Matt Blumberg points to an interesting chart - a significant one at that - literally talking about life changing impact of technologies and their adoption. Mankind has been adopting new technologies faster and faster over the last century. The surprising element is the faster adoption of the new age technologies. The chart, from a report issued by the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, shows the U.S. household penetration of new technologies on the vertical axis and years from date of introduction on the horizontal axis.The adoption of internet and the mobile phone may record to be the fastest adoption by mankind of any new technology. I guess that these two may also score to be the most quickly embraced technology in big numbers globally across rich and poor nations. Pointer of things to come in the flat world?
Kathy Sierra has an interesting post on the changing face of marketing. She writes with good insights, it's so trendy to diss marketing. Especially if you're in engineering, product design, or virtually anything but marketing. In this new open-source/cluetrain world, evryone is a marketer.If you're interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on..Congratulations. You're in marketing. The difference between what we now consider "old-school marketing" (otherwise known as The Four P's - Product,Price, Promotion, and Placement - heavy on advertising and "branding") and the "neo-marketing" we're doing here is frickin' huge. When people are passionate about something, and in a state of flow-and you have contributed to that by helping users/members learn and grow and kick ass-these are some of the happiest moments in their lives. Trying to promote more of that is something we should feel wonderful about, not guilty. (Pic : Courtesy Kathy Sierra)
Adi Oltean of Microsoft has technical insightson how GMail will evolve in the near future and concludes that GMail will offer around 3 GB around Jan 1 2006. Going by the article, Gmail already offers 2.5 GB space to users- can anyone confirm about this. Oh.. Interesting. As an active Gmail user, am happy – but it would be interesting if Google can publish statistics about usage of storage space in mailboxes, details how many times they are accessed, average mail size, geographical spread etc. Also an indication of spam volumes..( We won’t ask about content nature – though google may know about it very well). This may become an useful set of measures to track - am sure with Google's strategy to integrate all collabarative components & Gmail, certainly the rules of the game are set to change. With rival Yahoo announcing new search functions following its much spoken about plans to overhauling to make web mail look like desktop mail, the email market is becoming a hot place of action..
Jim Moore writes, "The world of informal media now has two main legitimizing institutions, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses". - The first are the A-list bloggers - They hold their places in large part because they do important work for the community, and they do it diligently and well. They got where they are by dint of contribution. The downside is that network effects have locked these folks in, and they represent a particular subset of the burgeoning world of informal media. It is difficult for new folks to break in now, and this may become a problem as the blogosphere expands. - The second is Google page rank. Non-transparent, mysterious, but very legitimizing for some purpose. Essentially, Google turns the links that folks maintain on their web sites-the link rolls, the pointers, etc, into an implicit tagging system. The good news of this system is that it can encompass an almost infinite range of topics, as many topics as can be meaningfully described in keyword searches. And it is quite open in that a new, ermergent topic can be established, gather a cluster of links, and become searchable without any human intervention or permission and even notice on the part of Google. The downside is that Google ratings do not show much personal expert judgement, they are slow to stabilize around a new topic, and tend to point to works back in time rather than current contributions. Of course there are legitimizing institutions, with powerful if specialized influence like Slashdot . Commercial blogs like Boing Boing are playing an important role. Tags on de.licoi.us are coming on strong, within the community of active, hard core digerati. But we need a lot more.
Paul Graham writes, "In the past there existed a corporate ladder. In the past, a position on the corporate ladder was genuinely valuable, because big companies tried not to fire people, and promoted from within based largely on seniority. A position on the corporate ladder had a value analogous to the "goodwill" that is a very real element in the valuation of companies. It meant one could expect future high paying jobs. One of main causes of the decay of the corporate ladder is the trend for takeovers that began in the 1980s. Why waste your time climbing a ladder that might disappear before you reach the top?
That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a startup, and sell it to the big company. At the very least we want options. The corporate ladder was one of the reasons the early corporate raiders were so successful. It's not only economic statistics that ignore the value of safe jobs. In the new model, it seems a bad plan to treat jobs as rewards. Plenty of good engineers got made into bad managers that way. And the old system meant people had to deal with a lot more corporate politics, in order to protect the work they'd invested in a position on the ladder.The big disadvantage of the new system is that it involves more risk. If you develop ideas in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. For better or worse, the idea of the corporate ladder is probably gone for good. The new model seems more liquid, and more efficient. But it is less of a change, financially, than one might think.
(Via Silicon.com) New research indicates that companies providing IT products and services will continue to increase their use of outsourcing agreements in order to lower overhead expenses. Evans Data survey finds, 33 per cent of businesses surveyed intend to increase their use of outsourcing during the next year, while only 6 per cent said they are planning to decrease their number of outsourcing pacts. In terms of overall workload, 45 per cent of respondents to the Evans survey said they outsource less than a quarter of their development operations, with only 7 per cent reporting that they farm out better than 50 per cent of that sort of work. Companies are focused increasingly on outsourcing as a way to cut costs rather than find specific expertise, reversing a trend of years past. A significant number of enterprises said that saving money was their primary goal in adopting outsourcing pacts, while a lesser number specified expertise as their objective.The situation has changed in five years – while in 2000 only 15 per cent of the companies surveyed in 2000 listed cost cutting as a main driver for outsourcing, while 44 per cent said they used the arrangements specifically to garner skilled talent. Researchers at Evans said that they expect the trend toward budget-related outsourcing to continue to grow. Another interesting result of the survey highlights lot more companies planning to spend more on IT over the next year.
Ben Trott provides a fresh perspective on Ping mechanisms. Generally tools have pinged weblogs.com and blo.gs for years. But of late, there are more and more parties interested in receiving direct pings, rather than federating based off of the updates that weblogs.com and blo.gs have always propagated. It's a bit ridiculous to suggest that direct pinging is the only possible technical way to find out about updates to a site. Google and other search engines seem to do pretty well in keeping their indexes current, even though they don't receive any pings. And they're indexing billions of web sites, while there are only tens of millions of weblogs. The ping federation was expected to solve at least some of the problems, but has not done till now . With Services like TypePad and LiveJournal, the issue of authentication & spam pings is not as problematic – they can now on – with a stream of updates to blogs on services that listeners can watch.
Talks to sell A.T. Kearney, the high-end consulting arm to another consulting firm, Monitor Group, collapsed after negotiations failed to yield an acceptable agreement.EDS bought A.T.Kearney about a decade ago for around $600 million. A.T. Kearney had revenue of $806 million for all of last year employs over 3,200 people in 35 countries, had an operating loss of $10 million in the period. Earlier, EDS in a bid to make A.T.Kearney independent, the company's headquarters was shifted to Chicago and new advertising campaign was launched that didn't include the "An EDS company" tagline. As the move did not yield results,EDS believes "it's in the best interest of A.T. Kearney to have a new ownership”. In June EDS said it had shifted its plans for A.T. Kearney, opting to sell the business to an outside party and abandoning pursuit of a management buyout. Who could be the takers? How about offshoring companies- they may be worried about the high cost structure and negative cash flow - but this also opens up a fresh question - what specific value can A.T.Kearney provide to acquirers .In the consulting arena, just as in technology sector, the cost structures are changing - India HQ vendors are definitely attempting newer ways of providing services in the consulting space as well.They would be concerned about mucking their profitability streams, if they plan to acquire A.T.Kearney with its existing cost structure and its mode of operations.Some one not having a established consulting practice - trying to move up the value chain,can perhaps consider - even though the cost may appear to be high.
(Via New Scientist) Personalising searches has long been a challenge. Search engine Vivisimo allows searchers to personalise pages manually by clustering the results of ambiguous searches. This allows subsequent searches for "jaguar", for example, to group pages into separate categories for cats and cars. An upcoming search tool will comb hard drive and work out personal interests before serving up web pages tailored to one’s taste. The search engine shall automatically ranks results according to information about your personal interests it gathers from your PC. Wow - Same query may result in varied results depending on the machine from which you are searching - one result in office desktop, another in blackberry and yet another at home. Different results in Office goer's PC, College goer's PC, Teenager's PC.. Quite interesting - it may become the case that a person is better known by the system that he carries/uses.. Interesting indeed.
(Via IHT) In Japan, Yahoo has already made 50 percent of its PC content available on Yahoo Mobileincluding news, finance, shopping and travel services. The need for mobile readiness is particularly acute for certain services like auctions. About 10 percent of bidding at Yahoo Japan is already conducted via mobile phone.The phone screen and the Internet content underneath is almost always controlled by the mobile carrier. Yahoo and the other major Japanese portals, like Excite Japan, MSN and Goo, see that barrier breaking down, and they are investing heavily in their mobile phone content. The number of Web sites designed for viewing on cellphones is starting to catch up with the number of pages designed for PCs. There are 400 million to 500 million searchable Japanese-language Web pages, compared with 60 million mobile Web pages. Including carriers' pages, the cellphone total goes up to an estimated 100 million. The proliferation of cellphone Web pages is likely to surge again with the advent of "number portability," which allows subscribers to hold on to their phone numbers when switching service providers, and is likely to be introduced next year. When that happens, competition among carriers will increase and subscribers will gravitate to content from portals like Yahoo, which users can get irrespective of their carriers.
OECD’s Communications Outlook 2005 report finds the communications industry has returned to profitability but developments in Internet technology are challenging the role and business model of traditional telecoms companies, creating pressures for a new approach to industry regulation. Some key findings: - From 2003 onwards, the number of fixed phone lines actually fell in OECD countries, with mobile operators gaining market share at the expense of the traditional telecoms companies. - VoIP presents a challenge to mobile telephones, which in many countries are now more numerous than fixed connections - OECD countries reveal an average saving of 80% by using VoIP for international calls over traditional carriers. - Wi-Fi hotspots in cities, will provide tougher competition for 3G mobile operators - Service operators will increasingly offer integrated video, voice and data products in a single service package.
we had been covering the advancements in SOA and mulitple perspectives in adopting SOA within the enterprise. In respect of business, SOA is fast becoming vitalto the enterprise not just as this gives insight into the right way to approach IT - platform independence, reusable code, and so on - but because it furthers the ongoing "business-ification" of IT.For most companies today, IT doesn't just serve the business, as increasingly IT becomes the business. SOA permits the rapid realignment of that nervous system to suit the organism's needs without limiting its ability to change again tomorrow as the economy and competitive environment evolve. In this context, we see that the process of initiating SOA is always challenged along the lines of How to do application partitioning and decompose into granular components and the means to develop/extend and deploy these. After all new platforms and tools have always characterized new phase advancements in IT. SOA adoptions inside the enterprise - the applications may be enhancements/integration of existing applications or in few cases new set of applications. The adoption seems to be a rising curve – meaning we may get to see a lot more of this in the days to come. SOA is a complete overhaul impacting how systems are analyzed, designed, built, integrated and managed. And not just some systems - all systems including packaged applications like ERP. SOA is first and foremost about a network of services. The value of an enterprise’s service network is directly related to the effort of creating/obtaining services and making them available. All networks require a critical mass of 'valuable services' before they become useful to the consumers Amy Wohl writes, For SaaS the promise of SOA is compelling. She points out that if we can craft libraries of standard components and offer them as the basis for net-native applications, and then permit customers to request an application that is better suited to their needs by calling out the right combination of components (that will automatically work with each other and with the customer's data sets), that would be truly exciting. This may very likely happen first in well understood horizontal applications like CRM, where the maturity of the application makes it likely that we can understand exactly how to refine the components and just what choices to offer users. Or it might happen in well defined vertical markets like segments of the insurance industry or of manufacturing. Specific insights & standards will make it possible to make the leap from offering a standard application to offering applications created by SOA to the customer needs and envisions that "In future when we take multiple applications based on these components and integrate them to support a complex process, spanning across multiple business partners, SaaS may have a real advantage, as across the supply chain visibility can be achieved with browser based interfaces for various stakeholders across the supply chain for interactions". Neat - the challenge is in execution, but the idea masks several real life complexities.
Rajesh points to a guest post in Om Malik's Blogsite by Robert Young wherein Bob highlights that the internet has a deflationary effect on every industry it touches, whether it be financial services, travel, printing & publishing, media & entertainment, or telephony. Google’s strategic plan it seems is to obviously leverage deflation to its own advantage. He adds, "Google’s recent moves show that they are using “free” to gradually devalue of Microsoft’s assets, and thus its market cap. This is part of a mutation of the OS into a whole new animal. Google with their desire to build a comprehensive “platform will make Microsoft’s entire strategic plan and mission, which revolves around the continued proliferation and dominance of the desktop PC operating system, obsolete by making Google itself the (virtual)operating system". In the future, all computing devices, whether it be the PC, mobile phone, TV, etc., will simply be terminals that “plug-in” to Google’s massive server grid and application services. With the increasing price/performance of CPUs, memory, bandwidth, and storage, Google’s strategic edge will be based on their advantageous cost of processing bits. Free services, supported by advertsing become the new model (user should be comfortable sharing data & behavious though). In future google shall provide solutions for meeting all computing needs & Bob writes tantalisingly that hardware devices shall be bought based on such criteria. This way, Google is using the internet to systematically devalue Microsoft’s assets, forcing a “Microsoft’s Black Monday” on the wall street in future. David card adds Google is leveraging themantra that built Microsoft: who controls the UI controls the user; who controls the API controls the programmer. Great businesses are made of this.
True as with a slew of recent product launches, Google has made software developers as key stakeholdersin the success of its initiatives. Google is supporting standards and providing hooks intended to let outside developers create add-on products. Just as Microsoft’s developer driven -"ecosystem" of applications running on Windows and Office, its desktop application suite, helped microsoft immensly, Google is now trying to re-create a similar ecosystem on the Web. The News.com article rightly points out that almost all Google's services are accessible via APIs, which give software developers the documentation needed to build add-on products. Google's latest services underscore the company's efforts to create a platform on which to build add-on products and services. While Google's products are not a replacement OS, but the collection of tools released thus far serve the same purpose. Even products that run on Windows PCs, such as Google's Picasa photo-editing software, could tie back to Google's online services. Google is intelligently rebatching Microsoft desktop products/services as its. In perpetuating the Web as development platform, Salesforce integrated its CRM services with Google Maps and is toying with a few other Google services, including AdSense and Sidebar. Adam Gross of salesforce.com highlights that companies, such as eBay, Yahoo and Amazon.com, treat their Web sites as customizable platforms, & offers a starkly different technology vision to developers than traditional software companies do.It is slowly leading to a situation where one model says build for Windows and the Microsoft 'stack'; the other says build for the Internet. The platform of the future shall not be focussed on controlling the hardware but it is going to be around access, community, collaboration & content. Amazing vision - getting executed very well in very high stakes game - clearly the rules of the game are changing.
Informationweek has come out with a report om comparing Hosted CRM Solutions. The article prefaces by writing that this is not an endorsement to use hosted CRM within enterprises and asks enteprises to assess by deciding whether to turn over something as critical as CRM to an outside party calls for soul-searching on both the IT and business sides- as customer relationships are the core of your business. A careful consideration about whether getting a single CRM system from an outsourcer help salespeople do their jobs better is neesed. Questions like should entire customer database reside in the hands of a third party? Would the CRM provider stick around? What are its service-level agreements- won't it have service-provider or software problem that may not be fixed right away? For business processes that are unique, can an outsider offer the flexibility you need?. All need to be answered beforehand.
The comparison results are available here . The report concludes saying by testing services from Entellium Corp., NetSuite, RightNow Technologies, Sage Software (formerly Best Software), Salesforce.com and TriVenture, which resells Microsoft Corp.'s CRM offering through its CRM OnTarget service. The Iweek Editor's Choice award goes to Sage Software's SageCRM.com 5.7, which wowed us with its well-designed interface, though the competition is hot on its heels and all the offerings leave room to improve. I just looked at the Features List of the products compared and found that there was little differentiation across the product features - this clearly shows that this is under evolution and it is not inherently amenable to any great product level differentiation - though innovative features or the first to roll out like Sforce providing results as RSS Feeds could give it a temporary lead in mindshare - but nothing that others can't catch up- I wonder how medium to large enteprises could even consider these small feature list packages. I am a little surprised that Siebel, the key player in this space, claiming some 28,000 customers on hosted services alone did not take part in this review. My mind went back several years back when commercial magazines used to compare small financial accounting packages or desktop productivity tools / PIM packages. Looks to me that hosted CRM solutions are getting similar treatment - no complaints here.
Several people ask me on norms & guidlines for corporate communications blogging. Deutsche Bank has come out with a crisp report on blogging for corporate communications. Corporate blogs are still in their infancy. Their number is estimated to total 5,000 in the USA. The trend is booming, though. Traditional media, such as newspapers or television, have begun to integrate blogs in their websites. Companies are assigning employees or external authors to deploy blogs as a public-relations tool or as a way to disseminate product information.
For corporate communication management, blogs fall into three different levels of significance: A. The blogosphere offers a new communications arena and can influence public opinion on the company. B. Customers, experts (e.g. software developers) and aficionados of certain products are among those who seek publicity as bloggers. Company employees also use private blogs and may possibly voice opinions in them on company-specific issues. C. Companies can use blogs as a communication tool (corporate blogs).
The report also discusses about strategic issues covering the areas of monitoring, policies and corporate blogs . A good report though scores low on specific insights.
We have been covering in this blog about the downside of opensource questioning its maturity, lack of business model, some some perspectives and Reality Check.Forbes writes about VA Software - claiming to be “at the center of the open source technology revolution” operating SourceForge.net, a site where developers collaborate on open source projects and it also runs Web sites, like Slashdot and NewsForge, where the anti-Microsoft crowd rails against the evils of proprietary, closed source software. Forbes says that it turns out VA Software's main product, SourceForge Enterprise Edition, is as closed-source and non-free. Customers cannot view or modify the program's source code or basic underlying instructions (a hallmark of open source software), and they definitely can't share the code with others. Officials at VA Software say they can't release SourceForge Enterprise Edition as an open source program, because, if they did, copycats could create knockoffs of the program, and that would hurt sales.
This is the latest twist in the evolution of the free and open source (FOSS) movement.What began as a revolution has now become just another marketing slogan. Startups are latching onto the hype around “open source” to gain interest from venture capitalists and earn street credibility with the FOSS community, but then proceed with a business model predicated on making money by selling closed source code. Enterprises like EnterpriseDB, Gluecode, call themselves “open source” companies, but actually use a “hybrid” business model that involves selling closed source programs that run on top of some open source code. Richard Stallman says that VA Software should not be shipping programs that are not “free”-by which he means programs with code that cannot be viewed, modified and freely shared with others. Stallman differentiates between his “free-software” movement and the “open source software” movement. While open source proponents simply believe closed source development is less effective than open source development, free software proponents say “non-free” software is unethical, “because it keeps users divided and helpless, prohibiting cooperation,” Stallman explains. Bodell at VA Software asks, “If people are performing work, what is the model for compensation?” Well this is what the whole world is asking!!
We are regularly tracking the developments around Wimax here, here, here. Wired writes, going by what was spoken about in the recently concluded Intel developer’s conference – within the next10 years - we will sit in our living rooms watching films as they premiere at local theaters, carry on video conferences across the globe and chat using VOIP services. Intel envisions that wireless internet networks will eventually be ubiquitous and ultra-fast, enabled by WiMax that allows for citywide broadband networks. Instead of the services we use today for voice and video, we'll turn to wideband audio and new systems for transmitting movies online. Intel's disruptive bets go beyond wireless technology. With a stake in Skype, - intel is well positioned provide a boon to makers of home-theater systems and providers of next-generation voice-over-IP services. "Their dedication to the use of WiMax for the delivery of high-quality content is an interesting shift," said Andy Castonguay, senior analyst with the Yankee Group. "Essentially what that's going to do is really drive a number of competitive delivery models in a way that could potentially shake up a number of industries here in the U.S. and potentially overseas." WiMax, uses unlicensed spectrum and a network of antennas to deliver high-speed wireless service over a radius of several miles, & is among the leading up-and-coming disrupters. The technology is not in widespread use, but it may be soon. Now more than 100 trials are currently under way across the globe. Several cities in the US are looking at deploying wireless broadband within their borders. But while citywide wireless broadband sounds enticing to laptop owners, phone and cable companies that have invested heavily in providing high-speed internet over wired networks have reason to take a dim view. Sean Maloney, points out Intel’s plans to support mobility ubiquity rests on the fact that the number of voice lines worldwide skyrocketed with the proliferation of cellular phones, which made the phone truly personal. At the same time, the Internet has unleashed an insatiable demand for computing power. Now, if we can deliver ubiquitous broadband based on open standards and drive performance and power innovation on computing and phone platforms, mobile computing has the potential for continued dramatic growth. Add in the competitive threat of other services, such as high-quality, or "wideband," VOIP and direct-to-PC movies, and a broad range of industries could be vulnerable. "(WiMax) could also be a direct threat to the movie theater industry, the DVD industry and any number of content-delivery platforms that exist out there," said Castonguay. On the downside, it's unlikelythat wireless broadband networks built to today's standards would be fast enough to support Intel's rosy vision of the home of the future, says Joseph Byrne, senior analyst with the Linley Group. High-definition video, in particular, would be "exceedingly difficult" to deliver over today's WiMax networks Really powerful technology indeed - no doubt that this can disrupt all the three C's - in the convergence industry.
Rather than trying to guess the number of foreign workers the US economy needs year-to-year, Congress would be better off removing the cap altogether and letting the market decide, writes the WSJ. Each year, the U.S. issues a set number of H-1B visas to educated foreign professionals with specialized skills. Earlier it was announced that the annual H-1B cap of 65,000 already has been reached for next year. What this effectively means is that any number of fields dependent on high-skilled labor could be facing worker shortages: science, medicine, engineering, computer programming. It also means that tens of thousands of foreigners - who've graduated from U.S. universities and applied for the visas to stay here and work for American firms - will be shipped home to start companies or work for our global competitors. The size of foreign workforce in the US is mainly determined by supply and demand, not Benedict Arnold CEOs or a corporate quest for "cheap" labor. Ever since the H-1B quota was first enacted in 1992 there have been several years amid a soft economy in which it hasn't been filled. When U.S. companies can find domestic workers to fill jobs, they prefer to hire them. Surveys show that in the valley, 52% of "foreign-born scientists and engineers have been involved in founding or running a start-up company either full-time or part-time." A central irony here is that opponents of lifting the H-1B cap also tend to be the biggest critics of outsourcing, which is fueled by the arbitrary cap. American companies don't have that luxury. They operate in the real world of heightened competition.
This blog has been covering the developments centered aroun Ajax, Web 2.0 and their impact on the environment. As I begin to delve deeply into the world of Ajax, Web 2.0 & Ruby On Rails, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that these technologies really transform the web into a more effective applications platform; and jazzy frameworks like Rails facilitate bringing down the application development time and effort to a situation where something special becomes so common. With application development becoming faster, cheaper and easier, new avenues of design, development, enhancements and collaboration gets opened up: Typical opportunities are :
- Decouple implementation details of application design and implementation – a long cherished dream - Making deployment such an easy job – deployment of applications can become an easy & casual act – enabling to bring lot more people to perform this activity –potentially lot more than ever witnessed in the past. Users gains new level of control over their experience. Personalization on-the-fly - both on design templates and content layout structures are enabled..
The foundational infrastructure like Rails, become an enabler – which applications can build on and thereby shift attention to other aspects of design and development. These applications shall have lot more clean design and elegance – in all aspects of the application. These are setting new standard for web applications and shall be a powerful catalyst in rolling out the next wave of such applications.
Cringley thinks that with more than $2.5 billion in cash already on-hand, Google may not have any plans at all for that extra $4 billion. The company may be raising the money as a cheap insurance policy against some later day when Wall Street might not be so enamored of the giant search company. Google may not go after big acquisitions but will roll-out incremental products at a blinding pace. PayPal co-founder Max Levchin explains that rapid development is an important key to market dominance. That pace of technical development, which probably isn't sustainable for long at any company, isn't possible at all at more mature companies like AOL, Yahoo, and especially Microsoft. Google’s plans are not clear – including the rumoured dark fiber, data center etc. Google needs ever more bandwidth, sure, so dark fiber makes sense to buy when it is probably as cheap as it is ever going to get. It will take the company another five years just to mature the businesses they already have. Bob thinks that Microsoft's clearest threat still comes from Apple. Apple already super-dominates the music player market where Microsoft doesn't even really exist. But the real jewel is one Microsoft has to lose, not gain - the PC platform, itself. Microsoft is woefully late with its next Windows upgrade, while Apple is far ahead with even the current version of OS X. Apple is moving to Intel processors and hackers have already shown that OS X can run fine on non-Apple hardware. But Apple doesn't want to give up its profitable hardware business to compete head-to-head with Microsoft. And remember, Apple totally dominates the portable music player market and will probably sell 25 million iPods or more this year. Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version - OS 10.4 - on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store? It wouldn't kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn't hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple's store. Somehow I feel that Cringley is too optimistic on Apple( just as large companies can not rapidly roll out- companies of the size of Apple may not be able to take radical steps like what Bob is speculating – but am totally convinced about Microsoft’s vulnerability in the emerging world. Anycase Bob’s columns are always a great pleasure to read.
The tsunami that ricocheted around the world following the Indian Ocean earthquake last year left a puzzling pattern of waves in its wake. Beaches in Peru and Mexico, nearly 20,000 kilometres from the earthquake, received waves that were three times larger than those hitting the shores of the Cocos Islands, just 1700 km away. Now it turns out that the waves were funnelled along underwater structures, such as mid-ocean ridges and continental shelves.Researchers find that there were two main factors affecting the manner in which the tsunami wave spread – focusing from the source, and guidance from the topography of the sea floor. Close to the epicentre the waves were controlled mostly by the shape of the earthquake fault and the long-thin rectangle of water it violently displaced. “Cocos Island lies to one side, so it didn’t receive much direct energy,” explains Titov. Meanwhile, waves further afield were shaped more by sea floor topography. The energy shot along mid-ocean ridges and continental shelves, to reach far-field locations like Peru and Mexico. The simulation also explains why some nearby islands, like Nias, did not suffer much initially, but were hit by a large wave many hours later. New scientist has compiled tons of data and a lot of analysis – excellent read for those interested.
(Via Jeff)A forbes article captures the real state of small scale manufacturing in China. Michael Allen’s Jolida (joe-LEE-da) makes amplifiers and CD players that were burning out and breaking down; paint bubbled and peeled, volume knobs made buzzing sounds. Overwhelmed by returns of faulty products, in 2001 Allen was losing money, being hounded by creditors, struggling to make payroll and fending off his wife, who insisted he should flip the "off" switch on his crazy hi-fi venture and find something else to do for a living. "Americans think they're just going to start sending orders to some factory in China and bing-bang start getting whatever they want for 80% less,"says Allen, chief executive of Jolida in Annapolis Junction, Md. "It doesn't work that way.You're dealing with people who grew up in a communist system. Quality control?There is none." Chinese-made diodes, resistors and circuit boards were cheap, but 15% of them were defective. So Allen started buying parts from Germany,Japan, Malaysia and South Korea and shipping them to Shanghai. This adds $10 to the cost of an amplifier, but it cut the return rate from 5% to 1%. Definitely worth it for these costly appliances (priced from $350 for a 30-watt amp to $9,500 for a three-piece system that puts out 200 watts per channel). “A lot of American companies are propelled by fear "he says. "They think, ‘I've got to get into this lower-cost structure because everyone else is.' They imagine China is going to be just like here, that they'll just look in the Yellow Pages and find a good supplier. His message to U.S. entrepreneurs rushing over: Slow down Important read for all those interested in china.
(Via IHT)While the likes of Amazon, eBay, Google & Yahoo come to anyone’s mind when we think about the economic impact of information technology, the biggest impact on the economy may well show upin small and medium-size enterprises. As computers get cheaper, more powerful and more connected, technologies that were only available to the WalMarts of the world become available to the small fry. By the late 1980s cash registers had become just another computer application. They could add up receipts, compare sales with inventory, create order lists - in short, they could do just about everything that the big chains could do. In the 1990s, cash registers became networked, allowing the small stores to download records in a form suitable for spreadsheet analysis and accounting software. Big chains like Wal-Mart could use satellite networks and mainframe computers to track purchases, manage inventory and record customer behavior. These intelligent cash registers allowed small companies to adopt business models that had previously been available only to large enterprises. Equipped with a scanner, a cash register could be used to verify the sale of each item, allowing companies to share data on revenue with the supplier. Some ice cream manufacturers effectively contract for space for a freezer in a store and share the revenue from purchases each time a sale is made.
Even the success of the big Internet companies rests, in large part, on the fact that they provide advertising and sales platforms for small enterprises. EBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo all make it possible for small businesses to reach national, and even global, markets that were previously inaccessible. The Internet has not just affected the selling side of small businesses; it is also having a big impact on the production side. While western workers complain about offshoring, the economic benefits from international trade outweigh the costs, which is great as long as you are not one of the costs. The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus for the US economy. It allows the small players to have access to labor markets similar to that of big boys. Constant supervision, constant communication and constant coordination are necessary to make small business grow. But it is just these things - the ability to supervise, communicate, and coordinate at a distance - that have become so much cheaper in the last 20 years. Big enterprises were the first to reap the benefits of this technological progress. But the impact of information technology on small and medium-size enterprises may yet turn out to have the most impact on the economy.
Recently came across this series India’s rise as an R&D hub. Technology companies must first win the battle for R&D talentbefore they can win the battle for market share. The cliché that "the company's most valuable assets walk out the door each night" has never been truer. Time and time again, companies with the best R&D talent win the battle for market dominance. Companies ranging from unproven tech start-ups to Silicon Valley giants are now trolling campuses in search of the best talentin the world. Much as GEis considered a top recruiting ground for future CEO candidates, companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM are among the top places to recruit top technology talent. With China looming in the distance as a competitive threat in the tech sector, companies realize that they must recruit at Microsoft and Google just as they once recruited at General Electric. From a macroeconomic perspective, it is clear that R&D spending matters. The U.S. spends 2.59% of its GDP on R&D, while the European Union designates a relatively paltry 1.93% of its GDP to scientific and technological development. China, by comparison, spends only 1.3% of its GDP on R&D spending. Clearly, countries (like companies) can only become leaders in a global knowledge-based economy by paying more attention to innovation and creativity. With that in mind, both Europe and China are trying to catch up with the U.S. by increasing their R&D spending. More than just pouring millions of dollars into R&D initiatives, companies must adopt a comprehensive view of talent that places a premium on the ability to come up with new ideas and new business approaches. The fact that R&D talent is in such demand is perhaps not so surprising, considering the potential impact that creativity and innovation could have on the next round of global economic development. As Daniel Pink, shows in his new book. "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age," the key competitive differentiator in the coming years will be the ability of companies to tap into right-brain thinking. Factors like creativity, intuitiveness and design will be more highly prized than linear, analytical thinking. Being able to see the whole picture will be more important than being able to crunch numbers. By moving their talent to the front lines in the R&D war, companies are able to integrate their talent strategy with their business strategy, giving them the best chance to leverage the innovative thinking of their best researchers.
Jason Stamper earlier scooped about the integration vendor Tibco's plans to roll out a rental-style pricing model last week. Tibco says that this applies to all products and will be made available to all customers - both new and existing. The company is already incrementally rolling out its "Time-Based" pricing model, which enables customers to pay for a bundle of software, services and maintenance over time. Vivek Ranadive insists that it in no way replaces its more traditional license sales model, but rather is complementary. As it already makes substantial% of its revenue from a combination of ongoing maintenance revenue and services – this move is not to be seen in place of Tibco's traditional software sales, but in addition to. This is not a wholesale move to subscriptions - some customers who may prefer to consume software packaged with services on a more utility-style basis, they now have that option. Tibco thinks that Time-Based pricing model is likely to appeal to most to new customers in Asia Pacific - where monthly pricing is very popular - or smaller enterprises for whom an up-front payment may be less attractive than paying over time. It may help in getting new type of customers and additional revenue channel for Tibco. This is indeed a significant move – one that certainly others are bound to imitate –particularly in the SME segment. It needs to be seen how the pricing is structured including collection mechanism and how Tibco’s traditional partners react to this. Also to observe is the fact what happens to defaulters and enterprises that jump in and out of the schemes. The locking cost, jump out & switching costs need to be understood in greater detail. In traditional economics, leasing may be cheaper than rental pay structures. The pressures of competition & pricing makes companies try out new models – thees sometimes force companies to think for the customers as well – no more proof is needed to be convinced about massive changes that are bound to happen in the enterprise landscape
In an interview with Mr.Rajat Gupta, Dr.Manmohan Singh,Prime Minister of India discusses his plans to modernize the country's infrastructure, attract FDI, and create jobs - all in the service of eliminating chronic poverty and disease in India. Dr.Singh rates his government achievements at six out of ten, a performance he said was unsatisfactory. I sort of liked reading this as what came out looked like a clear perspective of what the country should be aiming for and a certain amount of big hat thinking with doses of moderation and reality. Some key points from the interview: - India needs a growth rate of about 7 to 8 percent per annum, sustained over a period of the next 10 to 15 years. It needs to underpin that growth by strong performance of agriculture, strong performance of our physical and our social infrastructure. - There is a lot of backlog in improving the infrastructure. India may need an investment of about $150 billion in the next seven to eight years to realize the ambition to provide an infrastructure which is equal to the economic and social challenges faced by the country. - India needs a lot more FDI than it’s got, and needs to have the ambition to move in the same league many other countries in the neighborhood is moving. India may not be able to reach where the Chinese are today, but he is optimistic about the role of foreign direct investment, in the areas relating to infrastructure, where the needs for investment are very large. - Extreme rigidities in the labor market, inflexibility of the labor market, is not consistent in achieving the goals in a world where demand conditions are changing so fast, technological conditions are changing so fast. - India will need a second green revolution to increase production and productivity, and in the process create more jobs. Services today account for 50 percent of our GDP. Services cannot move far ahead of what's happening in manufacturing, and there lays an imbalance. India may need to do a lot more on manufacturing because, ultimately, services respond to what's happening in the production sector. Agribusiness and food processing are important parts of modernizing the economy, moving into a phase where a more modernized agriculture helps not only farmers but also helps consumers. - Over the next 10 to 15 years about 50 percent of India’s population will be in urban areas. India needs new strategies to look at urban transportation systems, urban management of solid wastes, new sewerage systems. - In India the savings rates are improving and the proportion of young people to total population is increasing. If India can find productive jobs for this young labor force, that itself should bring about a significant increase in India's savings rate in the next five to ten years. If the savings rate goes up, in the next ten years, by 5 percent of GDP, it would have generated the resources for investment in the management of this new urban infrastructure that is needed in order to make a success at modernization and growth. - In a world in which technology is changing at such a fast pace, where demand conditions change very fast, India needs to look at a more innovative mechanism to cut down on this rigmorale of many tiers of decision-making processes. - Overall, India is today on the move. The pace may be slow, may not be as quick as some people would want, but the direction is unmistakable. India's future lies in being an open society, an open polity, a functioning democracy respecting all fundamental human freedoms, accepting the rule of law and, at the same time, to emerge as a successful, internationally competitive market economy. After reading this please read this piece -why china no match for india
The Week has an interesting article by Sabeer Bhatia and an equally interesting profile of Rajesh Jain. Highly timely , it covers the evolution of the internet thus fare and related opportunities and give a look ahead in terms of what could be in store. Sabeer Bhatia writes, The growth in Internet usage did not happen in a steady manner. The inflexion point happened in the late 90s precipitated by two innovations — the availability of the ubiquitous Web browser and e-mail services such as Hotmail. Since then, the Internet has evolved into a platform for free speech that is now accessed by nearly a billion users worldwide, and its influence and impact on communications, commerce and intellectual freedom is unprecedented. In India, this opened up opportunities for consumers—the medium could be leveraged to achieve social, business and development objectives—and for software creators to craft technology solutions based around the Internet to establish India as a powerhouse for innovation. India’s performance on the first front has been middling. The Internet user population in India is estimated at around 25 million - it is an anaemic figure. Also, this growth is concentrated almost exclusively within large cities. I am often asked a question: "Could you have done Hotmail in India?" And my answer has inevitably been, "No!" Had I attempted to create Hotmail in India, somebody would have come to me claiming that I was taking away the revenues of phone or fax companies! The Internet can be a powerful democratising force, offering greater social, economic and political participation to communities that have traditionally been overlooked. While there have been several attempts to bring down the cost of PCs to an affordable level, these efforts have been largely misplaced. I do not believe that bringing down the cost of a PC, to say Rs 10,000, would magically facilitate a ‘tipping point’ that would unleash wide adoption. Mobile networks, that are increasingly pervasive in India, will provide the last-mile channel for individuals to access the public Internet network and these will increasingly be broadband in nature. To boot, Internet access can be provided by upgrading the many privately-run public telephone offices in the country today. This blog covered about challenges and unique solutions in improving teledensity in India. The week article goes on to cover Rajesh Jain. Before fame and money embraced Jain he swallowed many failures. His foray into software development failed, forcing him to take a break in the US in 1994. Fascinated by the power of the Internet, he started IndiaWorld, a Web-based news and information service for NRIs, with his savings. IndiaWorld made rapid strides in collecting content as well as making eye contact. Consisting of Khel.com, Khoj.com, Samachar.com and Bawarchi.com, it became one of the largest India-centric portals. Rajesh feels that a positive aspect of the Internet boom was that it triggered a "flavour of entrepreneurship". He wished that the boom had lasted a little longer. "With any new technology, we tend to overestimate what it can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the long term," he says. "For anything to work, the eco-system has to fall into place." Jain is now on a mission to take the Internet to 100 million Indians through his venture, Novatium. Interesting prople, iconic entrepreneurs and lot more is expected to come from both.
Fastcompany has a very interesting perspective on leadership and the challenges faced in the emerging future. The article starts by defining leadership as a fuse of vision and integrity, perseverance and courage, a hunger for innovation, and a willingness to take risks and goes on to cover Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria's perspective :The duo unearths an immutable attribute that's shared by all of the giants of business: They had an innate ability to read the forces that shaped the times in which they lived - and to seize on the resulting opportunities – naming it aptly as “Contextual Intelligence”. They have also come up with a ranking of the top 100 business leaders of all time.
They find that contextual intelligence is an underappreciated but all-encompassing differentiator between success and failure. Seeing how context creates different kinds of business opportunities, the authors categorized their business legends by the different types of opportunities they pursued. Nohria identified three prototypical leadership types - the entrepreneurial leader, the leader as manager, and the charismatic leader - and showed how each used their contextual intelligence to thrive in their times. I was curious to see what type of context setting lay in store for potential future leaders : The context is summed up very well: In the next 25 years, demography, technology, government regulations, geopolitics, labor conditions, and social mores will powerfully influence the opportunities available. Government is playing a bigger role than it used to & are witnessing shift in geopolitics. In terms of technology, breakthrough innovations in IT and pharmaceutical development may have run their course. We think of these as growth industries, but they might well be maturing. In demographics, what will happen as retiring baby boomers start withdrawing their money from the market? And then there are the dramatic changes in Asia. Just as Japan created lean manufacturing, is there a new management innovation that's coming from India or China, but hasn't yet been given a name? In each of these dimensions, there are very important changes afoot. They will coalesce and create opportunities for entrepreneurial leaders to launch new businesses, for managers to maximize the value of existing businesses, and for leaders of change to rescue businesses that have fallen into decline. The one thing that we know for certain is that context is vitally important; it will shape the opportunities in these new times.
(Via Javaworld)Oracle is building its middleware portfolio through R&D and acquisitions and is increasingly getting positioned as head-to-head competitor with IBM. Already locked in the database slugfest, the middleware fight seems to add a distinct flavour to it. SAP and Microsoft, also see opportunity as corporate data centers move to environments where data and systems are shared and reused in so-called service-oriented architectures. Middleware - such as application servers, business integration software, and data management systems based on open standards and Web services - provides the foundation for this new IT environment. Information and the integration of information is becoming much more important, as it helps enterprise gain insight into their own operations, their customers and their competitors. The fight is essentially controlling every possible space as the industry itself is transiting, mutating before consolidation. We recently covered IBM’s aggressive middleware acquisition strategy and IBM’s domination of the EAI market. Oracle is in a similar acquisition spree – outside of its application business, notoable acquisitions include acquisition of the assets of content integration software maker Context Media, identity management software – Oblix & Collaxa for business rules engine. IBM is working towards providing native XML support for DB2 & Websphere product line shall be geared for grid deployments, an area where oracle already has a lead. Oracle appserver is gaining more respect and IDC analysis shows that Oracle's application-deployment software business growing at twice the rate of the market average. With changing markets, customers are looking for databases, application servers, message-oriented middleware, and even applications and tools that integrate well, and prefer buying form one vendor. Oracle is positioning itself as a software vendor that can provide the integrated infrastructure that a corporate buyer needs, from its database to its PeopleSoft enterprise applications—all supported on its flexible, grid-based infrastructure.Interesting development- but all point to one thing - consolidation is happening fast at least at the base of the technology stack and big players shall dominate - but they have to do a lot( more efforts and spend more resoorces) to become more pronounced.
The Google desktop with sidebar is seeing rave reviews and lot of views are coming out as to how Google may move into the center of the desktop. Jason Kottke has an excellent perspective about the evolving WebOS segment. Excerpts with edits and comments: Google’s browser was expected to be a sophisticated local caching framework included, and Google will provide the reference apps (replying to emails on Gmail or posting messages to Google groups while on the plane). With GDS, Google finally had an application that installed on the desktop and, even better, it was a little Web server that could insert data from your local machine into pages you were browsing on google.com.WebOS may refer to three main parts to the system: - The Web browser (along with other browser-ish applications like Konfabulator) becomes the primary application interface through which the user views content, performs services, and manages data on their local machine and on the Web, often without even knowing the difference. Something like Firefox, Safari, or IE...ideally browser agnostic. - Web applications of the sort we're all familiar with: Gmail, Flickr, and Bloglines, as well as other applications that are making the Web an ever richer environment for getting stuff done. (And ideally all Ajaxed up to provide an experience closer to that of traditional desktop apps.) - A local Web server to handle the data delivery and content display from the local machine to the browser. This local server will likely be highly optimized for its task, but would be capable of running locally installed Web applications (e.g. a local copy of Gmail and all its associated data). Aside from the browser and the Web server, applications will be written for the WebOS and won't be specific to Windows, OS X, or Linux. Compared to "standalone" Web apps and desktop apps, applications developed for this hypothetical platform have some powerful advantages. As these run in a Web browser, these applications are cross platform (assuming that whoever develops such a system develops the local Web server part of it for Windows, OS X, Linux, your mobile phone, etc.), just like Web apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, and Salesforce.com. You don't need to be on a specific machine with a specific OS...you just need a browser + local Web server to access your favorite data and apps. This would help the application developers to write just one appwith the WebOS. The user can run local applications and use them when offline as well. Eg could be Gmail, iTunes, Flickr etc. Anyone with XHTML/JavaScript/CSS skills can build these, but that depends on how open the platform is. And that depends on whose platform it is. Right now, there are five organizations moving in this direction – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla. A truly different and exciting world is on the anvil.
Intel and RIM have agreed to a deal where Blackberry will use battery-saving chip technology in future versions of wireless handsets and support Intel’s push to encourage WiMAX long-distance wireless communications technology. A Research in Motion / Intel partnership may also give a glimpse of what is to come in future versions of BlackBerry handheld devices. RIM doesn’t yet offer the volumes that would normally attract the likes of Intel, they are a dominant player in the handheld market, a market that Intel has had trouble entering. The low-power Centrino chip would, of course make it easier for RIM to build Wi-Fi capabilities into future versions of the BlackBerry. When you hear about Intel getting into bed with a wireless handset maker to offer low-power, battery-saving chipsets that you could be talking about some type of Centrino technology. A Centrino powered next-gen BlackBerry that is WiMAX ready is too exciting to think of. Interesting development indeed.
The Industry Analyst Reporter highlights thatSOAused primarily by large enterprises to rescue applications and processes in distress is now reaching ubiquitous implementation in the U.S, regardless of size or vertical industry designation, according to the high tech industry analysts. The Yankee Group sees, in a matter of a few years, SOA has seen wide adoption across the market, most notably among wireless, financial services and government sectors. Survey results show that retail will show the fastest adoption rate in the next 12 months; planned use of SOA in 2006 reaches saturation for wireless, retail, financial, manufacturing and government. 2006 will be the year of initial SOA project completion on a broad basis - not a hit or miss trend, but through a rising tide of broad and deep adoption of SOA across the market. Up until now, SOA implementation has been a predominantly homegrown, in-house affair, but now plans are in place to employ comprehensive SOA solutions strategically as a foundational improvement in areas such as application integration and content aggregation. As Sandra Rogers points out,We’ve had business process technology for a while, but it’s all been proprietary. Now there’s an effort to get a view of end-to-end processes. There are many business drivers you can point to: compliance issues and regulations that require process tracking and auditing, older legacy applications, and client-server applications. The need for flexibility is driving a lot of the interest. The adaptability, the flexibility to create a system and change it as needed are important. We’ve also seen companies taking advantage of the speed to deployment and the reusability of these services. It’s a continuing learning process—they’re trying to figure out the most efficient way to develop a service. We hear from people who are turning to vendors to provide these services. The amount of vendor support behind the standards is critical. Users see continued forward movement on the part of the vendors, and that lends a lot of credibility to Web services.Enterprises ramping up their SOA initiatives indicate they are placing their focus on content, data and metadata. Amongst the standards that matter, XML tops the list and tools, directory and middleware messaging standards followed in order of importance. SOA is definitely top on the list in many enterprises - How holistically - they can be planned, executed and leveraged are the key determinants of success.
BEA is in the news of late for matters like improved quarterly results, beefing up Business Process Integration engine and CPU pricing norms revision.Today it announced the acquisition of Plumtree portal software. BEA has its own J2EE-based portal platform - the BEA WebLogic Portal, which the company describes as a transactional portal. Plumtree's product suite includes a portal designed for non-technical business users and related products for collaboration, search, analytics, and content management. Plumtree supports both Microsoft .Net-based and J2EE-based application servers. This cross-platform support was appealing to BEA. Alfred Chuang says, "The portal is becoming the central point of integration in the enterprise." There is no overlap as seen by BEA as its reasoning is that WebLogic Portal targets companies using transactional portals in a J2EE application development environment & Plumtree's portal is designed for business users in a collaborative workgroup setting. A lot of people asked me what I think of this – as I work with closely with both the companies, I shall not saying anything in detail – but I think this is good for Plumtree customers and it was always there in the air for a long time that PT is just waiting to get the right price to sell out & good for BEA as it gains more customers at a throwaway price and begins to look a little more strong. Portals play a critical role in delivering personalized & contextual user experiences. Increasingly portals are becoming an integral structure of SOA frameworks that intelligently aggregate, integrate and orchestrate the presentation/interaction management layer. We wrote earlier that a framework of service-wrapper tools, orchestration tools, process automation &execution engines, and a page generating engine could be composed to produce a generic composite application framework that could be used by business to generate a composite app. The hallmark of composite applications will be the use of standardized & consistent set of infrastructure services provided by the composite application framework based on the SOA framework of dynamic, extensible, federated interoperability and enabled by XML-based technologies. Portals are increasingly being seen as integral to component applications framework – this enables them to blend portlets comprised of applications, information, communication and collaboration services centered on various profile data/metadata standards. In general different portal products may have different frameworks/standards on template mechanisms, communication interfaces and may follow different approaches on the nature of build and orchestration. It may look surprising but interoperable standards across various portal platforms do vary. We may see that enterprises may take a positive view on best of breed portals , all other things being equal including financial standing and quality of support, but may increasingly be more inclined towards examining the full blown application from so called platform vendors like IBM, BEA, SAP, Oracle. The resulting scenario could be that inside every enterprise there may be a couple of major platform players/infrastructure platforms that provide the anchorage for core applications - but it is likely that many enterprises will be looking at a set of preferred vendors providing core SOA support around which best-of-breeds may be spun together. It may become a race between such ecosystems for marketshare and gaining positive points in terms of performance & flexibility. I also foresee a few more acquisitions and coming together and hosted environment centric portal solutions getting prominence.
Derek Sivers writes, being protective about ideas has been historically felt. Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. Good ideas include some thinking about execution and delivery. In general moving from an interesting but vague idea, to specific and actionable is the difficult part of creation and invention.
Explanation: On a scale of 1 to 20, an awful idea may score -1, good idea = 10, brilliant idea = 20
NO EXECUTION = $1 WEAK EXECUTION = $1000 SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000 GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000 GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000 BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000
In business primarily to measure, we may need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.That’s why we say execution is the key, excellent execution may make the difference between huge success and other grades of success. Thats what Ram Charan & Paul Allen are writing about.
The Internet is a place of innovation, creation, and communication & any regulatory mechanism need to be centered around the principle - “don't constrain the technology; constrain bad actors”, writes Greg & Susan. In an excellent article starting from first principles , they argue about the care and subtlety needed in regulating the internet environment. Excerpts with edits & comments added:
The Internet has become a forum for borrowing, mixing, developing, and tinkering. In the softer sciences like science and art - innovators build on each other's work. Innovation has flourished, countries have reaped the rewards, because Internet technologies enable the rapid, widespread, and often anonymous flow of information. With free flow with advances in digital media - photography, video, music - and there lay an amazing opportunity for wide-scale experimentation and creative expression. Two decades ago, home computers brought us a revolution called desktop publishing. Now home users have the tools to create professional-quality movies and music - and a way to share them with others. Public policy should encourage innovation and free-speech, balancing the rights of individuals with the greatest public good. DRM, needs to respect experimental, standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants aspects of the Internet. DRM technology should be designed to respect legitimate needs and current rights of honest users (including backups, format changes, excerpting, and so on). The following principles of digital rights management need to be considered by all: - Innovation flourishes through openness - open standards, reference architectures, and implementations. - All creators are users and many users are creators. - Content creators and holders of copyright should be compensated fairly. - Respect for users' privacy is essential. - Code (both laws and technology) should encourage innovation. An "optimistic" model whose fundamental credo is "trust the customer" is the need of the hour. Excessive limitation not only restricts consumer rights but also potential, as such solutions strongly interfere with the creation of future works and fair use of copyrighted content. In an ideal world, solutions should encourage information flow, including the capability for creating future works. Systems that encourage the user to play with digital material, to experiment, to build and create, will be a win for consumers, for technology developers, and for content producers. Technologists, artists, developers, users, and rightsholders need to move ahead in a balanced and forward-looking manner. If done properly, it will be a win for the Internet and for society.An excellent article worth reading several times and ponder over.
India headquartered software companies could potentially unseat such giants as EDS, CSC, Capgemini, Unisys, Perot Systems, Accenture and BearingPoint,says a study by Katzenbach Partners LLC (New York). The study finds that the indian big four - Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and TCS will have greater market incentives and capabilities to serve customers consistently and make good on promises during the critical third and fourth years of contracts. Indian firms are motivated to grow and maintain quality, and the marketplace has taken into account the quality of their operations and cash flow. The U.S. and European players are mainly seeking to build value by cutting costs, whereas the India headquartered companies will continue to invest in clients into a contract, when half of all outsourcing deals normally would fall apart. Legacy Outsourcing players may disappoint customers deep into IT Contracts. Richard Schroth, a technology and outsourcing expert & Nathaniel J. Mass, have developed a new corporate performance metric called the Relative Value of Growth(TM) (RVG) and together with Roopa Unnikrishnan, worked on the report and its findings were shared recently. RVG determines the degree to which a company is rewarded - in terms of market capitalization - for growth and/or margin improvement. Companies with high RVGs that are predominantly rewarded by growth tend to be rewarded handsomely for achieving it - and also tend to have strong profit margin A virtuous cycle is seen with Indian outsourcing companies: Strong growth boosts valuation ratios, which, in turn, create reinforcing incentives to grow. Indian companies offer superior operating margins due to low cost of service, strong vertical market focus, high quality, reinvestment in innovation and strict conformance with global standards. The U.S. & European players will not be rewarded by Wall Street for growing and investing - only for streamlining, and that's not good for customers.A company rewarded by margin improvement tends to have an inferior profit margin and may realise less pronounced gains in shareholder value, due mainly to the difficulties of trying for cost improvements to retain long-running customers. In analysing IT and outsourcing firms, the study finds Indian players to have a high relative value of growth rating. They are highly motivated to grow and the marketplace recognizes its quality of their operations, cash flow and prospects. But American and European companies have much lower relative value of growth rating, meaning their main incentive is to build value by cutting costs.
I agree with Dr. Scroth’s view that the US/Europe biggies may talk about economies of scale, experience and commitment to customers, but that's a disconnect when it comes to the basic incentives and the marketplace. Faced with cost pressures, they may be prone to turn over projects to more junior staff, pay less attention to older customers and focus on rationalization, consolidation and even withdrawal from businesses that require greater innovation investment. Meanwhile, Indian companies are evolving into global players by developing international strategies that include recruitment in China and Russia. Major U.S. and European outsourcers must grow and improve profit margins or face mergers, consolidation and loss of market share. The advantage for India headquartered firms amongst other things is that they do not have to unlearn old behaviors or adjust to old systems. Some of the plusses credited to Indian firms include superior operating margins, obsession with quality, reinvestment in innovation, leadership in conformance to global standards and world-class corporate governance. The warning bells for some and welcome signals for more are loud & clear – Seeing the growth, scale-up plans and impressive wins recorded by Indian HQ firms, it is more than obvious that in this changing flat world – India headquartered firms are are very likely to give the glorified titles of Old Stanby’s to the Accentures,EDSs,Cap Geminis,Bearingpoints and the likes of the world.
Last week, Sandhill published a piece that I wrote about the emerging world of composite applications. I had been too busy the whole of last week -could not find the time and inclination to write a brief for this blog and point to sandhill. Here's the excerpt:
Today in reality, most IT applications inhibit & not truly enable business process change. To meet the business needs, IT must either build or deliver a new generation of applications that embody business processes, reuse existing applications, and are built to accommodate change with minimal effort. The enterprise application features are mostly maturing, and increasingly large enterprise users are finding less missing functionality in their applications, creating a downward pressure to spend on upgrades around these products. Software margins are suffering due to smaller average prices, flat or reduced license sales, heightened pressures on needed investment in technology changes and an increasing apathy of end use investment in packaged software. Budgetary constraints and years of expansion and overpurchasing have left many enterprises with a hodgepodge of ERP solutions. Business finds that as the installed software base grows, traditional approaches to serving new business needs are proving inadequate. The need is clearly finding mechanisms to support synthesis of new processes while supporting existing processes powered by packaged software and other applications. Today the epicenter of applications that can bring distinct value to business is now firmly centered on domain-specific application platforms or frameworks.Composites embodying processes require less code and less time to build fit in nicely as the solution here. Composite applications consuming services, represented as existing corporate applications, packaged enterprise applications, third-party functions, or new features and functions shall become the new framework for application deployments within enterprises. A framework of service-wrapper tools, orchestration tools, process automation &execution engines, and a page generating engine could be composed to produce a generic composite application framework that could be used by business to generate a composite app. Enterprise applications shall begin to coalesce around open web services where users can pick and choose just the features they need, and support add ins of distinct blocks provided by other companies. This would enable business to create and modify applications more economically and swiftly. Leading edge products this can come from a mega enterprise or a small IT shop) shall begin to roll out simpler, more flexible and easy to modify blocks of solutions, to meet customers demand of more flexible and agile systems. Composites shall enable the co-option of culture, content, technology & process binding together content centric business process definitions & supporting, architectures – all these set the stage for software effectiveness to be correlated to business results in as direct a manner as possible. The architecture effort needs to ensure support for scalability, consistency, reuse and breadth. The distinction amongst enterprises shall come through distinct style and pattern of deployments, elements of it will be off the shelf and require integration, such as infrastructure, services platforms, packaged applications, and standards based process templates interfacing possibly with legacy apps exposed as services. Obviously moving to such an arrangement is a huge decision for enterprises- a strategic one of high order magnitude. The transition to composite applications would obviously be a long & arduous journey for enterprises, but this should lead to a new degree of alignment setting in rewarding business with immense benefits. Typically a three year transition with IT leading the charge would be the recommended game plan for global enterprises to embrace the new framework holistically. Product engineering too shall also see a positive influence - facilitating development of software in modular pieces, enabling rapid delivery of new functionalities. Several independent developers could start writing specialized programs that plug into the composite apps framework. The composite application ecosystem can comprehensively transform the enterprise ecosystem. Read the full article here
Strategic advantage should be viewed in dynamic terms as opposed to static terms wrote,M/sJohn Hagel & John Seely Brown. They argued that while traditionally strategic advantage was based on geographic distance or core competencies(typically static),increasingly the only sustainable edge has to do with the capacity to accelerate capability building.We recently covered Bweek's Chindia perspective. John Hagel adds his perspective on this issue - as a regular following the developments in this region - his views carry a special value - Here he rightly points out that three powerful forms of business innovation - open distribution, lean manufacturing & open production are propelling the economic growth of India and China. Lean process management – is heavily inspired by Toyota’s management innovations - Indian companies are applying these management techniques to rapidly improve the performance of a broad range of administrative business processes. He recommends that the western companies learn these techniques in their administrative business processes, or outsource and offshore these business processes to Indian companies who are mastering these techniques. The two other forms of business innovation emerging in India and China – open distribution and open production - are largely being pioneered within these countries - they are not inspired by management practices in other countries. Open distribution innovation focuses on customer facing business operations while open production concentrates on product development and manufacturing activities. These related share some basic principles - incremental innovation, modular design, focus on both product & process and third party mobildation to aggressively roll out amongst others. Western companies would do well to study, understand and, wherever possible, adopt these business innovations in their own companies. To some extent, these management techniques can be accessed through outsourcing relationships, but these innovations span the full scope of a company’s operations. As we covered earlier,western enterprises not participating in the mass-market segment of emerging economies, are clearly missing out on opportunities to develop the capabilities needed to compete back home & globally. This is amongst Asia's contribution to the world at large - in a flat world - these matter a lot more.
I notice that in most cases Technorati cosmos search does not work at all. I can say with reasonable definiteness that Technorati tag does not work at all – atleast in my case. There’s no use in claiming coverage of additional millions of blogs every quarter, when the existing coverage quality can not be maintained. Om Malik has a detailed note on the deficiencies of the tagging system in Technorati. Noting said about technorati excites me anymore.
Jason Kottke echoes similar views when he writes, No more Technorati. He points out that the results are often unavailable for queries with large result sets (i.e. this is only going to become a bigger problem as time goes on), and most of the rest of the time it's slow as molasses. When it does return results in a timely fashion for links, the results often include old links seen before in the results set, sometimes from months ago. And that's to say nothing of the links Technorati doesn't even display. Results compared with comparable results shows that Technorati is seriously deficient. Technorati sucks. For the sake of the growth of the blogosphere, it is better that technorati gets acquired by larger player with lot more resources and a better plan to scalability and maintaining search quality. For the sake of curiosity, am tagging this post as Technorati - to see how Technorati picks this up and shows in results.
I come across wannabe entrepreneurs - very accomplished in general, wanting to start online ventures in entertainment/ intermediary business - while the fundamental reasoning seems acceptable - new media, large population, no geographical boundary, ever growing market - the digital intermediary business may seem a lot more tough and it looks to me that only bigger business may benefit to play this role while they may be servicing the needs of the long tail.
Sean Ryan points out, at the end of the day there are only a "serial monopoly" of 4 suppliers (labels), making it more difficult to get reasonable music rights than it is negotiating with an oligopoly like OPEC since Eminem and Norah Jones are not substitutable, while crude oil from Mexico and Saudi Arabia is relatively substitutable. Any start up needs to have rights from all of the major labels (EMI, Sony/BMG, Universal, Warner) and most of the smaller ones in order to compete in the sector, and the lack of those rights generally cripples the business - therefore, there is essentially no negotiating leverage, which makes for very low margins. To top it off, you need to pair those low margins/lack of leverage with an intensely competitive marketplace, with RealNetworks, Napster, Apple, Sony, Yahoo, Wal-Mart, MSN, and a host of others all marketing like wild, discounting the product (MSN's buy 1, get 5 free), and trying to cut exclusive content deals. Only Apple has truly managed to show profits in the business, primarily through sales of related hardware, and finally, through an 80% market share of the download market, but it's must just be brutal for the others. While it is clear that digital music will eventually be extremely profitable for the content providers, including publishers, there is a lack of profitable business model for the middle man which requires broad label rights. While the internet technology may allow creators to have a direct relationship with end customers - these do not seem to be providing critical mass and unlikely to become a part of mainstream distribution channel. As Rasgupta points out channels like Napster are also a losing phenomenon. Chris Anderson shares his perspective on the emerging opportunities - these look like tough models to sustain till these grow and gain momentum. Larger digital intermediaries dealing with a broader base of products( like Amazon) may see some success , but it is pretty much “NO” to wannabe digital disintermediaries.
Too often the issue (however dry it looks) of IT's contribution to business success is always raised and we see opinions swinging from one extreme to another - while most of the IT fraternity wholehearteldy beleivess in the inevitability of IT in business environments and marshall substantial facts and figures as evidence. The nay sayers highlight that IT is a commodity and can not provide business with competitive differentiation. The CIO magazine writes, The intelligent use of bold technologycan offer companies a chance to achieve significant competitive advantage or save significant money. The keys to using technology boldly and successfully, according to those honored in this year's CIO 100, are risk management, change management and gaining the trust of your users. The references look neat and are unique in the way they have leveraged IT for business benefits. Excerpts with edits & comments from the three cases cited in the article.
- In the slow moving beverage business, Healey’s groups uses IT to revolutionize the business, and to do it quickly. Local autonomy is built into the wine and spirits business because distribution is highly regulated, and state liquor laws vary widely. The sales and marketing efforts are localized by state, and silos of data grow up around state lines. Healey wanted a solution balancing local distribution and autonomy. Healey's group bucked the industry culture by creating a centralized application that he says reduced headcount for managing brand content from 16 to four while simultaneously increasing the overall quality of the product materials. Instead of numerous regional content managers designing sales materials—often with varying outcomes—now a single person with a strong background in the spirits industry and a knack for creating compelling content can, leading a small team, put together sales and marketing materials for reuse throughout the operations. An application called E-Pride lets salespeople visit one site and retrieve a wide range of product information and backup material—including real-time access to ever-changing sales promotions—quickly. It also gives them another competitive advantage - They can look up information about competing products. India’S Reliance Infocomm needed to grow quickly if it were to compete with entrenched providers & forced it to use technology as its prime agent for growth. Part of Reliance's business goal was to provide wireless data services, not just voice. And CDMA offered the company both more reliable data transmission and what it saw as a smoother transition to advanced data services down the road. Reliance’s dramatic growth created dramatic challenges. Part of Reliance's strategy depended on spreading franchises throughout the country, including in places where network connectivity was limited or even nonexistent. Reliance had to move from batch upload of data to real-time transaction processing. For real-time performance, Reliance was going to need a faster network. So it turned to the only other option available—its own wireless CDMA network. Scale was a challenge and the option was fraught with risks. To reduce the danger, it made several critical decisions. - First, it decided to offer franchisees initially only a small piece of its overall customer processing suite—customer bill payment posting—while it continued to develop the rest of the technology behind the scenes. - At the same time, Reliance was working on a backup plan that would allow for real-time updating via fiber optic links in 20 percent of its locations, with the remaining 80 percent allowed to use the old batch system until the new version became operational. - It then created a stripped down application that made more efficient use of bandwidth. Through careful support services, within 90 days of implementation 100 percent of franchisees were using the new system. The project brought down the overall customer acquisition cost and cost of service throughout the customer’s lifecycle. - The fast growing city of Phoenix saw its public safety wireless communications system—encompassing police, fire department, EMT and other radio systems- stretched to the limit. To smooth the process of technology vetting and adoption, the city's IT department led a coalition of agencies, including fire and police as well as a variety of technology providers. Unfortunately, the coalition had few if any best practices to guide it. Standards for such public safety networks are still developing. To reduce the risk involved with adopting the relatively unproven Project 25-compatible technology, the group sent representatives to other cities and towns that were already using similar wireless systems. They also spent considerable time quizzing technology providers and other experts on the state of the burgeoning Project 25 standards . Very nice examples - more details like investments, time period rollouts, efforts and agencies involved and quantified benefits & derived business value could have made these references more rounded & complete. Phoenix's success with this bold and critical initiative has also inspired them to contemplate other bold moves in the future. The article rightly concludes by highlighting that three very different organizations. Three very different technologies. But one common theme: the willingness to boldly use IT tools to deliver outsized business benefit.
A decade back the advent of the web opened up vast banks of information to anyone with an Internet connection. Intellignet programs use data from public Web sites & uique solutions mix up that information to suit specific user needs. Often developed by third party/individuals, “mash up" programs, provide services beyond those of the base sites. We had been covering the rise of Web 2.0, the impact of mashup's in transcending new frontiers. We covered several important advancements related to Web 2.0 here, here, here, here. We also covered Yahoo and Google moves to publish documentation , making it significantly easier for programmers to link virtually any kind of Internet data to Web-based maps and, in Google's case, satellite imagery. Their uses have been demonstrated in dozens of ways by hobbyists and companies that includes display of instant maps showing the locations of the recent bombing attacks in London.
News.com writes, Web site owners will increasingly resemble software companies - To generate traffic and sales, they will encourage add-on products and Web services. They also portend big changes for site owners - at least, for those who want to take part in the next stage of the Web, called Web 2.0 by some. Instead of treating the Web just as a handy way to publish information, businesses need to start acting like software companies and encourage programmers to build services on top of their platforms. "Mash-ups" let people combine information from different Web sites and are reshaping the Web experience, allowing independent developers to better control and customize the information consumers can get. By mimicking software companies and encouraging coders to build upon their data, Web site operators can give consumers more-tailored services-and themselves richer products. Amazon.com touts its "seller platform" for letting third-parties sell through its Web site, and it has regular software product releases. Applications like BookBurro lets people compare book prices. This sort of Web service can be constructed pretty quickly: Instead of having to build a book search and e-commerce engine from scratch, one person can create something entirely new by combining Amazon's tool with other data sources. Inviting third-party developers to build on top of a company Web site-much the way Microsoft woos outside programmers to its Windows operating system- creates a new ecosystem and a now healthy business. eBay, for example, already gets more than 20 percent of its listings via programs created by outsiders to automate the auction giant's process. Mash-ups like these are emerging as a growing number of Web properties are releasing instructions, or APIs, on how to access their data. With these publicly available APIs-often published in standardized XML protocols-programmers get the documentation and tools needed to pull data from Web sites and to combine it with another information source to create something new. The effect is to put a great deal of power in the hands of outside individuals and to transform Web sites into programmable machines.Some Web start-ups are making developer involvement a central part of their business plan. For example, Flickr and social-networking service 43 Things both publish APIs. This all adds up to a shift in the Web. In effect, the nature of what a site can be has changed. Rather than being part of a publishing system, Web sites are becoming programmable, much like a PC's operating system. Business would be able to tap into the Internet "cloud" and procure and combine third-party Web services from a public directory, too.We are in the midst of an age of radical change & advancement of the web world - huge changes are clearly in store in the near future..
Every new technology would find a preferred way to get inside enterprises. Amy wohl points to the fact that it is traditional for software incumbents to represent new software as an incremental change. Product vendors put much effort into making the transition from one version of the software to the next as smooth as possible. Ease of upgrade and incremental value coming out of the upgrade would be the key determinant in customer’s choice to use the upgrade opportunity. Enterprises generally tend to ignore routine upgrades and may bypass one cycle of upgrade.Substantial upgrades may call for extended period of thinking – customers may evaluate options and may postpone taking a decision pending reasonable evaluation of alternative options. She sees that this is the opportunity for Software as a Service. When incremental upgrades are offered that are sufficiently new or different that they cause the customer to wonder just what the best course might be, there is an opportunity to present an SaaS-based solution - where it is appropriate. Customers are always glad to hear that they will be able to prolong the use of existing hardware, save money, and move expenditures from capital to expense budgets.
My Take:This may be a practical step in a sales cycle – but SaaS was supposed to be an application of different Genre – It should by definition alter the concept of enterprise applications and should be a factor in budgetary planning exercise of customers( upgrade/migration finance are generally decided upfront at this stage itself inside enterprises) – influencing that process is a much better option -The sale has to happen based on adding value to enteprises- meeting expectations and future proofing the enterprise on various options to sale up and step up IT support.It another matter that large enterprises have not be so warmed about the SaaS hype up until now.
India is almost certain to have a major role as a center of software development is the ringing theme that I hear from multiple sources. Already companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, already tap Indian talent not just to crank out code but to help design and develop commercial offerings, not to leave out Google & Amazon. I am aware of several product companies planning to move part of engineering work to China in the next 1-2 years. Oracle recently announced the acquisition of iflex. Increasingly, Indian software enterprises want to put their own companies names on product labels, at home and abroad, by capitalizing on their country's highly educated and low-cost workforce to build and sell software for everything from back-office programs to customer-facing applications. It could have far-reaching consequences for software prices worldwide. India's IT-services industry, and their development teams bring with them the disciplined Six Sigma and CMM-I approaches to quality management and experience with Web services and hosted applications to the products they develop. It's a mind-set that fits well with the business world's slow march toward more services-oriented, Web-friendly IT architectures. The large IT-services enterprises want to grow faster - shareholder pressure is forcing them to look at areas of higher-margin software business. (IBM's gross margins, for example, are 26% for services and 87% for software.) Competition for talent is another dampener for growth. Only a small percentage of the talent pool of IT workers in India has experience building or managing software companies. The Indian IT diaspora could fill in to an extent – fact remains homegrown talent has demonstrated great global success in the services sector(many overseas Indians/other nationalities have difficulty in recognizing this – there are many expert commenter available dishing out free advise). The VC ecosystem in India also needs to develop the way it did in Silicon Valley to provide a nurturing environment for growing companies. The market for software with "Made In India" tag just getting started, but there's no telling how far it can go. But fact remains that India has not so far seriously applied in developing products – it requires a concerted approach – identifying stack elements to truly product aligned marketing & sales. India also needs to think big and act fast – lot of opportunities abound – from web 2.0 related opps, web services, SOA, RFID, Mobiles, Gaming – floodgates of opportunities are open – India Inc needs to get into this right earnest – the window of opportunity may not be open for a long time. The rate of innovation and ability to move first/fast into a space would be the paramount criteria.
(Via CSRWire) Arthur D. Little recently surveyed 40 technology companies in Europe, the US, and Japan on what they call "sustainability driven innovation" The report finds increasing corporate commitment to sustainability innovation, though it demonstrates room for more growth. The study finds - 95 percent of companies surveyed believe that sustainability-driven innovation has the potential to bring new business value, - 25 percent feeling this will definitely happen, - 90 percent of respondents cite reputation as likely to benefit from sustainability innovation, and 80 percent anticipating brand value gains, - 60 percent of respondents already see improvements to their top line (or the income statement line devoted to total revenues), - 43 percent expect to see future bottom-line benefits (or the income statement line devoted to net income), - 72 percent Of respondents already generating sustainability-driven innovation are doing so through new products and services, - 80 percent through process innovation, - 60 percent entering new markets or developing new business models.
In comparing the degree to which corporations integrate sustainability innovation as business strategy to doing so through product and process design, the report dubs four types of corporate actors: leaders, laggards, dabblers, braggers. Leaders integrate sustainability innovations into both business strategy and product and process design, while laggards do neither. An interesting report, though some comments on the methodology may dilute the result veracity -Overall a timely report on an important business driver - its amazing to see that enteprises across continents share common concerns.
(Via Bloomberg)Have no doubt about India’s ability to sustain India's competitive advantage in back-office tasks by looking at the greed of college undergraduates in India. Even as youngsters in cities such as Bangalore price themselves out of the low-end, back- office market, India won't send back those jobs to other countries. Andy Mukherjee highlights, the work will be taken up by a 2.5 million-strong pool of jobseekers aged 20 to 24 who have at least an undergraduate degree and who live in villages where the cost of living is much lower than in cities. He quotes Satyam Computer's Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju as saying most support tasks are ripe for "virtual delivery" because falling costs of communication hardware will make it possible to ship work to villages that are otherwise difficult to reach & Raju attributes that due to disappearing distance, - "There's absolutely no difference between the work done in Hyderabad and Bangalore and what can potentially be done at the center in the village". Specialised managers look after harnessing that potential. Satyam doesn't plan to send any of its clients' work to villages. The company's involvement will be limited to transferring to the rural back-office some of its 200-odd internal support tasks ranging from human resources and accounting to performance management. GramIT, another project, is also seeking work from a hospital in Hyderabad to manage their patient records out of the village center. Technology may also help bridge the educational gap faced by students in under-equipped village schools. IBM supplies free computers to poor children to play games and learn english. Educational CDs designed by the Azim Premji Foundation, related to Wipro Ltd., are taking 9-year-olds on a space odyssey. Byrraju foundation associated with Satyam helps village community pool money to set up a plant that's pumping out bacteria-free water at 3 U.S. cents for 12 liters. Coca-Cola Co.'s mineral water sells in India for 28 cents a liter. None of these efforts can compensate for the failure of the Indian state. The digital economy is showing that India could be much more competitive than even its policy makers realize.When raw talent/ good personnel resources can be harnessed and organised to provide results with a business/result focus - eneormous potential gets unleashed - mark this - more and more human resources would begin to get channelised for opportunities like this in the coming years.
Jon Udell writes,"With a little help, UIMA could be a boon to unstructured data retrieval. He points to Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s involvement in various key initiatives of IBM like on-demand, open source, Linux , autonomic, and grid computing. Irving earlier revealed IBM’s plan to open source its UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) SDK. While the details are gnarly, the general plan will look familiar to anyone who’s thinking in terms of service-oriented architecture. The UIMA software provides a framework for coordinating many different text analyzers. Each runs as a service that consumes and produces data in common formats. Applications are composed by declaratively combining sets of analyzers. Using a potpourri of technologies, these analyzers pore through unstructured text looking for named entities (people, places, companies, or products, for example) and relationships among them. Then the analyzers tag these entities to enable structured search. Queries are XML fragments that can nest entities, such as “person” and “organization”, inside relationships, such as “president_of”. Such tagging if it were already present in the document, or linked to it by way of an external tagging service, would enable you to skip the rocket-science analysis phase and proceed directly to the query endgame. As blogging begins to play a greater role in enterprise knowledge management, two strategies will present themselves : - First, there’s social tagging. It’s true that the Web dwarfs the enterprise, but people who use social tagging services form small communities around specific tags. Maybe such communities can flourish at enterprise scale. - The second strategy is microformats. The idea here is that your blogging tool should make it easy to post items that contain nuggets of structure. As I see it, these developments shall have the the potential to herald Blog 2.0.
(Via Lesscode)A custom prepared presentation viewed as being quite useful to several expert users within an enterprise was valid only for an hour or so, takes more than two weeks to prepare. Alexbunardzic wonders why a software application, on the other hand, gets invariably perceived as being something that not only must possess phenomenal longevity (at least 3 to 5 years, according to the current rule of a thumb), but must also offer a huge portion of salvageability, that is, reusability. A typical Microsoft powerpoint business presentation,is not expected to be reusable. There usually is quite a wealth of useful information and knowledge buried inside such typical presentation, but not all are particularly bent on salvaging that content, or on reusing it, or on evolving it, etc. In the world of software application development, the delivered source code, and all the embedded knowledge it carries within, gets treated as pure gold. All of a sudden, everybody talks about the need to reuse it, not to reinvent the wheel. Something is terribly mystified (beyond any recognition) in the world of software application development, calling for a reality check. The current technologies in vogue, (J2EE and .NET) are so complicated, and calls for efforts to roll out a highly customized solution. It is becoming more and more clear that delivering huge, bulky, all-things-to-all-people software applications is simply not the way to go. We are now ushering into an era of disposable software. Build it quickly, with a particular narrow problem in mind, and for a particular, possibly short time frame of valid use. Then, be prepared to throw it away, and to move on, not looking back. With the new generation of tools and new outlook on the philosophy of software development, such an approach is becoming increasingly feasible. Instead of attempting to build one giant, general purpose app, we should focus on building several more specific apps that would address specific needs of individual business blocks – otherwise, we would end with an extremely precious product that had myriad of features that end-users mostly didn’t care about. Think about it - In reality, a good software developer should be able to do just that — deliver a disposable, short lived product that addresses only the pressing needs of the moment, and then simply disappears. No maintenance, no enhancements, no song-and-dance, no bells and whistle. Interesting piece to read and definitely ponder over.
Chris Anderson writes, it is a mistake to see the world through Top 10, 100, and 500 lists more evil headism.There's nothing wrong with rankingby popularity-after all, that's just another example of a "wisdom of crowds" filter-but all too often these lists lump together all sorts of niches, genres, sub-genres and categories into one unholy mess. The Feedster Top 500 blogs & Technorati Top 100 list shows there are a couple of gadget blogs in each list, two or three political blogs, some uncategorizeable subculture ones (BoingBoing, FARK), a personal blog (dooce) and a Flash developers site (Albino Blacksheep). Clearly this is a semi – random collection of totally disparate things. To use an analogy, top-blog lists are akin to saying that the bestsellers in the supermarket today were: 1. DairyFresh 2% Vitamin D Milk 2. Hayseed Farms mixed grain Bread 3. Bananas, assorted bunches 4. Crunchios cereal, large size 5. DietWhoopsy, 12-pack, cans Chris concludes,lists only make sense in context, comparing like with like within a category.
We recently covered, IBM dominates the EAI market with more than one-third the marketshare of enterprise application integration market, wherein we wrote,"The acquisitions can also be seen to be leapfrogging IBM to head-on compettion with application-oriented providers of data integration, such as SAP and Oracle. No doubt we are seeing more and more product deals from IBM in the marketplace - IBM is definitely muscling in aggressively in the enteprise middleware and application integration market". Redherring writes , IBM not losing steam after 25 acquisitions in four years in the middleware segment. The perepective goes on like this -IBM’s appetite for middleware is shifting the industry’s focus to a segment of the software industry that was once a catchall for any software product not classified as an application or an operating system. Today middleware, the layer of software that facilitates communications among other software components across a network, has become a highly competitive market dominated by IBM and a collection of smaller players. "IBM is putting a huge amount of effort and money into basically creating a development environment out of WebSphere and DB2," said Charles King, an analyst with PundIT Research. “IBM is basically providing its partners with a platform for their applications. It’s a pretty unusual strategy IBM‘s partners bring the application and IBM l provides a one-stop shop for everything else. IBM focuses on acquisition prospects it has worked with and companies that have created products with which it is familiar. Portfolio rounding with partners having a lot of affinity with IBM technology is said to be the motto. IBM exited the applications business a few years ago and has since put together a formidable force of developers that build on its various middleware platforms. IBM’s direction is clearly toward being a business process outsourcing provider and getting as high up in the stack as they can go without stepping on the toes of their partners
Bweek reports, Google Buys Android for Its Mobile Arsenal. Android had at one point been working on a software operating system for cell phones. The search giant quietly acquires the startup, netting possibly a key player in its push into wireless, "the next frontier in search". Bweek adds, Rubin of Android once said there was tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences. Google has been toiling to make its services more appealing to people who access the Net over cell phones and other mobile devices. In April, the company uncorked local-flavored search for mobile users. Also in April, it announced Google Short Message Service (SMS), which sends text-based information to mobile users seeking everything from driving directions to weather forecasts. Recently, Google acquired Dodgeball, a mobile social-networking service. Using a wireless device, users can send a text message to their circle of friends, announcing that they will be at a certain coffee shop or hangout. In addition, users can be notified if friends-of-friends are within a certain vicinity. With Google's acquisition of Android, it will be interesting to see what new wireless products emerge from the joining. Look at the possibilities – Mobile OS, Mobile Toolbar, Google Earth, Location based Froogle .. Exciting.
The core functionality of the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in US cars - seems to remain the same after several years. The next versions of GPS would have the capability of “learning” so that the route traveled everyday can become the default way to get between two locations, even if the GPS determined by default a more efficient method of getting there, writes Jeff Pulver.With EvDO service becoming available in the US, the next level of expectation is "internet ready"GPS for the automobile. Pulver is looking for a new GPS that connects to the internet on a real-time basis and reports back to a community the observed real-time road conditions anonymously. The basic concept is that with report fed back in about relative speed on a given road, the driver gets the ability to observe the posted speeds of others who are also using a similar service. The goal isn’t so much to create a map of speed traps on a major road, but rather to provide the real-time input needed into a GPS so that routes can be optimized at all times given the real-time road traveling conditions. Also, with real-time internet access, the GPS could get up-to-date information when looking for destinations, up-to-date maps in some cases and connect with many of the websites which track and report on real-time traffic conditions. This in turn is envision as the evolving “autonomous, anonymous, automobile.” Roadcasting along with real-time IP based communications network could change the landscape of automobiles and decisions on the road. The power of technology and its multiplier effect and the reach that technology has to influence our daily lives - Amazing if we reflect.
Jeff Bussgang thinks that the biggest change has been in transitioning from sitting in the entrepreneur’s seat to the VC’s seat, is the profound difference in the way entrepreneurs and VCs look at that all important dimension of time. He writes, for an entrepreneur, time is the enemy. He need to scale up and do product rollouts, raise money and close deals , take decisions with limited data – all in parallel. Every quarter can be looked like an hourglass, with the sand running out every 90 days and a mad scramble to close as many deals as possible before time ran out. At an earlier stage company, that hourglass metaphor is similar, but the sand running out is the cash on your balance sheet! In short, entrepreneurs learn to fight hard against the passage of time. In contrast, Jeff writes, VCs seem to love the passage of time. When you’re evaluating a deal, more time means more information. When making investment decisions, VCs prefer to watch movies rather than look at snapshot pictures - in other words, they like to see a project evolve over time, not evaluate it at a discrete point in time. They like to see teams gel together. They like to see entrepreneurs actually achieve the milestones they claim they’ll achieve with time. The key to working together is to simply recognize this difference in this attitude towards time and try not to fight against it. My Take:While the logic looks good - we may need to recognize a few additional issues besides style of management - participative/guidance oriented to plain intervention – A. Not all investments are the same – some may need a different approach towards investment assessment – (while it is true every deal needs a thorough assessment – a few among them may need totally different approach)
B.Another thing to watch would be the difference in perspective - post investments – when it comes to issues of expansion, selling , when VC wants to exit – he wants it fast – the entrepreneur may like to keep the process controlled – VC may not care post investment – the entrepreneur may choose to continue – and therefore he may like the VC exit to be smooth and without noise. At that stage the entrepreneur is anxious about continuity and may desire subdued action - the VC choosing to exit may like to do it fast - even with lot of noise. There the entrepreneur and the VC have different perspectives on Time & Noise.
(Via Sloan Review). Companies in general have trouble shifting technological paradigms, and the gestation period for the use of technologies in business often a matter of decades - The Harvard Business School Internet2Business Applications (or "Biz-Apps") Group, found that the impediments to correctly identifying future billion-dollar market segments in communication technologies are formidable. For one thing, in both the commercial and academic realms, there is a tendency to adopt existing industries as frames of reference for new technologies rather than envisioning new industries or new forms for existing industries. Similarly, there is a tendency to anchor thinking in existing customer segments or to use others' ideas to extend one's own favorite thesis rather than to engage in true recombination of ideas. There is also a tendency to think in terms of a single "killer app" even though the next big thing is likely to be a combination of applications. Two practices are vital to overcoming these and other limiting tendencies in the pursuit of new technology-enabled businesses. Simply try things out: The next killer app will emerge through a process of "recursive visioning and innovative doing." Today's information technologies have radically reduced the fixed and design cost of simply trying things. Work processes have become iterative as engineers engage in real-time experiments. Focus on the information context :If killer apps will indeed emerge in nonobvious ways, the process can only be enhanced if applications are deployed in a context that provides more information than is actually needed for the application. This will create opportunities to discover more important uses for the app than were originally intended. Extrapolation of the present will follow lines less straight and more recombinant than can be deciphered. In that case, we will need processes and technologies that will allow us to intelligently stumble upon the future.
(Via Rednova) The digital tracks solid in the US alone has doubled in one year. The market for legitimate music downloads is booming, but the stumbling block of incompatibility will not go away. DRM technology wraps around song files to block mass copying and peer-to-peer distribution of music downloads. It dictates when, where and how music files can be consumed legitimately. At the heart of the problem are dueling digital-rights-management (DRM) systems from rivals Apple Computer and Microsoft. Files using either company's DRM are incompatible with players that support the other DRM. Microsoft's Windows Media DRM is supported on more than 60 devices and used for digital files sold by dozens of retailers, including Napster, AOL, Yahoo, RealNetworks, Virgin, FYE and Wal-Mart. Apple's DRM is called Fair Play and works only in Apple-controlled products and services like the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. Key to the long-term proposition of digital music is the idea of building a system where music can be accessed anywhere and everywhere. But in the short term, the industry is just looking for DRM rules to replicate with music files what consumers are used to doing with their CDs: moving seamlessly from home stereo to car to computer to portable players. Dimensional and eMusic are avoiding DRM issues by not supporting DRM at all. Instead, they sell licensed content in the open MP3 format. This tactic limits the amount of music they can offer, however, because the major labels will not license music to be sold as MP3 files. A consortium of carriers and handset manufacturers known as the Open Mobile Alliance is developing a third major DRM standard, OMA, for phones. Microsoft and Apple are also looking to facilitate the sale of music via cell phones, lining up support from handset manufacturers like Motorola (which is backing Apple) and Nokia (which is aligned with Microsoft).It is unclear whether the carriers want to sell music in either format. They may ultimately back OMA, thus exacerbating the DRM compatibility problem. Regardless of where compatibility problems originate, labels and retailers are looking to develop bridging solutions that can approximate interoperability. RealNetworks in July marked the one-year anniversary of its Harmony initiative, which allows tracks from the RealPlayer Music Store to work with Apple's iPod and a number of portable Some analysts see interoperability as a feature that could be promoted by large cable companies or telecommunications players offering broadband access. "Consumers derive value from interoperability, so a third party should offer interoperability as a service."
We recently covered Yahoo's claim of increased index size.Based on the data created from sample searches, the study conducted at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign concludes that a user can expect, on average, to receive 166.9% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results. It is the opinion of the study that Yahoo!'s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google's index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, it is puzzling that Yahoo!'s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google. This confirms what John Battelle reported as Google response to Yahoo’s claim of increase in index size. The whole index size thing development is increasingly becoming more and more curious
Romesh Wadhwani’s well thought out & well articulated viewpoints on the future of the software industry is a must read for all interested – Some of these points - I agree with and some of it requires definite deliberations – but overall quite thought provoking. Some key points that I liked in his original speech/article include:
Software industry is having troubles to grow as customers no longer value cutting-edge technology over business results,investors no longer value growth over profit, employees no longer value options over stability. The industry needs to make dramatic changes to reinvent itself over the next decade. Companies taking advantage along the lines outlined here may constitute the list of top 10 besides Microsoft, SAP & Oracle by 2010 says Romesh. The various points that he discusses include:
On Consolidation Mania: Most vendors need to retool, and gain expertise to acquire or be acquired at an attractive - and realistic price. Obviously this is not what they can excel at. Acquisition spree has to slow down.
The unified platform myth : SAP, MySAP has multiple code streams, CRM more, NetWeaver, another set. Through development and purchase, Oracle now has 10 to 20 enterprise platforms. Then there is the ever delayed Microsoft Longhorn. The reality is that it will be many years before an unified platform appears from any of the major providers( This may be opportunity for others – he says- looks a little far fetched to me however).
Future Of Packaged Apps:20 percent of a software product represents 80 percent of its business value. Software is moving back to an age of semi-custom applications. The future belongs to these products which contain 80 percent of the value for common clients. Various service providers can fill in the missing 20 percent on a client-by-client basis. This will lead to a sensible revenue recognition and maintenance model that won't force the bad behavior plaguing the industry today.
On Products & Services: In software, the product has always been the focus. Services have always been "the tail on the dog." In fact, it should be the opposite. Vendors need to run both products and services businesses separately with great leaders for each and need to benchmark their performance against best-in-class providers in each category. They need to deconstruct their services business model and run it differently to achieve superior returns - or cut it out altogether.
Software Providers & SIs:Software providers could become specialty BPO companies themselves - or boutique systems integrators or Web Services integrators. The value delivered to an enterprise will be large under any of these models.
The Emergence of a "Star Alliance": Imagine a software "Star Alliance," with vendors pulled together around vertical domains or horizontal processes. The products would be held together with pre-integration, common GUIs and united go-to-market models. The alliance would enable vendors to band together in a sensible way and integrate common components. It would drive a revolution in buying behavior and possibly drive growth into the double digits again.
Reinvent or Relocate:Facing the massive market shifts, software vendors will only succeed if they reinvent their business model. Like Huwaei sniping at the heels of Cisco, the day of such competition is not far off for US based vendors. The US industry needs to make changes in business today that will prepare the industry to take on such competition. 60 to 70 percent of development and 50% of your services work offshore and reduce your R&D to 7.5 percent of sales may be the recipe for survival/success. While there are enough points be picked as being contrversial - in general an excellent perspective - this presentation would be referred to by all thinking about the future of the industry. Pl. read the full article here.
(Via Business 2.0) Om Malik writes, "a trail of hidden clues suggests Google is building its own Internet - and might be looking to let everyone connect for free.He adds that Google is already building a national broadband network, though ostensibly for many reasons. Google needs these as it prepares to unleash a flood of new, bandwidth-hungry applications. These offerings could include everything from a digital-video database to on-demand television programming. An even more compelling reason for Google to build its own network is that it could save the company millions of dollars a month by avoiding middlemen - Google could share traffic directly with ISPs to avoid fees. Google’s interest in recently acquired Feeva likely stems from the startup's proprietary technology, which can determine the location of every Wi-Fi user and would allow Google to serve up advertising and maps based on real-time data. The next step may be to provide nationwide Wi-Fi – Google is geeting ready to offer free net access to everyone in the US This is really big - if Google can pull this off - the next generation net and next generation web - it is indeed a mighty vision come true.
One year after the most publicized initial stock offering in history, everyone's favorite search engine is balancing innovation and successwith a healthy dose of frustration. Google's business model has proven a success, and it continues to lead the league in innovation. Product releases have picked up dramatically as the company engages in a full-blown arms race against Yahoo and Microsoft. But Google is also feeling growing pains. It added an average of 10 employees every business day in the last quarter. The 4,183 odd employees , can no longer assume that colleagues know everything that's going on in the company. As everyone expected, Google is turning into a huge corporation. Internet advertising is taking off at long last, accounting for billions of dollars in revenue across the Internet. And Google alone accounts for about 15 percent of that revenue nationally, Add in services such as global mapping and imaging, as well as an international expansion that involves the burgeoning Chinese market, and one can see why Google is expanding by leaps and bounds. To cope with the growth, Google has reorganized much of its advertising operation. Staff and clients have been broken down by industry and revenue. Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products, reports that "We're in a state now where we do 16 or 17 (releases) a week," factoring in new features for international users. On the flip side, without getting permission from broadcasters, Google started recording their programming. It then displayed still images from the shows and snippets of closed captioning as search results. Teams of Google employees have met with broadcasters to discuss paying for the video by charging users, and sharing advertising revenue. Google recently reported stopping printed books. Through the growth, Google has stayed committed to making its search engine results more relevant. Analysts believe that Google is slowly taking aim at Microsoft's software business, a potential growth area bigger than online advertising. Google has spurred traditional media companies to try to play catch up. Through extra investment and acquisitions, those firms are hoping to adapt to a shift in advertising spending to the Web from print and television before its too late.
With web 2.0, a new perception of the internet is characterised by interactivity and personalisation, writes ITWeek. Web 2.0 expresses a sense that the character of the internet is undergoing a radical shift. "Blog" and "Podcast", both of which count as web 2.0 technologies. The technical drivers behind web 2.0 include broadband connections, cheap storage, and connected mobile devices. RSS news feeds, Ajax(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and XML web services are all important elements of Web 2.0. This is not so much about specific technologies, but more to do with new ways of exploiting what an always-on global network can do. A great way to get a feel for web 2.0 is to look at new geographic applications such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Microsoft's Virtual Earth. They bring together cartography, aerial photography and internet search to create a compelling answer to the question "where?" Web 2.0 sites are portal-friendly, easy to aggregate and easy to link to. This is where representational state transfer (Rest) architecture is valuable - the idea that even on a dynamic site everything should be URL-addressable. If a site has an API or even just an RSS feed, someone is thinking on the right lines, especially if it is useful for mobile devices as well as the desktop. Another characteristic is simplicity. Web 2.0 sites do everything to accommodate the user. Finally, web 2.0 is about conversation, which is not just a feedback form, but new ways of interacting with users.
We recently covered Bryan Stolle's view on market consolidation, wherein he sees new business models and technologies are taking hold across the software vendor landscape and points out that software is not a homogenous market. Since the market is heterogeneous there is no strong case for a market future with consolidation leading to a handful of players, he argued. As different enterprise software segments have very different maturation cycles in each market segment - the market lifecycle model espoused by Geoffrey Moore and others applies. There is still much innovation to be done, especially as the market gets more and more vertically focused. Software is a very broad category and reminds that we are a long, long way from a Global 5000 enterprise going to one company, and saying, "automate all my business processes." Talking about consolidation without digging deeper ignores tremendous opportunity
Forbes reports about SG Cowen's recent survey of North American enterprise application users wherein the results points to improved prospects for enterprise players, driven by pent-up capacity demand among existing users and some new customer expansion. This may bode well for the major application vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com, among others. SAP and Microsoft "are showing the strongest customer spending and share momentum trends," but the research firm noted that half of all users "are looking to reduce or cancel maintenance contracts, a key source of vendor profits." Interest in hosted applications seems to be high and rising - The strong adoption trends bode well for Salesforce.com and the nascent efforts at Siebel Systems and other larger vendors & also notes that oracle mergers and acquisitions, integration strategies have customers feel satisfied. Investors should not ignoremedium sized players in the enterprise software sector, as these are poised to outgrow the big fish over the next few years. SG Cowen report says business software makers like Lawson Software, Epicor Software, SSA Global and QAD which sell to midsized companies will outperform the market in the next five years. The report also adds, customer spending with smaller ERP providers to grow faster than overall software spending from 2006 to 2011. Midmarket companies have courted customers largely ignored by larger companies. Reaching them and catering to their unique needs is not easy. Software spending is different among midsized companies- for one; the average deal sizes are smaller. Because the companies have smaller information technology budgets, they concentrate on easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use applications that address specific business needs instead of large blockbusters with lots of bells and whistles. The midmarket vendors also adapted to the unique spending climate by creating applications that require minimal oversight, and selling products incrementally to work with existing installations. There are more than 75,000 midsized customers in the U.S. alone. It's worth questioning who is best suited to serve them. The consolidation game is not going to be easy – we are going to see not only a tiered set of players, but also vertical/segment/geography specialized players.
Looking at Eric Schmidt's homepage,you will notice two things. - First is the using the Wall St. Journal cartoon of himself as his homepage picture. - Second thing to note is he is still using his Yahoo email address. Yes,the Google CEO has his Yahoo email address on his homepage MONTHS after the release of Google's GMail product. - Third, even though he loves Yahoo email you will notice the address on the bottom is Google's headquarters. This is in contrast to how his homepage looked when he was with novell – with a photograph and a novell email address!!.
(Via Economist) Baidu will have to compete with Google, already the second-biggest search engine in China. Unlike Google, in its main market Baidu faces an unpredictable government, determined to maintain strict control over the internet and the media in general.Its recent crackdown on the content of mobile-phone text messages, for example, hit the profits and shares of several Chinese online firms listed in America, including SMS provider Linktone and portals Sohu and NetEase. In all, the 23 mainland technology firms that have floated on NASDAQ since 2000 enjoyed a median first-day gain of 13% only to see their shares record a median decline of 34% one year on, according to Straszheim Global Advisors, a consultancy that focuses on China. With more Chinese firms preparing for overseas listings—such as A-Max Technology, which makes MP3 music players, China Medical Technologies, and Focus Media, which sells advertising space on liquid-crystal display screens—that should give foreign investors pause for thought. As the Song poets realised long ago, the achievement of perfection requires judgment as well as enthusiasm.In contrast,Indian stocks have in general done well after going through stability period in U.S bourses. A businessweek analysis of financial data from shows Indian corporations are getting more bang for their money. Indian businesses have, with a few exceptions, outperformed their Chinese counterparts on return on equity (ROE) and return on invested capital (ROIC).Indian companies perform better across various industry groups because they face greater market pressures. Despite plenty of government regulation, India is by and large a well-functioning market economy. This leads businesses to focus more on profits and performance. When it comes to free markets, China is a work in progress. China's government has big stakes in most publicly listed companies, so managers must be mindful of government agendas. investors beware!
AJright comes with an interesting set of predictions in the mobility space – I mostly agree with his predictions and am listing a few that I strongly believe would happen:
Wireless PDAs, laptops with high speed wireless connections, and smartphones all have the ability to stretch the work-desk, making the world smaller for everyone. Some emerging technologies that may improve productivity, enhance entertainment, and even blur the line more with mobile computing items go like this: - BlackBerry / Treo are already well enmeshed into corporate environments - within 2 years wireless standards such as 802.11n and WiMax will enable these connections to happen over a larger area, and even eliminate Internet inaccessibility in some areas. - Wireless technologies will continue to compete for your wallet and air space. Cellular companies all over the world will either have to adapt their usage models to including VoIP plans, or be lost to the Vonage's & Skype's. - The competitive wireless landscape will push fringe devices to the lower rungs of usage (meaning non-connected PDAs, phones that cannot access the Internet and act as a modem, and notebooks/tablets that have only limited versions of WiFi). PDAs shall morph into handheld connected terminals (GPS and VoIP probably being the next main features). Notebooks will continue to get smaller, and convertible TabletPCs may take a larger slice of the traditional notebook market share. - PC/PDA makers may extend media managers / media players to support/include projector/projector capabilities - expensive flat screens and projector TV setups are replaced with just movie downloads from Comcast/Netflix/Blockbuster, etc. and a movie theater ready to go. - The future of mobility sees the normal user taking advantage of large hard drives and advance screen types to offer their families and clients a "cheaper than going out" entertainment experience. Project forward next five years: - In the next year there will be at least one VoIP service offered by a major mobile carrier. - More devices shall offer some kind of flash memory subsystem for backup purposes. We have already seen this with Palm and upcoming with Windows Mobile 5 PDAs. - One laptop maker offering a fuel cell-powered laptop before the end of spring. - Usable web browser on phone and PDA. XML will further break down the boundaries of document sharing, and blogs will continue to push the realism and speed of news reports.
I have been covering and sharing perspectives on user generated content several time as can be seen here, here, herewhere the theme generally had been that user generated content influences traffic/ helps enterprise in general.
David Beisel writes after the investment in Intercasting (specializing in user generated content for mobiles) – lot of companies are pitching in with web services on user generated content. He writes that: - All content is not created equal. Specialised/vertical areas by definition need specialist idea/content creators. The content creators themselves may be driven by multiple motivations for creating the content. This can vary from intrinsic rewards, like a positive feeling of contribution for sharing and a sense of connecting with others, or intangible and external rewards, as many blog authors are seeking fame and recognition. And in some cases,the rewards are explicit, tangible, and external - there users get paid to contribute.The need to contribute need to be assessed as this may reveal valuable insights. - Size /Trust Matters - User-generated content can come in all shapes and sizes – from microcontent (text snippets, photos, and location information) to full-length (podcasts, vcasts, essays/articles, etc.)The nature and volume of content generation should correlate to consumption for the mechanism to be recognized as offering true value. Some areas of subject matter require certain authority to support the material. Trusting the source is imperative in nearly all types of information. User-generated content is indeed valuable, but professional content-generation – “traditional” media – is not going away anytime soon. I completely agree with David - all types of information out there should not be user-generated. There are certain applications where user-generated content makes a lot of sense; but there are many verticals and applications where content creation should be left to the professionals.
(Via Fortune) David Kirkpatrick has written an excellent column on the business usage of RSS technologies. Blogs, and a related technology called RSS, may hold the future for software says Jim Moore – he and his partners have raised $100 million for the first-ever venture capital fund devoted to these technologies, called RSS Investors. Moore, thinks that blogs and RSS are ushering in "the democratization of web services." Moore while working with Dave Winer began to understand the business potential of blogs & RSS. Bigger Internet players are now snapping up firms that use these technologies. Flickr, recently bought by Yahoo, lets users share photos, post them to blogs, and send them from their camera-phones. And Bloglines was bought by Ask Jeeves, which is itself now being acquired by Interactive Corp. New RSS-centric companies are emerging all the time. One firm that Moore particularly admires is del.icio.us, which allows you to save websites you like, create labels for them, and share them with your friends. del.icio.us, makes highly creative use of RSS feeds. Moore says RSS and other technologies are poised to vastly expand online automated software programs, or what are called "web services." He thinks that more ways to acquire, share, and benefit from information will emerge. "There are a whole set of things which, taken together, are a new paradigm for software development," says Moore. "The revolution is that a set of elements now allow people, including end users, to very simply knit together powerful "web services." Moore thinks we are heading to a world of web services built around RSS and other simple web technologies. This will let just about anybody build on to someone else’s software application on the web. "The elements of this programming are very simple instructions, like URLs, RSS, and zip codes," he says. Even companies like enterprise software giant SAP could find themselves threatened, as pieces of their business become available as much simpler services on the web (Not sure how – after all the RSS /Feed readers can be used only for display!). In Future, companies will begin to figure out how to perform tasks, such as tracking inventory, using RSS feeds. There’s no question that RSS is one of the most powerful technologies of the Internet age.
The best way to reach a product to Generation Y is the Internet, says Newsweek. Specifically, blogs and chat rooms, where the opinions, whims and heartthrobs of today's youth are freely aired. The instant availability of even the most intimate consumer preferences and turnoffs has initiated a new boom in market research, which can be done more cheaply and accurately than ever before. Steve Rubel points to how unilever listens and responds to customers. Apparently the consumer product giant was actively listening to the blogosphere and they tuned into one voice, Dan Entin. Dan had been lamenting about how he is having trouble in getting his favorite deodorant. Unilever - a huge company with lots of to worry about - took the time to respond to Dan directly via email. Steven Levy adds, "The giants of Internet commerce all offer, right on the surface, gobs of up-to-the-second market information. Amazon.com gives sales ratings of even the most obscure products; eBay determines the market value of Picasso prints and baseball cards; Google search results tell you the Web popularity of anything". You can also do quick probes of the blogosphere with services like Technorati or Daypop. To make full use of the bounty of information, there are highly sophisticated services with sophisticated digital divining rods. Umbria, for instance, claims to have developed algorithms that can detect the age and gender of bloggers and chatters by analyzing speech patterns and subject matter. And IBM's WebFountain, does text analysis on billions of documents, from blogs to trade journals. While well-calibrated data mining will certainly tell you what people think about a given product, and even what they say they want to buy in the future, it still takes instinct, vision and the courage to ignore conventional wisdom to produce the category-busting innovations that become breakout products—and the obsessive subject of millions of blog items and chat comments that have yet to be written.
At a recent ITU cybersecurity event,Bruce Schneier, gave a keynote speech entitled Negotiating for Security. Mr. Schneier states that security is one of the fundamental building blocks of the information society as everything we now do with information requires some kind of security- sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, may it be personal, corporate or government related. He said that to a very real extent the limits of the information society can be seen as the limits of security. In other words, if we cannot do it securely, we will not do it with computers and on the internet. Therefore, this means that security is a fundamental enabling technology of the global information society. Moreover, he noted that society as a whole is increasingly moving onto computers and networks and therefore things that had previously nothing to do with computers suddenly do: whether airplanes or the national power grid, these now have an important information security component to their secure functioning. This means that information security therefore has become our general security, which is almost everything. This fact explains our need for an increased focus on security and why the things we are trying to achieve here at this meeting are so important. A Real Audio archive of Mr. Schneier's talk is available here.
Businessweek has a series of articles in its latest issue about the rise of China & India. For the international observers quaestions that come to mind include : The next superpowers? Societies on the brink of chaos? The countries that will take all the US jobs? and the clear answer is since India and China have one-third of the world's people, almost anything you say about them will be partly right. Bweek envisions China, India, and the U.S. evolving into a global triumvirate that will dominate the century. China and India will be both allies and counterweights to America - at the expense of Japan and Europe. China's competitive edge is shifting from low-cost workers to state-of-the-art manufacturing. India is creating world-class innovation hubs, and its companies are far better performers than China's. And a market-driven "Chindia" is fast emerging.
The rise of China and India will be better for the U.S. than the direst predictions hold - yet worse than the Panglossian projections of boosters in America and Asia. On the upside, American consumers will clearly benefit from the availability of inexpensive goods and services. American shareholders of well-positioned multinationals will enjoy higher profits. And Americans employed in successful U.S. export sectors will benefit because China and India will buy more Western-style goods and services - from cosmetics to jets to banking - as they get richer and increase their consumption. On the downside, life will be tough for those who are less skilled, less educated, and less able to adapt as the world changes around them. Even many highly skilled American service workers, from programmers to financial analysts, will suffer as low-cost Asian giants target U.S.-dominated businesses. "The individuals who are able to take advantage of the new opportunities do extremely well. Those who are poorly situated get hammered In coming years, India and China will consume more goods and services from the U.S. and elsewhere - both because they will be richer and because they will shift somewhat from export-led growth toward meeting serious domestic needs. In China, the shift will mean more money for health care, housing, and the environment, and less for steel and chemical plants. China's health-care spending per dollar of GDP is only one-third that of the U.S., so there's lots of room for improvement. India, too, will divert more of its newfound wealth toward uplifting its poor. This will create opportunities to sell American products and services. Many Indians and Chinese are more confident about Americans' future than Americans are themselves. John Seely Brown & John Hagel are both struck by how complacent U.S. business executives are regarding the business implications of offshoring. They write that it is in sharp contrast to the intense urgency seen while talking to executives in China and India. Complacency has always been risky and it is even more so today. By focusing on innovation rather than brawn, and ensuring labor and regulatory conditions are attractive...the U.S. will continue to attract and retain the best and brightest
Richard Waters writes, Something has happened to the open source software movement. It is losing some of the intellectual purity that first drew in the ponytail crowd. It is being subverted to the interests of bigger technology companies - something that makes the idealists who created the movement angry and perturbed. That, may be the wrong reaction as merging with the corporate mainstream is the logical next step. Open-source is a collection of methods for creating and distributing software that exposes the inefficiency in some parts of the traditional commercial industry. The idealism that has surrounded this movement has always masked some harder-edged economic realities, which explains why it can be absorbed into the mainstream with relative ease. Every software company worth its salt already has some open-source strategy – From IBM to Sun. Most commercial software released this way still comes with strings attached, as the owners try to grab the benefits of open-source – leading to a proliferation of different open-source software licenses - more than 60 at the last count. "shared source" and "community source" labels help to an extent faster absorption by giving users more control should add to the general good - even as it threatens the business models of the weaker developers, forcing a more efficient allocation of software development resources. The conflict between the ponytails and the suits was never as strong as is perceived. For many software developers, contributing software to an open-source project is an act of self-help: the wider community can create something that no developers working alone or in small groups can. Most developers work in the IT departments of big companies, writing code for their employers: pooling those efforts with others is a more efficient way of building software. This movement of linking developers also serves to disintermediate the big commercial software companies. Successful tech businesses are beginning to borrow ideas (EMC – Vmware) from the open-source world. The open-source purists are not impressed at this half-hearted approach to "openness". There have been rumblings of criticism. Is it true open-source? No. But it is a sign that powerful ideas that have bubbled to the surface in one of the world's most dynamic industries have filtered through into the wider corporate consciousness. My Take: I am not seeing any great fascination towards opensource in enterprise applications from buyer perspective and I still beleive that opensource lacks a business model for sustenance.Not withstanding the fact that Opensource absorption at absolute levels - this signals the success of open-source pioneers in reshaping the software landscape, not the end of a dream Category :Opensource
BL Ochman scoops, Technorati is about to be soldto a large search engine company. She thinks , the deal should go down in about a week. Speculation ranges from Yahoo to Google to Newscorp to Mark Cuban as prospective buyers. I do not have any inside information - but I can say one thing - considering the significant changes that Technorati has seen in the last six months or so and considering that the market looks hot and a few big deals are happening in the market - this may be a possibility. Jeff Jarvis reports that this coule be just a rumour. Niall Kennedy point out this to potential buyers. If I were Dave, I would definitely look at a sale option, if the price is indeed good. As a leader in the blogspace search market - Technorati is always an attractive option lets wait & see.
Vinnie provides a wonderful coverage of Enterprise 2005, highlighting that conflicting priorities summarized the tone of the meet. Some good ideas that got discussed in the meet which he covers include: - A keynote speech summarized the turbulent state of the software industry – “Investors want growth AND profitability. Customers want innovation AND viability. Employees want options AND stability”. - The convoluted process of consolidation & the seeds of continued fragmentation are being sown by the "consolidators". - Opportunities abound for intrepid vendors as the bigger vendors rationalize acquired architectures and modernize existing ones. This would keep them a) Keep them inwardly focused for a while and b) Reflect expensive migrations for their customer bases. If focused vendors could price alternative solutions at rates economical compared to the migration cost- they could carve out chunks from these vendors. - India and other offshore markets will increasingly move from services to developing packaged software. - A "Star Alliance" similar to what has happened with international airlines. Instead of acquisitions, there could be shared branding, delivery, capacity sharing. - Software companies need to become more like Accenture or Infosys or just focus on product development and let partners provide services. - Rolling out semi-finished software - as “20% of code provides 80% of customer value ,moving away from the" bad habits” of frequent releases and maintenance revenues”. “Using opensource hosted components to bring costs down & ability to leverage offshore engagements to bring down R&D costs.
I beleive that consolidation along platform players, ecosystems & innovative startups would constitute the future landscape. Few more things that to my mind looks significant are: - May be this is the start of age of discontinuity - we may see newer type of applications emerging.(It would be the case of fast Vs slow ,innovation & responsiveness largely helping the case of vendors) - Composite applications would begin to evolve more fast and could become an important element in tthe emerging enterprise landscape.
Jason Stamper writing on the ESB technology origin highlights Roy Schulte's view that Candle's Roma product of 1998 that is the ESB's "most direct ancestor", but that it was Sonic Software that coined the term. Candle was acquired by IBM in April 2004 - an irony that will not be lost on either Tibco or Sonic Software, since IBM has only recently begun to claim that it too has an ESB of its own - IBM's Steve Mills holds the view that IBM has been delivering ESB functionality for many years. Roy recollects that Tibco started with an enterprise message bus in 1990'S, not an enterprise service bus.Tibco’s products in the 1990s were supersets of the first ESBs in many respects but their lack of web services support meant that Tibco had a subset of an ESB in some respects, but TIBCO today has a superset of ESB. Competition is getting stiffer by the day in the ESB space. With ESBs thought to play a key enabling role as the foundation for service oriented architecture or SOA - which is itself expected to be one of the most important trends in enterprise IT over the next decade -several want to claim pioneer status in this space. Dennis Howlett sees the role of ESB's differently and points out that: - Firstly ESBs are a departmental solution that, cannot be meaningfully compared to an enterprise integration platform of the kind sold by TIBCO, IBM and others. There is no sensible cost/benefit comparison because the two solutions are fundamentally different. - Second, ESBs are NOT the foundation for a service oriented architecture but a component. - Finally, the ESB is yet to make any appreciable inroads into the enterprise integration market. The integration vendors are often solving some of the world's most challenging integration problems as most of their customers are using enteprise integration as a pathway to differentiated performance, and identifies companies like FedEX, Harrahs, BP, Vodafone, Fidelity, BBC, Associated News, Astra Zeneca, Pirelli, Audi etc who are using complex integration solutions to derive differentiated advantage.Each of these highly complex organizations has a USP/IP that cannot be readily replicated and these are accomplished by buying best-in-class solutions to each of their problems and then tying them together using an integration framework. He highlights that similar sucess stories need to come out from the ESB camp.I definitely feel that the ESB players shall have a good role to play in the emerging SOA landscape.
IBM, an early supporter of Linux is extending efforts to popularize Linux beyond the OS level. Moves include the release to the open-source community of Cloudscape database code, supporting the ongoing development of the Eclipse project and Gluecode, that sells support and services built around the Apache Geronimo application server. So far, Linux adoption on PCs has been a non factor, in part because of the lack of third-party applications.IBM wants to break the Jinx – at the LinuxWorld conference. IBM launched WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, designed to provide enterprise search middleware for powering intranets, extranets, and corporate public Web sites. Just as Linux's standing within companies has risen from being relegated mostly to running Web proxy connections and file/print functions to in some cases becoming a primary operating system for mission-critical applications, IBM’s Mills believes that Linux can make progress on the desktop. It's a dynamic that's been promised for years by companies that offer applications running in desktop Linux environments, but IT managers haven't been the least convinced and are, despite a sometimes love/hate relationship with Windows, are loath to give it up. Desktop Linux advocates say Linux's time has come for people who use their PCs to perform very specific functions like call-center workers. Linux on the desktop is happening, but mostly in transactional spaces, such as in retail environments where companies use the operating system to run point-of-sale devices, Call centers etc. Desktop Linux is lacking primarily in the area of third-party applications that companies use to perform functions specific to their business, as opposed to core desktop applications used to create documents, do instant-messaging, or run E-mail. I strongly beleive that the best demonstration of opensource success would be to measure & monitor a combination of trends such as,how much gigabytes of opensource software resides in your desktop, or how many no. of opensource applications that one runs as a proportion of total no.of applications accessed, how may clockcycles are consumed by processors in running opensource applications. Mobile/Handheld environment can also provide the best possible reference for Opensource.
Rajesh points to Sacha's well articulated note on open source vendor positioning. As he sees it, based on positioning towards open source, different open source companies could be categorized as : 1. The truly committed - The "truly committed", bundle companies that make of Open Source their principal strategy- Gathers companies with an increasing commitment to an Open Source strategy but that also have some existing critical revenue streams to protect, and hence cannot simply switch to a full OSS strategy overnight
2. The mixed-codebase - communicate a lot about their love of Open Source even though they usually only contribute marginally to OSS projects (if at all). 3. The pragmatics - These companies mostly develop proprietary software (ISV) and deploy it on (and make use of) Open Source software as a way to maximize their target market
4. The anti-strategist – Frequently confused with the second category (the "mixed-codebase" companies) as they share lots of common attributes (contribution to OSS projects, etc.) but are fundamentally different
5. The headless chickens - Are usually ex-"in-denial" companies (see category 6 below) under pressure of Open Source and paying the price of their denial.
6. The in-denial - Prefer not to see Open Source and will make sure to mention its existence as less as possible
7. The anti-OSS - Like the first category ("the truly committed"), benefits from an extremely clear positioning: they hate Open Source. Given the popularity of Open Source on the market, very few companies risk that positioning as it might backfire Sacha concludes that in his thinking only strategies 1, 2, 3 and 7 can be stable positions (with strategy 2 offering a good runway), while the others are unstable
Like many other nascent technologies, RFID has improved with age, writes BWeek. Excerpts with edits & comments: RFID has become more reliable and less costly. Boeing says its RFID system works 99.8% of the time, failing to read just 21 tags out of more than 18,000 in six months. That's negligible compared to the occurrence of human error when deliveries are entered manually. RFID system costs have come down, finally making the technology's return on investment attractive. While several years ago, the simplest RFID tags cost $1 to $5, they now sell for 25 cents to 50 cents. And tag prices are still dropping - expected to reach 20 cents this fall as suppliers deploy new, materials-saving manufacturing processes. Now manufacturers are starting to incorporate RFID on their own accord, to better manage their inventory and to track work in progress, storage containers, and tools. Indeed, RFID adoption among manufacturers is about to go into high gear. As many as 40% of all U.S. manufacturers - in industries as diverse as aerospace, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, automotive, and mining - will deploy RFID by 2010, up from under 10% today, estimates Kara Romanow, an analyst with AMR Research. That's a tremendous jump, considering that most companies using RFID today are running only limited trials.
RFID suppliers should see a sharp escalation in demand in mid-2006. That's when manufacturers are expected to first start moving from pilot tests to large-scale RFID deployments as new, industry-standard RFID technology comes to market. Called Gen 2 RFID, these new readers and tags will be cheaper, a lot more accurate, and work at distances up to 30% longer than their predecessors. With Gen 2, it would be far more easy to implement RFID. RFID no longer requires a mountain of special add-ons to corporate networks. Manufacturers that have installed Wi-Fi, a wireless broadband access technology, on their factory floors can use these networks to capture information from RFID tags without the help of RFID readers. Major customization and tweaking of corporate software systems have become unnecessary, too. RFID feeds, for example, will be a standard part of Microsoft' enterprise-resource-management software, used to track products through the manufacturing process and due for release in the first half of 2006. Tools and equipment vendors are starting to make RFID a standard part of their wares used by manufacturers to improve asset management. Business-intelligence software helps managers analyze daily trends in inventory buildup. In the future, RFID's importance for making business decisions will grow, as the tags start incorporating more memory as well as a slew of sensors, recording things like temperature and noise levels
The current chair of the Apache Web Services project foresees a future without J2EE, and has just launched a software startup with a mission to make it happen, writes, Phil Wainewright.The inherent implication is that a lot of J2EE is unnecessary (if not downright "klunky") when building web services integration. There are a cluster of releases & tools that put into the hands of enterprise developers, enable the creation of a powerful services infrastructure based on lightweight Java servers rather than having to invest in the heavyweight J2EE platforms marketed by the established proprietary vendors.
Simeon Simeonov writing on The Next Programming Models higlights, the process of building software hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 80s. Excerpts with edits and comments: Layers of abstraction are fundamental to software. Some layers are defined through programming models, e.g., machine language, assembly language, 3GLs, JSP. Others are defined through a combination of tools and frameworks, e.g., MFC and Visual Studio on top of C++. There is a limit to how high we can raise a level of abstraction through tools and frameworks alone. At some point, a new programming model is the best way forward. Two programming models that can significantly improve in the next few years. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs):Applications that have the deployment characteristics of browser-based applications but have equivalent power and more interactivity than desktop applications are the need of the hour. RIAs fulfill that. They bring complexity on two levels. First, computing happens on both the client and the server over a potentially unreliable WAN. Second, they aim to deliver highly interactive user experiences (UEs). Users respond better to these types of interfaces, as in general no one wants to use old-style Web maps when you can go with Google maps or the Flash-based AbMap. A good RIA programming model will protect developers from the details of location, i.e., the tasks associated with synchronizing data shared between the front- and back-end, invoking back-end services, dealing with online/offline operation, etc. It will also have an advanced rendering engine, preferably one that is cross-platform and device independent, and a presentation model that hides much of the hassle of resolution, screen orientation and internationalization. Java doesn’t cut it, primarily for UE reasons. More than PC-based applications, mobile applications really need a makeover and there are a lot of dollars at stake. Microbrowsers are trying to find ways to bring AJAX + DHTM ± WAP to devices. Java has deep market penetration but poor UE. Composite Applications :One of the cornerstones of SOA is that services can be implemented using anything.Traditional approaches for writing the glue code between services leave a lot to be desired.Deeper and more declarative mechanisms for putting services together are needed.Building, deploying and operating composite applications requires dealing with issues such as policy definition and enforcement, service evolution/versioning, system / deployment architectures and post-deployment management and monitoring. A winning programming model has to begin to address governance issues to face challenges like maintaining applications over time as services evolve. There is plenty of innovation possible in the utility computing space.
Bryan Stolle, CEO, Agile in a hard hitting viewpoint outlines that Considering the innovation going on in the software business, it is surprising that many analysts and investors can describe the entire, $600 billion, many-thousand-company industry with words like "mature" and "consolidating". He sees new business models and technologies are taking hold across the software vendor landscape and points out that software is not a homogenous market. Since it is heterogeneous there is no If strong case for a market future with consolidation leading to a handful of players. As different enterprise software segments have very different maturation cycles in each market segment - the market lifecycle model espoused by Geoffrey Moore and others applies. There is still much innovation to be done, especially as the market gets more and more vertically focused. Software is a very broad category and reminds that we are a long, long way from a Global 5000 enterprise going to one company, and saying, "automate all my business processes." Talking about consolidation without digging deeper ignores tremendous opportunity. He cautions that the way analysts are running down the industry, many innovative vendors will have to shut their doors before they get the chance to be the next Salesforce.com. Enterprise software is a long-term investment and serious business - analyst firms should put serious effort into better guiding IT buyers with thoughtful analysis around predicting market evolution, not just "feeds & speeds". Scale matters, and everyone is trying to find ways to achieve it, whether it be through investments in new products or market segment expansion to drive organic growth, or more through inorganic M&A efforts to create more immediate results.
Vinne Mirchandani, a very incisive analyst criticises the prevalent view - The chorus of "market is consolidated". He points out that 15 years ago Charlie Wang at CA was seen as the consolidator as he acquired large number of companies. Ditto with Baan’s acquisition spree several years ago and points out that there are still over 700 packaged software companies listed with the SEC, and at least twice as many either private or listed on non-US exchanges. If the Big 4 continue to define the market in classical waysthey may feel good for a while about their market strength, but they will be blindsided by coming BPO competition. They will continue to be outflanked in vertical markets by the likes of SunGard and Cerner. And deep infrastructure capabilities at vendors like CA, Mercury and HP. Continued custom development by the likes of Accenture and Infosys. And new generation SaaS and open source models. My views on consolidation remains the same - 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 and I expect the software market may get grouped along the patterns of:
- Platform Players Forcing Consolidation:
- Basket of Best Of Breed Players ( as part of a larger ecosystem)
- Bunch of Innovative startups
The general trend toward consolidation is already felt. The only issue is outside of the top 5/6 players several other players addressing specific niche areas currently have ore than 50% of the marketcap - we have to see how the economics,integration, customer reaction all mix up - with software, more than the employees, customers get alarmed about any possible merger moves. What I do not see in the arguments centered on developments in the past and the potential in the future is : how would these companies survive the next 6-8 quarters and how on earth would any customer feel comfortable with the many walking dead companies - sad as it is -but reality is more important.Big time acquisitions are already happening. Consolidation fever ahead - not sure whether customers would benefit a lot because of this - till the haze cleares, it is clearly alarming!!!
Bill Gurley in a FT interview covers a wide range of issues on Emerging technologies & Business models. I am excerpting from a lengthy interview, Key points which I fully agree with ( except the broadband hyperbole in Asia- True parts of Asia-Particularly SEAsia, Japan & Korea have good broadband infrastructure- others are clearly behind the US in terms of broadband availability- Lets face it). - On Silicon Valley: There are many reasons why Silicon Valley is an epicentre, and there have been death-knell calls before, as far back as several decades. But Asia and Europe matter in innovation and will forever & says he is concerned about US broadband policy& education quality . - On e-Learning : The University of Phoenix Online has a massive market capitalisation. Plus you have Blackboard BBBB out there that is not doing bad either. What I keep hearing is that online education is on fire in Asia. Now there are two things that are different about Asia. In many Asian countries, access to very high speed broadband is more prolific - Also, as you continue to read the insatiable thirst for learning in countries like China is well above the Western world. In these areas, and for these reasons, you should expect online learning to thrive - it will be huge. But it will be correlated with broadband speed. -On Podcasting : I suspect someone will make money out of podcasting, but you have to look at supply and demand. If there are a number of people that want to do it for ego reasons, than supply is inflated and pricing comes down. I would suspect - because of the targeted nature - that “subscription” is more likely to be the model that emerges.. But its not mass market by definition. -On Innovation : Google and now Skype give me confidence there is still plenty of room for innovation. Plus the connected medium allows for viral adoption at every turn. - On Leisure Time Trends: The most amazing shift in free time usage is clearly the move to MMOGS [Massive Multiplayer Online Games]. People are spending hours and hours in the multi-player environments. The biggest bang has been in Asia, but World of Warcraft’s success in the US this past 9 months is nothing short of remarkable. For those that don’t know WOW launched last December - $50 for the CDs and $14/month to subscribe. 3.5m users now. The top success before was Everquest - 400K.People are spending 8-20 hours a week in these “Worlds”. -On Tagging: I think (and could be wrong) that tagging is another one of these “tricks” I have mentioned that simplifies the problem. It’s not a universal solution, and it works much better with some data types than others. Allow sorts and searches on tags and they will be increasingly used, but I wouldn’t put VC money behind a company focused on tagging. - On Internet disruption of regular business: Telecom will face the biggest upheaval from internet-based communications in the next 10 years. The telecom sector is undergoing major disruption. You have the obvious erosion of price/minute voice. Newer technologies are disruptive - the market will choose the cheapest solution. The world of video will see disruption as well. -On Hot Innovative Companies & US: The two most talked about emerging companies in the press this past week are Skype and Baidu, neither of which are based in the US. It’s a global game for sure, and Friedman has it right - the world is flat. -On Small Business & Internet : The small business of the future will be dramatically aided by technology. First of all, I think any small business will simply have laptops and a printer all connected via WiFi. Everything else will live in the cloud - e-mail, storage, PBX, applications. Salesforce.com is a great example. New VOIP solutions will allow all members of the small business to be distributed, yet it looks to the outside world like they are not. Plus, with good graphics and creativity, you can look as large as you want to be on the internet. - Has Internet Peaked : It would be very hard to suggest that internet has somehow peaked. Certain sectors like online dating, where the companies and offerings are quite saturated, could be viewed that way. But the new things like Skype and KartRider continue to amaze and shock me. An interesting perspective- except that Asian business success potential looks slightly overrated(pl. note- am not talking about technology advances in asiahere).
The top 3 were: - taking pictures - 42% - receive location specific information - 25% - watch TV - 24% The survey results are based on some 2000 odd users – clearly sample size problem.Other interesting findings that has come out includes things like: - browse the Internet - 21% - voice communications - 21% - remotely control home - 18% - remotely monitor house - 16% Mobile gaming does not find place – I am also curious to know which nation the survey covers- hope it is not restricted only to the US- Admittedly a laggard in mobile technology adaption as compared to Asia and even within Asia- Korea & Japan represent one end of the spectrum. Inclusion of Asia /Agewise usage segregation would have given a different set of results.
Infoworldhas an interesting article with indicative metrics for returns on RFID investment - though the actual details of solutions,investments, savings and returns computed are not revealed - a peek into process efficiencies makes interesting reading. For Gillette, RFID has improved order processing, streamlined inventory management systems, and increased shipment accuracy, providing operational cost savings in excess of 20 percent per distribution center. The Gillette Company uses RFID for both pallet and case applications. It moves its inventory to a packaging center, where they are placed into cases and moved to the DC to be compiled into customer orders. Before the EPC (Electronic Product Code), this procedure required an operator to scan the cases at least five times, and involved at least three different keyboard operations. For example, somebody had to count the number of cases on each pallet and verify that each case contained the right product. The process for a pallet to go from packaging to the DC took about 20 seconds. With EPC in place, all the cases in a pallet are scanned with RFID readers as they move along the conveyor belt. Moving a pallet to the DC now takes five seconds, or 25 percent less time. When a customer order is processed out of a DC, it is often a mixed order, meaning different products need to be assembled onto a single pallet. This labor-intensive task used to take anywhere from 80 seconds to 20 minutes. With RFID, the process takes 20 seconds per pallet because each pallet is spun through a “verification tunnel” that knows exactly what the customer ordered and whether the pallet contains the correct products. For special event promotions, earlier the data collection and forecast used to be an output of an erroneous spiral -primarily due to delays and co-ordiantion issuesin logistics. Using RFID, both the retailer and Gillette are able to track the time elapsed between events and strategize how to reduce the pain points the next time. If Gillette can move product so it gets where it needs to be when it needs to be there, it means products are on the shelf when consumers want to buy them - a major step forward. Factoring in productivity savings of 20 percent per DC, in addition to improved product availability on retailer shelves, Gillette estimates it has realized a return on its RFID investments in excess of 25 percent.This makes interesting reading - but lot more details about facilities/processes changed at various supply chain nodes are needed to be fully convinced but no doubt even big number improvement in part of the supply chain after RFID implementation should offer significant benefits.
We recently covered Web 2.0 transcend new frontiers wherein we wrote,"small pieces - loosely joined are creating new functionality by combining these different services. While location-based advertising revenue is only beginning to emerge from the new mapping services, the tools being made available, known as application programming interfaces, have already led to an outburst of innovative applications. Clarence Wooten writes,the web is clearly changing before us. Most folks don’t have a complete picture of what’s happening, What’s different about today’s Web is that new technologies and behaviors that have popularized the blogging phenomenon, are also transforming the Web from a medium where information is simply published and remains static, into a platform where applications reside and services are distributed. This transformation is being referred to as Web 2.0- a collection of small pieces of loosely joined technologies coupled with a movement towards collaboration and interoperability. Implications of Web 2.0 will be far reaching. It has already significantly affected how to use the Web. Information is not received only through Google or Yahoo but through services like del.icio.us, Technorati, and Gataga. Collection of feeds can be used to create TagClouds that generate automatic folksonomies that allow me to analyze the popularity of related information (tags) over time. An arms race is clearly already happening between Yahoo and Google as evidenced by a spate of recent micro-acquisitions of promising Web 2.0 startups Flickr, Dodgeball, Blo.gs, etc. These strategic acquisitions are a clear attempt by each to acquire knowledge, technology and data to position them to capture mindshare and advertising dollars from the changing Web. Open API’s are enabling the creation of apps on top of apps – TagSoup and the Craiglist - Google Maps hack illustrate this.Web 2.0’s impact shall be felt more with the emergence of platforms for the development of rich Internet applications and services. Ajax is enabling the creation of plug-in free Web apps that rival the performance of client-based desktop applications. These developments represent the very tip of exciting innovation to come — innovation that will require a new approach to venture investing led by a new breed of angel and venture investors that are able to successfully balance irrational exuberance with prudent funding to fuel the creation of new platforms for growth.
(ViaNews.com)Yahoos says it has completed a vast expansion of its search engine index and now encompasses almost double that of its main competitor. Yahoo's Tim Mayer said Monday on the company's Search Blog that it now indexes more than 20 billion documents and images. That's almost twice the 11.3 billion Google publicly says it currently spans. Of the 20 billion elements in Yahoo's database, 19 billion are documents, 1.5 billion images and more than 50 million audio and video files. In the absence of Yahoo not disclosing the size of its search index, industry observers had pegged the number at no higher than 8 billion documents. Yahoo supplanting Google as king of the search indexes-in size at least-is indeed a surprise, and gives it a lot of grist for touting its search feature as a solid alternative to Google's. That has been a public relations challenge for Yahoo since it unveiled its own search feature last year after years of licensing Google's. The internet & search industry is definitely seeing brisk action-too much dynamism, I should say.
(Via Knowledge@wharton) Hossein Eslambolchi, president of AT&T's Global Networking Technology Services sees "Something fundamentally big is happeningthat will profoundly affect the life of every person and every business over the next five to 15 years - the collapsing of everything into one single, global, ubiquitous, collaborative virtual IT world." Forces in technology in operation are driving computing from a centralized model to a decentralized one, from the center to the 'edge.' These forces, which demand new systems and business models, represent both threat and opportunity. The network will take over the headache of managing disparate technologies - will be like having a conference call with four people, each speaking a different language with the network rapidly translating everything into English. Supporting such collaborative work will be an intelligent computer network in the center - "the basis for everything" - with equally 'smart' devices such as phones and computers at the edge. Collaboration will dominate both the technology and the workplace. The network shall constitute a virtual office. With millions of workers telecommuting, the trend will accelerate as a result of the convergence of voice, data and text in mobile devices - laptops, PDAs, cell phones - where they will operate based on software applications collaborating seamlessly, without effort on the user's part. The security problems may also grow exponentially in an increasingly networked world. With basic connectivity now assumed, and so much technology moving into the hands of users, "we're entering an era in which people are participating rather than just receiving information," says Jonathan Swartz, president of Sun Microsystems & adds "The PC revolution has been about empowering users and consumers; now the enterprise has to take them and their new tools into consideration in new ways. Instead of just connecting India to the network, India will now actually participate in creating market opportunities. And, a billion people with cell phones are going to have a massive impact on the IT enterprise." In this networked, collaborative world, telecommunications is no longer equipment; instead it is software. There has been a huge scale-up in the complexity of computing," said IBM's Alan Ganek, head of the company's autonomic computing initiative, "which has resulted in businesses spending more and more money on maintaining and managing their systems. "No one product will solve the problem. We will need architectures, standards, software 'advisors' that help make systems self-managing, similar to the human body's autonomic nervous system." "Trust is the currency of the participation age," added Sun's Jonathan Schwartz. 10 years from now, your laptop will be authenticated the same way as your cell phone is today. And just as you can check the numbers of those calling you before you take the call, you'll be able to choose to view only authenticated email.There's lots of innovation bound to come.
(Via Duncan)With VoIP residential subscriber levels about to reach millions and gross revenue potential running upwards of billion dollars with trillion minutes of time usage- it represents a great opportunity for telecom service providers and also force them to develop flexible and responsive offerings, writes,John Myers. Telecom service providers need to get their data warehouse and business intelligence groups involved in creating repeatable processes, not just a one time project. These services can be developed as premium services by fully using the strengths of the Internet or internal intranets that traditional networks and network providers do not. Michael Porter's five competitive forces model applied to telecom service provider looking at pay VoIP market could run like this: • Industry Consolidation ( Rivalry) • Wireless Local-Area Networks (Substitutes) • Security/Fraud (Barriers to Entry) • Pricing(Buyers) • Broadband Access(Suppliers) As a low-cost provider, telecom service providers looking to build a business model for the pay VoIP services market need to focus on lowering their costs relative to the rest of the industry. This can mean everything from low overheads to open source applications (ex. Asterisk - the Open Source PBX). The highest potential internal cost is fraud and the costs associated with fraud. Data warehouses and business intelligence can prevent this type of fraud and thus lower competitive threat - With the increasing amounts of VoIP traffic, the key will be effective monitoring and analysis of a telecom service provider’s customer usage event information. Unfortunately, with the “stateless” nature, literally and figuratively, of VoIP traffic; the key will be to migrate the information from the network to an analytical environment as close to real-time as possible. In this context, data warehousing and business intelligence can enable the success of telecom service providers in this market. Telecom service providers looking to position themselves as a premium provider of pay VoIP services & provide services and charge similar to existing landline and wireless service providers, those providers need to focus on providing the best quality connections possible. VoIP QoS can be a tricky as it relates mostly to the capacity and traffic on a given network segment or a series of network segments. Most pay VoIP service providers, especially for residential subscribers, do not own the networks that they pass traffic across. For these organizations, data warehouse and business intelligence can enable competitive advantage again via the monitoring of usage event data. Ensuring that network service level agreements, or SLAs, are met can prevent poor connection experiences for their business and residential customers. Despite the relative “ease” of finding “slow” or “stopped” network segments, the timeliness of the data is just as critical for auditing of network service level agreements for telecom service providers positioning themselves as premium providers as it is for their low-cost counterparts. This results in the need to identify those problem areas and make arrangements for other network routes in the short-term and other network partners in the long run.
Of all the criticisms about opensource is its lack of readiness for meeting enterprise requirementsis the most strident criticism about opensource.We also covered Kim Polesce's views on providing support for opensource products.Linux world writes,Open-source apps becoming more enterprise IT friendly. The article notes that open-source software vendors are working to make the applications easier to deploy and support in a bid to make their applications more enticing for corporate IT users. At the recently concluded O'Reilly Open Source Convention, many open-source companies were touting enterprise applications that offer alternatives to proprietary software for a wide ranges of uses, including business intelligence, customer relationship management and content management. A major difference in the open-source movement compared to a few years ago is an increased focus on making open-source applications easier for corporate IT departments to use. At least two companies, SpikeSource, and SourceLabs, have been doing just that by offering custom-built, preconfigured and pretested stacks of open-source applications to enterprise IT users. The goal, as per SpikeSource, is to help corporate IT departments better manage the various open-source applications they want to use, including Web servers, application servers, databases and more. Five years ago, corporate IT departments faced similar issues when deploying Linux and applications like Apache Web Server. As the number of open-source applications being deployed rose, interoperability became a major issue. The problem was that multiple patches, release dates and bug fixes for applications had to be tracked and completed, complicating the process. To ease the use of open-source applications, competitors SpikeSource and SourceLabs developed their own configuration and testing models, then offered their prebuilt or custom stacks to users. "The real issue is the interoperability of all these things and making sure they all work together & that's the benefit of automation" for testing and configuration. Seven preconfigured stacks are also available for users who want the most common open-source software assortments. The popular LAMP stack of open-source applications includes Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL database and PHP, an open-source programming language mainly for server-side applications. The SASH and AMP stacks include similar applications. Interesting to read- clearly more effrots are going in to make opensource movement a success- but still a very long way to go before becoming a mainstreamoption for enteprises.
The nonstop evolution of Google's product line provides an interesting analysis writes, James Fallows. Google and Microsoft are often mentioned as the rival titans of today's computing world, but the news of the last month shows how fundamentally different their positions are. Microsoft recently began distributing trial copies of its next version of Windows. Because its operating systems have become the technical standard on which so much of the world's software is based, Microsoft can no longer do anything by surprise. By the time Longhorn/Vista reaches consumers, its features and elements will have been known and discussed for many years within the industry. Google has also become a de facto standard-setter. Whenever it adjusts the secret formula used to determine each Web site's page rank, companies that have optimized their sites to come up near the top of Google search results must scramble to react. Recently,Google improved its map service with a hybrid view, which overlays street names on satellite photographs. At about the same time, Microsoft released its new Virtual Earth service, at VirtualEarth, with a built-in hybrid view and, in some cases, satellite photos that seem sharper than Google's. Google also released Google Earth, a free version of what had been an expensive product called Keyhole. It offers satellite and mapping data for the entire world, albeit with varying degrees of clarity. It has two simple-sounding but fascinating features: a tilt view, which approximates a 3-D perspective on terrain, and a flying view, which approximates the look of flying from point to pointAs Google provides only an indirect service to these other companies, rather than supplying a part of their technical underpinning, as Microsoft does, it can change what it does with a minimum of warning to the outside world. From the typical user's point of view, this mainly means that new Google features show up unexpectedly - and often & thats the key difference between these two!.
Across the world, some governments are trying to promote the usage of opensource software - am hearing the push efforts being undertaken from dozens of nation capitals and different agencies. I have not heard great implementation success stories though from govts - corroborated by agencies outside of the implemetation team/sponsors. It is a pity though as governments are amongst the best places to implement opensource holistically. We covered recently the decision of Ethiopian government to not use opensource. The australian government has come out with A guide to open source software for Australia government agencies. The guide, while not throwing any great light about opensource to someone who knows what opensource is all about, is aimed at assisting government agencies by providing practical information and approaches for agencies to consider when assessing open source solutions. Risk management procedures and the different contractual considerations that can apply to open source software issues are addressed in the Guide, as are cost of ownership issues. The guide says, understanding cost of ownership issues for open source software is important because, under an open source model, costs are incurred at different phases of the implementation and operation of an information technology system. The key tenets adddressed( as frameworks for evaluation) in this guide includes amongst others: - True Cost Of License - Support available - Software reliability & security - Legal concerns My views on opensource - I have spelt out several times in this blog - Perspectives, seriousness issues in adoption, costly & litigatious, reality check, not ready for enterprise still hold valid in my view - would be activley looking at answers for the issues raised.
I came across this interesting article - while I can't vouch for the correctness or pffer comments - it reinforces the fact that well run processes share a common denominator covering a high degree of range - that shows proces maturity & stability in operations. This article highlights that At the heart of Linux and the Toyota Production System,is a set of work, communication, and leadership practices that contributes to a new form of collaboration. This collaboration also relies on two infrastructure components: a shared pool of knowledge and universally available tools for moving knowledge around. Excerpts wiht edits: The Linux and Toyota communities both are said to be sharing a common discipline in that both are composed of engineers,forming a homogeneous lot easing communication amongst themselves. But these groups are far more disciplined and rigorous in their approach to work than are other engineering communities. Both emphasize granularity: They pay attention to small details, eliminate problems at the source, and trim anything resembling excess, whether it be work, code, or material. Linux members, for example, share an obsession with writing minimal code, compiling each day's output before proceeding to the next and extirpating programming flaws as they go along. For their part, TPS [Toyota Production System] engineers are relentless in applying short cycles of trial and error, focusing on just one thing at a time, and getting inside and observing actual processes. Both groups carry those principles to apparent extremes. Linux programmers whittle away at code in pursuit not of computational efficiency but of elegance. Toyota engineers reject stampings for the Lexus hood—while flawless and entirely within spec—because the sheen, to their eyes, lacks luster. Widespread, granular communication :In both the Linux and Toyota communities, information about problems and solutions is shared widely, frequently, and in small increments. Most Linux hacker communication is not between individuals but by postings to open, searchable Listservs. Anyone can review the version history of the code and the Listserv debates—not executive summaries or abstracts but the raw activity itself. And every code contribution is stress tested by scores of people. As a famous open-source mixed metaphor puts it: "With a thousand eyes, all bugs are shallow." The median upload to the Linux kernel is a mere dozen lines of code. The working alpha version is recompiled every twenty-four hours, so hackers reconcile their efforts almost continuously. If someone worked in isolation for six months on even the most brilliant contribution, it would probably be rejected for lack of compatibility with the others' efforts. The Toyota philosophy of continuous improvement likewise comprises a thousand small collaborations. Toyota engineers are famously drilled to "ask why five times" to follow a chain of causes and effects back to a problem's root. This is not a vapid cliché about thinking deeply. Quite the contrary, in fact. The precept's merit is precisely in its superficiality. Saying that B causes A is simplistic—all the complexities of multiple interactions boiled down to a single cause and effect. But the chain of thought required to discover that C causes B, and D causes C, quickly takes you into a new domain, probably someone else's. So rather than concoct complex solutions within their own domains, engineers must seek simple ones beyond them. "Doing your why-whys," as the practice is known, is not about depth at all—it's about breadth. And as with Linux, Toyota's communication protocols enforce this discipline. Each meeting addresses just one topic and drives toward a specific outcome, even if that means the same people meet more than once in a day. Lessons are written in a standard format on a single sheet of A3 paper. And everyone learns how to craft these reports, down to the fold in the document that shows the main points and conceals the details.Quite interesting indeed. while the points may be debatable given the fact one is a commercial organisation and amongst the biggest in the world and the other one is mostly a voluntary effort- the commonality of the approach is appealing enough to ponder over Read the full article here.
Keeping the workplace neat and desktop clean is always a difficult task but an important one that lot of us(me included)need to be pay attention. In the age of wireless, Jeremy Wagstaff suggests a few ways to sort out the cable chaos both above and below your tabletop. - First off, assess whether the cables can be organized better. For example, if you've got more USB devices than you have USB ports on your computer, you may want to consider buying a USB hub. This allows you to plug many more devices into your computer without having to scramble around swapping cables - always an eyesore. - Below the desk is a great place to hide cables, but if it's a tangle down there, you're only creating other problems: a lot of dust and the danger that you'll snag a foot and either break a leg or unplug your PC if you stand up too quickly. The under-desk thicket of wires is best kept off the floor, with a Cable-Safe Cable Manager or alternatively strap a power cord to a table leg with Velcro cable straps to keep the cables neat and off the ground. - Cables linking hardware above and below the desktop can be clustered together and fed into a cable spiral. Cables are best not just stuffed out of sight, but also coiled up so there's as little unnecessary slack as possible. It can free up desktop space for other stuff like pictures of loved ones, knick-knacks, week-old sandwiches etc. - If you like creating a work of art out of your workspace, check out the design-award winning Cableyoyo ($5 from cableyoyo.com), a deceptively simple spool for coiling most cables, from mouse leads to the cable hooking up your cellphone or iPod to the laptop. Just wind the cable around the spool and you can make even the most boring cubicle look kind of cool. There's a removable base and adhesive strip if you want to attach it to the back of a monitor or beneath a desk.& these are portable as well. For many readers this all may sound a tad fussy and unnecessary. A workspace is supposed to be strewn with cables could be a viewpoint – but it is always more elegant to make it aesthetic - It's an affliction that can be cured relatively easily and with a dash of style.
We recently covered Online Does Not Cannibalise Print wherein we wrote,"Recenty Dow Jones announced more profits from online compared to traditional media(This in my opinion reflects two things: Online making tradtional media reach to larger people and rise of online world can't be resisted - better embrace it -Indiactions are that combined strength of both online and offline readership of WSJ is larger than traditional print media readership).Retailers can definitely experience that buyers of all trendy and unique things surf online, do their research before any purchase - In the online world through comparison shopping, targetted advertising, promotional schemes, personalisation and preference patterns all provide unique value that can potentially drive offline sale as well quite significantly.Add mobile technologies and online world - the combination can really create deep impact in the offline world".Foliomag writes,The shift to e-media, in terms of mainstream content providers, has been “seismic,” and for business publications that means leveraging their content— and, in many cases, their newsrooms—for the end user. For some magazines, the structure of the traditional print newsroom and its integration into the digital realm is changing and, in many ways, a work in progress. Businessweek plans to integrate all platforms and has plans to roll out more verticals like innovation/design channel launched recently. But for all of the openings to content delivery it has created, the shift to e-media has caused some obligatory friction in magazine newsrooms among some of the venerable print reporters who are either hesitant or too busy to contribute online content. The shift is not without challenges – lot of reporters owe their allegiance to print media – Businessweek goes to the extent of making a sstory’s online performance review to staff’s own performance. WSJ sees the huge online subscription number as an indication of the strength of the online media. “The seismic shift has rattled the print newsroom just enough,” says Bigman of Forbes.com. Friction and its transformation of the newsroom aside, it is agreed that e-media in many ways is still in its incubation stage. “We’re on that next big wave.” And that wave’s curling lines—be it blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts or digital editions—has left many publishers abandoning preconceptions.
Fast changing marketforces, noise of consolidation and technological advances are fast changing the traditional means of buying software – already a buyer’s market, the way forward looks very challenging form the price perspective. The economist writes," The chipmakers are unleashing powerful disruptive forces". New chip architecture is allowing them to roll out ever more heavy-duty hardware at competitive prices. The real losers in the pending upheaval could well be software suppliers. Firms such as Oracle, SAP and IBM, whose industrial-strength programs are the bedrock of business, could be badly bruised in the process. But inevitably, end users - companies big and small that depend on enterprise software to do their various business transactions - are going to be feeling pressure as well. The current brouhaha over software licensing has been set off by the arrival this month of large quantities of chips containing two central-processing brains (or “cores”) on the same device. With the wholesale switch to dual-core processing, some software firms feel they are about to be short-changed. If two cores on a single chip can do twice the work of a single processor, they argue, then customers paying license fees based on the number of processors running their software (one of the most common forms of software licensing) will be getting a free ride on half the new cores being deployed. Users feel it is grossly unfair for software firms to charge more for improvements that stem entirely from buying better hardware.
Phil Wainewright writes in an insightful article,The issue of value-based pricing for softwarehas come to the fore because of a confluence of industry trends, of which the advent of dual-core processors has become the final straw.The existing pricing model used by software vendors bears absolutely no relation to the utility of the software to an individual customer, being completely arbitrarily based on the number of processors it is installed on. A customer lumbered with a badly designed implementation that scales poorly could easily pay four or five times as much as another for the same features and performance. Whereas hundreds of customers of an on-demand application might share the lower of the two costs between all of them, reducing it to a fraction of the on-premises equivalent. SaaS, emerging service-oriented architectures and grid computing will soon make processor-based pricing universally untenable. Richard Veryard argues "For the service economy, output based pricing makes much more sense. Consumers pay for what they actually get, rather than what the service provider uses. There are various ways of calculating this, at different levels of granularity, with different distribution of risk" and asks If airlines can manage value-based pricing, why not the software industry? Phil adds, sofware vendors think they're in the software business when really they're in the business automation business. The true reason for buying software is to have some element of business operations run better, faster or more cheaply. On-demand service providers don't charge for software — in fact they drive their cost of software as low as possible. Instead, customers "buy access to the functionality the software provides. This difference in design intent is the key to understanding the true nature of [the on-demand applications model]." "Software-powered services" shall be the generic name for the on-demand application sector because this is where it ultimately and inevitably leads, to an endpoint where software is simply the infrastructure that powers automated business services. In that scenario, the only way to price is in terms of business results and their perceived value to the customer. The industry too seems to recognise: Oracle's president Chuck Phillips reveals that oracle is looking at moving from processor-based pricing to something more closely related to business metrics: In his own words, "We'd love to get to a mode where we're looking at the number of employees served, the number of checks processed — you name it, some business metric — and take it out of the technology realm and tie our success to their success in terms of business". Aggressive players like Microsoft and wannabe aggressive player IBM should take the lead and respond aprropriately and help in expanding the market - software price is actually an inhibitor in trying new IT initiatives.
Big Blue is getting hip. Infoworld notes that after adopting a corporate blogging policy, IBM is latching onto another hot tech trend,podcasting. IBM recently posted the first podcast in a new series aimed at sharing its researchers' views about the evolution of technology in various fields. IBM will use the popular MP3 format that can be downloaded automatically by programs such as Apple's iTunes or the open source iPodder. Users subscribe to their preferred podcasts, then listen to the programs on portable music players such as iPods, or through audio software on their PCs. A format that initially caught on for "broadcasting" music programs has been rapidly adapted for other uses. Earlier,IBM has posted podcasts before for employees on its internal network, but this series marks its first public experiment with the format. The debut segment, titled "IBM and the Future of Driving," explores the changing ways in which cars are built, driven and maintained. IBM expects to post another 10 or so before the end of the year, planned topics include IBM's takes on the future of shopping, health care, banking and the home with look aheads about convergence of business issues and technology solutions.
Senthil points to the development of major companies joining the trend. GM, Pepsico are among other corporate podcasters. On a GM-sponsored site, listeners can hear Bob Lutz, its chief car designer, discuss new auto designs. PepsiCo uses podcasting in a marketing campaign. Apple is offering a wide selection of podcasts to consumers via its iTunes online music site. Listeners can tune in and subscribe to audio updates of news, travelogues and other radio-like programming. Yahoo is the latest to join the bandwagon – it has introduced a site that helps listeners locate and download podcast material. No doubt,Podcasting is fast becoming a mainstream activity - both in the consumer and enterprise segment.
Dan Farber writes about Yahoo’s plan of a major investment from its nearly $500 million annual engineeringspend to build out its own world-class research group. Yahoo has its sights set on Nobel prizes and making breakthroughs to ensure the future of the company. Search and creating more personalized user experiences that take advantage of underlying data and relationships is still in an infant phase. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other major players understand that the spoils will go to those who provide answers, rather than links, and develop ways in which billions of consumers and creators of content can participate in an economic and social value chain. Raghavan, Head, Yahoo Research says he will be able to attract top talent given yahoo's standing and the opportunity to impact Yahoo’s audience, who account
