the attraction is lost. Jeremy Zawodny has indicated that Yahoo wanted to be the first to be out the RSS search.
Fifth- (and this point will be a long one) Feedster and Technorati have, fundamentally, the wrong UI paradigm.(Browse Vs Search Paradigm). Dave Sifry, CEO of technorati responded by saying that 90% of Technorati that is "under the surface" so to speak ,and shall begin to surface in the future.
My Take: I agree with the views of Andrew. Both Tech
