Guide To Finding Information: Search Engines

A Perspective On Software Market Consolidation

This is an abstract of a brief note that I wrote for sandhill on Software Market Consolidation.The new economy software startups measured on different parameters are beginning to realize that earnings have replaced revenue growth as the new measure of success on Wall Street. This shift in outlook and measurements are creating pressures – these shall trigger a powerful wave of consolidation throughout the industry over the next few years.
The grouping may be along the patterns of:
- Platform Players Forcing Consolidation:
- Basket of Best Of Breed Players:
The general trend toward consolidation is already felt. Big time acquisitions are already happening. This phase of growth may be stepped up in the coming days:
- Acquisitions across the segments including application, systems, infrastructure players ;
- The maturity lifecycle of the industry and the more mature players ready to leverage acquisition opportunities to improve their future standing;
- Slow pace of innovation facilitates the identification of acquisition players and acts of acquisition.
In general, consolidation needs to be driven with the objectives:
- To grow market share (limited value to customers)
- Technology upgradation (Short term attractive – over a period competition may catch-up)
- To expand domain expertise- Offers long-term benefits to the vendor and customer.
Every vendor needs to choose what’s most important depending on the state of its business and the industry. Smaller vendors shall become part of ecosystems centered around key players and to survive. please read the full article at Sandhill.

Saying No In Business

Saying No in business is becoming an art and is an absolute must. Bill Burnham captures this succintly when he writes about saying NO to entrepreneurs. Bill writes it is essential while saying no to be:
Honest: It’s tempting to use a convenient excuse, but you and the entrepreneur are both better off if you are upfront and honest. .
Specific: To the extent that you can be specific, you owe entrepreneurs the real reasons for why you are saying “no”. Not only is this the right, professional thing to do, but it will also help force you to make sure you are making the right decision.
Quick: A fast "no" is much better than a long draw out “no”, both for the entrepreneur and for you.

( Via Slacker Manager) Skip writes in CTO’s corner about Jim Collins saying "Great" companies have a better sense of focus of their execution is the idea to start putting together a "Stop doing" List and lists common areas where this can be tried out in business.
"The customer is always right." - Slogan used often in reference to providing good customer service. But, what if the customer is wrong? What if you are providing a product or service and they just don't understand how it intended to be used and uses it incorrectly? They need to understand where you are coming from.Too often, we react to customers' need too quickly and don't understand what their real problem is (which usually isn't the problem that they are communicating).
"Every customer is a good customer"- While it is true for profit-based companies to have customers in order to stay in business, there is such a thing as having a bad customer. Find out how this potential customer treats their other vendors as well as their particular customers. You can learn a lot about how they will treat your organization. If they are coming from a competitor, really try and understand why they are leaving them and coming to you. There are bad customers who can become high maintenance and take service away from the rest of your customers. How will your other customers feel about that?
"Every opportunity is a good opportunity". This kind of goes along with the previous statement, but focusing on what products and services you provide to which industries. Diversification and ability to service and nichefication strategies are important and should be factored in. Getting into the wrong opportunities not only takes you away from the good things that have kept you in business but could come with costs that could hurt the bottom line of profitability and possibly end your business. Opportunities come with risks, just make sure you understand what they are and if it is worth the gamble.
Motherood goody goody statements are fine- but bottomline- here are times to say YES and keep on your "to do" list. There are also times where it is best to say no and add to your "stop doing" list.Saying NO is never easy but has to be done.

Jingles & RFID Tags

Software Industry Consolidation -Role For Outsiders?

Mike Nevens, Ex Mckinsey managing partner opines,interests of executives, board members, bankers and private equity firms is coming in the way of the"Interlocking overdue restructuring and consolidation in the software industry". Excerpts with heavy edits:
The hyped up demand for software is gone. Some of the software companies are investing for a future they can never reach. They need to be restructured – downsized, merged, acquired or liquidated. The consolidation has begun but the problem is that it is not happening fast enough or at sufficient scale. The biggest constraint is that management and directors of many companies are not thinking clearly enough about the reality in front of them. These small coalitions are self-interested & despite their modest size, these coalitions can change the course and pace of progress. They slow down decision making, introduce complexity, and often lead to increased constraints on thought and action that limit the range of options open for consideration by the senior management and boards of the companies infected with these informal coalitions. Many private equity firms are caught in the same informal web of these informal, self-interested coalitions. They depend on the cooperation of managers and executives for ideas for deals and for the management talent to run these ventures.

The potential benefits of consolidation are substantial. Restructuring could spur the software industry to do a better job for its customers. Customer spending will likely pick up only when enterprises become convinced they can get distinct benefits from their IT investments. Customers need solutions that are tailored to their industry and their current state of internal capabilities, and help in changing organizations, business practices, policies and processes to become more productive. The myriad of small tech companies cannot deliver this value proposition. They simply throw more technology at the problem –which exacerbates the situation. Mike concludes by saying,"As it happened in the energy sector, people and firms outside the circle that formed around the prosperity of the 1990s will lead the reform of high tech". I actually wanted to point to this a little later but could not resist. My views on software industry restructuring(written before Mike's view appeared),slightly different in expected outcome but, in total agreement on the basic facts and on overdue consolidation could be published shortly,as part of this series. More on this topic next week here.

Open Source & IT Management - Next Wave

Jeff points to an interesting article on Opensource & IT Management that appeared in Linux Journal. Excerpts with edits and comments added:
- The four platforms that now dominate the IT management market-from BMC, Computer Associates, HP and IBM all were designed for the upper echelon of the Fortune 100. The result is an overload of capabilities and features that the majority of companies don't want or need. Many Global 2000 firms now pay license costs for IT management software that are very high.
- Deployment and system administration of these proprietary systems are even more expensive tasks, typically costing five to eight times the initial software-licensing fee.
- Key concern of IT teams using commercial IT management frameworks is the inherent difficulty in customizing and configuring these proprietary systems. Getting standard products configured and deployed often takes months, even years in many cases. Once the system is installed, users face rigid vendor lock-in scenarios and difficult/costly upgrade paths.
-Much like Apache during its initial rise to prominence in Web servers, open-source IT management products, such as Nagios, have matured rapidly and now offer competitive functionality and greater flexibility over proprietary platforms at a fraction of the cost.
- In 2005, however, the dynamics of the user market are shifting. With companies such as AOL, Cingular, Siemens, TicketMaster and TimeWarner Cable already embracing and relying on open-source IT management products, the category of open-source IT management solutions is poised for mainstream adoption.
- In the opensource world, product upgrades and expertise needed to maintain are more economical and lot more quicker. Opensource IT management solutions have three core characteristics that make them well-suited to the task of monitoring and managing heterogeneous IT environments:
- they provide open interfaces;
- they are built on component architectures that are highly configurable; and
- the open-source code is transparent and designed to be modifiable.
This combination makes an open-source IT management solution an ideal "manager of managers." Most companies have several different IT management systems in place already, each monitoring different aspects of the network at any given moment. One system monitors application performance, for example, while another focuses on databases and still another manages routers and other network devices. By providing a consolidated view across the entire IT infrastructure, this manager of managers approach enables better IT performance and more timely IT decision-making.
Open-source solutions lower both the upfront cost and the long-term TCO of IT monitoring and management in several ways:
-No licensing fees
-Lower deployment costs:
-Low system administration overhead
-Low hardware costs:
-A Growing Open Source Ecosystem
A number of opensource IT management products are gaining traction, including Nagios--660,000 downloads since 2001-for availability monitoring; MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) for network device statistics; Nmap for network scanning and discovery; Ntop for network traffic analysis; SyslogNG for log file analysis; and Cacti for SNMP analysis and performance graphing. These products provide strong core functionality for an enterprise-class monitoring solution. A growing ecosystem of companies is now in place with a track record of delivering professional consulting, integration and support services that many CIOs require before making the move to open-source IT management.
My Take:Opensource is a mixed bag in terms of user adaoption thus far - paradoxically , the adoption and usage appears higher in system admin area - typically the arena of techies. Opensource need to move into the desktop and mobile market - to make its presence felt -only when millions and millions begin to use it over and over again, the movement would stop unstoppable momentum. The opensource bodies should look at the mass market segment seriously - if inroads can be made there -I beleive it is certainly possible- then it shall become the real force that could fundamentally alter the technology world.

Technology Changes The Art Of The Possible

(Via Knowledge@Emory) Being able to read the signs and able to read the signs and stay ahead of the curve is an invaluable skill for business professionals. Benn Konsynski,a well known expert on the role of information technologies that transform enterprise and market practice, has turned his future forecasting skill into an art. Recently he spoke to a public forum in Atlanta as part of Emory University’s Great Teachers Lecture Series.
Key points in the speech:
-Science is the study of what we can know, while magic is about shaping nature to our will. Figuring out the way magic works and replicating it is the way that technology is conceived - technology is magic revealed or understood. "Magic brings the will, aspiration and purpose to conceive technology."
- Information, relates to commerce and commerce practice. The first is that information is the only commodity you can give away and still have, and second, that information is imminently recombinant. It can be ripped apart, elementalized , unbundled and recombined in new ways.
- CEOs who study history in general, and specifically the history of their company and market, have a head start in tracking what is to come. Those who try to see ahead without looking back have a poor sense of what is possibleand miss out on spotting trajectories from key events.
Assumptions to be challenged in future thinking.
- First—the myth of total revolution. "During second world war days, nuclear technology was expected to impact everything . The same hype structure killed the early stages of the Internet," he suggests. Emerging technologies need to be carefully evaluated as to which changes are viable and which are not.
- The second myth is the myth of social continuity, meaning we assume nothing is going to change. Streetlights and Air travel prove that small initiatives can become significantly big. Perceptions that narrow or limit the expectations of emerging technologies need to be challenged.
-The third myth is that of the technological fix. "Focusing on a solution to a societal ill or perceived problem limits the prospects of understanding the strength and opportunity in a particular technology," warns Konsynski, who relishes the implications of the "boiled frog" story.
Some of his thoughts about what lies ahead:
• Goods will be delivered to drop points on the routes you drive, because the house is less safe and work is not convenient. Strip malls may become waypoints for pickups.
• Sensor and identity technologies will be everywhere. Nanotech sensors will testify to the integrity of pharmaceutical packaging and alert us to tampering, transport schedules and mishandling.
• Goods may be tracked from the second they are created until the second they are destroyed. Rules of “ownership” may change. Networks of "things" form where inanimate objects can communicate. When they disengage the network ceases to exist.
• RFID (radio frequency identification products) is only the tip of the iceberg. Motes, smart dust and mesh net technologies, which are emerging right now, will proliferate and have a profound impact down the road.
• The small and the many will dominate the large and the few. This is already true in building super computers. Once these were monolithic engines, now we cluster many computers and link them together. This will be especially true in nano and micro technologies.
• The passive shall be active. Things will have minds of their own. Documents will want to be processed, packages will "demand" to get to locations or to people, “things” will know their rights and seek enforcement.
• Commerce is based on authentication and attestation – who are you and what decision rights and authorities do you have?
• Things shift from place to person, as has already happened with the cell phone. Where once calls were made to a location, now calls go to a particular person.
• Country club-like commerce nets will emerge. The idea of the open network will diminish as small digital universes become more important. These will be members-only forums where you will play by the stated rules.
• Technologies need to come to people and adapt to personal cognitive styles and practices, not the other way around. Up until now people have had to come to technology and everyone has needed to approach it the same way.Indeed thought provoking - speech fully ridden with powerful ideas and relevant exapmples.

Making it easy to evangelize usability

Jakob Nielsen provides guidelines and a key word for evangelizing usability within your company.

The key word for early evangelism is to be opportunistic in allocating your scarce resources. You can’t follow the recommended usability process in all its glory because your organization lacks the commitment required. Instead of fighting windmills, go for the easy wins. Paradoxically, the more successful you are at evangelizing usability in your organization, the higher the likelihood that you'll have to change your strategy. The approach that takes your company from miserable usability to decent design is not the one you'll need to get from good to great. Typically, usability becomes "established" in a company without giving the usability group the power to fully own the total user experience. The usability group is often viewed as a service organization that supplies usability expertise to project teams at their managers' request. At this point, usability groups rarely have enough resources to supply all projects with the services they need to meet the recommended UCD process.A company progresses through a series of maturity levels as usability becomes more widely accepted in the organization and more tightly integrated with the development process.And that’s the key, being opportunity driven (and creative) instead of being resource driven.

Snapshots Or Videos

While assessing competitive scenarios, we always say speed wins- After attaining a critical mass, between competing enterprises or locations, all other things being equal – pace of advancements and speed of execution makes the difference.

John Hagel points out, "Western executives often make a big mistake in assessing offshoring and outsourcing options. They undertake a detailed comparison of current capabilities and then make their decisions based on this snapshot. But snapshots miss the point. This approach misses the fact that many offshore locations, especially in China and India, are building capability at a much faster pace than comparable companies in the U.S. and Europe. It's relative pace that counts - executives need to watch videos, rather than staring at snapshots.

He points to the Economist magazine writing in Jan saying this about Huawei: Yet the true extent of Huawei's international reach is hard to gauge and pointed to its waek technology base. Three months later The Economist quotes third party survey results as saying,Huawei's ascendancy is "astounding" and says it has already surpassed several incumbent vendors in perceived market leadership.As a result,incumbent western firms should be "very scared" of Huawei. He wonders that three months have made a difference a year in the case of the Economist. And concludes that western executives need to figure out how to position their companies in these offshore locations in ways that enable them to leverage this significant difference in relative pace.
John is perhaps right in admiring the pace of change of technology related things in China & India and the west should leverage this capability while working in Asia – while I agree with him on this – I must also say that many mainstream publications including the Economist always write with limited understanding of issues when it comes to Asia and also have no compulsion to be consistent or seen to be right in hindsight.

Using RSS For Data Integration

John Udell writes,RSS helps blur the boundaries between human network and process networks. He writes about using RSS for data integration and outlines how he has configured his blogsite to use A9's opensearch capabiliites.Excerpts with edits and comments:

Amazon's OpenSearch API demonstrates the power of RSS for process-to-process communication.
- Step one was to add an alternate interface that would return results as a lightly modified RSS 2.0 feed.It differs from a vanilla feed only by a couple of A9-specific tags. These are neatly encapsulated in an OpenSearch namespace, and they demonstrate a fact about RSS 2.0 that has been too little known and exploited: It’s extensible.
- Step two was to register the service, which can be done by pointing A9 at a document written in an A9-specified XML format.
OpenSearch is interesting in lots of ways, but the focus here is on its use of RSS. A9 doesn’t subscribe to the search-results feed in the way feedreaders would. It doesn’t poll for changes.Instead it sends a request to the site when an A9 user with an active InfoWorld column performs a search. The response packet sent back just happens to be formatted as RSS 2.0, but from A9’s perspective, it could be any XML format.
RSS 2.0 creates network effects that go way beyond the point-to-point relationships between A9 and its search partners. RSS 2.0 search results served double duty. It accomplishes the integration with A9, but it also dramatically expanded InfoWorld’s RSS surface area. Now, for the first time, one can subscribe to any InfoWorld search in a feed reader.
Most people nowadays use RSS for person-to-person communication. You know the pattern: When a publisher posts a blog item, subscribers are alerted. A growing number of folks are also using RSS for process-to-person communication. Subscribing to searches is the best example of this pattern. A9’s use of RSS for process-to-process communication represents a third pattern. We’ll be seeing a lot more of it. Not because RSS enables process integration in special ways - it doesn’t - but rather because RSS helps us blur the boundaries between human network and process networks.

SOAP : From Brain Dead Onto Real Death!!

Carlos Peres in a series of postings says, writes SOAP is Comatose But Not Officially Dead. Carlos writes," SOAP is comatose, but hasn't declared legally dead by either IBM or Microsoft. SOAP is supposed to be the underpinnings of Web Services. Between 2002 and late 2004, despite the knowledge of SOAP’s tight coupling approach, the industry by and large persisited with SOAP.
With the rise of REST and the fall of SOAP, denial has been now replaced with panic". Carlos adds, "The RESTful approach has now born fruit. Applications like BlogLines, Flickr, Mappr, Del.icio.us and 43Things are revealing that proof is in the pudding. All of these have shunned SOAP in favor of more RESTful designs. Carlos demonstrates through a no. of blog posts the disdain with SOAP by various people in different contexts. Some of the writins include the likes of - Distinctions between enterprise and "consumer" are breaking down. REST is evidently where that convergence is being played out, not WS-I".
While examing SOAP’s interoperability- Carlos writes, "Of course, the last 2 tips are the most revealing of all. If everything is sent over the wire as a XML document that is described by an XSD then it all boils down to how easy you can work with these documents. That is working with XML api's like DOM and XPath. The enclosing envelope should be irrelevant to the concerns of the average developer; it should be treated like just any other transport protocol. All that extra machinery provided to support the SOAP envelope is precisely that, extra machinery and has never been shown to improve interoperability. Therefore, in terms of effort, interoperability via SOAP is not any easier than doing it in REST. In fact, its actually more insidious because a developer is all too easily lulled in the fallacy that an object is the same as the XML document" and concludes SOAP is brain dead..

In a follow through posting, Carlos writes,The last nail may have been when Yahoo announced its Web Services. REST was awarded the design win over SOAP. The Yahoo! Search Web Services are all REST services. That means you can easily construct request URLs that will work in your browser, on the command line, and in your code. Carlos concludes,"The day REST is synonymous with "Web Services" is the day SOAP is truly dead, and that day may have arrived a day too early for many".There is no doubt that SOAP has failed to live upto its promise and the industry is now pushing REST in a big way.

Amazon, Technology & Winning Ways

Amazon.com has one potentially big advantage over its rival online retailers. Excerpts with heavy edits and my comments added:

While competitors have detailed systems for tracking customer habits, critics and boosters alike say Amazon is the trailblazer, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. Amazon has collected detailed information about what its customers buy, considered buying, browsed for but never bought, recommended to others or even wished someone would buy them. It has built ever-more sophisticated tools to recommend more purchases, direct your searches toward products it thinks you're most likely to want, or even stop the forgetful among us from buying the same book we purchased five years ago."In general, we collect as much information as possible such that we can provide you with the best feedback," said Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer.
More recently, Amazon has launched a Web search engine, called A9, with ability to remember all individual searches - and the site reserves the right to share that information with its retailing arm. Amazon also funds a Web site called 43 Things.com. It seeks to link people with similar goals, such as getting out of debt. There are questions whether A9 is worth the hefty investment.A9 ranked 41st in popularity among search engines in February, attracting only a fraction of visitors to Google or Yahoo.
Manber, A9’s chief says,- there are no current plans to link customer's Web searches with their Amazon shopping habits, even though data from both sites are stored using the same customer log-in. Amazon's backing of 43 Things potentially gives it an opening into social networking. At the site, people list personal goals and find out who else shares their ambitions. Many internet companies, including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc.,are investing in technology that seeks to build communities.

My Take: A9 seems to give me-too results like other search engines, but with a more complex interface- we have to see how this finds users regularly reusing the search engine.I see clear synergies and definite value add for amazon to develop such networking sites such as 43things.com. Amazon’s collaborative filtering and recommendation mechanism is definitelt miles ahead and all set to improve further and reap bigger rewards for amazon. The technology coupled with Amazon’s process gives it an unparalled edge even attracting rivals to use the Amazon platform.Technology edgethat can accurately anticipate a customer's greatest desires is going to be a differentiator in the growing competition with Internet-based upstarts and traditional retailers moving online, - customer relationship centers around this.Amazon may need to get more explicit and understand the sensitivities involved.

Inc Magazine Selects 26 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs

Inc. magazine goes behind the scenes with 26 entrepreneurs who best exemplify the extraordinary drive, creativity, and passion of American business. In the top 26 list, one for each year of Inc., spans the gamut of the entrepreneurial world, from well known names, such as Richard Branson, Michael Dell, and Martha Stewart; to Tony Lee, a former janitor who bought out his steel manufacturing employer; to Craig Newmark, who has been almost the antithesis of a dot-commer with his no-frills Craigslist site. Inc. says, no matter what the accomplishment, each entrepreneur profiled here offers a fascinating case study in what it takes to thrive in today's economy. Interesting list indeed - when the fad now is to to a fault focus only on high tech industry, the selection looks balanced.

Swami Vivekananda's Chicago Address in MP3

(Via Reuben) Divyesh of Desigeek has put up MP3 versions of Swami Vivekananda's famous speech at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. The quality looks good indeed given the fact that these were originally recorded in 1893. The links:
Part 1 and Part II.

The Future Of Microsoft?

Thomas Hazlett writes a provocative article titled Is Microsoft toast? Excerpts with heavy edits, cross references and my views added:
Apple, finally price competitive with PCs, and offering software used interchangeably with other programs, the company is staging a run. Apple’s share of the US desk top computers market was up by half from 2003 to 2004.That share is still low – just 3 per cent for desk tops, about twice that for notebooks – but a much bigger run may be in the offing. Apple, with its tight, integrated interfaces cinching hardware to software has proven powerfully resistant to viruses and spyware, the poisonous infections of the Internet. Microsoft users scramble to update their software with the latest patches, frantically downloading anti-viral software, running and re-running spyware disinfectants. With the Mac offering equally proficient word processing, presentations, spread sheets, web browsing and email, along with the standard multi-media applications, many look at Apple as a credible alternative.
A new "browser war" has been launched in the form of Firefox.We covered the viewpoint Firefox is to IE, What IE was to Netscape,wherein we covered the raise of Firefox. Customers are embracing Mozilla because it navigates the web faster than I.E., is free to download, and resistant to spyware.The threat, just as with Netscape (and its embedded Java script) a decade ago, is that valuable functions will gradually shift away from Microsoft’s domain – including, in the end, the operating system itself. This application creep happens so easily – like Google -providing a new and improved search engine, splices in a few well-targeted ads, and is now capitalized at $50bn. Microsoft, despite ‘owning’ the software on which the applications run, did not get here first. We also covered the threat perception to microsoft in the piece Bandwidth is microsoft's enemy where we looked at the challenges and opportunities for Microsoft in the high bandwidth world.The range of product innovation chipping away at the large, increasingly vulnerable incumbent is impressive, and the diversity of organizational innovation more so. Apple is today on the upsurge because its personal computing systems have been vacuum-sealed, and because the company has – to the point of fetish – delighted in producing its own devices. Its dominance challenged, Microsoft is trying hard to come back – with a new, more bug-resistant Internet Explorer web browser, with vastly expanded email (Hotmail and MSN) offerings, and an array of intensive counter measures. This looming competitive Armageddon may well rock Microsoft to its core, it most certainly will produce a new bundle of benefits for consumers.
My Take: Microsoft appears to be losing customer centricity and their cultural DNA seems to be moving away from incremental innovation –particularly with the windows platform and their inexplicable delay in rolling out Longhorn are clear indications of losing steam. Microsoft will take decades to be out of business as their product basket of offering is wide – and some niches may still save the company- We have written earlier that Microsoft has made impressive strides in the CES market- we covered Russ's viewIts game over for microsoft's competitors in the CES space, but also note that they are not able to shine in the areas of search, blogging etc.. We also covered earlier Microsoft dropping the passport initiative clearly a demonstartion of not being able to make it work well enough despite its size and pursuing a powerful idea at hand. I am still baffled why Microsoft (other than for being selfish about its interest) as to why Microsoft is not considering providing a hosted solution - when enteprise application software vendors are beginning to provide and stepping up aggression in pushing. Microsoft may end up to be a palse shadow of its present –that would be sad indeed – but the risk is indeed high for Microsoft. Microsoft is lucky that currently there is no one alternative that can dislodge it in key arena's - starting particularly in the desktop segment..

Mobile In Gas Stations - Anatomy Of A Techno-myth

The Economist writes, The debate over the safety of mobile phones has little to do with science. Excerpts with edits and comments:

Adam Burgess, a researcher at the University of Kent, in England answers the question- Can mobile phones cause explosions at petrol stations?. For the concern rests not on scientific evidence of any danger, but is instead the result of sociological factors: it is an urban myth, supported and propagated by official sources, but no less a myth for that. Mobile phones started to become widespread in the late 1980s, when the oil industry was in the middle of a concerted safety drive. A precautionary ban on the use of mobile phones at petrol stations was imposed,in large part, a response to the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988, when 167 people died in an explosion on an oil platform off the Scottish coast. The worry was that an electrical spark might ignite explosive fumes.
By the late 1990s, however, phonemakers—having conducted their own research—realised that there was no danger of phones causing explosions since they could not generate the required sparks. But it was too late. The myth had taken hold.Despite the lack of evidence that mobile phones can cause explosions, bans remain in place around the world, though the rules vary widely. Such concerns are part of a broader pattern of unease about mobile phones. There is a curious discrepancy, Adam Burgess notes, between the way that such phones have become indispensable, and the fact that they are also vaguely considered to be dangerous. The safety of mobile phones would appear to be not so much the province of the hard science of physics, as of the soft science of sociology. Some belief's are indeed very difficult to dislodge!!.

Yahoo – The UnGooGled & The New Bridge Between Silicon Valley & Hollywood

Michael S.Malone writes, "For sometime Google has been the yardstick by which business and technology success is measured". Excerpts with heavy edits and comments added :

The indignity to Yahoo is unfair as Yahoo's numbers show: 165 million registered users, 345 million unique visitors a month, $49 billion market cap, and a 62 per¬cent increase in revenue last quarter, bringing 2004 total revenue to $3.6 billion. Yahoo makes more money and has more patents, services, and users than Google. Given Yahoo’s recent financial results and the expected growth in its business- Yahoo may very well be the most valuable business on the Web. Yahoo is the biggest consumer Internet company you may almost never think about.
Yahoo is everything on the net - offers specialty services,mass appeal, narrow and wide,shallow and deep – its both horizontal and vertical," COO Dan Rosensweig says, rather unhelpfully. Terry Samel has revived one of the great Internet brands using a classic tool of old-world business, M&A, and simply by giving the customers what they want. He has spent money in acquiring Web companies like Inktomi and Overture. As Om Malik points out –"Yahoo’s Overture division is finally getting its act together and rolling out its small-publisher service. By buying Flickr earlier this month and OddPost last year, Yahoo has bought into the open-standards, web services business model, something which has gotten it much love from the bloggers. Adding RSS and blogs to My Yahoo first makes them cooler than the other two - MSN and Google. In an effort to beat Google, the company has upped its free email storage to one gigabyte. Yahoo offered desktop search tool, just like Google. It is launching a blogging-meets-social networking tool, Yahoo 360".

Yahoo believes in horizontal scalability - As an Internet company, it's possible to continually add products and services based on market demand without worrying about shelf space or distribution. Yahoo has the technical capability to build most anything- recent additions like video search, desktop search, and RSS reading are shining examples. Yahoo has the cash to buy anything it chooses not to build. Each service becomes more valuable in concert. This effect is only amplified by broadband.
- Google is focussed on technology while Yahoo says their focus is in understanding what customers want.
- Google invents for markets that don't exist; Yahoo goes after markets it wants to own. If that means a state-of-the-art search engine, so be it.
- In short, while Google was busy becoming what Yahoo! used to be, Yahoo! has become what AOL should have been.
- After Yahoo delinked Google from search early indications are that - Yahoo! is actually gaining ground in Google's core business. These findings, along with the fundamentally different approaches to business, would seem to point to an epic clash between Yahoo! and Google.
Yahoo and Google are headed in different directions. Google is on its way to battle Microsoft later this decade, while Yahoo is looking towards Hollywood. Yahoo wants to delivering rich content to any Web-enabled device at any time, a vision that could make Yahoo the obvious next step in Hollywood's Internet strategy. Yahoo doesn't just want to deliver movies. – but wants to provide more personalized experience. Customizing the site down to the neighborhood level will make it more appealing to users and indispensable to advertisers.Powerful forces driving the business holding great potential for Yahoo’s business. Technological change and further customization will be constants. Jerry Yang says, "Access isn't sufficient. It's not enough to search. You also have to find - and then share with others. That's where this company is going" Yahoo has really come back with a bang – its proof that solid companies with dynamic plans and nimble footed decisions would win in this internet 2.0 age as well.

The Clash Of The Business Models - The iPod Phone - When? If Only!!

(Via Businessweek) Mobile carriers such as Verizon and Cingular are hesitant to sell the Apple-Motorola gadget. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:

The iPod mobile phone looks irresistible than a device combining the digital-music prowess of Apple Computer with Motorola's expertise .The launch is delayed apparently due to lack of support from such giant cellular operators as Verizon Wireless and Cingular. The wireless companies are reluctant to promote the Motorola-Apple phone. Behind the clash are two very different views of the future of music on mobile phones. Motorola and Apple would let customers put any digital tune they already own on their phones for free. That would help Motorola sell more phones, and it would help Apple expand its dominance of digital music. Verizon, Cingular, and other wireless operators want customers to pay to put music on phones. The carriers have no interest in conceding the booming digital-music market to the tech players. Carriers are seeing, Apple as "a competitor not to be embraced, but to be rejected."

For the 99¢,paid by customers for iTunes,Apple only gets about 4¢ of that, after paying the record company and others- Apple says iTunes is only a breakeven business. Verizon and others typically subsidize the phones they sell to customers, One way would be for U.S. carriers to follow the in Europe where carriers such as Vodafone Orange, and O2 have set up their own digital-music stores, letting customers download music tracks over the cellular network to their phones. Carriers get a slice of the $2.80 customers pay per song. Wireless players also could offer customers subscription services, with access to thousands of songs for a flat monthly fee of $15 or $20.

U.S. carriers hope to position themselves as major players in digital music and swipe the spotlight from Apple. Their ideal scenario would be for customers to use their mobile phones as digital jukeboxes, plugging in headphones to listen on the go and dropping the phone into a cradle attached to stereo speakers at home. While Apple and Motorola may object, wireless operators can buy music-downloading handsets from phonemakers that are willing to play by their rules - perhaps aggressive Asian players such as Samsung and LG. "There is a sweet spot in mobility and music," says James Ryan, Cingular's vice-president for consumer data services.

Smaller rivals, such as T-Mobile, may peddle Apple to gain ground on the industry leaders. Motorola says it's working out ways for carriers to profit from digital music, and it expects to launch the phone with that support this summer. Motorola and Apple could also bypass carriers altogether and sell the phone via retail stores or their own Web sites.
My Take: Interesting battle ahead – battle of business models and we have to wait and see how the consumer pull factors weighs in here against aggressive push by dominant players – is there a role for any additional regulation here not that one asks for – but can wireless carriers be legally right in refusing to sell new models of phones that consumers may like? Consumers may also want to ask the question why should the wireless players want consumers to pay almost three times more than what Apple in charging for downloading music? Apple should get more aggressive and may be open its treasure chest a bit to muscle in. Apple should also try and penetrate non-US markets- Apple is traditionally late entrant in the the international markets - more so when mobile market is growing fast particularly in Asia - where music is also a very significant medium and it may be easy for Apple to tie up with different mobile carriers in the fragmented asian markets.

Websites As Public Digital Content Repositories

We recently covered Paul Allen's view, Fastest Growth Sites Are Built on User Generated Content. Paul writes,one of the most powerful ways to develop web site traffic is to enable users to share their content through your web site with others-to create community around user generated content.Many of the fastest growing web sites of all time did this (or do it now): MyFamily.com, eBay, GeoCities, Xoom, Homestead, MySpace, Epinions, Hotshots, LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, Friendster, and more.If sites are uses to get customers to blog, use message boards, upload photos or reviews, the effect shall be dazzling.With open source software (for message boards, blogs, uploading photos, and more) and with the cost of hard drive storage a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago, the time has never been better to try a user generated content strategy.

Siliconvalley reports, websites aiming to become repositories and clearinghouses for a wide variety of digital content created by the public tapping into a growing interest in so-called grass-roots media, are getting launched. Ourmedia, is offering a central place for people to upload and store any digital media they want to share with the world, including video, audio, images and text files. The service is free.The service could help content producers find new audiences for their work. And it could become a cultural archive for researchers and future generations of Internet users wanting to view history through an alternative media lens. Grassroots media has enjoyed an explosion of interest in the past year, fueled by the increased credibility of bloggers and the growing popularity of video and audio tools such as camcorders and editing software.
Content is proliferating. A video blogging Internet discussion board - which had only about 50 members in December - now has about 5,500. Podcasting has spawned thousands of amateur Internet radio shows.The Internet Archive, building its own massive digital library, has agreed to host the Ourmedia files on its Web servers. Ourmedia's free hosting is a boon to video and audio artists, who can face costly storage and bandwidth fees when they upload large media files to the Web.
The organization eventually plans to release the source code of its Web site, potentially spawning an array of similar Web sites and media repositories. The group also is talking with companies such as Yahoo and Google about hosting media files on their own servers. It wants third-party developers to build their own interfaces to its content. And the group is exploring peer-to-peer technology that would allow Ourmedia to become a gateway to media files stored on individual personal computers.
Much of Ourmedia's vision is shared by another site called NowPublic, allowing everyday people to act as editors, reporters and photographers. A user submits "assignments" requesting information about a particular topic or event, and others upload video, photos or text to complete the story.With increased web activity, lowered bandwidth costs,plummeting storage costs and advancements in webservices technology coupled pioneering initiatives like this, the voluntary digital content movement is all set to grow rapidly.
Category : Emerging Technologies.

Remixes & The Long Trail

Someone mailed me today to say that all blogs are remixes and packaged rehashes - I have enormous respect for him and his idea.While I see his point, I disagreed with it completely.The Long Tail is now Big Business. .Brian Dear writes,about the Long Trail. "Remix" is the theme of the Etech conference "Remix your hardware", "Remix your software", "Remix your web".The thing about remixing is that it makes something new out of something old. The act of remixing itself is nothing new. Remixing even in media is nothing new. Remixing in music in particular Mash-ups, remixes, all that stuff has been around for decades. The path hewn by the pioneers of remixing goes way back. It's a long trail.
The Long Trail is about the unevenly-distributed future. Stuff that's coming on your radar today came on someone else's radar days, or weeks, or months, or years, or decades, ago. Stuff being presented at the ETech conference is for the most part remixes of work done over the past years to decades. This isn't necessarily bad, but it is interesting when the conference is called "Emerging Technology". Thanks to blogs and a saturation of news and technology websites, one knows a lot of what's going on.
Pito Salas offers an excellent perspective with a counterview saying criticisms that new products getting launched are similar to doctoral thesis published long back miss the key point that,sometimes the kernel of an idea came from some other project. Often things are invented simultaneously in different domains. while certain products 'perfect' what was done already in a more primitive way - A'successful' product has a relatively small bit of 'science' or 'invention' or 'creativity' and a ton of great engineering, not to mention marketing, sales and business strategy. So there's nothing new under the sun, it's all just remixes. But that doesn't necessarily make it unimportant!
My Take: I totally agree - not everything need to be fresh creations, nor we should always overlook what currently exists - part of new growth shall be extensions of what exist and intersection of what currently exists would lead to newer ideas or products - so i think we should never underestimate to ability to build on what exists and by all means encourage looking over the shoulders of giants and the ability to build on others thoughts. Innovation would not come out of vaccum.

Technology & Our Changing Daily Lives

David Kirkpatrick writes,as technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, we seek out other less obtrusive gadgets to protect us from all the noise.Excerpts with heavy edits and my comments added:

In this device centric age, technology is increasingly defining usage of time.The amazingly small and light iPod is giving new insights into how technology is changing our daily lives. With the iPod shuffle, it's infinitely easier to live in a world of music. Subway riders are quieter than they once were. David thinks that as many as 25% of all the commuters either in the cars or on the platforms are listening to music, an audio book, or a Podcast in NYC. In the Tokyo subway, almost all the commuters pull out cellphones or other electronic devices and peck at their miniature keyboards, sending messages or playing games. In Korea,Taiwan,Singapore, Hongkong - things are not far different.

David thinks that this is something the music industry needs to fully appreciate We can now simply listen to more music. That's why downloading music has got to be an unalloyed good for the industry. The music companies probably have to figure out different pricing models, but there's no question that the industry's opportunities are growing, not diminishing, as people have easier access to music and listen to it more often. David reckons one reason that music could be becoming more centric to us in digital lifestyle has to do our exasperation with the other technologies -cellphones, PCs, BlackBerries, laptops, etc. With all these devices, we're wired and ready to receive telephone calls, e-mails, IMs, and instant everything all the time. The email is particularly annoying– with each passing day its more and more debilitating. David writes, email is becoming a curse, not a blessing.with increasing numbers and too time consuming. Music soothes the frazzled beast,helping to sooth frayed nerves!! David’ further goes on to discuss about the cellphones and playstations – well reflected thoughts and quite insightful. So more technnology and more innovation is clearly the answer to the ills of technology.

My Take: Mobile in its present form may also become as unpopular as today's email.It is clear that over the next five years with more and more digital devices integrating into our daily lifes and more and more digital infrastructure getting installed - life is never going to be the same- it is as if a new world, true in its physical sense as well - is getting created. Huge opportunities await those who sense and take steps to leverage this massive emerging tecchnology and applications

Web Services Mash -Up @ETech

There's much excitement around the public web services springing up from big players and not-so-big players alike: Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Salesforce.com, Alexa, Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. The possibilities when you string these services together are indeed amazing. Alan Taylor of Kokogiak,and associated with "Amazon Light", an early example of what could be done with Amazon.com's Web Service platform,Erik Benson of erikbenson, associated with 43things.com and allconsuming.net and Cal Henderson of Ludicorp come together to make an oustanding presentation titled web services mash-up. Some of the key tenets outlined include:

•Complementary data is your friend
•Overlaps, Intersections, Keywords, Tags, Categories, etc.
•Use a common "key" to fetch multiple results (technorati tags)
•Chain results together, building on each call (Google Categories -> Flickr tags)
•Add your own information into the mix

Some Considerations to be thought through include:
•Terms of Use, Attribution/credit/licensing
•Acting conservatively (when using others' resources)
•Reliability/Graceful failure (esp. when results are chained)
•Caching (wisdom of and methods of)
•Using RSS as an API, screen-scraping
•Encourage opening up other APIs, make it business-wise.

The presentation is also made available here.

Category: Webservices, Emerging Technologies.

Patterns - Picture & Word Fusion

Jonathan Harris launches TenByTen.An interesting site that works with the process that every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources,primarily Reuters, BBC & New York Times and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.When you open 10x10, you will see a grid of the top 100 world images that hour, ranked in order of importance, reading left to right, top to bottom. Along the right edge of the screen are listed the corresponding top 100 words, one for each image. 10x10 is built using Perl, MySQL, PHP, and Macromedia Flash.Wordcount is a related Site of the 86,800 most frequently used English words arranged as a single sentence. Clearly finding patterns make the difference - if through this well engineered implementations powered through uniquely designed algorithms, if we are able to find new patterns in words and pictures, we have advanced in technology with possibilities of potential breakthrough in fields like Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence.

Dr Gernshenfeld & Fabulous Fabrications

(Via Economist)Dr Gershenfeld,the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Centre for Bits and Atoms believes the world is poised for a personal-fabrication revolution,- a way to help inventors in poor countries realise their ideas. He hopes Fab lab will, be part of it.In his opinion,just as computing power moved from million-dollar mainframes to hundred-dollar PCs, industrial-scale machinery is, beginning a transition to the desktop. While personal fabricators will not replace mass production, he believes that within the next few years they will allow individuals and small businesses to customise products to their needs. At $20,000 each—the fab lab may indeed release an outpouring of frustrated talent.
Just as Startrek had the replicator—a device that could assemble any object, atom by atom- The Nutri-Matic vending machine concocted drinks molecule by molecule in, personalising them by analysing an individual's taste buds, metabolism and brainwaves, with moderate success. Neil Gershenfeld,has built version 1.0 of the personal fabricator, and it is already being deployed around the world.The "fab lab", as Dr Gershenfeld has nicknamed his invention, is a collection of commercially available machines that, while not yet able to put things together from their component atoms, can be used to make just about anything with features bigger than those of a computer chip. Among other tools it includes a laser cutter that makes two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures, a device that uses a computer-controlled knife to carve antennas and flexible electrical connections, a miniature milling machine that maneuvers a cutting tool in three dimensions to make circuit boards and other precision parts, a set of software for programming cheap computer chips known as microcontrollers, and a jigsaw (a narrow-bladed cutting device, not a picture puzzle). Together, these can machine objects with a precision of a millionth of a meter. The fab lab's purpose is to endow inventors—particularly those in poor countries who lack a formal education and the resources to implement their ideas—with a set of tools that can translate back-of-the-envelope designs into working prototypes.
Fab labs to create sensors meant for measuring fat are being deployed in Indian In Ghana, people have used the labs to produce a cassava grinder, jewellery, car parts, agricultural tools and communication equipment such as radio antennas. Solar-powered items to harness the relentless local sunlight are in the works. In Norway, Sami animal herders are using fab labs to make radio collars and wireless networks to track their charges. In Boston, the residents of a mixed-income housing complex are using the fablabs to create a wireless communication network.This opens up the opportunity in infinite ways for technology to reach the mass - helping the poor and underdeveloped in the process.

Evolving Blogging Platforms

Jeremy writes after Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr and launch of yahoo 360- He sees that the blogging market falling into fairly well defined places- there is a already a well defined split between the hosted services that offer blogging capabilities (Blogger, TypePad, Y! 360, LiveJournal, etc) and the "host it yourself" model.That second group is the ecosystem that MovableType and WordPress currently dominate and these may continue to do so. If you further divide that into "corporate/enterprise" and "personal/non-profit" groups, both products will find their respective roles.
WordPress will come to be the de-facto choice in the world of self-hosted personal weblogs and low-end webhosting "value added" package. MovableType will be the blogware of choice in the corporate blogging world, both for internal weblogs and those that face the outside world.

My Take:I agree with Jeremy's view thus far,( he has avoided discussing about blogger at length,considering it is the markestshare leader - I can well agree - Google has done little with blogger so far and service is worsening!), for personal projects that are self hosted - I think WordPress appears to be the best choice. For managed solution TypePad and MoveableType may need to be considered. Though Movable Type, appears to be losing its edge.These prefeences can change. Over time, competition will intensify and new players would try and get into this space. The hosting solutions like blogger and typepad are going to grow increasingly popular as more and more people begin blogging. WordPress has a lot of momentum behind it.

A Brief Perspective On Offshore Outsourcing & American IT Service Enterprises

A brief piece on the topic of offshoring written by me has been published at Sandhill. While not covering all dimensions of offshoring, have tried to cover a few key factors. Excerpts with edits:

Every form of digital data – creation,transformation and reporting is up for grabs in the offshoring world. But as Daniel Drezner points out,"Close to 90 percent of jobs in the United States require geographic proximity. Such jobs include everything from retail and restaurants to marketing and personal care - services that have to be produced and consumed locally, so outsourcing them overseas is not an option". There is also no evidence that jobs in the high-value-added sector are migrating overseas. The parts of production that are more complex, interactive, or innovative - including, but not limited to, marketing, research, and development - are much more difficult to shift abroad.Outsourcing would affect less than 2 percent of employed Americans. I refer to Paul Strassman’s views that there is no direct evidence to support the frequent predictions that U.S. firms will tend to outsource in order to increase profits and thus eventually leave America with a "hollow" economy.

Who will win the offshore race? The US IT services firms are under tremendous pressure from their customers to demonstrate better value for money focing them to be provide delivery from global centers. The legacies between India headquartered enterprises and traditional IT services companies are different- It’s the Southwest Airlines Vs United Airlines legacy difference. Having talented employees trained to deliver services is not enough. Leading offshore service providers have developed tools, methodologies, processes, and the management expertise for providing services to clients across geographies. India headquartered vendors think of focus on speed, imagination, and excellence in execution as a sustainable competitive differentiator. The already established western service providers often tout domian knowledge and well entrenched relationships as their edge –Empirical evidence suggests that this is not an exactly inimitable edge. If you find this abstraction interesting -please do visit sandhill.com and read the full piece.

Category : offshoring

Blogosphere - Readers Survey Findings

Henry Copeland has published the results of this years blogosphere survey. Some Interesting results:
- Year over year, some figures are remarkably stable. One reader in five is a blogger. As was the case last year, exactly 1.7% are CEOs. Almost the same number (44%) spend more than $500 for air tickets. 86% purchased music online, last year and this. Last year, 79% were men. This year, 75% are men.
- Clearly the blogosphere is crawling with certified grade A opinion makers.
- The blog readership appears quite broadbased with readers from all industries - Computer professionals constitute just 8% and just about 10% people from the computer related industry.
- Almost 88% of readers find the blogosphere to be between useful and extremely useful in providing news and opinion.
- More than 70% do not use RSS readers for reading blogs and that 90% plus readers never listen to a podcast every week.Interesting details.

Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds

Elizabeth Albrycht shares some good ideas for deploying RSS in corporations -i nternally as well as part of your employee communications, knowledge management, content management, and other systems. Excerpts with edits and comments:

1) RSS offers a way for users to organize incoming information - to overcome spam related issues around email– on their terms (since this is user subscription based). While ads are increasingly entering RSS feeds, but they remain relatively free from spam at this point.
2) RSS provides a great channel for delivering press releases to the journalists and analysts covering your company without clogging up their email inboxes. This channel can be used to deliver information that might not be worthy of a press release, but which you deem could be interesting to press/analysts nonetheless. Some companies using feeds successfully for their newsrooms include: Cape Clear Software ,IBM, Intel etc
3) RSS can be used to keep partners informed. It would be a good idea to add an RSS feed to extranet or partner area and keep it populated with press releases, announcements, product detail, meetings, etc.
4) To Keep your customers informed : Besides news, one likely target is product support information. Product tuning, specs, troubleshooting and security updates are just a few of the topics that companies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and UserLand Software provide in their RSS feeds.
5) Provide specific informational categories to enable users to receive what they are most interested in. There can be distinct feeds for different products / Geographies or services.
6) Resource centers/online libraries could be made dynamic. RSS can be used to inform audiences of new case studies, white papers, and presentations. By providing a feed specific to your library, people don't have to visit the website to see what's new.
7) RSS feeds can be created for each event planned, as well as a general event feed that keeps your audiences up to date on where and when your organization will appear.
8) RSS feed can be setup to capture and publish everything that is being said the organization online, and audiences can be kept up to date on the buzz in an automated, easy-to-manage manner. This also provides a great way for employees and executives to listen to what people are saying about the organization.
9) RSS feeds can be set up to feed for special promotions. Limited-time only product discounts, early-bird specials to events, prizes and more to key customer sets can be provided.
10) RSS feeds can be created using private (password-protected) RSS feeds as public ones. These can be a great way to keep employees, partners, customers informed of company happenings, events, promotions, office closings, and other information you don't necessarily want widely available.A feed can also be used for a final press release distribution 24 hours before it hits the wire, - to comply with SEC regulations. Well thought out - with RSS feeds getting more and more popular - corporates need to embrace feeds in a big way - in as many ways as possible.

Music To Knowledge : Rapid Strides

Paul Lamere writes about the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR)- a fairly new field, rivalling and perhaps even exceeding the field of speech recognition in terms of the technical challenges. Excerpts with edits:

Successful MIR researchers typically need to master signal processing, machine learning, symbolic representation, search techniques, pattern classification as well as music theory. Advances in speech recognition over the years have been aided by the availability of a number of freely available toolkits such as HTK, ISIP and the Sphinx family of recognition engines. Just as with speech recognition, the availability of good tools will help advance the state of art of music information retrieval. M2K is an open-sourced Java-based framework designed to allow Music Information Retrieval researchers to rapidly prototype, share and scientifically evaluate and has been just released.

M2K comes with a large set of MIR specific modules, (currently oriented toward audio-content-based analysis), as well as a number of sample itineraries (an itinerary a task-oriented configuration of modules). M2K builds upon the D2K data mining framework developed by the Automated Learning Group at the NCSA. M2K is open source, the code is well written by folks who understand MIR. M2K provides bridges to other toolkits such as Marsyas, and Matlab. Perhaps most important, M2K has a tie-in to the IMRISEL which will soon be hosting a large collection of music (in audio as well as symbolic form) that will serve as a resource for MIR researchers. This is key to MIR researchers since getting access to large bodies of music can be very difficult and expensive. The Music and in general entertainment industry is making rapid advances and research and tools like these would help improvements in a significant way.

Paul Graham On Startups

Mark Fletcher On How Bloglines Was Built

Mark Fletcher, on his experience in starting Bloglines.

• Passion - because it will consume your life
• Cheap technologies - great time to start an Internet service.
• Hardware/software is getting cheaper
• Keep it simple
• Release early and often
• Moonlighting limits risks
• Free services - less pressure
• Hire a lawyer
• Web services APIs are a good thing
• Find good help (especially sys admin)
• Outsource to eLance.com (you can outsource all kinds of stuff. Have contractors bid for your work)
•Architectur 101: Front-end (web, mail servers); Backend (user dbs, other dbs, storage)
Software choices :
• DBJ (http://cr.yp.to) qmail djbdns daemontools
• ClearSilver (web templating package)
• Berkeley DBs
• Linux/Apache
• C/C++/bash/python
• Skiplist data structure
• Avoid NFS
• Avoid table-level locking in MySQL
Hardware choices :
• Two choices: dedicated servers vs. buying/hosting. Dedicated server route – costs are less
• Design for cheap hardware
• eBay - hardware cheap
Architecture choices:
• Copying files vs. client/server
• Calculate on the fly vs. cache
• Relational DBs vs. Flat Files (all blog articles are stored as flat files)
• RAID vs. Redundant
• Linux software RAID 1 - rock solid
Sysadmin choices
• DNS round robin for web
• Hot back-ups for off-line processing

Andrej points out,the size of the company was under ten at the Ask Jeeves acquisition. Marks presentation is available here.

The Inmelt Revolution @ GE

GE under Jack Welch focussed on super efficiency drives, financial engineering, process centricity - all these made wonders in yesteryears- The new GE is moving into a performance framework of hard-nosed, investment, incentive and penalty laden with heavy emphasis on risky but with potential high return to fule high growth "Innovation & Imagination Breakthrough" projects. Inorganic growth is out and new portfolio management principles come into place.This the new GE. Businessweek writes Jeff Inmelt is turning GE's culture upside down, demanding far more risk and innovation. Excerpts with edits and comments added:

Jeffrey R. Immelt admits to two fears: that GE will become boring, and that his top people might act like cowards.He worries that GE's famous obsession with bottomline results - and tendency to get rid of those who don't meet them - will make some execs shy away from taking risks that could revolutionize the company. Immelt, is clearly pushing for a cultural revolution. For the past 3 1/2 years,he has been on a mission to transform the hard-driving, process-oriented company into one steeped in creativity and wired for growth. He wants to move GE's average organic growth rate - the increase in revenue that comes from existing operations, rather than deals and currency fluctuations - to at least 8% from about 5% over the past decade. The new imperatives are risk-taking, sophisticated marketing, and above all, innovation.

Inmelt is throwing away long-cherished traditions and beliefs. Immelt has welcomed outsiders into the highest ranks, even making one, Sir William M. Castell, a vice-chairman. That's a serious break with GE's promote-from-within past. He is pushing hard for a more global workforce that reflects the communities in which GE operates. Immelt is also encouraging GE managers to become experts in their industries rather than just experts in managing. Instead of relying on execs who barely had time to position a family photo on their desk before moving on to the next executive assignment, he's diversifying the top ranks and urging his lieutenants to stay put and make a difference where they are. The GE chief is tying executives' compensation to their ability to come up with ideas, show improved customer service, generate cash growth, and boost sales instead of simply meeting bottom-line targets. As Immelt puts it, "you're not going to stick around this place and not take bets."

Globalizing research has allowed GE to get closer to overseas customers.Most of GE's growth will come from outside the U.S. Immelt predicts that developing countries will account for 60% of the company's growth in the next 10 years, vs. about 20% for the past decade. Over the past 18 months, Immelt has agreed to invest $5 billion in 80 projects that range from creating microjet engines to overhauling the brand image of 3,000 consumer-finance locations. The hope is that the first lot will generate $25 billion in revenue by 2007 - cheap, if it works, when you consider what it would cost to acquire something from the outside with that level of sales. In the next year or two, Immelt expects to have 200 such projects under way.To Immelt, the best managers are great marketers and not just great operators. That's a rethinking of GE's long-held bias that winning products essentially sell themselves. Immelt is also looking for more leaders who are intensely passionate about their businesses and are experts in the details. "I want to see our people become part of their industries," he says. For him, reinventing GE is the only way to make his company dominate this century, much as it led the one before. As Tom Peters points out, "Kudos to Welch on talent development: All three of the finalists for his job—Jeff Immelt, Bob Nardelli at Home Depot & Jim McNerney at 3M are going gangbusters!".

Oracle -Tough And Exciting Times Ahead??

New Peoplesoft = Peoplesoft + JDE
New Oracle = Oracle + New Peoplesoft
New-New Oracle = New Oracle + Retek
Not Sure what would follow. This is not an exercise in tautology.
The challenge for new-new-oracle is the roadmap for integration.There are now four code designs and schema to be harmonized. Different classes of cutomers and multiple varieties of implementations to be supported and upgraded. Customers need to be convinced of the integrated roadmap.The transition challenges are indeed phenomenal in the design of the new platform and less said the better about the migrations that customers need to spend on. Would this be a good opportunity for external service providers and oracle consulting – some may think that this may cause nightmare to service providers.
Come to think of it – there are not many companies in the world who have succeeded in integrating products with huge customer base all that well. During the acquisition proceedings of Peoplesoft, Oracle was predicting huge maintenance revenue stream – irritating some customers. Microsoft’s acquisition of Great plains and performance of companies like CA/DIVINE which acquired a lot of product companies have not been anything to write home about. But oracle might have assessed all the downsides before plunging into this. Here’s wishing new new oracle and its customers all the very best.

Gates : The PC Era Is Just Beginning

We recently covered in this blog, Nicholas Carr's views titled, "requiem for the PC" wherein he wrote that the the PC is the engine of computing, in business it's just a cog and not even a particularly important one anymore. In Nicholas Carr's mind, 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 and this could potentially mean the end of the PC Era.

Bill Gates, in his counter viewpoint says Although critics claim the desktop is passé, its greatest potential and that of other computing devices is still ahead. Gates viewpoint in summary:

-When PC was launched, only big companies could afford bumb terminals hooked to central units. Computing resources were scarce and costly. The advent of PC changed it.

- At economical levels, companies can now empower their workers with raw processing power providing quantum leaps in productivity, communication, and collaboration with PC technology.

- The PC is now a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it - at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.

-Single-purpose applications like word processors and spreadsheets have evolved into rich collaborative tools that help teams share information and work together efficiently. Web services are enabling companies to unlock the knowledge of an organization, empowering individual workers to make more strategic decisions, and turning a company's most valuable asset into a strategic tool that drives competitive advantage.

- The Web-services revolution blurs the distinction between information, applications, and services on PCs and mobile devices, on a company's intranet, or on the Internet - offering customers seamless computing and communications wherever they are.
- In technological terms, a lot of intelligence is moving to the edge of the network. Managing a diverse ecosystem of connected servers, PCs, and mobile devices is a vastly different task than managing the relatively static and disconnected networks of the past, and software tools are evolving in turn to enable systems that increasingly manage themselves.

- Computing will change our lives more in the next 10 years than it has in the past quarter-century - and that the PC, in all its forms, will be the centerpiece of this new wave of innovation.

My Take: The PC is no doubt facing massive challenges - challenges in the form of raise of pervasive devices, advances in telecom bandwidth and consequently the advent of hosted solutions as a serious option( Gates has not touched upon this) and we are not seeing any findamental changes in the PC operating systems and collabaration is taking new forms which Windows family is not able to catch up with. Most of the criticism about the PC comes from the operating system's fundamental instability and poor reliability. I think that PC's contiuned use depends to a large extent on the speed and featured in future windows rollout and to an extent the increased reach of the functionalities of the mobile and the PDA.Afterall the PC sale volume is very less compared to the mobiles which are selling several times over.

Bill Burnham On 2005 Software Top Trends

Bill is spot on when he writes, XML is at the heart of almost every significant trend in the software industry from Service Oriented Architectures, to Message Aware Networking, to Composite Applications, to Data Abstraction. Bill writes, for all its importance though, XML has always played second fiddle to HTML. However 2005 may well be remembered as the year in which XML eclipses HTML in terms of overall importance to the web. That’s because XML is now the de facto language of machines-to-machine interaction on the web and such interaction is exploding thanks to adoption of web services and the proliferation of web-capable devices. Now XML is evolving to the point where many new XML-based standards seek to embed within XML aspects previously only associated with complied code, such as business logic and state. In this way XML messages are now becoming free standing bits of code and integral parts of applications. In essence, XML messages are becoming software. I also concur with Bill in his reading Sofware as a service where he writes, 2005 may very well turn out to be the year that software as a service goes from being an alternative means of delivering software to being the preferred means. I can already see a groundswell of favorable opinion about this with small enteprises.

Bill's 2005 Top 10 Software Trends:
#1 XML
#2 Open Source
#3 Software As A Service
#4 Service Oriented Architectures
#5 Message Aware Networking
#6 Inter-Enterprise Applications
#7 BPEL
#8 Composite Applications.

Long Tail Or BOP : Nicheification Or Commoditization

Chris Anderson writes on the topic Long Tail Vs. Bottom Of The Pyramid and comes with some insightful observations:
- The BOP like the Long Tail, is about finding ways to efficiently address sub-economic markets. BOP is talking about how to sell goods and services to the world's 4 billion poor, for mutual benefit. Chris earlier wrote aboutThe Biggest Market Is In The Smallest Sales. The natural thing is to relate the bottom of the pyramid & the Long Tail.

- The similarities are notable. Both theories are based on the notion that if you break the economic and physical bottlenecks of distribution you can reach a huge, previously neglected market. They both recognize that millions of small sales can, in aggregate, add up to big profits. And they're both focused on ways to lower the cost of providing goods and services so that you can offer them at lower price point while still maintaining margins.
- There is a key difference between them that makes them fundamentally incompatible. The Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) argument is essentially based on commodification. Take existing goods and services and make them an order of magnitude or two cheaper, either to buy or to make but ideally both. Typically, this means reducing goods to their bare essentials and delivering them on a massive scale.This requires:
- 1) low price points;
- 2) minimal marginal costs (reduce consumables and packaging to the bare minimum);
- 3) "de-skilling" services so non-experts can deliver them;
- 4) the use of local entrepreneurs.
The canonical example is the 1 cent single-serve shampoo.The BOP model is focused on taking a single product or service and finding ways to make it cheap enough to offer to a larger, poorer, market. Chris think - so this is essentially about commodification.

- The Long Tail, on the other hand, is about nicheification. Rather than finding ways to create an even lower lowest common denominator, the Long Tail is about finding economically efficient ways to capitalize on the infinite diversity of taste and demand that has heretofore been overshadowed by mass markets. Affluent and rich (those comparable to those in the head) find themselves in the tail.Indeed, they are often drawn down the tail by their refined taste, in pursuit of qualities that are not afforded by one-size-fits-all. And they are often willing to pay a premium for those goods and services that suit them better. The Long Tail is, indeed, the very opposite of commodification.
- The Long Tail is made up of millions of niches. The Bottom of the Pyramid is made up of mass markets made even more mass. Both lower costs to reach more people, but they do so in different ways for different reasons. Chris concludes, They're complimentary forces, but fundamentally different in their approach.
My Take:Both ideas are about expanding the market. It's just that they represent different but complementary approaches. The idea is to create a different financial structure enabling a wider choice of portfolio at lower price points. Some questions remain though:
- Can a same organisation or business model benefit from both the long tail and the bottom of the pyramid?.
- Can commoditization or Nicheification provide entry barrier to competition and if so how easy is it to get past them?.
- Would these models inherently suit one industry segement over other - say would The Long Tail be more adaptable to say services and commodification to manufactured goods etc , or suit different geographies differentl say nicheification in the US and commoditisation in the Africa's?.
- What impact these approached would have on say the new economy industries over the traditional industries.
- The economic benefits - while BOP has already demonstrated some attractive economic returns - we need to analyse the economic returns from the Long tail as seen from different players - volume or variety need not always contribute positively to profits - the data needs to be studied in more detail.

R.I.M -Blackberry & Increasing Competition

Symbian, a maker of operating systems for cell phones, has licensed software from rival Microsoft,- a sign of growing cooperation between the two companies. The deal is also an extraordinary development signaling a possible detente among the two companies now vying to control the market for software to power smart phones. Smart phones make up an indiscernible percentage of today's 1.2 billion cell phones, but they're expected to become more prevalent by the end of the decade. For now, Symbian dominates the market, mainly because Microsoft has had trouble generating interest for its phone software among No. 1 handset maker Nokia and others. The Economist also writes,The seemingly ubiquitous e-mail device faces growing competition. What Apple's iPod music-player is to teenagers, the BlackBerry e-mail hand-held is to executives: the gizmo they cannot be seen without, and often cannot live without."RIM hopes to benefit as wireless e-mail,like the mobile phone before it, goes from being an executive toy to a technology with mass appeal.Currently,70% of RIM's revenue comes from the sale of BlackBerry devices, and the rest from software and services. To broaden its reach, RIM has licensed the BlackBerry software to big handset-makers such as Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, while continuing to sell its own devices. It is both co-operating and competing with some much larger companies, as it navigates the transition to a more software-and services-based business. Other firms sense an opportunity to offer handset-makers their own BlackBerry-like software instead. "This segment is switching from proprietary innovation to standards-based mainstream growth," says Danny Shader of Good Technology, a maker of wireless e-mail software that runs on a wide range of hand-held computers and smartphones.
The next versions of Microsoft's mail-server and PocketPC software, due in a few months, will include support for BlackBerry-style "push" e-mail. Getting mobile e-mail to work is far harder than it looks "The complexity is masked by this very simple, user-friendly device," says blackberry executives. One possible outcome is that RIM and Good, a competitor will end up fighting over the lucrative corporate market, while the less-demanding consumer market becomes commoditised. But with hundreds of millions of e-mail users worldwide and, despite their apparent ubiquity, only 2.5m BlackBerry devices in circulation, it is still early days for the mobile e-mail business.

New Type Of Tagging!!

Several people pointed to me about FindArticles - a new facility to find focused information, re-launched by Looksmart, related to Furl, the social bookmarking service.FindArticles is focused on delivering the best and most essential search results. There are different kinds of searches. Finarticle says it has assembled all the essential publications covering a wide range of subjects — and are continually adding to our collection. The publications and subjects are organized by major categories: Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Business & Finance, Computers & Technology, Health & Fitness, Home & Garden, News & Society, Reference & Education, and Sports. You can sort results by article date, length, relevance or publication name.

Open Source CMS & Mainstream IT Solution

There is a good article on open source content management systems in the latest issue of EContent Magazine. Excerpts with edits and my comments:

Linux’s poularity and growth is facilitating growth of open source in many areas and, the number of open source content management products on the market is growing. What separates opensource CMS companies such as Zope, Lenya , eZ publish, and Nuke from better-known counterparts is that the open source products tend to focus solely on Web content management, rather than enterprise content management
Open source vendors—also provide the code (though not necessarily for free), and companies can do with it what they will within the terms and conditions of the license. Usually this means that a company can manipulate the code in order to develop a CMS that meets particular specifications. Open source software packages tend to be more of a foundation on which to build a CMS, rather than a more polished "out-of-the-box" solution that comes from mainstream content management vendors. Although there are typically no licensing fees associated with open source solutions, requisite customization often requires intensive in-house development (and probably help from an outside consultant).

Most of these packages are Hypertext Preprocessor-based. Known as PHP, this is an open source, server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. Blossom explains, "PHP is the key for many of these systems. It's an interpreted language similar to Perl, which doesn't require a compiled executable to operate—a Web page defined via PHP gets loaded, interpreted, and executed each time it's invoked" (it can be cached to reduce interpretation overhead). "Libraries to support PHP are built into most Apache Web server releases, as are mySQL libraries, so, it's near-zero incremental investment for most systems to use CMS on the typical rack server," says Blossom of Shore communications. Frank Gilbane points out- "There are lots of development costs associated with the open source systems. The licenses are free, but you still have to surround any CMS application with a lot of services. This is at least as true with open source as commercial packages" In fact, it is in this specialization and customization that many open source companies make their living. If you are looking for a lot of flexibility and have a powerful in-house development team that can work together with consultants as need be, open source content management systems can work in the enterprise. In fact, several of the better-known open source content management companies like Zope compete with the proprietary solutions for enterprise sales. For the most part, opensource is not seen as a big threat to the major ECM players.

HP + Snapfish = Digital Photography + Online Media

HP plans to acquire Snapfish, an online photo service.Snapfish, a massive mail-order film processor with operations in the United States,U.K. and Canada has more than 13 million registered members and is growing at a rate of more than 500,000 members per month."HP believes by offering a superior online photo service through Snapfish, it will be able to offer the home photographer greater choice when deciding exactly how, when and where they share, store and print their photos." In addition to its free online photo sharing, Snapfish's service includes photo storage and management, free editing tools and software, online print ordering, wireless imaging services for camera phone and color handset users, and more than 70 personalized photo products, such as calendars and mouse pads. Snapfish hosts infrastructure services for retailers, Internet service providers and wireless carriers, allowing them to offer the same products and services to their own customers.
"It clearly demonstrates that even the leaders in digital photography are having to deal with the online photo component," says JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg. HP needs to expand range of services post this acquisition to see dollars and that needs a lot of strategising and good execution.Consumers do not pay for services long-term,and very few do anything more than print photos."Most print them or e-mail to friends," he said. "HP will have to get more of their clients accustomed to doing these types of services if this is going to take off."

My Take: With this acquisition,a forward integration to its suceessful printing business,HP becomes a powerhouse in the photo business. Strongly believing that their ink jet process is better then the vastly more common, and generally more expensive, Kodak process that currently dominates the personal and professional photography business. HP has made a strategic investment in purchasing one of the leading on-line photo processing companies. By holding the quality and reminaing innovative, improving customer service – HP can become hughely successful – well that was the case in all other LOB’s for HP.

Yahoo + Flickr and The Emerging Frontiers

The much expected news is confirmed to be true now - Yahoo buys Flickr. Caterina commenting in the Flickr Blog writes,"The things that were important to us were: being open, building innovative stuff and kicking ass. The stuff Yahoo's announced recently (including, ofcourse,this)? They're evolving in really interesting ways -
and from our look inside, we know know that there's a lot morecoming".Yahoo won't be the Yahoo you've come to take for granted.Competition has done great things for Yahoo. The best thing is we no longer have to worry about finance, HR, legal, or things at which we are completely incompetent and were taking our time away from building Flickr.
Jeremy Zawodny writes, combining [Flickr's] mix of tagging, communities, syndication, open APIs, and interactive UI with Yahoo's services and millions of users will lead to even more great stuff.There are many parts of Yahoo that will be Flickrized in the coming months. And with more resources available, Flickr itself will be able to grow like never before.

Emerging Trends:
- Google,Yahoo and for academic completion include MSN for comparison of what they are doing:
- All the three have mail capabilities, web, toolbar, desktop search, paid search(includes plans)
- All three have RSS readers available in some form
- All three have picture imaging services
- Retail and Small Biz Services
- Blogging: Google has blogger – Yahoo has announced beta(Flickr shall be integrated into Yahoo 360), MSN spaces already exists.
- Yahoo has music service, MSN is getting in there. Google may be there
- Google and Yahoo already have catalogue services
- Google may have browser plans
- Yahoo may get into music and blogging more aggressively
- IM services of Yahoo and MSN may become more enriched, Google may need to get in there - we can expect something innovative to happen here.
As Joe Wilcox points outExtended Mobile Search could be the next frontier for all the three. All this means is that the range of services increase and as the user base is the whole connected world, the rate of innovation is also high - very exciting and all signs of more excitement to come.

Saving The Internet!!

Professor Hannu H. Kari of the Helsinki University of Technology is a smart guy, but most people thought he was just being provocative when he predicted, back in 2001, that the Internet would shut down by 2006. "The reason for this will be that proper users' dissatisfaction will have reached such heights by then that some other system will be needed," Kari said, "unless the Internet is improved and made reliable."

Ed Amoroso, CISO of AT&T, says that among the 2.8 million e-mails sent to his company every day, 2.1 million, or 75 percent, are junk. The increasing clutter of online junk is driving people off the Internet. In a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 29 percent of respondents reported reducing their use of e-mail because of spam, and more than three-quarters, 77 percent, labeled the act of being online "unpleasant and annoying. Kari may have overstepped by naming a specific date for the Internet's demise, but fundamentally, he's right. The trend is clear. Amoroso of AT&T believes that the fundamental security problem is that during the past decade, and quite unintentionally, the network's intelligence has migrated to the edge. "We're all sys admins," he says. And millions of end users holding sway over their security settings translates to millions of potential dumb configurations, boneheaded double-clicks and unintentional security lapses. Accidents happen, and bad guys take advantage of the fact that not all end users are created equal in terms of security. After all, Amoroso argues, do you control power distribution around your house, or do you just plug stuff in?

He thinks AT&T can make a ton of money off this idea: Return control to the network providers (like his own company's phone system in the 1970s, he says, a time when Ma Bell controlled everything, including the technology's interface), and let the providers charge you for doing all of the filtering, traffic analytics, worm detection and incident response. "That's my solution," Amoroso says. "Create a service. Make money." Mary Ann Davidson, CSO of Oracle and champion of the quality coding movement, says she's tired of coders arguing that their jobs are too creative to eliminate errors such as buffer overflows—that coding's an art, not a science. She applauds ethical hacking, where developers attempt to break software before selling it. Davidson says some schools now divide developer classes in two, a green team for writing code and a red team for breaking it. The application's relative security becomes part of its final grade. "Why isn't that standard development process?" she asks.

Part of the problem of securing business online is that the risk is often invisible. In the physical world, visual clues exist to help us discern who's a legitimate merchant and who's a crook. We know which neighborhoods to go to and which ones to avoid. Several people suggest using XML and meta-data to tag websites with safety, reputation, past performance and other security ratings to act as signposts for dangerous cyberneighborhoods. A virtual Better Business Bureau could manage the data so that when users visit a website, their computers pull down the XML meta-data about that site. The data might tell the browser to go ahead and load the page because this really is a bank's website, their reputation is good, and they use strong encryption and have appropriate privacy policies. At bad sites, the browser would simply deny the page load, thereby preventing a phishing scam or some spyware from being installed on the user's system.Setting up that independent managing body to not only create the meta-data criteria but to manage it, too, would be a huge job. But it would protect us from our blindness to online warning signs in profound ways.
Category : Internet

Hollywood & The Future Of Video Over The Internet

(Via Scobeleizer) Mattgoyer points to an excellent series of articleson the Future of Video On The Internet. The article published in three parts viz.- PartI and Part II and Part III anlyzes the emergence of internet as a strong media for rendering video over the internet and also examines hollywood's reistance to the scheme and how Hollywood could be fighting a losign battle. Excerpts with edits and comments:

while the real time model of broadcast and cable maytake some time to be widely embraced over the internet, that shouldn’t prevent the internet from becoming a new distribution system for video content. The internet has features which compensate for its limitations, making new models practical today. For example, the internet has the most flexible of network architectures. It also has huge amounts of storage and processing power, both at the core and the edge. And the software platform of the internet is mature, and can easily be modified to meet the needs of consumer video. Best of all, the cost of experimentation is negligible in comparison to alternative broadband architectures, such as cable and satellite. Imagine a store and forward model analogous to email. Imagine variants of TiVO, without the arbitary limits. Imagine business models that leverage the intelligence of computer technology, enabling personalization not only of programming, but also of business models, including advertising.
One of the favorite things about the internet is the "long tail". With cheap storage and a flexible architecture, the internet removes many limitations of physical distribution. In retail, it allows for infinite aisles of merchandise. In journalism and politics, it enables limitless voices to be heard. The effect of the long tail has been to change the nature of retail, journalism, and politics - and many other categories - by increasing the choices available to consumers. Proponents of IP TV and similar models insist on perpetuating notions such as programming channels, inherently limit ing consumer choices due to hollywood – which is comfortable with channels and is generally reluctant to embrace change. Hollywood’s control of video content is not absolute, but it’s broad enough that few businesses and investors dare to challenge it.Hollywood generally gets its way, but history shows that it is not always right.(Do you remember how hard the studios fought against VHS?)

Hollywood needs to recognize that as a platform for video, the internet is not the same as theaters, television, and DVD. It is possible that the value of Hollywood-produced content is not as high on the internet as it is in traditional distribution media. Then again, perhaps the internet will generate incremental demand by stimulating the "long tail" for legacy video content. Television and movie executives need to be open to new business models over the internet, both for their libraries and new content. Just as MTV and advertising spawned new art forms in video, so too will the internet. This goes way beyond pricing and distribution models.

Categories : Video, internet, Emerging technologies.

A Peep Into Blogging Movement Inside IBM

Bill Ives points to Phil Borremans disclosure about the number and use of weblogs at IBM.Phil Borremans writes at this moment there are about 2800 internal weblogs (on a total worldwide population of about 330.000 IBM'ers.) with about 12700 entries. About 200 blogs have more than 10 posts on them. On the other hand, editors can come from any part of the company; engineers, communications, research, software. you name it.Some of these blogs are "information blogs" linking to interesting articles, URl's, RSS feeds etc...but some are used for project management. In this case blogs are used to get the team on "the same page" with regards to progress being made or issues being tackled.Some people are so used to the "older" methods of working that they really do not jump on the wagon. Being able to change people and get them to participate from the start is the biggest part of the job.
Category : Blogs.

Software Industry - Not Getting Matured Nor Getting Commoditized

(Via Bweek) While there are signs of broad industry consolidation, the $190 billion software industry is expanding,not contracting and definitely not reaching maturity or commodity status. Hundreds of new software companies quietly enter the market every year, boosting the industry's overall size. Private-equity firms invested $1.1 billion in first-time funding for more than 200 software companies in 2004.
Software did not stop being essential to streamlining and integrating strategic business operations. The typical enterprise has deployed thousands of software applications. Making them all work together is a profound challenge. Enterprises need the horizontal integration of varied systems, combined with sophisticated software tools and business intelligence analysis programs to allow the real-time use of all the information software generates. This desire to integrate is creating pressure - and strong incentives - for software providers to expand beyond their traditional areas of expertise or acquire smaller players. Rather than reaching maturity, the industry has come to an "inflection point." By and large clients may not buy software just to boost productivity. Instead,they'll invest in software (and services) to redesign business models and the way work gets done.

That shift is creating opportunities across an industry as a complex "ecosystem" of newer, small companies align with more established players. Expansion of the software market is fueled by programming standards and open-source software, lowering the entry barriers.Although company names and products will continue to change over time, the software industry will evolve to meet ever-growing customer demands.We shall see an influx of innovative new players, private and corporate investment, and a healthy expansion of the industry. The need for software and services would keep improving for times to come. Gartner's predicts 5% growth for the industry while J.P.Morgan estimates growth to be at 4% for 2005. These are significant numbers considering the huge base of existing business.
Category :Software, Emerging Trends.

Email Blocking & Filtering Report

The report is significant as:
a) it measures deliverability across a broad cross-section of mailers, not just a single ESP's clients, and
b) it is a true measure of deliverability - what actually reached to the recipient inbox
Key things to know:- The "false positive" problem (non-spam ending up in the junk mailbox) is getting worse, not better. Here's the trend:
- Full year 2004: 22%
- Second half 2003: 18.7%
- First half 2003: 17%
- Second half 2002: 15%
Mailers who work on the problem can have a huge impact on their deliverability.
The guidelines to keep email deliverability high include:
- Keep email lists clean and up-to-date
- Closely monitor how email addresses are acquired
- Make sure all emails sent are expected and relevant to customers
- Monitor complaint feedback across ISPs and abuse queues
- Honor all unsubscribe requests promptly
- Use the proper bounce algorithms
- Implement the new authentication protocols
- Monitor delivery across ISPs and spam filtering applications

The Long Tail - Chris Anderson @Etech

Chris Anderson expands his thought on the longtail theme here with emphasis on Minitails. From explosion of variety of products in 1990 , we are now seeing explosion about information about products – this forces all marketers to seek more analysis and understanding.

Category : The Longtail

Infocomm Revolution - Hierarchy & Bureaucacy Busting!

Tom Evslin writes about VISP - It’s a Village ISP which besides "eGovernance",provides email, web browsing, and basic computer literacy training. A VISP owner Rani( there are obviously many like her), by charging for all these services grossed about $110 in her first month of operation.The most important point that Tom writes about is: "egovernance" works in this framework as the functioning is based on negotiated agreement which allows it to funnel complaints from VISPs directly to a high level in the various govt. departments and gives them the right to follow-up on a promise that all complaints will be addressed within two weeks.
eGovernance is a product, not a charitable service. VISP entrepreneurs make money (and pay back their loans) because people are willing to pay to get results. Their customers can also get and fill out forms online and peruse available government programs.Bureaucracy is hierarchy at its stultifying worst. Hierarchies used to be needed to move information. Now electronic communication allows hierarchies to be flattened. It’s a very hopeful sign that this is beginning to be true for the poorest of the poor as well as those of us who have a Blackberry for use when our computers are out of convenient reach.

Tom also writes about a conversation with a World Bank who said that use of village computer kiosks is helping to reduce the corruption which is often more than a 100% tax on people who can least afford it in the developing world. People wanting to start a business used to pay numerous small bribes – often just for the right to get through the door of a government office – in order to get the needed permits.A program which allowed the applications to be filed electronically at village kiosks bypassed the greedy hands in the middle. Tom concludes by writing, the requirement for the permits will eventually be lifted once it no longer supports a cottage industry of door keepers.
Categories : eGovernance, Bureacracy.

Blogger And Huge Performance Problems

We recently wrote aboutBlogger & blogging tools long way to go wherein we highlighted,"leave aside innovating - blogger has regular problems in publishing - sometimes publishing goes remarkably slow and basic things have been left unattended like - setting right the counter for the no. of items published (not fixed for about five months) and delay in incorporating basic features like trackbacks". Blogger has given persistence problems in publishing. Infoworld reports Google takes steps to correct performance problems slowing down its Blogger service saying blogger is working to address performance problems that slow down its popular Blogger service. Biz Stone writes, Google is both adding new hardware and addressing an electricity-availability issue in order to improve performance, -Biz Stone, a Blogger official in an entry posted in the official Blogger team blog. Stone wrote,"We use Blogger for this blog and many of the people on our team use Blogger for their own, personal blogs. We don't have a super-special employee server that gives us preference over anyone else so we are just as frustrated with slowness and performance problems," Stone wrote. "That being said, we are just as eager as you to make this fix so things will be fast again."
My Take : Clearly Google needs to spend more resources on Blogger and that too on priority.Can't wait to get going - hope blogger imporives features leaps and bounds after this bad publicity - my published no. of posts still shows 900+ reflective of status as back as Nov.2004. Like google - blogger needs to be at the leading edge of advancements - here it is seen as struggling to keep providing what it was providing two years back. After not many know how to seamlessly scale as google knows - not making blogger benefit from this expertise would definitely make criticisms like google not being innovative when there is not competition , google bought over blogger only for adsense etc appear true. Google has the unique opportunity of winning over the blogging communities loyalty and also resultant good feelings of being associated with it - it is seriously running the risk of losing this goodwill.

Categories: Blogger, Google.

The Inevitable Rise Of The On-Demand Era

Enteprises are beginning to shift from software licenses to on-demand programs over the Internet. Mark Templeton,CEO of Citrix, is betting that high-speed wireless networks will allow access to any piece of information anytime and anywhere – this has the potential to change the world.In the "on-demand" world, users pay software companies periodically to allow access to everything from office computer files to vast music libraries such as Rhapsody. On-demand pushers would like to emulate the utility business, which charges its customers monthly for electricity, water and phone service. Cable television is another corollary they invoke. The idea is that customers would rather subscribe to software programs over the Internet than pay for a license for each individual computer. They could do so without the upfront costs and receive upgrades for free. On-demand and Internet software companies would count on recurring nickel and dime compared to millions in sale of enterprise software. That mind-set is causing an upheaval of business models.
Microsoft’s Darren Huston, said he's not sure companies are willing to give up control of their software to the seller's servers. Software in the on-demand model resides in the software company's server in a remote data center and is accessed via the Internet. In the license model, software is stored on a desktop computer or a server at the office that is accessed through an ethernet connection. As business software can be so data-heavy, a high-speed Internet connection is a necessity for on-demand programs to fly. As more people have bought these connections, subscription software has a chance to flourish.
We recently covered the viewpoint Bandwidth is Microsoft's Enemy- In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn’t matter, and there’s no lock-in. In such a world, Microsoft loses its monopoly, and the consumer wins. This is why bandwidth should scare Microsoft more than any other company. Proving the viability of the phenomenon is the launch of Adobe to provide software on demand. we also covered recently Kleiner Perkins partner Ray Lane's view about change in pricing or business model, and the emergence of software as a service and its inevitablity, in fostering fundamental shift in enterprise software culture.
The OnDemand model factors in shifting structures in market and their impact and differences protecting the players from the discount schemes played in more traditional software. OnDemand market is still a nascent and fast growing market, providing potential for very high growth. With a subscription pricing model of priced –to-sell customers are saved from upfront investments . As the revenue stream is single stream – predatory pricing in anticipation of future revenues form multiple streams like support and services simply may not exist or exist in a very limited manner. In the near future, on-demand may not provide discount to gain marketshare but may grow significantly and eventually provide substantial competition to enterprise software vendors on equal footing.
Category :ondemand, emerging technologies.

Making Big Things Happen with Small Teams

Jason Fried's nice presentation at the SxSW 2005 event makes interesting reading. The basic theme of Jason’s presentation is to start building as soon as possible rather than wasting time on planning and documenting. Jason is spot on when he says that many clients don’t read, don’t understand or misinterpret specifications. It’s only when they get a chance to see something working that they really know if that’s what they wanted or not. Jason suggests that an iterative process comprising of lots of small steps was the best way to solve this problem.The approach seems to suggest trial and error over clean design.. His approach would really decrease the initial overhead and speed time-to-market. However if a fundamental problem crept in at the start of the process, it could result in a large part of the project needing to be redesigned or recoded. Simplicity in application design would minimize the impact of changes. Anycase lots and lots of rework is unavoidable in a trial and error process

The Long Tail & The Blogosphere

We recently covered Chris Anderson's Long Tail article- one of the the most talked about article often - admittedly a masterpiece and reflection of deep thinking.

Technorati’s David Sifry discusses the long tail of the blogosphere in part 3 of his current state of the blogosphere series. He defines blog influence in terms of linking activity, and graphs said activity. He concludes that. even though the amount of influence that a single blog [towards the end of the long tail] may have is less than that of a single blog on the A-list, the aggregate influence of all of the long tail far outstrips even the mainstream media. This also has implications for enlightened marketers and media companies. There is power in the conversations going on around you, and not necessarily from the places that you'd ordinarily expect. Companies that work in conjunction with the trends going on in the long tail: e.g. fostering peoples voices, listening to and incorporating their comments and feedback, and fostering a community have a tremendous opportunity awaiting them.Dave has published some information about the traffic details of Mainstream Media & The Blogosphere. A full perspective of the longtail would need an analysis of the demand side and supply side of the long tail to undertsand its full impact.

Category: Blogosphere ,Longtail and Technorati.

Pay Per Click Ad – Drain On Enteprises Spend?

David Jackson, based on solid research has some some insightful and interesting observations to share. The most striking theme that ran through the Q4 financial results of Internet companies, irrespective of size, was the impact of rising pay-per-click ad prices. The winners were the ad brokers - Google and Yahoo. The losers were companies that rely on advertising to attract traffic, as their marketing expenses grew faster than their revenues. To an extent, crooks/misusers seem to be several notches above genuine technology.For example – in the case of Amazon - marketing expense grew much faster than revenue (44% versus 31% An impressive assessment of data relates to a lot of interesting enterprises like eBay , Priceline eDiets etc.

My Take: The data may be true but based on increased use of the internet and given the fact it is also the only universal media and given the fact visit to sites are purely voluntary - if technology develops to isolate misusers and by having better negitiating powers with the likes of Google and Yahoo, (May be the advent of another player in this space may help) business shall begin to get their interests protected - may take sometime but pay-per-click ad's shall have to become more and more strong.

Customers, Democratisation & Future Of Innovation

We recently covered in this blog Paul Allen's Views , the fastest Growth Sites are Built on User Generated Content.One of the most powerful ways to develop web site traffic is to enable users to share their content through your web site with others-to create community around user generated content. Many of the fastest growing web sites of all time did this (or do it now): MyFamily.com, eBay, GeoCities, Xoom, Homestead, MySpace, Epinions, Hotshots, LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, Friendster, and more.If sites are uses to get customers to blog,use message boards,upload photos or reviews, the effect shall be dazzling.With open source software (for message boards, blogs, uploading photos, and more) and with the cost of hard drive storage a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago, the time has never been better to try a user generated content strategy.

The latest issue of The Economist has an article on user-driven innovation. Innovation need not happen just in labs.Recent corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production.Electronic Arts (EA), a maker of computer games, ships programming tools to its customers, posts their modifications online and works their creations into new games. The customer is the king, market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.The rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is about to publish a book, "Democratising Innovation".User innovations always would have a much higher rate of success.
Traditionally, firms have innovated by sending out market researchers to discover "unmet needs" among their customers. These researchers report back. The firm decides which ideas to develop and hands them over to project-development teams. Studies suggest that about three-quarters of such projects fail. Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods - Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers(named lead users,luminaries etc) who innovate. While many expect innovation to provide monetary rewards to creators,user-led innovation implies customers donating their creativity freely.
A highly recommended reading highlighting important themes. user reinvention, the economics of open source, and technologies of collaboration and early involvement.

Seeing What's Next Throught The Prism Of Porter, Drucker and Christensen

Dave Pollard, has recently written an overview of Michael Porter's, Peter Drucker's and Clayton Christensen's approaches to innovation research. Dave believes research has not got its rightful place inside modern business enteprises. Dave writes,"Research is probably the most undervalued, and poorly done, process in Western business. It's not rocket science, but doing it well takes practice, a disciplined process, and strong creative, analytical and communication skills."
He adds, if assigned to do some innovation research today, he would use a combination of all three approaches, looking at the markets, and potential markets, and the forces that drive them, from all three perspectives. That way you can actually get a '3-D' forecast of the future of your,or your client's, business or industry, or the entire economy. It may make more sense to integrate into the research process Imperato and Harari's Thinking the Customer Ahead approach, a type of primary research (i.e. face-to-face, as contrasted with secondary research, which is looking at written documents in the public domain) that entails helping the customer to imagine where their business is headed, and then working backwards to assess the implications of that on where your client's business is headed. The Pyramid Principle methodology to document the research and perform the analysis would be very useful and the results could be probably structured as scenarios or future-state stories, embedding the results of the identified strategic innovation and differentiation responses".
As again, Dave does a masterful job of abstracting different schools of thoughts and approach to innovation research –providing guidelines to spotting new business opportunities, predicting the future competitive forces in business and their implications for one’s.

The Dawn Of The Next Generation Messaging World -Part II

In Part-I, we covered the four generations of the messaging industry – this industry has quickly moved through three generations - segregated messaging, through integrated messaging, through unified messaging(UM) and further leading to the fourth generation, unified communications (UC).

The key tenets of the unified messaging would range from message screening, returning, cross mechanism messaging, and providing groupware capabilities such as calendaring and scheduling as part of unified mailbox portal. Routine functions like calendars, schedules, contact list, etc. from their inbox, as well as over the phone via text-to-speech capabilities shall be made available. These voice enabled groupware capabilities shall allow users to access them not only from a PC, but also from the telephone. Thus, the UM infrastructure or messaging server will become the portal to all enterprise information and applications .The traditional voice mail industry shall get verticalised Forward-thinking messaging enterprises will create packages and features to capitalize on the needs of specific industries. This could dramatically improve communication in education, hospitality and in general all service industries. In the enterprise arena, UM is fast becoming a reality.

Andy Clark once wrote that we absorb and rely on technologies and learn to make them "natural self-extensions". We incorporate technologies into our ecosystem. We are all digitally woven and wired to the hilt and all appendages like blackberry’s and mobiles are becoming commonplace and part of every moment of life. Clark points out, "the mind is just less and less in the head"; when we need information, we usually fire up our PC and access it elsewhere. content creation, pervasive presence and contextual awareness become the fundamental elements of effective collaboration, and these presence enabling technology and devices shall become very important in the day-to-day interactions and activities. Pervasive awareness encompasses the emerging world today and how we can control the publishing of awareness of your location, "projecting" to others your interruptability and the modes of communications most appropriate in a given context For instance while swimming you'd rather suggest to others that they call you rather than "texting" or "emailing" you. Projecting your accessibility / interruptability to others might be really easy if we integrated our handheld wireless devices with our varied communication services. Truly effective messaging and collaboration lives at the intersection of technology, organizational dynamics, and social dynamics.

The Dawn Of The Next Generation Messaging World -Part I

Several industry developments are strongly influencing the emergence of unified communication.Among others, these include Internet Protocol (IP) convergence, the spread of wireless messaging, and the emergence of third-party message stores. IP is fast becoming a universal communications platform on which voice and data technologies are converging. This convergence is taking place in areas such as telephony and messaging platforms. Telecommunications carriers are beginning to migrate their voice telephone traffic—from traditional circuit-switched networks like the PSTN—to the IP networks that handle their data traffic. Networks no longer distinguish between different types of traffic. Internet messages, are increasingly beginning to carry text, voice, and multimedia content. A similar convergence is happening across messaging platforms. - faxes, pages, voicemail, and e-mail have traditionally been handled by separate messaging systems. Emerging standards like the new Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) and the Fax Profile for Internet Mail (FPIM) standards enable e-mail based on Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to transport voice mail and faxes. and also provide interoperability as well. In such an IP environment a voice mail message becomes an audio attachment to an e-mail, and a fax simply becomes an image attachment to an e-mail. In short, the next-generation e-mail “inbox” will manage all kinds of text, audio, image, and video messages.

Third-party Messaging Service Providers (MSPs) are beginning to build on this common IP base, by uniting messaging technologies via Internet standards based protocols to enable message sharing from a consolidated infrastructure. Soon, messages of all types will be stored and processed from a single IP message source that will use a dedicated filtering and folder system. This unified messaging system will be highly flexible and extensible, and will offer users the ability to send or retrieve a message of any type from any device or interface. The messaging industry has quickly moved through three generations - segregated messaging, through integrated messaging, through unified messaging(UM) and further leading to the fourth generation, unified communications (UC). UC goes beyond the message management capabilities of UM, and incorporates realtime connection and call completion across a range of devices, as well as call management, collaboration, media handling, voice-enabled groupware capabilities, etc. In addition, to typical call centered functionalities, intelligent and flexible call-handling alternatives to both the caller and the mailbox user are provided. Sophisticated call and message management functions will be the next planned advancements in functionalities. Part II shall follow.

Walmart RFID Mandate -Status Not Encouraging!!

Wal-Mart mandated that by January 2005 its top 100 suppliers must apply passive RFID tags based on EPC-global standards to cases and pallets headed toward three specific Distribution Centers (DCs) in Texas. Virtually all manufacturers of consumer goods will eventually be impacted by this because Wal-Mart’s moves in RFID are being copied by other retailers. ARC Research’s Steve Banker reports based on discussions with companies that were actively investing in EPC (Electronic Product Code) RFID that public reporting on the status of Wal-Mart’s RFID efforts has been highly misleading. The impression that all Wal-Mart SKUs bound for three of the retailer’s Texas Distribution Centers from the top 100 suppliers will be RFID tagged starting January 1st is incorrect There had been negotiations between Wal-Mart’s top 100 suppliers and the retail behemoth and WalMart has shown more flexibility than many anticipated.
Different suppliers negotiated a wide range of agreements. The largest tranche of supply would cover 700 Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) to start with and even very large companies,will be shipping less than a dozen. Steve concludes,"The focus right now is on Wal-Mart and the question people are asking is, "What is the status of your effort?"The more interesting questions should be directed at Wal-Mart’s suppliers.Those questions are, "How successful were you in your negotiations with Wal-Mart? What does it take to do well in those negotiations?" My Take: This again proves the idea that it would be very difficult to get things done based on stiff deadlines. I am a little suprised that this large scale non-adherence to deadline did not get that much attention compared to the frenzy in the media in the run up to the implementation. This is disappointing story for RFID tag manufacturers, readers and solution providers who were expecting huge opportunties to encash both during the course of implementation and planned additional rollouts and rollouts in other retailes , expected to push for RFID following Walmart's footsteps.

A9'S Opensearch RSS & Vertical Search

( Via Silcionvalleywatcher)

Jeff Bezos announced OSRSS,for Open Search RSS,a small set of extensions to RSS that enable vertical search. There can be very different set of results depending on which database you search. "If you search the Web for "Vioxx,"- you'll get the impression that Vioxx is about class action lawsuits. If you search the medical database PubMed you'll get very different results" - specific medical and pharmacological results. "PubMed actually does sophisticated translations from search term to specific medical terms." When a searchable database uses the OSRSS code to identify itself, it becomes essentially a "channel" to A9, and users can select which databases they want to see results from. OSRSS consists of three simple extensions to RSS that simply state total results, a starting index, and number of items per page. This is an important development indicating the maturity and the dawn of new generation search mechanisms a.k.a niche search engines.
We wrote sometime back, Search Evolution : Vertical, Horizontal, Niche!!,I see myself beginning to use niche search engines more and more(though all niche search engine usage put together could be substantially less than any one general search engine usage). For example services with discovery mechanisms powered by specialized algorithms like Findory or Topix shall always find a special place in the internet world where the volume of digital content is swelling by the day.The view expressed that"As advertising spending continues to swell in the search category, more and more marketers will diversify their "network" buys with small targeted placements on these specialized engines that potentially provide a better bang for the advertising buck" looks right.But the overall volume of business could be low but can provide with some significant stream of business. But Niche players need to provide more and more specialised offering and creating a new category of service that mainstream players may not be able to focus and provide - like Amex offering more than what traditional banks can offer -traveller's cheque convenience.

SAP, Platform Leadership, And Salesforce.com

Bruce Richardson while assesing on the backplane opportunity for the enterprise software leader asks,"What is SAP’s equivalent to PCI, USB, or Pentium adoption?". Bruce writes, Shai Agassi, while launching netweaver divulged his plans to offer an SDK that would allows users and integrators to create their own xApps, SAP’s offering for composite apps. He described this as his top priority. This has not happened while customers and partners would love this, in the words of Bruce -"it is not clear whether it would help SAP sell more seats". Bruce also notes,"SAP has started to talk in general terms about building an Enterprise Services Repository (ESR) containing Web services, composite apps, and the modern equivalent of a data dictionary. Conceptually, this repository could be the new enterprise backplane, managing the flow of data into and out of a company and its extended ecosystem. SAP hasn’t provided any details on pricing or availability.If it helped to sell chips, Intel would likely have different agreements with participants (who contribute ideas) and adopters (who use the specifications to build products). No monies would change hands". My take: Bruce appears to be completely right upto this point.
In the second part, whenn he wrotes about salesforce.com looking for platform leadership – This clearly insults the notion of leadership and looks silly to compare salesforce.com with SAP /other CRM leaders .As Jeff points out, it is not easy to implement salesforce.com- the effort taken to customize for each and every enterprise’d need is substantial.

Travelling!!

Open-Source - Defensive Or Offensive Strategy?

Open source software like any other phenomenon respects laws of economics. Open-source software such as Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, and Perl started to attract widespread attention from a new audience: engineering managers, executives, industry analysts, and investors.

Most of the developers of such software welcomed this attention: not only does it boost the pride of developers, it also allows them to justify their efforts (now increasingly related to their salaried positions) to upper management and their peers.
Hard questions abound:
- Is this really a new way of building software?
- Are each of the successes in open-source software a fluke of circumstance, or is there a repeatable methodology to all this?
- Why should resources be allocated to open source projects where competitors would get to use the same code, for free?
- How reliant is this whole development model upon the hobbyist hacker or computer science student who just happens to put together some code to make something work well?
- Does this threaten or obsolesce known appraoches for building software and doing business?Recently companies like IBM and Sun made several of their software prodcuts to be available as open source products. Corporate open-source must be a strategy to support a business model, not the other way around argues, Benjamin Booth of WebMethods. Since software, can get commoditized quickly and as open-source initiatives contribute significantly to this commoditization, the rationale and application of open-source strategy should be taken seriously. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:

Overall value can only be increased in any trade when each party's relatively scarce goods can be produced more easily than the other. Open-sourcing, collectively, effectively increases every producer's "natural" resources. If open-source software can be thought of as lumber - more open-source software means free lumber for all software manufacturer "builders".There has to be a higher objective that adds overall value to the exchange. The list of open source software looks exhaustive. Software makers in a well-defined software market, rife with increasingly cheap or free alternatives, face two primary alternatives:
1) innovate to redefine the market or
2) start giving your software away. Several reasons can be cited for giving software away:

- It increases the effectiveness of collaborative research
- It increase labor force mind-share
- It increase the market for higher value software
- It neutralizes a competitive threatWhen in later stages of the software market-cycle, the open-sourcing option makes it worthwhile to consider what kinds of threats might be neutralized. The software marketcycle gives insight into understanding this better
- Stage 1: Highly unique and valuable software - There is only one viable supplier
- Stage 2: Software facing increased competition - There are multiple proprietary suppliers who compete by increasing value and keeping prices flat.
- Stage 3: Software facing commoditization - Margins decrease even lower as there are increasing numbers of cheap or free, equally viable alternatives.
- Stage 4: Commoditized software - There are so many cheap or free alternatives that there is little differentiated value in the software itself anymore. Sales are structured around maintenance and support more than anything.The stage at which the software is at is critical to assess and whether it commands premium. Is the software aging a bit and facing an increasing number of viable, cheap or even free alternatives? If so, predominant options are to innovate, redefining your market, or consider open-sourcing and undercut competition while also preserving or increasing your market. Knowing when to open-source highly depends on the scenario.
Thus -opensourcing is sometimes offense, more often defense, and maybe a little bit of both.

Warren Buffett's Annual Letter To Shareholders

The legendary Warren Buffett is the modern day business icon-trusted by millions and all his speeches are tracked by innumerable Warren Buffett is superb in multiple dimensions and at different levels. His Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letter is among the most read about and he sets the bar in terms of assessing business model success and investments analysis.
This years annual report has been released and his letter to shareholders is available here.
This is required reading for anyone running a company – for analysis, grey matter, business model assessments,organization,analogies,style,and humour.You can also read all his letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters going back to 1977.

Knowledge Management & Knowledge Conscious Management

(Via Slacker Manager.)Martin at mopsos writes Eighteen Commandments Of Knowledge Conscious Managers. These ideas may be very difficult to introduce in 20th century organizations,or those thatdo not recognize mastery of knowledge flows as a source of competitive advantage. Excerpts with edits:
1. Don't always challenge. Welcome one another's thoughts and opinions.
2. Experiment constantly. Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects
3. Release the need to be right. It's OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them. If you punish failure, you destroy entrepreneurship, stiffle innovation and in the end you harm the company.
4. Know by doing, so that there is no gap between what you know and what you do. The first responsibility of a manager is not to manage people and budgets but to have a hands-on practice of his/her mission. Position without competence results in disaster. Competence without position results in helplessness.
5. What you know does matters, but who you know and who knows you matter even more.. Acknowledge that it takes time, effort and travel money.
6. Don't refer to internal organizations. Talk about specific people. -Organizations cannot be trusted, because they are impersonal, complex, and change every 24 months anyway. People and communities however are far more resilient and trustworthy.
7. Consider internal client-supplier relationships as the worst possible form of internal collaboration- this is the epitome of bureaucracy. It damages the social capital of the company and paralyzes its ability to solve problems for the customer.
8. Before deciding on a plan, always ask with whom the plan was discussed. - Reject all proposals and action plans bearing only the signatures of your staff. The value-add of a corporate manager is not to come up with bright ideas, but with ideas shared with other stakeholders.
9. Involve people collectively in your thinking. Using managerial authority to deploy programs and plans from the top-down generates compliance at best, but never commitment. If you want people to adopt your views and act accordingly, you must engage into meaningful conversations with them, and not "cascade down" or "communicate messages".
10. Management is not so much about delegating to individuals than about organizing and empowering groups.Effective action ("execution") in a big organization is all about coordination and synchronization. Speed of execution is best achieved by self-synchronization of competent people who understand and trust each other.
11. It's not about giving objectives. It's about making sure they understand your intent.If they really understand your goals and if it makes sense to them, they will figure out what to do by themselves.: It is by far more difficult to articulate a clear intent than to give objectives.
12. Never give targets without negotiating them first.Giving quantitative targets without negotiating them with those responsible for making it happen is bad management.
13. Deliver high quality information and develop shared situation awarenessDon't hoard information from your staff.. Don't work on a "need to know" basis.
14. Balance planning for the future with learning from the past - Balance market studies, action plans, specifications etc. with case studies, lessons learned, good practices. Spend half of your time reflecting on past experiences. Commitment to the past reaffirms the company’s identity and culture.
15. Don't promote people that sound smart, but those who make sure that smart things happen. –"It is the promotion process, stupid!". Be convinced that the company's promotion process is the primary driver of employees' attitudes.
16. Don't expect dedication from someone who fears for his job -All efforts are stalled by the fear of job loss.
17. Never manipulate your staff. - Employees are hypersensitive to inconsistencies and incoherences across organizations. They immediately detect every single sign of manipulation when they hear conflicting messages. Establish trusted relations with your peers first. Trust is the bandwidth of communication
18. Get yourself a technology coach - Communication and collaboration technologies are dramatically changing. E-mail is dying. Those who oversee this will be left aside of the most important knowledge exchanges of the planet.

Singapore IDA's Ten Year Technology Roadmap 2005-2015

We recently covered singapore tops global IT readiness index. Singapore achieved this leadership based on its very rigorous process of technology forecasting ,careful planning and prioritization and flawless execution. The Infocomm Development Authority has published the The Infocomm Technology Roadmap - one of the pillars towards the masterplan of the IDA national infocomm blueprint for the next ten years. It charts the vision, trends and developments of the technology landscape in Singapore for the next five years and aims to align Singapore's technological direction with worldwide infocomm developments.

The Roadmap highlights how major technologies can be deployed to help Singapore address the key challenges of economic growth, national security and population demographics in the next decade and indications suggest that the opportunity for the creation of new value through IT is greater than ever before.
In IDA's perspective, the next 10 years are expected to witness the confluence of innovations which hold the potential to dramatically change the way we live our lives. To many the possibilities will seem unimaginable. For instance, sentient technologies will enhance the quality of life for both young and old.Sentient technologies will also create more exciting lifestyles in smart homes and entertainment applications for the masses. Sentient technologies will transform the Internet from one that is passive to an intelligent agent that analyses and delivers personalised information. This means that the Net will intelligently sift through information to deliver exactly the information requested.Smart systems will be routinely deployed to advance eldercare, such as to sense and remind elderly patients at home to take their medication or multiple pills at different times. Preventative healthcare can reduce costs and provide peace-of-mind to caregivers too. Monitoring of the elderly at home and detection of abnormal behavioural changes will be achieved through telematic systems enabled by communication technologies, sensor networks, tracking systems, biosensors and wearables. A very impressive 184 page report tracking all the emerging technologies and how it can be applied to singapore and society at large.Must read report for all interested in emerging technologies.

Software Business & The Long Tail

Joe Kraus writes brilliantly about the long tail effect on search business and provides his perspective about the future software business.

In Excite’s heyday, millions of searches were handled everyday. The query distribution looked quite insightful.Excite query distribution.In fact, the frequency of the average query was 1.2. That means if you wrote each of the millions of queries on a slip of paper, put them all in a fish bowl and grabbed one at random, there was a high likelihood that this query was asked only once during the day. Of ten-plus million queries a day, the average search was nearly unique.The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the "long tail" – percentages categorised-queries asked a little over once a day.

The real reason Excite went out of business is because we couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day, while overture and google could find a solution for this.It was a special kind of marketplace where small advertisers could reach small markets efficiently. It was and is a revolution to the traditional economics of advertising (where the cost of producing and distributing advertising requires large markets to justify the expenditure).
Search is a long tail business and that is the source of its power and profit.
Chris Anderson wrote a great article called The Long Tail recently and pointed out 57% of Amazon’s sales come from books you can’t even buy at a Barnes and Noble. This runs totally counter to the traditional 80/20 rule in retailing – that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your inventory. In Amazon’s case, 57% of their book revenue comes from 0% of Barnes and Nobles inventory.
If we look at the software industry from this prism - the purpose of software in business is to support these "business processes" - To support the way a business does business – from the way a business runs it’s hiring and firing to the way it orders materials to the way it tracks sales.
- First, every business has multiple processes.
- Second, while some of these are pretty common in name from business to business (recruiting, for example), in practice, they are usually highly customized.
- Finally, there are simply a large number of processes that are either unique or that are common to millions of very small markets and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to buy software for (for example, the process by which an architecture firm communicates between it’s clients and the city planning office).
These mean that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.This is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve.

In the past, software’s long tail has been generally inaccessible because software has been
- Too difficult to write
- Too expensive to write and distribute
- Too brittle or expensive to customize once deployed.
It just hasn’t been economical for someone to create a custom software company to help architecture firms.In the software business, the traditional focus has been on dozens of markets of millions instead of millions of markets of dozens. The traditional software model is to make software have enough features and address enough of a homogeneous market that you can sell millions of copies of the same software. In the past, that’s been the only way to make money.
Joe writes,Jotspot is building a platform to make it easy and affordable to build long-tail software applications. To take those Excel spreadsheets and turn them into real web-based applications where you don’t have versionitis, where updates find you instead of you looking for them and where you can integrate data in your hard drive with data from the web, email and other applications and Joe concludes by advising entrepreneurs to look for the long tail in all business and develop strategies for fulfilling those needs. Joe has a good presentation on this topic available here.

Stage Set For India Headquartered Software Companies To Grow Phenomenally

India headquartered IT services firms have taken scalability in the services arena to a new high. Not many in the outside may know whats happening inside these emerging global giants. This scalability is made possible based on "process focus of these firms. You need to have the processes in place to manage this scale. Need to have technology and backbone which is robust enough." The economictimes article gives a glimpse of the developments inside these enterprises.

- Infosys Technologies has been hiring about 50 people a working day for the last nine months. For the full year, it will hire 12,000 people. It received a million applications.
- Wipro adds three employees to its staff every working hour. It made 40,000 offers between April and December, more than the number of people it currently employs.
- Satyam will see an addition of 30,000 to the present 20,000 in the next few years.
- TCS’S headcount stands at 43,681 people with over 6,200 added in last two quarters. In a short span of 12-36 months, almost all the top five Indian IT services firms will boast of a 50,000-strong workforce making the term "software factories", the post-modern equivalent of the good old manufacturing ones.

Trendsetting HR practices are coming from leading Indian IT companies. The core strength of the cultural and HR processes, which have been developed by companies are in many ways superior to those followed by the US companies. The Indian headquartered IT software companies are setting the global standards now in many areas and not just in software development.As Partha Iyengar of Gartner agrees, "Indian companies have applied their process mania and capabilities to the recruitment area as well. Hence, they have a pretty robust process - right from the mechanism to solicit resumes, to screening them, to doing online testing and filtering candidates to the final hiring and orientation. Once you have a process in place, it becomes extremely repeatable and scaleable."

The view of the indian firms about US /Europe headquartered companies offering to compete - "The ability to process million applications, recruit thousands, train them and put them to work without de-stabilising the organisation might emerge as a core competency of the Indian IT services firms – which could become the key differentiator with the MNC firms that have mounted a vigorous challenge for leadership in the offshore space".
My Take: Admittedly these enterprises shall gain more strength in the days to come - there may be a lot more that these companies may need to do to withstand competition and create new frontier for growths.We shall cover these in a separate post - there are imminent dangers and infinite opportunties - To just highlight the marketcap of these top tier companies listed in the US bourses vary from 3 Bn USD to 20 Bn USD ... Several such things would come into interplay when we assess growth prospects for these enteprises.

Online Paid Content Consumption & User Generated Content

Consumer spending for online content in the U.S. grew 18.8% to nearly $1.6 billion in 2003 over the year before, according to a new study from the Online Publishers Association. Three content categories accounted for 64% of total spending in 2003: personals/dating, business/investment and entertainment/lifestyles. Excerpts with edits and comments:
- The personals and dating category continued to dominate, accounting for 28.8% of all Web content revenue last year. Consumers doled out $449.5 million on matchmaking sites in 2003, up 48.8% from 2002.
- Business and investment content providers reeled in $334.1 million last year, a 14.4% increase versus the year earlier. Though the entertainment and lifestyles category was among the top three revenue generators, spending on that type of content declined nearly 6% last year to $214 million.
- Credit-help sites and community-made directories also experienced a drop. The former was down 9.5% at $36.6 million, while the latter was off 4.6% at $87.6 million.
- Conversely, the personal growth category grew by a whopping 104.5% to $90.7 million last year. Other content categories notching notable increases: general news (up 25% to $87.5 million), sports (up 26.6% to $38.2 million) and greeting cards (up 12.3% to $40.6 million).

The study also found that 16.4 million U.S. consumers paid for online content in the fourth quarter, up 2.1 million over the same period in 2002.Monthly subscriptions have eclipsed annual subscriptions as consumers' pricing model of choice, with the former representing 49.6% of total subscription revenue and the latter 41.6%.
Paul writes,one of the most powerful ways to develop web site traffic is to enable users to share their content through your web site with others-to create community around user generated content.Many of the fastest growing web sites of all time did this (or do it now): MyFamily.com, eBay, GeoCities, Xoom, Homestead, MySpace, Epinions, Hotshots, LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, Friendster, and more.If sites are uses to get customers to blog, use message boards, upload photos or reviews, the effect shall be dazzling.With open source software (for message boards, blogs, uploading photos, and more) and with the cost of hard drive storage a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago, the time has never been better to try a user generated content strategy.
My Take: As these show, user generated content and the content service gets more people to look at online content- not general content per se - the various facilities to collaboratively communicate and be a part of a like minded/related interest community id the differentiator attracting more and more people to experience the online world better.

Gordon Moore Not Optimistic About Nanotechnology!

Gordon Moore says, although many believe the future of the computing industry lies with building chips out of carbon nanotubes or other novel materials, it won't be easy to replace silicon. Mr.Moore adds,"Modern-day microprocessors contain hundreds of millions of transistors, and soon will have billions,and, to break even, manufacturers have to pop out millions of these complex devices. Although researchers have been able to produce individual nanotube transistors, the ability to mass produce hasn't been shown".Designers have been able to put more transistors on chips for decades by shrinking the size of the transistors, but they are now at the point where some structures inside chips are only a few atoms thick. "Any material made of atoms has a fundamental limit," Moore said. The solution? Make the chips bigger. Carbon nanotubes, he added, wouldn't be completely left out. They could be used to replace the metal interconnects between the transistors.

Process Forensics :Snapshots Of Digital Footprints

Internet growth in the U.S. is around 2 million new users each month, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, and security-related incidents have increased every year since 1998 and doubled from 2001 to 2003, according to the CERT Coordination Center.Checkpointing software is a computer tool designed to allow administrators to backup and recover data and more smoothly introduce new systems into a network.Process forensics involves extracting information from a process’s address space for the purpose of finding digital evidence pertaining to a computer crime. The tool stores the state of a running program, or process, so that it can be restarted from that point.
Researchers from the University of Florida have combined the concept of checkpointing with that of intrusion detection - determining when an unauthorized user is accessing a computer - to come up with a new tool that could help in computer crime investigations. Like in the real world,computer forensics involves determining who did what after an attack has taken place. Although intrusion prevention is the ultimate goal, as long as intruders continue to be successful, there's a need for good ways to collect data concerning intrusions.

Forensic investigators looking for evidence of a computer crime typically analyze several types of files looking for data that will allow them to piece together computer activity. These include log files, which keep track of computer events; swap files, which are used by the computer as a temporary holding space for data and could still house evidence of the illicit computer activity; and unallocated space and slack space, which may contain data from files that were deleted but have not yet been completely overwritten. In contrast to this data saved in files, checkpointing saves data that resides in memory and is usually discarded when it is no longer needed by the process or when the computer is turned off.

Orchestrating Global Innovation Networks

(Via Businessweek) Names like HTC,Flextronics,Cellon, Quanta Computer, Premier Imaging, Wipro Technologies,and Compal Electronics, are fast emerging as hidden powers of the technology industry,They are the vanguard of the next step in outsourcing - of innovation itself. When Western corporations began selling their factories and farming out manufacturing in the '80s and '90s to boost efficiency and focus their energies, most insisted all the important research and development would remain in-house.

The likes of Dell,Motorola,and Philips are buying complete designs of some digital devices from Asian developers, tweaking them to their own specifications, and slapping on their own brand names. It's not just cell phones. Asian contract manufacturers and independent design houses have become forces in nearly every tech device, from laptops and high-definition TVs to MP3 music players and digital cameras. The reigning view - "Customers used to participate in design two or three years back - but starting last year, many just take our product. Because of price competition, they have to."

The search for offshore help with innovation is spreading to nearly every corner of the economy., Boeing Co. (said it is working with India's HCL Technologies to co-develop software for everything from the navigation systems and landing gear to the cockpit controls for its upcoming 7E7 Dreamliner jet. Pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly are teaming up with Asian biotech research companies in a bid to cut the average $500 million cost of bringing a new drug to market. And Procter & Gamble Co.says it wants half of its new product ideas to be generated from outside by 2010, compared with 20% now.Underlying this trend is a growing consensus that more innovation is vital, but,current R&D spending isn't yielding enough bang for the buck. Companies either will have to cut costs or increase R&D productivity."Most leading Western companies are turning toward a new model of innovation, one that employs global networks of partners. These can include U.S. chipmakers, Taiwanese engineers, Indian software developers, and Chinese factories. IBM is even offering the smarts of its famed research labs and a new global team of 1,200 engineers to help customers develop future products using next-generation technologies. When the whole chain works in sync, there can be a dramatic leap in the speed and efficiency of product development.

The downside of getting the balance wrong, however, can be steep. Start with the danger of fostering new competitors. Another risk is that brand-name companies will lose the incentive to keep investing in new technology. The demarcation between mission-critical R&D and commodity work is sliding year by year. The implications for the global economy are immense. Countries such as India and China, where wages remain low and new engineering graduates are abundant, likely will continue to be the biggest gainers in tech employment and become increasingly important suppliers of intellectual property. Some analysts even see a new global division of labor emerging: Consultant Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book A Whole New Mind, argues that the "left brain" intellectual tasks that "are routine, computer-like, and can be boiled down to a spec sheet are migrating to where it is cheaper, thanks to Asia's rising economies and the miracle of cyberspace." The U.S. will remain strong in "right brain" work that entails "artistry, creativity, and empathy with the customer that requires being physically close to the market."

India's R&D -Rapid Strides -Lot More To Do

David Kirkpatrick of Fortune writes, that Science and Engineering Need to Be Cool Again and earlier he wrote aboutIs Engineering Uncool—or Just Unappreciated? in the US context and also wrote India is taking the education of its next generation much more seriously than the U.S. While it is generaaly well known that all knowledge related work would slowly move towards India,and that several western corporations in the high tech sector are already moving research work in considerable volume towars India,I was wondering what's the view on this from the indian research fraternity. Here the view from Raghunath Mashelkar,a well known name from the Indian scientific community. He writes,India's R&D has the potential to reach the Top. His key thoughts run like this:
- Five years ago, he predicted: "The next century will belong to India, which will become a unique intellectual and economic power to reckon with, recapturing all its glory, which it had in the millennia gone by".
- In 1926, the distribution of scientific productivity was analyzed by Alfred J. Lotka of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York. The result of his investigation, which remains largely valid, was an inverse square law of productivity, by which the number of people producing n papers is inversely proportional to n2. This means that for every 100 authors who produce, say, one paper in a given period of time, there are approximately 100/22, or 25 authors, who produce two papers and one author, who will produce 10 papers. Thirty years later, the same law was found to be applicable to patents.
-This means that the bulk of scientific and technological creativity and productivity lies in the minds and abilities of a small number of highly talented individuals.
- Jack Welch on setting up GE’s R&D center said,: "India is a developing country, but it is a developed country as far as its intellectual infrastructure is concerned. We get the highest intellectual capital per dollar here." One way to understand what Welch meant is to calculate the number of scientific research publications the country produces per dollar that is spent on R&D in India. Using the data provided by Sir David King (chief scientific adviser to the UK government) for scientific publications in major, peer-reviewed journals (SCI publications), I calculated the number of journal publications per gross domestic product (GDP) per capita per year. The top three nations were India (31.7), China (23.32), and the United States (7.0). John Welch's intuition was right!
- Indeed, if we apply Lotka's law of scientific productivity, India's and China's competitive advantage ought to increase by several orders of magnitude as more and more of the most talented scientists return. In this way, by shifting much of their R&D activity to countries such as India and China, the world's industries can greatly bolster the domestic intellectual capital of these countries.
- As I see it from my perch in India's science and technology leadership, if India plays its cards right, it can become by 2020 the world's number-one knowledge production center, creating not only valuable private goods but also much needed public goods that will help the growing global population suffer less and live better.
My Take:
- While the potential may be high , India needs to learn from the US to focus on applied reseearch more aggressively.Reseach in the emerging areas of digital/mobile technologies, Silicon, Conductivity,Communication, Sensor systems, Bio-technology etc. Anything less than being seen as world leaders in innovation in each of these categories would not be seen a full fledged success.
- For all its proclaimed prowess, India has not been able to produce nobel prize winners
- The academia, industry, government linkage looks very weak and needs to be improved several times over.
- India needs to attract lot of foreign talent to work out of India in cutting edge areas - India should be seen more easy to do business with and should host and participate in lot more scientific activities - conferences, exchange programs etc.

Identity Thefts And Emerging Solutions

To combat phishing, companies are augmenting passwords with new web safeguards to keep your personal info protected writes, Stephen Wildstorm in Businesweek. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:

Unlike virus attacks, in a typical phishing attack, thieves send mass e-mails supposedly from reputable businesses, directing customers to a site where they are asked to divulge vital information, such as passwords, bank account numbers or credit card information., Phishing is theft, pure and simple. They pull it off primarily by fooling their unsuspecting victims, rather than by exploiting flaws in software. Phishing incidents continue to proliferate despite the concerted efforts to control them. The time has come to attack the problem at its root: the inadequacy of passwords. For Web sites where the potential losses are large, such as online banking sites, the password, no matter how cleverly constructed, has become too dangerous to use by itself.

The issue is authentication - proving that you are who you claim to be online. Even the strongest password can be stolen by phishing. So for real security, passwords should be supplemented with either a biometric, such as a fingerprint, or a code. In most cases, the latter is an electronic password that changes with each log-in and that's generated by a device you carry. Biometrics work well on corporate networks, where the initial registration can be done in person, but they're problematic for online-only transactions. Code devices may have broader appeal.

Solutions like Entrust have come with a number labeling each of five rows, a letter for each of 10 columns, and a digit in every cell. This allows for many trillions of arrays to be generated randomly with a near zero probability of any two being alike. when you log in to an IdentityGuard-protected system, you are asked to enter your user name, password, and the digit that appears in three or four cells. You look up the information on your array, which could be printed on an ATM or credit card, and enter it to log in. This site tracks online phishing scams and identity theft issues –including phishing scandals in sites like eBay and here is an article phishing story in a banking environment.This is going to make doing business online slightly less convenient, but it's a necessary evil. The extra step is far less trouble than cleaning up after an identity theft

Closed System - Giving Way To Competition

Cory Doctorow provides a word of warning to DRM-crazed companies,somewhere out there is a competitor who will steal your customers with more open products. More interestingly, he believes that DRM is bad for business, too. Excerpts:
For the mobile industry DRM is bad as:
- If you want to predict whether or not technology or a business is going to be successful, you have to imagine whether or not it's doing what the underlying technology is designed for.
- The Internet and the computer are designed for making copies Computers are designed for is for slicing and dicing bits and moving them from one place to another. And if a phone does not make it easier to copy things, then you're going to be out-competed by someone who decides to start a business that's about using the Internet and computers to make copies.
- If you started a business to outfit locomotives with special horseshoes in order to keep the blacksmiths happy, you probably wouldn't have lasted very long. Likewise, if you're starting a business to outfit phones with special locks that make it hard to copy things in order to make the music industry happy, then you're probably not long for this world.
Customers often avail themselves of the services of companies that add new features to their devices even if the industry that created the devices doesn't want those features to be there, as anyone who's ever used a VCR-plus or a TiVO or had their phone unlocked knows.
When TV came along, the movie companies were completely convinced that no one would ever go to see a movie again so long as they could watch them on TV. And so they all got together in a smoke-filled room and they said, "There will never be movies on television. End of story." And for a couple years, it worked. But then one company got the jump on the rest of them: Disney. To start Disneyland, they needed to raise $17 million, and ABC offered them $10 million if they would open up their vaults to their network. It was a good partnership for both of them. Disney got a huge competitive advantage over the other entertainment companies.
Any smart executive needs to jump for the opportunity to sell your customers a better product that does more and costs less.

Changing Landscape Of IT Service Delivery Management

( Via Zdnet)"Virtually every IT organization should be adopting process methods for service delivery". This is fully correct. There is a quiet revolution going on across IT organizations toward maturity via process-based frameworks, such as those prescribed for service management. IT Service Management (ITSM) may be the holy grail for once and for all aligning technology with business, as Gartner's Colleen Young(reg required) explains:"Through its emphasis on process effectiveness, fundamental business management capabilities, service positioning and financial accountability, it enables internal IT to address credibility gaps, improve performance, reduce costs and compete with external sourcing alternatives."
My Take:There is no doubt that service delivery excellence would become a key differentiator between service companies - The difference between service companies in the growth rates, despite size and same reach is reflective of their business models, positioning and their delivery abilities. When it comes to the crunch the decision of the CIO would be largely a factor of the service delivery framework including relevant domain experience in place at the consulting firm which includes quality procedures, communication, escalation mechanisms all other things being equal. From a service provider perspective, scaling up and providing broader range of services would be largely dependent on the maturity of the service delivery frameworks in place. All service business need to be assessed in terms of maturity to work as scalable business platofrms. In service business all said and done size matters. This is applicable to all service firms - more so for service firms with global delivery capabilities.

Groove Bought Over By Microsoft

The important development of the day is Microsoft's acquisition of Groove.
In the recent past, we have noted that with the latest version of Groove which Ray Ozzie said was a product that would straddle both IBM and Microsoft world - was anyway getting Windows-centric. Groove fills in a niche that Microsoft didn't have the right technology for. Groove was also a hit with people needing to collaboratively work without an Exchange server.

While Microsoft had some products around P2P & collaboration technologies ,Groove is miles ahead and this way it is a good acquisition for Microsoft. Groove shall become totally centered/supportive of Microsoft technologies moving forward.This integration may be quite easy as Grooveanyway uses may windows native components. A good buy for Microsoft - As far as Groove - had it stayed as a separate entity - could have made headway in the collbaration market.

Semantic Web : From Web Of Documents To Web Of Data

(Via News.com)"Semantic Web" heralds the arrival of the Internet's next evolutionary phase. Tim Berners Lee, director W3C,compares its advent to the dawn of the Web 10 years ago. Just as the Web encompassed existing Internet technologies while adding its revolutionary system of hyperlinks,so,they claim,will the Semantic Web give birth to vastly more powerful ways of gleaning information from the world's computer network.Advocates of the Semantic Web say it will give birth to vastly more powerful ways of gleaning information from the world's computer network. The Semantic Web protocols aim to let computers distinguish different kinds of data. Armed with those distinctions, applications could more automatically trade information, for example between an online address book and a cell phone. A Web site could automatically reconfigure itself on the fly based on the needs of a particular visitor. Search engines could narrow down results with greater precision.
Berners-Lee said in an interview that the haze of confusion surrounding the Semantic Web activity has a familiar ring."It's akin to the responses I got years ago when I was trying to explain this Web thing to people, especially in industry," Berners-Lee said. "The idea of a universal information space with identifiers and one-way links was a paradigm shift. We didn't have the vocabulary then to describe the things we take for granted now with regards to the Web in general. So it is with the Semantic Web." "This is about connecting the data to its definition and context," said Eric Miller, Semantic Web activity lead for the W3C, in a Tuesday keynote address to several hundred conference participants. "We're moving from a Web of documents to a Web of data. The W3C acknowledges that existing technologies already satisfy some of the needs the Semantic Web is designed to fill. One is the consortium's XML recommendation for creating highly descriptive and computer-friendly mark-up languages. Others lie in rapidly evolving database management systems. The new technology is envisioned as a comprehensive shift in the way data is exposed to the Web. "When a large enterprise designs lots of database schemas and XML schemas, the designers are making arbitrary design choices about exactly how to build the system," Berners-Lee said. "These choices have no actual connection to the real application, yet they are baked into the system. Anyone who uses the data has to know what these decisions are." Key goals for the Semantic Web architects include reuse of data and what backers call "recombinant effects." They hope that by letting computers digest and exchange information about context and meaning- a word that raises the hackles of artificial intelligence critics--they will allow data to survive the systems where it originated and traverse different applications as easily as browsers traverse the Web's billions of pages today. As that data takes on a virtual life of its own, it could be exploited and combined in unexpected and unexpectedly profitable ways. "The really exciting thing isn't that you can merge your own data between applications-that's like links on your own Web site,"Berners-Lee said. "The really exciting thing happens when others have their data in a mergeable format and make it available. When that public information becomes mergeable, we're in for the next, very pronounced stage of Web evolution."

Microsoft To Enter Service Business?

Faced with limited growth opportunity in a mature software market, Microsoft may be weighing a future as a service provider. The company has quietly launched a pilot project from within its IT department to provide full-scale outsourced IT services to battery maker Energizer Holdings Inc. Microsoft gradually assumes management of Energizer's Windows desktops, including software distribution and related upgrades, operating system management and management of security measures such as antivirus, antispyware and firewall technologies. Microsoft will also take over help desk and end-user support activities, adding 24/7 support, managing all e-mail services and server management and electronic document storage. The corporate plans also revealed that Energizer will continue to manage its non-Microsoft systems, including its SAP implementation and other specialty applications. It will also still handle its own user accounts, corporate network and the management of its PCs and PDAs.
Microsoft has historically been absent from the cut-throat service provider business, although it has offered some services through its consulting division. It's a challenging business, with high labor costs and constant price pressures, compared with the product business, where Microsoft is naturally more familiar, experts said. The outsourcing arrangement, which has no specified end point, operates out of Microsoft's IT department, and uses the same staff members who run Microsoft's internal operations. Microsoft often touts its own global enterprise, which supports 75,000 employees, as a giant test bed.
Microsoft's move into the service provider business will certainly irk the likes of IBM Global Services, Hewlett-Packard Co. and EDS, which will likely reassess their relationship with Microsoft should it become a competitor. One possible reason for entering the services business at this point is that Microsoft will have other opportunities for selling more software in addition to services. With Microsoft inside a customer's facilities, it's less likely they would opt for Linux or products from IBM or Oracle Corp. Interesting move by Microsoft - besides being a new area of business , increasingly other partners of Microsoft will try and develop different type of relationship with it -not sure whether this would benefit microsoft at all..

Fareed Zakaria: 500 MPG with Plug-ins and Biofuels

Fareed Zakaria writes Over the last five years, technology has matured in various fields, most importantly in semiconductors,to make possible cars that are as convenient and cheap as current ones,except that they run on a combination of electricity and fuel.Hybrid technology is the answer to the petroleum problem. Hybrid cars already can run on a battery and petroleum. "plug-in" hybrids is the next step,with powerful batteries that are recharged at night like laptops, cell phones and iPods. Ford, Honda and Toyota already make simple hybrids. Daimler Chrysler is introducing a plug-in version soon. In many states in the American Middle West you can buy a car that can use any petroleum, or ethanol, or methanol—in any combination. Ford, for example, makes a number of its models with "flexible-fuel tanks." (Forty percent of Brazil's new cars have flexible-fuel tanks.) Put all this technology together and you get the car of the future, a plug-in hybrid with a flexible-fuel tank.
The current crop of hybrid cars get around 50 miles per gallon,with a plug-in and it can provide 75 miles. Replace the conventional fuel tank with a flexible-fuel tank that can run on a combination of 15 percent petroleum and 85 percent ethanol or methanol, and you get between 400 and 500 miles per gallon of gasoline. (You don't get 500 miles per gallon of fuel, but the crucial task is to lessen the use of petroleum. And ethanol and methanol are much cheaper than gasoline, so fuel costs would drop dramatically.) Fareed concludes, "Smart government intervention would include a combination of targeted mandates, incentives and spending,could make this happen".

Asian Century : The Rise of Innovation in Asia

Jeff Nolan points out to the HBSworking article on Rising asian innovation prowess.We recently covered John Hagel & John Seely Brown's detailed writeup here and here stating,"Far from being easy targets for exploitation, emerging markets are generating a wave of disruptive product and process innovations that are helping established companies and a new generation of entrepreneurs to achieve new price-performance levels for a range of globally traded goods and services". David Kirkpatrick writes,"After my trip to India last month,my worldview has been changing" -" Now I'm aware of how quickly the divide between the developed countries and developing ones is closing. Seeing what’s happening in India helps make it clear that the U.S. can no longer count on remaining the world's technological leader". To stay competitive with India—and other emerging economies—it must do more to train young Americans in the sciences and technology. David adds, "Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, explicitly drew the link in a reent discussion - "In India and China," he said, "30% of the students get science and engineering degrees. In the U.S., it’s 4%." In India, it is every parent’s dream that his child become either an engineer or a doctor. In the U.S., engineering is considered uncool. Citizens in other nations— India, China, and elsewhere—show a more tenacious work ethic and a greater willingness to tackle tough subjects like engineering". Also add the fact that India has the maximum number of young people in the world today and also the maximum number of english speaking young people.The Economist captures this succintly when it wrote,"A broader view of innovation that values the role of incremental change communicates the power of bootstrapping.Companies that start out with limited capabilities—such as those in many developing economies—can rapidly build them over time through a series of modest process and product innovations. Ultimately, individual innovations may matter less than the institutional capacity to sustain a rapid series of improvements and the pace at which they are developed and disseminated through the network. The principles and examples are very illuminative, but Asia( nay india) may need to do more to change the rules of game decisively across all shades of the spectrum. We also covered recently about the Heightened interest about India.
The HBSWK article says,"Although Asian countries have been able to use cost advantages and software coding prowess to attract outsource business from around the world, the region is quickly moving up the value chain to challenge America's leadership in innovation". AsHBS professor Warren McFarlan put it,"researchers in the U.S. may soon have as much to fear about losing their jobs to overseas competitors as call center employees do today". Executives debated "The Present and Future of Innovation in Asia" during the 2005 Asia Business Conference held on February 19th at Harvard Business School. A recent survey of 200 mostly Fortune 500 companies found an "irreversible process" of traditional white-collar jobs being sent to Asia, said Arie Lewin, a professor and director of CIBER, sponsor of the study. The article adds India is the favoured destination.We also covered in our blog earlier the Indian Industry's perspective - in the words of G.B.Prabhat -Across every industry spectrum, there is potential for knowledge work to relocate to India. and also covered India Inc moving towards delivering high value work.More and more, Lewin said,the work being outsourced goes beyond call centers and similar services to include research, HR functions, and engineering services. He expects organizations to create Web-based organizational structures that will help them compete globally. Certainly the United States has no lock on innovation, panelists suggested. Technology is the great leveler, the powerful ingredient that can catapult a company, an industry, and even a country to the head of the class almost overnight, said Kiyotaka Fujii, president and CEO of SAP Japan Co., Ltd.HBS professor McFarlan said it is clear that Asia has benefited from the Internet's ability to send work—including highly-skilled work—easily around the globe. "Asia is competing in the global technology-enabled game," he said.
My Take: All these are good developments and would only serve to make the globe more prosperous and this need not be seen as negative development in the US - After all the US is the engine of the global economy and traditional leader in innovation and applied research - hopefully these developments would spur the US to accelarate their preparedness and progress but we shall defintiely see a more prosperous and vibrant Asia in the next two decades. Thing also would not go on an autopilot mode for Asia - it is also beset with several social and economic issues that needs to be addressed right away to make the growth braodbased and sustainable.

Singapore Tops The Global IT Readiness Index

The World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology Report ranks nations on how good they are at exploiting global IT developments and takes into account- affordability of Internet access, telephone connection charges, quality of maths and science education, government prioritization and procurement of ICT.The Report uses the Networked Readiness Index (NRI), covering a total of 104 economies in 2004-2005, to measure "the degree of preparation of a nation or community to participate in and benefit from ICT developments".

The NRI is composed of three component indexes which assess:
• the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community
• the readiness of the community's key stakeholders - individuals, business and governments
• and the usage of ICT among these stakeholders

The report places Singapore as the best performer worldwide in a number of categories - quality of maths and science education, affordability of telephone connection charges, and government prioritization and procurement of ICT -- and gets extremely high scores in other areas, such as affordability of Internet access.
The United States drops to number 5 in the ranking, following a three-year reign at the top. However, the loss in rank is less due to actual erosion in performance with respect to its past history and more to continuing improvements by its competitors. The United States maintains global leadership in the business readiness component of the rankings as well as in variables such as the quality of its scientific research institutions and business schools - which have no peer in the world - and the availability of training opportunities for the labour force as well as the existence of a well-developed venture capital market, which has spurred innovation.
Asia and the Pacific do extremely well this year with Singapore at number 1, Hong Kong and Japan entering for the first time in the top ten, at 7 and 8 respectively, and Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Korea and Malaysia quite well positioned at 11, 15, 21, 24 and 27 respectively. India and China significantly improve their positions climbing to number 39 and 45, compared to 45 and 51 in 2003, respectively. Japan's top ten performance is noteworthy, given the country's impressive track record in the area of technological innovation, second only to the United States in terms of US patents registered.

RFID As Supply Chain Infrastructure

We recently covered in this blog,RFID at the core of business processes.RFID is becoming the supply chain infrastructure for all major supply chains. In the next five years all supply chain networks would have to embrace RFID in a big way. This has attracted the usual cast of enterprise application vendors. AMR writes, "But traditional automation vendors aren’t quite ready to cede control of supply network operations. Instead, many view RFID as yet another battleground in the ongoing fight to keep the enterprise application vendors out of their real-time domain. However, RFID lures new entrants into the fray as the infrastructure vendors (like Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Microsoft) add middleware and embedded device capability to their products. RFID is turning into a battleground for automation/MES providers; but this time, in addition to device providers, WMS vendors, and ERP, there are middleware providers with strengths in data synchronization, master data management, ERP, and B2B integration, and relying on smart edge controllers for simple device and event management".

At least five identifiable classes of application vendors are laying claim to RFID for supply network operations. They are as follows:
-RFID pure-plays—Middleware application vendors including Acsis, GlobeRanger, OATSystems, ConnecTerra, GenuOne, and ClearOrbit. A number of these small companies got their start in the Auto-ID work at MIT.
-Large automation—Large automation vendors, such as Brooks Automation, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, and WhereNet, to which RFID is “just another (data collection) device,” and software vendors such as Apriso that have ventured beyond their Manufacturing Execution System (MES) roots into logistics execution
-Large infrastructure—Includes BEA, IBM, Oracle, and Sun. These vendors are currently progressing on RFID strategies and seeking ways to add RFID data acquisition elements to their platforms, essentially co-opting middleware functionality.
-Integration vendors—Vendors of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) products such as TIBCO, webMethods, and SeeBeyond are cautiously pushing down into RFID through partnerships.
-Enterprise applications—Primarily Warehouse Management System (WMS) vendors such as Manhattan Associates, which has developed its own RFID middleware, and RedPrairie, HighJump, Provia, and Marc Global, which have partnered with RFID pure-plays today, but SAP, Oracle, and SSA Global are eyeing this arena as an additional revenue opportunity within their significant installed bases.

I agree with AMR's advice that "If the primary business driver and benefit come from supply network inventory tracking and management beyond the four walls, then turn to enterprise and infrastructure vendors for supply network operations help". Manufacturers that don’t have to comply with 2005 mandates should look beyond pure-play RFID middleware to their traditional automation vendors, large infrastructure providers, and their enterprise application vendors for help with their supply network operations.

Digital Lifestyle & Intensifying Service Provider Battle

We recently covered in this blog on extracting value from digital content where we covered the view about the impact of existing players in the entertainment and media industries ss:
a) a devastating body blow;
b) a profit-spewing bonanza or
c) the creation of a promising market in its infancy.
Barron's ina recent cover story writes,
Four large industries - computer makers, consumer-electronics companies, telecommunications providers and entertainment creatorswill feel the shock waves of rapidly developing change in the way the world consumes home entertainment.The battle to control the digital home is linked inextricably to the heated fight between the cable and phone operators. The rapid spread of wireless phones, combined with the soaring adoption of the Internet-based phone service known as VOIP, has accelerated erosion of the regional Bells' core residential phone market. Excerpts with edits and comments:
Telco's are making bold moves, ranging from multibillion-dollar projects to compete with their cable rivals in video distribution, to a flurry of mergers with cellular and long-distance outfits. Both cable and phone companies now offer a "triple play" - phone, video and broadband 'Net access - bundled into a single bill. Add wireless, and you have a quadruple play. Ultimately, consumers will reap the rewards of digital convergence, the ability to gain access to any type of media - music, movies, photographs, television - at the push of a button. Today, for the average cable or satellite TV subscriber, the set-top box provides access to, well, just TV.
In the digital home, consumers will have a rich array of choices. Television lovers will be able to choose among conventional scheduled programs, video on demand, shows recorded on DVRs and material downloaded from the Internet. They will be able to access the music and photos on their PCs via the TV. The television will be able to display e-mail and voice mail,the Web and home security and control systems. And all of this will be accessible from any room in the house - and, eventually, from any place outside the house with an Internet connection. Most of this can be done right now.
Shane Robison, the chief strategy and technology officer of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), puts the annual revenue from all the affected markets north of $1 trillion. 45% of U.S. homes - almost 50 million - will be digital within the next five years. .Cable guys appear better-positioned than the producers of television set-top boxes and their customers to win this. .
We recently covered Microsoft's impressive advances in the Consumer electronics sector.Microsoft has been pushing Media Center, a version of its flagship Windows XP operating system specifically designed for home-entertainment applications. Microsoft said more than 1.4 million Media Center PCs had been sold to date; the software can be purchased only with a new PC.Microsoft wants to transform the PC from "primarily a productivity device to be more of an entertainment experience, a lean-back consumer-electronics experience." In fact, navigating around a Media Center PC with a remote control isn't much different from using a cable box or a TiVo.Intel concedes that the PC may not be the center of the universe when it comes to digital media. And consumers will build their digital home around the content they want to consume.It will be personal. one might build it differently from a neighbor- the PC may have a critical role, but it may not be in the center. In the end, the battle for your living room will be a clash of the titans. "The center of entertainment is still the living room and the television. And net net, they still control the keys to that kingdom - the cable TV providers and applications like Media Centre ( Read Likes of Comcast and Microsoft)- are well set to make the most out of the emerging digital lifestyle market."

Black(Fake!) Globalisation

Bruce Sterling's looks at the underground economy in Belgrade, describing it as black globalization – fuse of globalization and the black market.Real business happens to fakes even when global enterprises open their shops locally. gGobalism extends well beyond easy,offhand intellectual property thefts like videotaping first-run films and burning them onto DVD. It commandeers the manufacturing, distribution, and business infrastructure in a parasitic rejection of the global order that is the engine of our collective future. The folks who made my shoes have everything it takes to make excellent footwear. Yet they choose to make counterfeits. It's a brave, new, destructive world of manufacturing and marketing:
Bruce- fakes are there everywhere – From NY toLondon to Dubai to Sydney.

Google Desktop Search 1.0 : Web 2.0 In Action

Google’s 1.0 release adds search over the full text of PDFs and the meta-information stored with music, image and video files including support for the Firefox and Netscape browsers,Thunderbird and Netscape email clients and new Chinese and Korean language interfaces.

- In addition to searching a wide range of computer files and email, Google desktop search tool can access the full text of web page history. Google Desktop Search can also be used to recover accidentally deleted or misplaced information.All results are accompanied by cached snapshots of each web page and document so users can access information even if they’re not connected to the web or if a document has been deleted.
- Google Desktop Search will also provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable software developers to create new and innovative applications using the desktop search Product.
- Additional enhancements to Google Desktop 1.0 include a free-standing search box that users can place anywhere on their desktop; making access to desktop and web information faster and easier than before.
- In addition to enabling users to block HTTPS web pages, Google Desktop Search now also excludes all password-protected documents from Microsoft Word and Excel.

As John Battell writes, the new version of Google Desktop will include APIs for any Windows application developer, letting anyone plug their application into GDS (ie, iTunes, chat, or...MSFT Office, for example).Developers can access these APIs to do two things:
- one, to make sure their documents are indexed by GDS, and appear as searched by GDS in any way they care to.
- And second, to plug Google search, all of Google search, into their apps. new GDS will also create a floating "search box" independent of any browser, which you can place anywhere you want on top of Windows....Web 2.0. certainly,
- it's also true that this release will cause no shortage of consternation up in Redmond.

The Moore Effect 1995-2005, 2005-2015?

Ryan McIntyre – one of the co-founders of Excite writes,"A decade is a very long time in Silicon Valley, particularly when viewed through the lens of Moore's Law". Excerpts with edits and my comments added:

Short term exponential progress is overestimated(where the curve is relatively flat),but we tend to underestimate progress in the long term (when the curve gets very steep, goes up and to the right, does a hockey stick, etc.).Though enterprise and consumer oriented companies like yahoo, google, eBay, Amazon etc..have different revenue models, their delivery model and back-end architectures for serving their customers are fundamentally similar. A quick overview of prices of key infrastructure elements in the data centers:
- Bandwidth: $1100/megabit/month in 1995 vs. $128/megabit/month in 2005
- Cage Space: $175/sqft/month in 1995 vs. $25/sqft/month in 2005
- Disk Storage: $1,300,000/TB in 1995 vs. $3,300/TB in 2005 (SCSI RAID)
- 1-CPU Server: $25,000 in 1995 vs. $1,000 in 2005 (web server class machine)
- 4-CPU Server: $360,000 in 1995 vs. $38,000 in 2005 (with 16GB RAM)
The compute performance of a web server class machine in 1995 vs. today if assessed makes interesting reading. Given five or six performance doublings since 1995 courtesy of improvements in clock speed, bus speed, architecture changes from 32 to 64 bit,additional cache memory and faster RAM, a conservative estimate would be that today's single CPU 1-U "pizza box" web server is roughly fifty times faster than last decade's model. Couple that with the 25x price difference for this serverx, in 2005 - one can buymore than one-thousand times as much compute power as it did in 1995. Bandwidth is at least ten times cheaper than it was in 1995, floor space in the data center is seven times cheaper and enterprise-class storage is at least four hundred times cheaper than it was only a decade ago. With some smart software and network engineering, the cost per gigabyte of storage can be brought down an order of magnitude further still using a distributed filesystem based on low-end IDE drives. Finally, with the rise of Linux, Apache, MySQL and open source in general, software license costs can also vanish from the equation when running a large-scale web service.

The cost to deliver an application to an end-user has dropped dramatically for web service enteprisess and the cost to operate their data centers therefore has much less of an impact on their costs of operations and capex budget than it used to, which means their gross margins for delivering their product have improved significantly since 1995. For companies like Yahoo, Google and more recently, Technorati, this means the cost to deliver a page view or search results page has gone down dramatically, while the average size of a search-results page is perhaps only marginally larger since 1995. Even considering the size of a search index (Google's 8B pages today vs. Excite's 10M in 1995) has grown nearly one thousand-fold, the costs of computing power and storage have accommodated this expansion while bandwidth costs and rack space have fallen nearly tenfold.
A subscription-based recurring revenue stream can foster different business models with dependable revenue stream and profit margins that can approach those of a traditional software company. In 2015, the increases in CPU speed, memory density and bandwidth will make today's costs and capabilities look as quaint as 1995's do today. Thus the environment will continue to become more hospitable to the software-as-a-service model, more entrepreneurs will create meaningful businesses based on this model, VCs will continue to invest in these ideas, and we'll all be able to enjoy some mind-blowing applications a decade from now that are simply not possible today.

KMWorld's 100 Companies That Matter In Knowledge Management

Hugh McKellar of KMWorld Magazine lists the top 100 providers of products and services that "exemplify the true ideals of knowledge management – the ones whose products and services continue to fundamentally transform the ways organizations operate." I was curious to look at consulting companies in the list - they have been separately listed as under:
- Accenture
- Basex
- Bearing Point
- CSC
- Delphi Group
- Doculabs
- Forrester Research/GIGA
- Fujitsu Consulting
- Gartner/MetaGroup
- IBM Global Services
- IDC
- Ovum
- Perot Systems
- PricewaterhouseCoopers The 451 Group
- ZenSarZenSar

Management As A Profession

According to this Harvard article If management was a licensed profession on a par with law or medicine, there might be fewer opportunities for corporate bad guys.The authors write, To speak of the professional obligations of individuals such as CEOs and other executives is to imply that business management itself is a profession— but is it Our criteria for calling an occupation a bona fide profession are as follows:
• a common body of knowledge resting on a well-developed, widely accepted theoretical base;
• a system for certifying that individuals possess such knowledge before being licensed or otherwise allowed to practice;
• a commitment to use specialized knowledge for the public good, and a renunciation of the goal of profit maximization, in return for professional autonomy and monopoly power;
• a code of ethics, with provisions for monitoring individual compliance with the code and a system of sanctions for enforcing it.

My Take: The authors suppose that if management were a licensed profession, there may be fewer opportunities for unethical folks.This doesn't seem like an entirely bad idea to me, but I just don't see how it can work in practice.No body is an expert to start with. They need lots of coaching before they become good managers, and lots of practice before they become excellent managers.There may be challenges in licensed professionals working at different levels. Any license/accredition need to come up with an obligation to continually update skills.It is very telling that , MBAs are the least likely to pursue continuing education- I think that virtually anybody may end up with management responsibilities.It may be a good idea to get senior-level managers/executives,to get on board.As good faith for stakeholders,this may serve as as an incentive for younger managers.The focus and thrust should be in measurable continual education.

Internet Surpasses Radio In Reach And Rivals Newspapers

The Internet surpassed radio as a source for political news in the United States last year as more people went online to keep up with the presidential election campaign, according to a new report released on Sunday. As many as 75 million Americans used the internet during the 2004 elections to get news, discuss politics through e-mails or to participate directly in the political process by volunteering or contributing money,Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults used the Internet to get political news last year, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.That's up from 4 percent in 1996 and 18 percent in 2000. Television remained the dominant medium for most voters, but 18 percent said they got most of their political news from the Internet, compared with 17 percent who said they turned to the radio for their news. For those with a broadband connection at home, the Internet rivaled newspapers in importance.
Michael Cornfield, Senior Research Consultant to the Project writes in his commentary,the Internet's distinctive role in politics has arisen because it can be used in multiple ways. Part deliberative town square, part raucous debating society, part research library, part instant news source, and part comedy club, the Internet connects voters to a wealth of content and commentary about politics. This is the first report that I am seeing where traditional media reach could be surpassed by the internet - clearly sign of things to come.

SAP : We Invented Globalisation In Effect

SAP is getting stronger and stronger - As seen in the field, in mindshare and in futuristic plans, SAP is clearly miles ahead.This article published in The Gaurdian talks about Kagermann's style, his determination - read SAP's determination to move close to dominating the market.
- Kagermann, is looking to a doubling of the market in a few years and combined oracle & Peoplesoft has less than half SAP's marketshare.Also in SAP's view -"The merger deal simply makes their business more complex, offering four products, and it will take them a long time to sell it to the market,".
- The NetWeaver platform of applications and services, offering customers the opportunity to build their own specifications on top, will outdistance Bill Gates's Microsoft and IBM. "SAP's strategy is to beat Microsoft: be better." Key to his plans is to develop and refine NetWeaver to enable customers to match their systems to SAP's technology, and present a wholly new "open source" model later this decade.
- Shai Agassi claims SAP in effect invented globalisation by enabling companies to integrate all their systems on one platform, allowing them to know precisely what individual far-flung businesses were doing in terms of sales, earnings, inventory and bottlenecks.
- New Technology is the driving force behind the trend for industry consolidation - in retail, financial services, utilities or autos - to capture and fund innovation. -- Netweaver platform will be a venture based on partnership with customers able to add their own reusable pieces of software to "compose" their applications.
- The core value, is inter-operability - the opposite of Microsoft's bundling all its applications into its Windows operating system and excluding rivals.
- SAP remains restlessly creative,determined to expand the company globally and develop new products via an R&D budget that accounts for 14% of sales compared with the European average of 2%.

The competitive landscape:
-With three code bases, three development teams, three competing business process models , its a nightmare for oracle to integrate Peoplesoft and JDE - probably, oracle may end up developing migration tools for from Oracle, and JDE and ONTO Peoplesoft- clealrly several months to shpow results and more to stabilise
- Microsoft reported flat revenues in its business solution division and their project green revamping four sets of applications- the Axapta, Great Plains, Navision and Solomon product lines planned until 2012 and resting on the much delayed longhorn project to start - SAP is all set to dominate the enterprise application market- they can become stronger and stronger moving forward - clearlly thought leadership, good engineering, flawless execution and ability to take right calls at the right moment reaps enormous benfits and is now providing unassailable leadership to SAP.

Blogger & Blogging Tools Long Way To Go!!

I was discussing with someone yesterday about the progress being made by content and portal players and we were relating to the progress being made by various players - I had been and I continue to be involved in various content & portal related initiatives amidst several consulting & IT initiatives - I definitely agree with Doc Searls views that google has not done much to improve bloggers.com capabilities. Doc Searls points out- " Google's acquisition of bloggers looks like the deal was mostly about grabbing up a few million pages for advertising placement".He highlights that just as Microsoft all but quit innovating with its browser after it achieved a monopoly (as Apple later did with Safari), Google all but quit innovating with Blogger -Not because it had a huge market share with Blogger, but because it had a monopoly role in advertising on blogs.There is enormous room for improvement in blogging tools. Based on my experience with blogger -leave aside innovating - blogger has regular problems in publishing - sometimes publishing goes remarkably slow and basic things have been left unattended like - setting right the counter for the no. of items published (not fixed for about five months) and delay in incorporating basic features like trackbacks.

A New MetaSearch Engine

I attended the SCS Gala Dinner, the annual IT event of Singapore on Saturday.While the IT scene at singapore is steady, it is refreshing to see a 21 year-old undergraduate student,William Chee Wai Leong from Singapore launching today TurboScout,a new search tool that helps Internet users to access and compare original results from over 90 search engines across 7 categories on a single web page, removing the hassle of retyping keywords into different search engines.Try this - readers may find this a useful tool( Disclosure : I have not used it that well myself to make any reasoned recommendation other than pointing out to the availability).Congrats -William Chee,Singapore needs several such efforts from all its residents to retain its competitiveness and leadership in the coming years.

Mark Locovsky & Microsoft's Future !!

Hailed as the brain behind hailstorm and well known name inside microsoft as a distiguished operating system architect,Mark Lucovsky wrote sometime back on Microsoft's inabilityto ship upgrades in time and how their upgrade process is not effective and not reaching a large population and how this ineffectiveness owing to the large cycletime looks odd in the modern web world and questioned how long can microsoft continue to support the windows platform this way and wrote that the world would increasingly look to new model players like Amazon. Some spirited defence have come from the microsoft camp like this and the one here. (Via Scobeleizer)Kevin Schofield perhaps captures the issues quite well.He writes, "in comparing Windows to Amazon, Mark is making an apples-to-oranges comparison.Windows is client code, and amazon is a server-based service.What I expected Mark to say was that Windows is big - really big, undoubtedly one of the largest software projects in the world, if not the largest. And it's been developed over a long enough period that the original authors of many parts of the code have since moved on, and maintenance of that code has passed on through several generations of owners who struggle with the challenge to maintain the insitutional history of the code, its design and architecture, and key decisions that were made along the way. The Windows team is facing design, construction, and maintenance issues that no one in the world has ever faced before. They do their best to make smart, well-informed decisions, but some days they struggle with issues that have no precedent to inform them". In a typical microsoft style, several from their camps are attacking google as well with themes like,
- Testing system for backwards compatibility and making sure that it works, is very very difficult
- Things are comparatively much, much easier when you talk about web applications because by their very nature they don’t need to tested for thousands of hardware /software configurations but merely for 4 or 5 type of browsers

- Google Toolbar works only with Internet Explorer and only on Windows Platform, even though it’s been in works for more than 4 years.If Google can ship the software, there should be a Google Toolbar for all major browsers (there are what 4 major browsers?), for all platforms (3 platforms?) in span of 4 years- this for a "toolbar" not even full fledged application!

My Take:Marc Locovsky's argument looks too shallow in writing off the future of windows on shipping delays alone. It is widely speculated that Google is in the process of building an operating system platform and asRick Skrenta points out Google has the most amazing talent on OS today. I agree with Kevin and others - Microsoft is demonstrating incredible energy to develop, test,and deliver software of mind boggling complexity to a very diverse base. They run very large scale beta tests, they support remarkable variety of hardware and software configurations, being run by every possible kind of environemnt - industry,customer,geography and user - They are also making enough noise about their support and have the needed marketing muscle to demonstrate their reach. Their claims about non windows based product upgrade review may be suspect but they are trying their best.In my way,Microsoft continues to be the best known name in pushing new technologies to the masses.our recent coverage on Microsost's winning ways in the consumer electronics sector reinforces this view. I agree with the view, there's no other company on earth that has the capability to develop, debug, beta test, deliver software on a massive scale like Microsoft.But with all their best possible effort on supporting windows and their undue delay in shipping longhorn, Microsoft has earned the wrath of a significant section of the user community, with windows malperformance.And with unfolding developments like Bandwidth & Microsoft, tough time lay ahead for them. They are pushing the user community to look at alternatives like hosted desktop solutions, or open source or await alternate operating systems - the window of opportunity for microsoft to maintain their well earned leadership is getting smaller and smaller.

Partnering With Technology Companies

Brad Feld points out to Jim Lejeal (Oxlo CEO’s) interesting post on working with Microsoft .

Based on my association with with multiple technology partners of various size and hue – I would like to offer my perspective (In layman terms -each relationship requires special focus and thrust and greatly depends on who is driving the relationship and at what level and with what objective):

- In general any technology product company’s approach to partnership varies from region-to-region and from vertical to account may vary based on the context – Over a period of time when the DNA of the both the enterprises become transparent to each other – the understanding may be better when every available opportunity may go through the relationship based first right of refusal basis- assuming that both enterprises have the needed skills to address the opportunity at hand.

Generally product companies look upto consulting companies in need of:

-Providing good solution propositions to prospects in pre-sale stage – Every product company would have specific industry solutions but a strong endorsement by a consulting company/system integrator improves the positioning in the mind of the customer a lot – Of course some consulting companies dictate what the product vendor need to do in presales(I was involved in a transaction where IBM consulting had sold a million dollar plus product license sale when no-one from the said product company had ever met the customer –both before and after sales!! – This is another extreme though occasions like this could be few and far between).
- Help in demonstrating that product would meet the requirements – by POC’ and demo’s etc.
- Involved help in deploying solutions- seamless integration of the consultants with the product team is a must.

From a relationship perspective,
-It is important to know the product companies org structure and know who matters and should keep track of all movements - Stay close in all possible ways with the designated contact -understand how you can make him succeed.
- Every company is different and definitely need to invest in time and effort to understand what their culture is and how do they measure their people.
- Insist and put in place a governance structure with defined charter to review health of the relationship with an objective to improve it constantly.
- Its important to have relationship at all levels in the product companies- CEO, CTO ,PS head, Sales at all levels & Mktg dept etc.
- Develop a partnership maturity index and review how this can be improved and understand how your partner ranks in their internal scheme of things - this should go beyond formalised relaionships and catalogs -an imporant index -understand how many times you get talked about in their internal meets.
- It is essential to attend all partner events – actively participate in their events and at the right moment get the opportunity to work with them on all dimensions- Engineering, Support Services,, Professional Services, Verticalised solutions, add on solutions, demo’s & collaterals .. ad infinitum for opportunities to pursue –Understanding how and where we can add value if the key to success.
Last but not the least- regular meetings, constant follow-ups and aggressively pursuing a jt biz.plan – all these are bare minimum’s for an sustainable partnership. A lot more can be written - we shall try this another occassion.

IT : Fundamental Shake-Up Ahead

We recently covered in this blog,upstart companies making headway with subscription model and we saw reactions form various segments-both in support and against.I believe enterprise software segment may be largely unaffected as anyway customer pays heavy maintenance fees.I definitely feel that there is a silent revolution happening in the IT world. Subscription based software selling shall definitely move into mainstream – with telecom infrastructure and early adapters of subscription model players showing satisfactory results. As this article points out, the pace of technological advancement means a business can't stay put: It either spends more to keep its IT infrastructure as good -or it falls behind the competition.
The landscape has begun to change with the emergence of pay-as-you-go schemes in which computer infrastructure gets leased. Some offer a subscription model, others treat it on a per-use basis but the idea is essentially the same. Instead of paying for an expensive computer infrastructure, companies remain current with the newest technology by offloading the chore to any of the growing number of would-be candidates angling for the business.
This concept was updated for the era of distributed computing with the advent of grid infrastructures and various software-as-a-service models.It's too soon to tell whether this idea will set the computing world on its ear, but it could prove to be a harbinger for the industry-if it's a success.

As Ed Sim poins out in a recent post,It is hard to believe that CISCO which once had a market cap company at $600b is now potentially a great value play. The hot growth sector these days is energy and now Exxon Mobil is the largest market cap company at $400b.The P/E ratios (range from 18.7 to 19.6)of the tech giants like Cisco, Microsoft, Intel and Oracle are equal to or less than non-tech large caps like J&J, Wal Mart, and Coca Cola (range from 19.4 to 21).In fact, Cisco's 2005 P/E at 17 is less than that of the S&P 500's at 17.4. When most people think tech, they think high growth but this chart and these P/E ratios should really bring us back to earth. Larry Ellison's assertion a couple of years ago that the technology markets are maturing, seems to be right. That is one of the reasons we see all of these huge mergers happening as companies seek to expand their markets, their product lines, and revenue.
We also covered the viewpoint Bandwidth is microsoft’s enemy,wherein we wrote,"In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn’t matter, and this is why bandwidth should scare Microsoft more than any other company". Add desktop applications – like Microsoft office to the list –and it easy to see that definitely fundamentally altering changes are happening in the IT industry and fast moving changes shall happen in the desktop segment and shall move on to cover all IT segments.