Workaround Life’s Digital Interruptions

Jon Udell, one of my favourites writes that modern humans may not be able to get rid of the constant interruptions in our day, but can manage them better. He elaborates that people are the exception handlers in all automated workflows, and intelligence and judgment won’t be automated anytime soon. The challenge may be in finding how to connect people and services. Managing that scarcest of resources, our attention, is a huge challenge. Jon argues that all of us have preferences, so it’s vital that people choose which channel to be interrupted on.But stuffing the same messages down one channel or another doesn’t alter the nature of those messages, or reduce the total effort required to process them. He rightly points out that we’ll need to tap our latent visual, auditory, tactile, and maybe even olfactory abilities. Today’s notification systems make poor use of that rich sensorium. One of Microsoft researchers’ key findings was that use of multiple large monitors helps information workers avoid context switches, making them more productive. Expanding the field over which our visual pattern recognizer can range is a good idea, but it only scratches the surface of what’s possible. More importantly, we need to enrich those visual patterns. The visual cortex can absorb dense information displays as Edward Tufte points out, those displays are carefully designed.Living in a state of continous partial attention may not be the end state. As Linda stone says that that the next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus, where experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive. Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back. This may need other convergent forces - sociological and economical to operate in alignment with this technological advance. Jon recommends that if continuous partial attention is the permanent new reality, let’s engineer our interruptions to be subtle, natural, and pleasing to the senses An important area of development that all bright minds need to focus on with IT & Pervasive technologies virtually domianting everyone aspect of life in this era of presence.

Category :Presence Era, Continuos Partial Attention, Emerging Trends

Sun Microsystems : Tough Situation

Tired of Sun Microsystems' inability to reach the status enjoyed in its glorious of the Internet boom, its stockholders voted to repeal the poison pill provisions in place to make it hard for a hostile bidder to take over the Santa Clara company.The proposal to eliminate a poison pill gained 84 percent of the vote at Sun's annual shareholder meeting, despite the opposition of the Sun board. A poison pill is a weapon used by corporate boards to block a hostile takeover attempt, by flooding the market with new shares in order to prevent a bidder from acquiring a majority of the stock. The vote is not binding on the board, but one analyst said the result underscores the discontent among Sun shareholders and sends a signal that they are "in a selling mood." The executive compensation strategy also has strong opposition before being voted for. The stockholders all but begged a knight, black or white, to come in and take over the company, said one analyst. Sun is in serious trouble, the sooner it finds a suitor, its better for all. Besides Sun hardware LOB underperforming seen over a period of time, its software LOB is in dismal shape – recent announcements and acquisitions not withstanding. Even in emerging areas like RFID, Sun is beginning to be seen as talkative company as against a thought or market share leader – with almost no bright spark left within to fuel growth. Gateway which had strong financial results might be interested in Sun at the right price – while sad to see sun slipping, that’s the way life has got to be – consistent underperformers serve better interests by winding up or be allowed to be bought.

Category :Sun Microsystems

The Booming Storage Market

Computer users all over the world are becoming digital pack rats on a colossal new scale, overflowing their files with data and saving them for a long time, writes the WSJ in a recent coverage of the storage market. It points out that in a digital age, the global appetite for archived information is growing: from high-tech body scans in hospitals to giant databases at retail chains, and even endless camera angles from a single ballgame. Something as mundane as digital camera makers increasing their pixel for recording creates a boom in the storage space needs. The stored information can be kept indefinitely in case it has future value. As we recently noted the technology for archiving for future usage may be technologically flawed. Analysts agree that the corporate data-storage capacity is expanding by 60% a year. Storage sales outgrew server sales by several times in the first half of this year. The boom is driving a wave of storage-company deals even as equipment prices fall fast. No wonder EMC is on a roll.
The new regulatory requirements, the proliferation of capacity-hogging video records, and high-speed Internet lines that let an emailer attach pictures- all directly contribute to the high growth of the storage industry. Scientific advances in genetics, meteorology, geology and other fields that like to send and store vast databases are also stoking demand. Many companies have begun storing data not merely as a matter of recordkeeping, but to exploit it for competitive advantage. Enterprises find organizing & digitizing content enhances value significantly. Storage faces many of the same woes as computer equipment does generally - especially falling prices as hardware becomes a commodity. The basic technology of most large-scale storage machines is the same - large numbers of disk drives banded together with software and circuitry. Price declines are in the range of about 35% a year. Storage vendors have stayed ahead of the curve by adding special features. A coming technology called perpendicular recording promises another leap in drive capacity - and likely another steep drop in price per gigabyte. A sudden slip in already-declining disk prices could crimp the storage makers' growth, since customers would need to buy fewer machines to store the same amount of information. In perpendicular recording, the magnetic bits of a digital file are arranged standing up on the disk surface, like soldiers in a marching formation. The storage technology boom is also aiding the growth of Enterprise content management industry besides facilitating the adoption of Information Lifecycle Management, a strategy for aligning IT infrastructure with the needs of the business—based on information’s changing value.ILM is an ever-growing and evolving process. In order to realize the benefits of the ILM process, IT must continuously review the usage patterns of its storage resources and ensure adherence to policies and procedures But like in any industry good leadership makes the difference. In the case of EMC, Joe Tucci recognized that a single trick pony - the high-technology, high-priced, high-margin business model - had become obsolete and was no longer differentiated after the bubble burst in 2001. He tenaciously iterated many times the three components of his business model and changed all four pieces of EMC’s internal activities. Results are impressive, for everyone to see.

Category :Storage Market, Emerging Trends

Forbes Attack On Blogs

Forbes in its cover story writes, blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims-even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat. Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo. Dan Gillmor provides a good perspective in support of the blogosphere. As I see it,mainstream media has always been a little apprehensive about blogs, though no one has ever come so openly against blogs like Forbes has done this time. In developed countries, the concerns could be on losing traffic volume( attack on Yahoo and Google only show that) and the power to influence, in several developing countries, mainstream media mostly have alignment with political, business camps – they find it jittery that the lever of influence could be disturbed. The article at best looks hilarious. Seasoned bloggers will not be deterred form being their own self - at Forbes article is hilarious. I do not imagine for one moment it will deter serious committed bloggers from being anything other than their normal self. Mark Glaser recently called a failed initiative to gag the blogsopherea 'breakout moment' for the Indian blogosphere,a clear indication of the positive strength of blogs. Vinnie Mirchandani holds the belief that few bloggers are beginning to be counted as significantly influential in the tech world. I have long felt the Forbes.com can never be even counted as a candidate for the regular best of the web picks that Forbes regularly publishes – that does not mean that we do not visit forbes.com site. Similarly in occassions when someone finds blogs to be a bugbear, the best thing is find out ways and means to launch a counteroffensive available within the system to neutalise - this can not be acheived by painting red with a broad brush. Big business needs to be innovative abnd forward looking in embracing and leveraging new movements like blogs - case in hand Unilever listening to blogs. In this contribution economy powered by signifcant user involvement in corporate initiatives, undoubtedly blogs play a unique role. Every media of expression has its own purpose and objectives that it longs to fulfill – so why complain and moreover if the new media such as blogs are powered by technology, it is futile to raise a voice against.

Offshoring : Supposed Danger Theory Built On Wrong Facts

Matt Marshall provides an update on a supposed off shoring disaster where it was thought that Ishoni Networks, a Santa Clara company once branded a rising star did not have a good experience with its office in India. IP’s were reportedly stolen and passed on to competitors – the investigation concludes NOT GUILTY. The set of people /entities who made these charges are said to be not even responding to this development.

Guys – Offshoring is safe – significant number of business entities are doing it – a majority of them are enjoying huge competitive advantages on account of this; a few can not even think of surviving with out offshoring. Do a proper due diligence before deciding to offshore – visit the facilities, talk to the people about to manage your engagement/relationship, talk to references, do a good background check up( facilities available in india now), look for service providers who are big and may not be compelled to cut corners. There may be teething issues – engage more- bring it collabarative governance structures – the benefits would flow in for everyone to see. It is indeed a safe and a very compelling proposition which today noglobal business can tend to ignore.

The Coming Standards War

In the near future, movie goers can have the same interactive experience typically available Iin multiplex. Blu-Ray technology can enable viewers go from watching an action movie to participating in an interactive game based on the movie, or he could switch to a 3-D version of a particular scene. Massive storage capacities up to 200 gigabytes supported by Blu Ray- provide an almost endless capacity for add-ons by home audiences. Sony stated that in fact, part of the justification for acquiring MGM was the profits to be realized from reissuing the 4,100 films in MGM's library in the Blu-Ray format. Sony has a critical mass of movies that it can release on Blu-Ray. Aside from its own titles, Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Lions Gate have agreed to release their titles on Blu-Ray. Warner Bros. Entertainment, announced it would release films on the Blu-ray format as well. Among six major Hollywood Studios- all but Universal have announced support the BD format. Paramount, Universal and probably Warner will release HD-DVD titles. A studio wanting its high-definition DVDs to be playable on personal computers - or for that matter on PlayStation 3 – will have to issue them in the Blu-Ray format. Next, almost all of the leading computer manufacturers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple, are committed to using Blu-Ray, though they may have show some support for HDTV as well. The situations of Sony and Toshiba are not symmetrical. For Sony, the Blu-Ray is an integral part of its overall strategy. For Toshiba, the HD-DVD is just another product they manufacture. A company reaching an accommodating deal on licensing fees could also end up making money by manufacturing the Blu-Ray DVDs.

The PC camp has not been a silent spectator - HP wants to make the transition to the next generation of DVD technology be as painless as possible. HP recently asked the Blu-ray Disc Assn. to add software that will make its Blu-ray DVD standard similar to that of a rival camp called HD DVD, empowering consumers wanting to legally rip movie DVDs to a PC hard drive - standards already included in HD DVD. By pushing for adoption of the same software used to add interactive features to HD DVDs, such as the ability to add the latest movie trailers, movie studios wouldn't have to throw extra money at supporting two approaches. As the Bweek article shows, Microsoft and Intel recently announced that they would break from their neutral stance to back HD DVD. Key Chinese manufacturers said they planned to have HD DVD products on the market in 2006. The next-gen DVD wars were reignited, making it increasingly clear that consumers would soon be faced with two kinds of DVD players when they go to the local retailer. Meenu Sarin provides a good perspective about the impending standards wars involving consumer electronics players, studios & the PC industry and she predicts that only one standard could win. I think that a unified standard would forestall the first full-blown standards war since VHS vs. Betamax. A single standard would certainly be good for consumers & Movie studios also stand to gain because they wouldn't be forced to make films available in both formats.

Jeff Nolan Exits VC Business

Jeff Nolan, the well known name in the VC fraternity leaves leaves the VC business. Apparently he would continue to be part of SAP albeit in a new role. Jeff says that his decision was owing to the desire to get more operations centric – he writes that – "I missed having direct operational control and I missed the sense of accomplishment that comes from successfully executing direct operational control, and quite honestly, all of the venture deals I was looking at started to look the same. I missed having a team. I was also concerned that my experience in operating roles in enterprise software was becoming dated and perhaps not as relevant to the state that the business is in today; it's one thing to spend 4 hours in a board meeting talking about a business, it's another thing altogether to actually do it". He adds, "I was presented with an opportunity to lead a team working with people I really admire and respect on a set of challenges that are of pre-eminent importance to SAP. In short, the more I looked at this the more I found myself thinking in the role, I was hooked big time".
Jeff, a regular in the blogging circuit is pretty direct in his writings. I am a regular reader of Jeff’s blog and hope he continues his regular postings. Matt Marshall points out that his caused him endless problems internally. Apparently, SAP even had their lawyers call him to shut the blog down. But Hats off to Jeff that he stood his ground for such a long time.
Here’s wishing Jeff best wishes in his new position.

Group Forming Networks & The Power Of Community Building

I am not particularly fond of various laws – Be it Moore’s Law, Gilder’s view or fore that matter even Metcalfe’s Law ,however profound they may sound to be. I do believe that these help in relating practical happenings to abstract higher order thinking – To this day am not sure what comes first the theory or the practice in the emerging technology/social phenomenon. Patricia Seybold in my view was amongst the pioneers to talk about the power of networking and community building, which we now see many web centric enterprises capitalize on). The guidelines she set out for how to succeed in eBusiness - build community, deliver personalized service, streamline your processes, and more - apply as much today as they did in the 1990s. Having said that I came across what is called as Reed’s law – an idea that proponents of social networks and the new generation web people are beginning to discuss often.

Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.(It was first cited in "The Law of the Pack," HBR years back). Even if the utility of groups being available to be joined is very small on a per-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system. Reed’s idea is based on the assertion that business participates in many networks—perhaps the most important are supply networks that allows access to and bidding among suppliers and distribution networks that allows access to and competition among customers. The structure of these networks or market spaces, especially the value of the connectivity and relationships produced in these networks, can play a crucial role in defining the value of your business. If one can manage or influence the networks that connect to suppliers and customers to create more value for all concerned, that extra value can be used as a competitive weapon.Read here for a detailed overview.I particularly liked what Reed has written several years back -
Scale driven value shifts have already caused IBM subsidiary Lotus, the pioneer of enterprise groupware, to incorporate features into Notes/Domino to interconnect in a limited way with the faster-growing Internet. But Notes' enterprise focus makes it difficult to support ad hoc groups that live outside large enterprise boundaries or span multiple enterprises. Though the email capabilities of Notes can easily interconnect with other Internet email systems across boundaries to capture a fair share of Metcalfe's Law value as the Internet grows, Lotus has chosen an enterprise-oriented model for sales and an enterprise focused security model. That choice effectively limits GFN (Group Forming Networks) reach to a few islands scattered throughout a vast Internet. Thus scale driven value seems likely to shift dominance to new groupware products and business models that can capture exponential value growth by enabling all Internet users to affiliate flexibly. By facilitating easy ad hoc creation of "teamrooms", big shares of a scale driven value shift from email to ad hoc project team collaboration can happen better..

The Gmail Creation Story

Warren Bennis recently wrote Google's engineers, founders and CEO have all the earmarks of a Great Group—a talent driven organization or enterprise, filled with people who set out to do something extraordinary and succeed in doing something that's never been done before. And like other Great Groups, Google has a few unique twists of its own.Google, whose revolutionary approach to search dominates the field, seems to have the ingredients that have produced greatness in the past. Whether commercially successful or not, all our Great Groups were daring innovators who were convinced not just of the importance of their work but that they were all but on a mission from God. All were carefully chosen collections of extraordinary talents who worked on their world-changing projects with an obsessive brio that often made them forget to eat or sleep—and occasionally doomed their marriages. However brilliant, they all believed, at least for the duration of the project, that "None of us is as smart as all of us."
Gmail is perhaps the biggest success among Google's recent launches.Paul Buchheit, Gmail Engineer writes about the creation of Gmail. – With ideas, many people were consulted about their email expecations. The idea was not to to simply bolt new features onto old interfaces but to rethink email. It was also realized that solving everyone's problems was too big of a challenge for the first release. It would be better to build a product that a lot of people love, than one that everyone tolerates, and so that was our goal.. Gmail got rolled out in April 2004 with 1000 MB of storage. Its Google’s philosophy to do as much as possible for users. Besides storage, Gmail included a quick and accurate search. It introduced powerful new concepts to organize email, such as the conversation view (so all those replies can be seen at once). It provided a fast and dynamic interface from web browsers everywhere, popularizing the techniques that have since become known as AJAX. This interface included many important features not commonly found on the web at that time, such as email address auto-completion, a slick spell-checker, keyboard shortcuts, and pages that update instantly. It included a smart spam filter to get rid of junk mail. Finally, Gmail made an important new promise: like cell phone users, one can keep all Gmail address & email, even if decided to move out of Gmail.or you. He notes that the free storage keeps increasing (2656 MB and counting), and there are interfaces in 38 languages, & has features such as auto-save drafts.

Microsoft Getting Serious About Hosted Models

Just finished reading Bruce Richardson's view that Google is the best personal productivity tool since the introduction of word-processing software. I do not fully agree with his view that technical integration hurdles as well as enormous corporate resistance to switching to a new package could come in the way of Google office( I definitely understand the complexity - but not so convinced about the conclusion). But he is spot on when he says that there is a lot more margin to be had going after Craigslist or the even bigger fish eBay instead of taking on Microsoft directly. Informationweek reports that in an year Microsoft wants to get into hosting in big and small ways by offeing hosted implementations of SharePoint as well as CRM and ERP applications. A handful of service partners now host Microsoft applications for customers; the difference is future customers could choose Microsoft or a partner to run the infrastructure. Technologically, the server equals service thing year by year is making good progress. SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services act as the linchpin for most of Microsoft's current and planned collaboration products and services. To keep the allure of partners alive, Microsoft is making noises that where the software runs-on premises or "in the cloud"-partners with domain expertise and other knowledge will be needed for implementation help. The promised "revenue-neutrality" to partners may mean that they would sell and even customize applications for customers that could run on Microsoft servers. Microsoft’s hosting push is expected to target wide gamut of users & hosted SharePoint could become the basis for a variety of such services. The article concludes by saying that Microsoft is exploring myriad ways to deploy and charge for software, ranging from subscription models a la MSN to easier ways for companies to buy incremental products not in their current Enterprise Agreements. I had been writing
Microsoft appears to be losing customer centricity and their cultural DNA seems to be moving away from incremental innovation –particularly with the windows platform and their inexplicable delay in rolling out Longhorn are clear indications of losing steam. Microsoft will take decades to be out of business as their product basket of offering is wide – and some niches may still save the company.I am still baffled why Microsoft (other than for being selfish about its interest)is not considering providing a hosted solution - when enterprise application software vendors are beginning to provide and stepping up aggression in pushing. Microsoft may end up to be a pale shadow of its present –that would be sad indeed – but the risk is indeed high for Microsoft. Microsoft is lucky that currently there is no one alternative that can dislodge it in key arena's - starting particularly in the desktop segment. While looking at future of microsoft, I wrote that the impending power of Broadband and hosted models are creating a new tapestry very different from what Microsoft is envisaging - one can note that microsoft has lagged behind in most of the new elements in this picture. Many think that hordes of cash, lock-ins and a lack of credible alternative to it would insure microsoft against any downturn in future - I doubt it - while microsoft may be creating froth in the consumer electronics sector- it is appallingly falling behind in its ability to be creative and seems to be losing touch in respect of making new roll outs win in the market - MSN portal, MSN search , declining attraction towards hotmail, the non starter called spaces.msn.com etc - all conclusively point to this. Glorious past is certainly no pointer to great success in future. It is nice to see that Microsoft is planning to take the right moves - Time for Google to pre-empt Microsoft in this move.

WSJ 2005 Innovation Awards

The Wall Street Journal's 2005 Technology Innovation Awards have been announced. Besides the Gold, Silver, Bronze awards and winners in 12 different categories and 20 runnerups were announced. Amongst the notable winners in the tech sector:
Wireless - Freescale Semiconductor won for its efforts to bring to market the first consumer products using "ultrawideband" wireless technology, which promises to deliver audio, video and data at higher speeds, using less power than other wireless technologies. Freescale has demonstrated its chips in a prototype cellphone from Motorola which spun off Freescale in 2004. Chinese appliance maker Haier announced that it would use Freescale chips in a planned 37-inch LCD television that can receive signals wirelessly from a digital-media computer.
Software - Agitar Software won here for its Agitator tool, which helps software developers find and fix bugs when writing new programs. Software writers typically have to scour for buggy code by poring over thousands of lines of code - often after flaws show up while users are running the program. Agitator automatically puts software through a battery of stress tests; it also can examine partial programs by simulating the whole software system.The judges recognized Agitar as it brings is an important advance in making error-free code writing more productive
Network/Broadband/Internet - Riverbed Technology won for its Steelhead network appliances, which speed the transfer of data and use of applications between remote offices and central servers. As many corporate computer users know, when emails, documents or spreadsheets are stored on a distant central computer, the wait to call up or change files can sometimes seem endless. Riverbed's appliance reduces these delays by storing redundant commands and data on local servers, slashing the amount of traffic that goes back and forth over the network and increasing overall network speed
Congrats to all – those nominated included. Let lot more innovation and entrepreneurship happen – bringing with it advances & prosperity

Web 2.0 : Time For Some Reality Check

Every new internet movement popular enough to generate buzz also generates a backlash. While Web 2.0 may mean different things to different people, much of it involves public participation and contributions from the commons. Web 2.0 is very open, but all that openness has its downside: With mass participation problems overshadow genuine activities like the splogs over blogs. Joel writes, the term Web 2.0 particularly bugs him. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. The very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless "Web 1.0" idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade's mantra, "They just don't get it. Wired points out that scams and scatterbrains - the same problems that plagued the old internet are cropping up again in a new wave of technologies known collectively as Web 2.0. This time around, proponents say Web 2.0 has been better engineered to withstand the troubles that wrecked Usenet, BBSes and free e-mail. The cycle is so predictable, it's almost a natural law. Nicholas Carr in an article titled
"The Amorality of Web 2.0,", Carr slammed overeager Web 2.0 proponents as hyper-hyped.The problems of Web 2.0 may have more to do with human nature, and less with the qualities of bottom-up, online media. After all, the postal system has junk mail, the phone system has 419 scams and telemarketers, and stock markets constantly attract cons. Earlier in response to his criticisms about Web 2,0, I wrote that Nicholas carr has rightly picked up the holes in the Web 2.0 hype- but cut the rhetoric, I do believe in the idea of Web 2.0 and that its time has come – for the simple reason that the web has to see advancements and it has to begin to impact normal life in more ways & means that what it is today and I do not subscribe to the media vs blog battle and that the media is losing the battle – the media may be seen to be losing as like other industries it has not looked in terms of cutting costs through means like offshoring, globalization – theres no one single global newspaper, global TV channel – also it has faced maximum technology changes in its ecosystem. – But to say that the web has threatened it to the extent of killing is wrong – as this note shows, adaptation is the key to succeed – online Wall street journal earns more than print version. So in essence it is just good models always win – with or without Web 2.0. I strongly beleive in the potential of Web 2.0. As I see it with mashups transcending known frontiers, 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.

The Indian Domestic IT Market :

Continuing with the trend of global PC growth, the Indian PC market recently crossed yet another milestone recently with one million PC shipments in a single quarter. I had been tracking PC deployment measures in India for a long time - from shipping the millionth PC across several years, million PCs in an year, Million PCs in six months to Million shipments every quarter - Next could be Million PCs every month - possible with the entry of Low Cost PC's ( may be mobile handsets are already doing it)or if the prediction that the next PC revolution will be televised comes true, fast enough. During the AMJ quarter of 2005, the Indian PC market witnessed a 9% sequential and 31% year-on-year growth to reach 10.5 lakh units. With price points either falling or stabilizing across all form factors, it was reported that the momentum was expected to continue in the coming months.The Indian domestic IT market is seen to be showing a lot of Buoyancy and is headed towards a heady growth in the nest few years. No doubt, the opportunity within India – home to over one billion people - drives from its very hot economy: GDP growth will be around 7% this year and next, corporate profits are on the rise, the stock market is booming, and inflation is under control despite the rise in oil prices. There is a sense of excitement in the business community, and strong economic growth is anticipated over the next decade or more. While most growth will come from IT and BPO exports, the domestic IT market in India, which accounts for around one-third of the total IT industry revenues, will also grow at a CAGR of 19% over 2004-2009. There are some good sectoral assessments and forecasts – regionwise, verticalwise done – a good snapshot. I was curious to cross reference information about the chinese domestic market - while data could be available from multiple sources, wanted to stick to IDC and find that there china country site is in Chinese - two immediate things to note : One obviously a robust and buoyant market and the second one - choice of language signifies the difference between these two giants.

Oracle - SOA Models Are Frankenstein

ZapThink's Jason Bloomberg recently compared Oracle's Fusion Architecture to Frankenstein. Oracle has been working on building out their SOA offering for a while by assembling various parts from various different companies and Bloomberg raises the question –“ will it all work when they’re done”. Criticisms like SOA is the architecture that supports such approaches and therefore need not be criticized have been voiced. The view that oracle's approach itself is a Frankenstein warrants definite attention. The view that Oracle may not have a single strategy with SOA definitely warrants a full fledged response from Oracle. The prevailing opinion seems to be that oracle is cobbling together many disparate and unrelated technologies and then give it to their customers pretending that it's a single product. Joe McKendrick points out that perfectly good products ahould not be allowed to die and its incumbent upon vendors with multiple separate product lines to keep all those pieces current and aligned with changes in the market.

Earlier I wrote that there are now four code designs and schema to be harmonized. Different classes of cutomers and multiple varieties of implementations to be supported and upgraded. Customers need to be convinced of the integrated roadmap.The transition challenges are indeed phenomenal in the design of the new platform and less said the better about the migrations that customers need to spend on. Would this be a good opportunity for external service providers and oracle consulting – some may think that this may cause nightmare to service providers. Writing about the potential for SOA, I pointed out that SOA as an architecture of services is based on the premise that software components operate as modular components (building blocks) of a larger, immediately executing transaction (unit of work). Services are designed to perform reusable partial processes on behalf of a bigger transaction. SOA is attractive because it enables reuse of logic and data in multiple contexts. At a fundamental level, the radical shift to SOA calls for a different mindset – a dramatically different one at that. The adoption of SOA shall signify itself to be an important development in the IT world. Software will be described as a portfolio of capabilities and possibilities instead of modularized applications. Data models will be standard-based and externalized to enable interworking between services, and data will be considered to be like any other form of "digital content" ever ready for exchange and transformation between systems. I also higlighted the view The actual goal of SOA - isn’t interoperability; if that is all you want then sprinkle a few Web Service interfaces on your existing design and you will have opened up your application to all platforms - but you will not necessarily have benefited from SOA.

John Hagel’s gave a new perspective about SOA. Commenting on this perspective I wrote that lasting value for business shall come out of enabling entirely new sets of business models- those that can be configured on the fly,( for example integrating all eBay related operators in multiple ways),enabling lean,mean & efficient best in class processes with well designed performance measures,and also by enhancing the ability of the business enterprise in leveraging emerging technologies like grid computing,applistructures,powerful convergence technologies- many of the solutions today are aligned to delivering solutions in the conventional way but these may change.In future, businesses may be measured by how quickly their models of operationand processes can be configured and reconfigured, SOA architecture need to provide for this dynamic builds and rebuilds.For now though, SOA is a recognizable and mostly virtual plumbing exercise. Most likely, vendors will draw their strategy from the experience of customers, and will adjust accordingly. Not to overlook the fact that though the vendor community is trying hard to improve their SOA maturity,evolving standards and entrenched infrastructure mean more pilots and lab environments and more & more scope for innovations as adoption tends to improve

The Indian IT Industry : Exerting Career Choices

The IT industry in India employs more than million people with promises to improve many times. This creates lot of opportunities and scope for multiple options to work on a myriad types of jobs in a variety of companies.Sitting on the side of recruiting so many consultants, who are quite indecisive and tentative, a lot of counselling is certainly needed to help them make up their minds. Lot of people ask me guidance about which job to take up, what company to join, what to expect as salary and what technology to pursue.
Anurag Verma has some good insights in terms of exercising choices careerwise for IT professionals working with India headquartered IT Firms. Some snippets:
- A bigger salary does not always mean better job-satisfaction. Big companies (with good cash flows) can afford to give more salaries than other relatively mid-sized or small companies or start-ups. Work content in startups might be better than big companies.
- Be clear about goals and ambition - the best thing is to decide what you want to do quite early on in your career.
- Indicate to prospective employer the specific area desired for work (it is advisable to specialize in one domain/work area) and whether the company does that kind of work and you can be involved in that work.
- The opportunities to work on challenging and complex projects are increasing in India.
- The typical work content in product companies involves a mix of routine and challenging tasks.
- It requires a lot of effort to select the company of one’s liking. The requirement of your friend might be different from yours and you should seek companies that meet your requirement.
- Most of the recruiters/placement services send bulk mail to all and sundry. They do not scan resumes properly and just match keyword(S).
- The idea that working abroad is better than working in Indian companies might not be always true. Typically takes 4-5 years of overseas experience to get a good understanding of the overall execution of software products.
- Increasingly the nature of the jobs done in India is as good as that in the US or other countries. The only difference is that the products that are futuristic in nature are not so prevalent in the Indian IT industry. In addition, career growth in India is much better - and faster - than overseas.
I would like to add – Look for quality of management , do some research about their customer profiles, look at their service offerings , geographical reach and the rate at which the organization is growing, talk to some ex-employees, current employees etc – Look at the profile of the executives working in the enterprise - where did they come from, look at compensation and career maps available within the enterprise and then DECIDE. Always ak yourself at the end of every year how much your profile has improved – be dispassionate and objective about it –be quite focused on the job and be aware of the internal environment inside the enterprise you work for and be fully abreast of developments happening in the industry. Network, network - a lot. Always remember – Your career is to a large extent your own making. Want to say a lot more. Some other time in future shall write about it.

Software Industry :Slow Growth Pushing For Consolidation

(Via TechWeb) Slow growth has triggered consolidation in a highly diverse software industry, according to a new report titled –"Software: Global Industry Guide". The report notes that the global software market reached a value of $132.2 billion in 2004, demonstrating and compound annual growth rate of 4.1 percent from $112.7 billion in 2000. Western producers dominate the market because clients believe experience and investments make them better prepared than smaller competitors to deliver cutting-edge solutions. The report lists Microsoft as a prime example of market consolidation and ranks Oracle as the world's largest enterprise software company and the world's second largest independent software company. I totally agree with the views expressed here that this period of consolidation will see many of the market's large companies meet head to head as they attempt to diversity their operations into other software sectors and will pit companies with similar economies of scale and scope into direct competition, creating significant pricing pressures as companies attempt to garnish market share. This will pressure on margins, reduce prices, increase the volume of new computer sales and have a net positive effect on software sales, allowing companies to counter shortfalls through and drive revenue growth. I had been talking about the impending consolidation for sometime. I also wrote that 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. At the same time, I certainly see niche players operations as part of a larger ecosystem gaining strength - they may be a chosen few but still this may portend a new trend as well.

Microsoft Finds Inspiration In Apple, Blackberry

Ray Ozzie points to Apple Computer's iconic music player as a "perfect example" of a product that marries hardware, software and services. He also points to RIM’s BlackBerry, which brings together an e-mail device, server-based software and wireless data service. The individual pieces of the package never get the attention as these are so tightly integrated. Microsoft fresh after announcing reorganization seems to be headed towards such models of offerings. Ozzie conceded that the rise of Google had been a "great wake-up call" and rallying point to get Microsoft thinking about services. The opportunities in front of the giant ranges from hosting software for small businesses that don't want the complexity of managing a server, to adding specialized products for large businesses that already have scores of servers.
As we covered earlier Bandwidth is Microsoft’s enemy and clearly is making Microosft re-evaluate strategies.Microsoft is lucky that currently there is no one alternative that can dislodge it in key arena's - starting particularly in the desktop segment. Microsoft's success has been due in large part to its realization two decades ago that control of the operating system on personal computers would give it a great amount of leverage over PCs. Most companies in the 1980s saw the operating system as a pure commodity product, but Microsoft understood that it held the keys to the kingdom. This dominance of the Windows operating system means that if you're a developer of a major software application, you need to deliver a product for Windows. This means software developers must use the programming capabilities provided by Windows - its API." Microsoft's chief nemesis Google is no pushover. While Microsoft has dominance over the desktop, Google has dominance over the Internet. But as Ozzie correctly highlights services-enabled software really is going to change the nature of how almost everyone uses technology, from consumers to small businesses to enterprises & that the changes will come "in different forms and at different paces." He believes that while cheap and plentiful bandwidth has made it possible for businesses to get their software over the Internet, enterprises will still have to pay for their software in some way, regardless of how it is delivered. Clearly the IT world shall never be the same again.

Business Intelligence : Stage Set For Consolidation

The last vestige of enterprise software untouched by consolidation is beginning to see some action – the Business Intelligence market. A recent acquisition made by Hyperion – it acquired Brio ( more of a reporting tool) made good sense. Now with Microsoft announcing plans to aggressively pursue this segment – the action hots up. Microsoft says it is throwing significant dollars for moving into a segment of the business-software market: business intelligence. In contrast to other pockets of software, sales of business-intelligence (BI), or analytics software, are rising. A beachhead in business intelligence will let Microsoft develop tools and programs that let corporate customers plumb the depths of multiple databases and applications to get answers swiftly. The next version of Excel, the spreadsheet application inside Office, will let users tie into data warehouses and enterprise applications, and cut and slice that data using Excel. Microsoft is said to be working on a raft of other products that will help it compete more broadly against the existing BI leaders. As Bweek article points out, Microsoft has vowed to take on Symantec in security, Intuit in small-business accounting, Adobe Systems in graphic design and document tools and, of course, Google in all things search. ( My Take : Not to say they would win – Microsoft launched SQL server promising more analytical capability than most others – oracle did not feel the heat as much as expected and Microsoft did not win in the database market to the extent expected.)

Next : Watch out for some consolidation in this space. Microsoft is hardly alone in eyeing this sector.Oracle recently described Siebel’s analytics as hidden jewel. Cognos, Business Objects may look attractive to enterprise majors.SAS may be the only major left untouched. Microsoft could also make some acquisitive moves besides SAP & Oracle. Oracle used its recent Oracle Open World conference to outline analytics as a key focus going forward. While there is a near consensus about the imminent consolidation in this space, the barriers could be self made – oracle looking at smaller acquisitions moving forward( they may be content with siebel analytics), SAP is conservative in playing the acquisition game and IBM as usual may not see acquisition a good fit – given its emphasis on services and consulting more than apps. As the BI industry is a mega segment and a fast growing one at that( repeated surveys show BI as a high priority spend area for enterprises), and a very important technology that could be used for competitive differentiation by business - the four majors may still make aggressive moves.

Category :Consolidation, Business Intelligence

Icerocket As Tracking Engine

Mark Cuban writes despite genuine attempts and disguises, splogs are difficult to be eliminated. His vision for icerocket.com is not to be a portal or about blogs. Clarifying its relevance Mark expands that it is not a gateway to the blogosphere nor trying to create context.Icerocket is meant for search for information about any keyword or topic and return the freshest information available,& then allow tracking that information on an ongoing basis. He describes Icerocket.com as a tracking engine. Tracking references made about a topic or keyword, allowing easy subscription to any website that supports RSS, and enabling RSS for any search result are some of the key features with icerocket.com besides:
- tracking info published by specific author maintaining multiple blogs
- timebased filtering, enabling all searches to be livebookmarks.
Icerocket.com isnt really a blog search engine and it is a tracking engine indexing any and every source of information that is updated on an ongoing basis and that includes blogs. Users wanting to know what is being said about anything, by anybody, for any given period of time will find icerocket.com the place to start. I like Mark Cuban , I like his candid thoughts and Simplicity and more than that I like Icerocket, a simple & clean tracking engine

Global Internet Commerce :The 10% Threshold Reached

Continuing with the trend of online merchants showing stronger numbers, AC.Neilsen reports, more than 627 million people have shopped online, including over 325 million within the last month. Over 212 million online shoppers mention Books as among the last 3 items they purchased online. In addition:

- over 135 million people have purchased DVDs and/or video games;
- close to 135 million made plane reservations;
- over 128 million purchased articles of clothing/accessories/shoes;
- over 112 million paid for music downloads and/or CDs;
- over 106 million purchased electronic devices (including cameras,
etc);
- close to 98 million bought computer hardware; and
- over 86 million consumers made hotel and/or tour bookings.

We earlier wrote that the web is clearly making a huge difference.In S.Korea, where broadband is widely used, 10% of retail sales happens through online media. It is beleived that in all developed world almost 50% of retail sales of big value items are influenced by web information.Clearly the tipping point in web usage for business purposes can be almost sensed. The IHT writing on this finding explainsthat the No.1 item purchased by shoppers country-by-country varied enormously, with more than half of South Koreans and Chinese placing books as their top purchase. Airline tickets were the most common purchase in Malaysia, Singapore and Australia. More than one-third of online shoppers in South Korea purchased cosmetics and nutritional supplies online, compared with a global average of ten percent. Over all, credit card and bank transfer are the most popular payment methods, but cash-on-delivery is the second most popular method of payment in Europe. For China, cash-on-delivery is the most popular method of payment, followed by bank transfer. Clearly the internet is creating a big niche for itself in the commercial world. Borrowing David Kirkpatrick’s perspective, GEMEYA is poised to wreak havoc on large service industries across the world. As Internet companies rapidly expand their services, they may become the biggest rivals to retailers, banks, and telecoms worldwide.

AJAX, Microsoft Office & Desktop Productivity Tools

Preston Gralla writes that sites leveraging Ajax Technology like Gmail, Google Maps, the Flickr photo-sharing site, or the Amazon A9 search site are all among the most popular sites that we are seeing getting used currently. The sites using AJAX(asynchronous JavaScript and XML) combining several existing technologies, including CSS, JavaScript, XHTML, XML, and XSLT, to build Web applications that look and work more like desktop software than they do Web sites. These provide a glimpse of the future, where broadband connections are everywhere available, probably bloated applications like Microsoft Office may not need to reside on the desktops. The future way could be just switch on the system, automatically connect to the Web, and you'll have productivity applications available just by heading to a Web site. While some may see AJAX a tad bit overstretched, the fact remains that the dominant desktop player Microsoft is behind the curve in adopting this new type of technology.As Preston sees it, in all its probability Google Office would be free, and have a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software obliviating the need for paying dollars to buy Microsoft Office. The future could very well be AJAX-built productivity suite.

Google : Amazing Numbers

While recently writing about Google and Microsoft, I wrote that Google is no pushover and cited its impressive results as an indication of how stronger Google is getting to be. John Battellebrings home the point that Google is pulling in more and more searches on its own site, which are the most profitable kind of searches there are. Some figures are quite insightful:
- Average revenue per search : 12 cents. It was around a dime in late 04.
- Avg. revenue per searcher: $7
- Avg. revenue per sponsored click: 62 cents.
- Estimated profits for Google in 06: Roughly $4 billion (Bear Stearns) (which is about the same as their forecasted annual revenues this year, FWIW)
- Revenue growth of Google year to year: 96%
- Revenue growth of Yahoo: 42%
- Estimated revenue growth for next year for Google (Bear): 61%
- For the average of eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon: 29%
- Amount spent on capex, 05 (estimate): $800 million

No doubt Google is on a roll, but its time that it outlines its vision for the future in specific terms - say for the next three years.

The IT World & Alarming Power Requirements

(Via Rajesh) Bob Cringley points that combining themes of several recent columns, we can see that a lot of money is being bet on a future user computing experience based on web services.Ubiquitous broadband along with hefty processing capability in your desktop, notebook, and coat pocket will bring entertainment, information, and even classic office services to us wherever we are, finally making real Sun's old motto that the network is the computer.The problem comes when you start to think about power consumption. It's not that disk drives consume so much power or that they haven't come down in consumption over the years, but each of those cabinets will require using modern drives about 3,300 watts to run while the full 100 petabytes will require 2.148 Megawatts. And all that heat has to go somewhere, so the building will typically use three to four times as much power for air conditioning as it does to run the drives, taking our total power consumption up to just under 10 megawatts, which at typical U.S. industrial power rates will cost about $5 million per year. Phil Windley points out that lately, power and cooling have turned out to be the big drivers in data center design. He adds, Over the last seven years, the average power consumption in data centers has increased 7-fold, from 20W/sq. foot to over 140W/sq. foot due to huge leaps in the density of servers. About 44% of the power in a typical server is used by things other than CPUs, memory, disks, and other compute components. Where does it go? The AC to DC transition in the power supply turns some of it to heat. A little ironically, fans and other air handling components eat their share. And, in some designs there's even a DC to DC transitions (HP, for example, distributes 48V through the chassis and then drops it to 5V at the blade) that loses more the inefficiency. Google recently talkedabout increasing power requirements. Urs Hoelzle has talked about it on several occassions. Google once blamed power related problems as responsible for blogger’s poor performance. I agree that the future brings with it a number of expenses and vulnerabilities. For users, there's the dilemma of trusting our data to external users. For service providers, there's the alternate dilemma of having to hold that data, because the cost of keeping that data online all the time will be huge. It's an energy crisis in the making.

India : New Economy & Old Order

A simmering controversy involving Infosys, Narayanamurthy & Devagowda is going on. While there may be multiple issues beneath, its time that this gets solved asap and within closed doors. Let pragmatism prevail and progress get the right focus and support.India has a long way to go towards balanced economic advances. I think that IT growth is inviting attention partly because of a limited focus on overall development - it is time that a movement bubbles up within India calling for giant leap improvements in all sectors and the country should embrace big thinking, mega projects and stretch on large investments as the way forward. BIG IS NOT BAD after all.

Digital Inclusion Through Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Kevin Schofield points to Microsoft research's recognition of Digital inclusion as a key area of focus. Digital Inclusion means that computing must be affordable, accessible, and relevant. Novel approaches in computing technology have the potential for great impact in a range of areas, including education, healthcare, and economic development. The relevance that research projects can have in this area is significant, given that estimates of populations that can be positively affected by computing technologies fall within 2–4 billion people worldwide.The group has invited proposals to pursue research in the areas:
- Creative new infrastructures, form factors, and applications of mobile devices (which include mobile phones or embedded devices).
- Improve connectivity, particularly in environments without existing network infrastructures or with intermittent availability to networking and power.
- Challenges in wireless networks would be a relevant theme in this category. Design appropriate user interfaces addressing challenges in literacy and for novice users of technology.
- Focus on relevant technology application advancements, taking into account the technology issues described in the three points above, which will provide benefits in such areas as health, education, and commerce.

I like the introduction which recognises that the power of computing and information technology must be, and can be, extended beyond its traditional user base to reach people who until now have not had access to such technology. Being digitally connected has become ever more critical to economic, educational, and social advancement. “Digital Inclusion” describes the goal of expanding the capabilities of computing technology worldwide to better serve social and economic challenges of underserved communities, both rural and urban.

Google, Microsoft & Impending Turf Wars

Red Herring writes that Google should continue to play down any rivalry with Microsoft, especially if it has any ambitions to tread onto the Redmond giant’s office software turf, warned former executives from Netscape.It quotes former Novell executives,"By consistently saying that google is not competing with Microsoft, it has allowed them to remain under the radar". Google could incur Microsoft’s wrath if it tries to compete with Microsoft for cash cows like Microsoft Office or operating system software. While it is true that every company loses its invincibility at some point, companies need to concentrate on business fundamentals: sound forecasts, receivables management, and tighter control of pricing in its sales efforts. The two companies are competing for key personnel, with Microsoft recently suing Google for luring away a Microsoft exec in China. However, as Google becomes a behemoth in its own right, it’s likely the two will compete for more than executive star power.

My Take : I do not agree with this view – Google is no pushover – even for Microsoft. Microsoft’s strength has been typically weak or less focused competitors that it had to compete with. Microsoft was able to crush competition partly due to its dominance of desktop( give its due – worked hard than most others and execution was great), but Google has a stranglehold on the Internet. In every competition in the internet world space between Microsoft & Google - it has always been a victory for Google. Microsoft itself has suffered many setbacks,losing the API war and concern about its future has almost become a street talk, with the giant tough challenges ahead. With bandwidth creating pressures on Microsoft, pushing things towards a hosted model (here Google clearly has lot more expertise – look at the success of the Google Adsense program) – there had been even speculation about Microsoft looking at breakup as an option. Google is consistently performing so well, it has to just execute – angering microsoft or not. Microsoft itself has a tough future ahead – google needs to go beyond new announcement and statement of intents as shown by its vision - It is time that Google gets more forthcoming about its future plans(Microsft scores better here)and announce a clearer roadmap that it wants to pursue lets say in the next three –to-five years. It has achieved a stature in the ecosystem that demands that it is far more communicative about its future plans.

Publishers Vs Google Print

Five major publishing firms filed suit against Google Inc to stop the company from creating a digital index of millions of copyrighted books. The Lawsuit, coming after a group of book authors also sued Google, sets up a legal showdown over the limits of intellectual property law in the age of global computer networks. The publishers are trying to halt the Google Print Library Project. The project aims to make digital copies of millions of books stored in the libraries of major universities, including Harvard. Google will then use its search technology to create an index of all of the text in each book, and make this index available on the Internet at no charge. The result would be the world's largest and most powerful index of books. A user could instantly search millions of volumes for information on a particular topic, and receive a list of relevant books. The index would also display small portions of the text, to help a researcher decide if he or she has found the right book.The publishers accuse Google of trying to profit by "massive, wholesale, and systematic copying of entire books still protected by copyright." They say that Google hopes the service will attract lots of new users to its website, thus allowing the company to increase its advertising revenue. In response to the lawsuit, Google argued that an online index of books amounts of "fair use," a legal concept that allows the reproduction of small portions of copyrighted works. Eric Schmidt makes a spirited defense of the move. The Google Print Library Project website said that publishers who don't want their work included in the index can contact Google and ask for the removal of individual titles. From a legal perspective, the case appears to be tossup, with good arguments on both sides. In their lawsuit against Google, the book publishers cite Yahoo's program as an acceptable alternative where they cite that Yahoo works directly with the owners of content to make that content available. Yahoo said that it would begin offering its index of books by year's end, and have about 18,000 books available by the end of 2006.I think that the technology movement fired up by Google is unstoppable - the book publishers may appear concerned - but this should only make book writing, publishing and perhaps digitizing published material more and more attractive.

4G Web Strategy :Revolution & Not Evolution

The web technology is indeed undergoing major transformation. Around the world, I definitely see a major overdrive by enterprises to leverage web technology in multiple ways. David Coe writes about the revolutionary advances into the fourth generation websites. He characterizes the various generation websites as:

1G - welcome to first generation websites - it’s 1994 and big brother just bought a modem. Evolution is wonderful and soon we’re experimenting with more brand new tools - “Hey look dude - it’s like a word processor - but for the web!”.

It’s 1999…and this is the world of 2G websites - a new millennium - is there a new web model?… all of a sudden you, me, and everyone we know is spending many, many, many $$$$s online.

Most marketing departments are disenfranchised from the web experience by the tyranny of their IT departments - the online suffragettes of their generation. This lack of engagement allows an undercurrent of resentment - fragmented sales and marketing — fragmented web solutions. This is a 3G website world!

“Traditional” website structure just doesn’t work any more - have a look at some sitemaps and the chances are it’ll look like a “typical” organizational chart. Businesses are getting leaner — people are getting multi-skilled. Multi-tasking 24/7 is the norm. The work/life balance starts to erode in the name of flexibility and freedom. Websites don’t work with “old skool” navigational hierarchy any more. But let’s not just make them flatter. Tourists bring back souvenirs — explorers bring home ‘stories’. Content is king. Content is everything. Yet most sites still lack contentf the stuff that ensures that people will come back time and time again — to re-engage with your site. Websites are like ogres — they have layers Very Interesting indeed.Must read for all interested.
Category :Web Technology

Gates & Buffet On Technology,Investments & Venture Capital

Courtesy of Paul Kedrosky happened to read this joint interview of Warren Buffett & Bill Gates.
BUFFETT: In the late 1990s people were looking in their rearview mirror, and they thought that God had granted Americans the right to 15% a year. They built that into pension assumptions. They built it to some extent into what endowment funds spent. Now, six or seven years later, people look in the rearview mirror, and they see that conventional investments haven't produced remotely anything like that. And so they say to themselves, "Well, how do I get it? I'll turn to alternative investments." You can be sure that vacuum will be filled by Wall Street people who say, "You're right looking in that rearview mirror and seeing conventional investments don't work. Come with us, because we have the Holy Grail." And the thing about the Holy Grail is that you have to pay a lot more.
GATES: In venture capital there were very high returns with small amounts of money, and then very poor returns with large amounts of money. This desire to have high absolute returns—and seeing that places like Harvard University were cleverly in alternative assets—has led to this thought that "Okay, there must be something out there returning 10%. I just haven't found it yet." So the fact that expectations of returns exceed reality, that's still true today.
BUFFETT: The biggest problem we have is in terms of rogue states, terrorists, and nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Economically, I think the U.S. is going to be fine. If the rest of the world's GDP per capita grows faster than ours, that's the way it should be.

Standardization & Early Adopters

As I prepare to attend this event today - am back in singapore after a long time -I came across this article on early adoption of standards. Peter Seebach reasons that before a standard becomes widely adopted, some ambiguity always exists about whether it will succeed. Even a standard formally endorsed by a major organization might turn out to be simply ignored by the marketplace. Adopting a standard before it has become fully established has advantages and disadvantages. The primary advantages of early adoption include influence on the early standard and competitive advantage over latecomers. If a standard related to your development efforts is forming, you might benefit greatly from involvement in the standards process. For that matter, the standards process is quite likely to benefit from additional input from people with expertise in the field. Not all of the advantages of standard interfaces and designs apply to early adopters. One can't take advantage of economies of scale right away. Still, the essential points are still there - better interoperability and reduced design costs. One can easily overlook the cost of developing a specification solid enough to build products on, but you can hardly miss the comparatively huge cost of trying to debug a product update that is almost compatible when your specification isn't precise enough. If forced to adopt a standard which does not seem to be quite stable yet, look for anchoring on the crucial basic principles of standardization.
One of the potential benefits of being one of the first vendors to adopt a new standard is beating competitors to market. Unfortunately, this can result in an attitude of competitiveness that can wreck a potential standard for everybody. Remember that standardization is about interoperability first and foremost. If competitiveness between prospective partners in a standardization effort sinks the standard, everybody loses. The early phases of standardization offer a severe temptation to break with the standard to obtain. Even though early adoption has its pitfalls, it offers the chance to improve the standards process and get better standards adopted sooner. I fully agree with the view that even if a standard planned to be adopted isn't quite ready, it might give one a head start on working with the final standard when it becomes available. The work required to adapt to last-minute changes is likely to be easier than the work of overhauling an entire design. A positive attitude towards interoperability, testing, and cooperation with other vendors and developers can make a standard succeed, which is generally good for everybody. As we noted earier,an ecosystem beats a product because its collective of competitors can explore and invest in many more ideas than any single company can muster. In an ecosystem, all the players share some key components despite claims of standardisation forcing commoditization.

EMC On A Roll

EMC now has acquired Captiva. The acquisition appears complementary to EMC's 2003 purchase of Documentum. Like Documentum, Captiva is part of an increasingly important niche called document management.The amount of digital data that companies generate and are required to keep grows exponentially. Input management software - which provides for the conversion of paper-based information to digital formats - has become increasingly strategic as companies electronically capture, digitize and categorize more of their information. This transforms costly and inaccessible paper records into instantly usable electronic business information, resulting in faster business processes and more accurate and timely response in regulatory compliance situations. Through this process, organizations gain a richer understanding of their information and become better equipped to classify it, create policy based workflow and automate information lifecycle management. This acquisition represents a natural extension to the EMC Documentum ECM platform and adds existing integrated technology to the EMC software portfolio. Captiva focuses on the early stages of information lifecycle management - information capture, digitization and categorization. I clearly see the syndegy here - as these together enable customers to either eliminate paper or automate its digital capture and integrate the information with electronic business processing for competitive advantage EMC will now offer customers the ability to move massive amounts of paper-based data into files manageable by Documentum's software and store and retrieve it using EMC hardware. Interestingly post acquisition of Documentum and Legato, EMC's dependence on its core hardware business has lessened considerably. (Disclosure : I work closely as part of my work with almost all the companies mentioned in this post.)Documentum is proving to be an asset to EMC in ways that aren't immediately apparent on the income statement. The two year old takeout has become something of a template for a wave of top line-driven acquisitions in the software industry that are presenting new opportunities for investors.SAP may see a fit and acquire i2, Manugistics, Aspen. Dave Dewalt, EMC software president, whom I recently met feels that the entry of players like EMC into the document management space and Oracle into logistics could well force the surviving smaller players to consolidate and predicts that the document management space may see only two/three players. DeWalt figures that IBM and Oracle will jump into the space, but are likely to build rather than buy a solution. I had been writing about the imminent consolidation in the enteprise software space. Predictions Galore- Interwoven may be seen as a good fit for Sun or Microsoft.

Prosperity, The Search For Meaning, & Business

Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book A Whole New Mind, argues that the "left brain" intellectual tasks that "are routine, computer-like, and can be boiled down to a spec sheet are migrating to where it is cheaper, thanks to Asia's rising economies and the miracle of cyberspace." The U.S. will remain strong in "right brain" work that entails "artistry, creativity, and empathy with the customer that requires being physically close to the market.".
He argues that the US is grappling with what he calls as the "abundance gap", a widening gulf between material prosperity and overall satisfaction. The ownership patterns of automobile and houses in the US clearly display the depth and reach of prosperity. The self-storage industry is a $17 billion-a-year industry - larger than the motion picture business. That's abundance. Surveys repeatedly have demonstrated that Americans are scarcely more satisfied with the way their lives are going than before the explosion of prosperity. A growing pile of evidence reveals that past a certain (and surprisingly low) point, more money and more things don't produce greater satisfaction. For entrepreneurs and investors, the abundance gap has two important consequences.
- First, to recruit talented people, organizations must now offer purpose along with a paycheck. Since more Americans have embarked on Fogel's "quest for self-realization," the way to attract talented individuals and keep them happy is to offer a sense of significance. As GE CEO Jeff Immelt has said, "The reason why people come to work for GE is that they want to be part of something larger than themselves."
- Second, the abundance gap represents an enormous business opportunity. Companies that aim to close the gap are poised to do quite well: For example, health care ventures that focus on wellness; travel operations that offer customized, meaningful experiences; publishing and education companies that provide materials to help customers lead those purpose-driven lives; consumer products companies that also aspire to some higher social purpose; and so on.
With basic needs available in abundance, there's a premium on products, services, and experiences that close the abundance gap and that help people in their search for meaning. These businesses would spread prosperity and happiness together.

Andreessen On The Humming Innovation

Marc Andreessen says exciting stuff "is happening all over the map" - especially in Silicon Valley. Andreessen’s Opsware is now focusing on software that helps companies better and more efficiently manage an ever-growing number of servers with multiple operating systems. This is at the backbone of several cutting-edge trends in tech, including running free Linux software on commodity servers; utility computing, where companies can pay for hardware and software as they go, like electricity or water; and autonomic computing, the idea that networks can run and monitor themselves. Andreessen is also behind a new venture called Ning. It's a Web site that lets people use very simple developer tools to build so-called social Web applications, such as developing a Match.com, but for activities other than dating, or a Craigslist for specific cities not on that site now. The Web site whimsically calls itself a free "playground" for such applications, and it plans to make money eventually through charging for premium services and advertising. Echoing Bill Gurley’s views that innovation in the internet world has not peaked. Andreessen thinks that the high rate of change has stayed like that for over last five years. He says that pockets of innovation are centered on broadband and mobile, there's the build-out of new, huge Web startups. There are huge rates of change, and businesses are continuing to build out Web applications. The consumer electronics sector is also vibrant with new technology, from music to video. There's actually a big story on the economics to build out information systems. It's falling in price so fast, the cost is becoming almost trivial. Then that's leading to explosion of new applications. Servers are completely commoditized. It's shocking the velocity with which networking and storage infrastructure software has commoditized. He believes that invention of 1990’s is being deployed at a massive scale. There are a large number of new software companies, and more categories are emerging all the time. Andreessen thinks that [Previously], people built all their own software & in the next 30 years [will be dominated by] the [application service provider] or service style. He goes on to predict that PHP may gain more acceptance over Java and expects that in the next five years, there will be new developers trained on all of the open-source stuff, having more control, and these trends will all continue and he believes that Valley is the place to be in for tech business.Pretty insightful and full of passion.

State Of The Blogosphere Report – Oct 2005

CIO's As Dinsoaurs : Preposterous

Infoworld raises the question about future role of CIO'S inside enterprises.The article notes that the center of gravity in decision-making for strategic IT solutions is shifting away from the CIO. As companies move back toward more centralized control, it is more often the case that the CIO reports to the CFO. Or, in cases where the CIO reports to the COO or CEO, the CFO will put his or her own people into the IT organization. In the age of compliance, there's a heightened interest in data management, data cleansing, and data warehousing. "Data governance" appears to be the catchphrase of the day to describe this new emphasis. Sarbanes-Oxley is changing how companies aggregate data. In the past, everyone sent their spreadsheets to the CFO, who put them all together. The CFO relied on regional controllers to get the data out of IT systems. Now, however, CFOs want to dictate or mandate the business definitions and unify them across the country and globe. In the future IT landscape, the CTO will report directly to the CFO, rather than the CIO. So is the CIO a dinosaur? SOX has brought in a culture of having information on a timely basis, with an audit trail and everything must be traceable to the source. In this context, while IT is responsible for satisfying the needs for compliance, the CFO is the gatekeeper. The CFO material is amongst the most wanted in the corporate world.
IT is not a mere back-office function to be seen as a nondifferentiating commodity. Leading edge enterprises see IT as a catalyst for positive strategic change.
My Take :Presposterous to say the least.IT now plays a leading role in changing the way the company deals with customers and partners as well as how to make things work internally to develop, sell, and service offerings. Complexity has grown exponentially—more technology, more applications, and more users—while the business cycle has shortened. The world is becoming increasingly connected, while most enterprises now operate around the clock. I think that corporates have been too focused on SOX and compliance matters – it has created pressures from multiple sides – Huge ERP centric investments made in the last decade, a limitless spend (some said that no one knows how to budget for IT to make systems compliant), increasing proportion of IT spend in corporate spends have also pushed CFO’s to take an increased role in IT spend decisions. We are now seeing enterprises are shifting dollars from maintenance and support to new app development,from legacy systems to Web apps, from internal IT to outsourced and offshore vendors, from IT dialtone to innovation. All these call for larger roles for CIOs. As they say, it is not just investments but innovative application of technology that would fetch far better returns on IT investment . Steve Ballmer is credited with the saying that - Successful innovation is a lot like hitting in baseball: No one hits it out of the park every time. Many different factors—both internal and external—affect your success at the game. You can strike out by getting to the game too early and by getting to it too late, but the only way to hit a home run is to keep swinging at balls." The emerging IT world itself can be a seen as an hotbed of innovation. Initiatives and achievements like the one at Sprint can come only from a CIO taking charge.

Offshore Vendors : Another Milestone Crossed

While covering the recent ABN Amro deal, I wrote, moving forward, the the basis of competition for IT providers, Indian or multinational companies, will no longer be just the cost-competitive, within-budget deployment of technology. It will soon change to the improvements in clients businesses that can be enabled by these service providers. IT firms have to now turn themselves into partners, helping their customers shape their business future, not merely their technology future. This means IT firms have to now acquire the capability to design potential business scenarios that incorporate and examine various technology alternatives, simulate them, and test them for attractiveness. Future competitive advantage will, in large measure, be defined by mastery over business Solutions. Exciting times lay ahead for the well prepared and the difference between winners and also ran shall keep widening. Economictimes reports that TCS has won a 850 Mill USD deal today. The article says that TCS will take over the entire business processes of Pearl and 950 employees in UK as part of the 850 million USD deal(Surprisingly as I write this I could find any information related to this deal in the TCS website). As of last year we noticed rise in billion dollar outsourcing deals. TCS claims that this decision comes after a rigorous and extensive, year- long, selection process by Pearl Group, who examined tenders from a number of leading companies before they decided to choose TCS. The company sees this win as a validation of its strategy of pioneering the next generation of Business Process Outsourcing opportunities. TCS has large practices on Insurance, Life Sciences & Healthcare (going by published information) - obviously its experience in the insurance industry integrated with deep technology skills must have been seen as a significant differentiator.I am sure analysts may dissect the nature of the deal in the days to come to understand the quality of the deal - this is indeed an important milestone in offshor vendor history, conclusively proving the mettle of offshore giants in taking global majors head on - even in megadeals. No longer big deals are the exclusive preserve/space for the IBM's & Accenture and the competition is clearly even natured and becoming more and more sharply defined.

Mobile Phones : The Rise Of Niche Markets

Dean Bubley asks why is it that the mobile phone industry (and its financial watchers) still clings to "volume market share" as such an important indicator? Given that phone prices span the range from $30 to $1000, surely it's an increasingly irrelevant statistic. He points out that just as watch manufacturers tend to quote revenue numbers rather than units. And if people do comment on volumes, they focus on a specific segment like "fashion watches" and all types of watches are not bundled together for financial analysis.I agree that the mobile market is getting stratified with multiple segments and special products like Vertu targeting niche markets.The mobile volume growth may come from the lower end of the market – profits may not come from this segment more instead the key is developing the feature rich phone markets. Profit margins, volume of sale woud have to be read together – and If I may add the R&D spend may become an important lead indicator as well as niches are seen to be giving better returns.

Enterprise Solution Platforms Displace ERPs As The Core Application

Barry Briggs points out new drivers for enterprise software are just now emerging - and how well companies adapt to them will determine their success, or, indeed, their survival – Compliance, Agility, Globalization, RFID &UI are to be seen as the five horsemen of the 21st century computing. IDC finds that the enterprise solutions platform highlights a shift away from ERP suites as the center of gravity in applications. Intelligent process automation speaks to the rising importance of operational decisions as the target for improvements in business efficiency. And the pull of compliance brings renewed attention to information governance across the enterprise. IDC detects repeating patterns of significance from the cavalcade of mergers, products, partnerships, and technologies on the enterprise software market radar. The competitive and high-IQ nature of software technology guarantees that the tide of significant advancements in the enterprise software industry will not likely be stemmed in the foreseeable future. The good news is that even in the post-bubble burst era, the flow of change, innovation, and investment continues.
Eight macro-trends have been spotted as operating in today's enterprise software industry and will continue to impact the industry for many years to come. They are:
- Enterprise Workplace
- Enterprise Solutions Platform
- Intelligent Process Automation
- IT Life-Cycle Management
- Information Governance
- Intellectual Property Management
- Dynamic IT Infrastructure
- Virtualization
As customers, and particularly CIOs, as well as software vendors and their value-added channel partners gaze over the long-term landscape of enterprise software, understanding such fundamental macro-trends may make the difference between success and failure, while a few more areas do come into my mind that could be added. The macro-trends foreshadow major disruptions in the software industry.

Category:Enterprise Solution Platforms

The Lognhorn Saga As Seen By Microsoft Insiders

Lots of microsft indsiders are opening up to discuss what they consider as ailing within Microsoft (I think lot many companies shall face similar issues within anyway). Complaints about Symptoms instead of the Root Problems as been identifies as amongst the key things along with the organisational issue of Microsoft structured and behaving like a lots of little companies and stack ranking for performance rewards are aired as key concern areas (for the purpose of repeating - these can be substituted as issue for any growing concern in thr IT field). Microsoft's product of grandeur has certainly inflicted lot of paind within while getting developed. An interesting comment clealry from an insider makes interesting reading : "The Longhorn saga highlights some stark lessons about why employees are pissed off and frustrated with the very top handful of execs. Longhorn will be a good product when it ships, but it will ship two years later than it should have. That extra two years represents what, maybe 8,000 man years of work? At a fully burdened cost of say $150k/head/year that’s $1.2Billion in direct costs of our resources flushed down the toilet. But far worse than those direct costs are the lost opportunity costs of not having the product in market two years earlier and getting started on Vnext". He pushes the blame upto Bill Gates for pushing the Windows group to take on huge, extremely difficult technical projects that destabilize all the core parts of the OS, and hold shipping hostage. Even worse, in some cases these efforts seem to be little more than ‘pet’ ideas of Bill’s, with little clear customer value. Second, the very top handful of execs in the Windows group are to blame, for placating Bill and not applying the most basic good judgment on engineering and project management. The comment notes that it was clear to nearly every engineer in every product group at MS that Longhorn was badly screwed up, for far too long. But no one at the top would admit it or come to grips with it for far too long. He calls for a leadership that is not necessarliy swaye by Bill's view points alone but have a rooting in reality. I do not know the internal dynamics of Microsoft to comment but Vista rollout is clearly testing microsoft's strength to the hilt.

The 300 Billion USD Plus TV Industry - Audience Shift & Chaos Scenario – Part II

We covered in Part1 Jeremy Allaire's view that a range of macro forces helping to force a collision between the Internet and the world of video and television distribution. Continuing with the discussion we examine more of his view here - The shift in format and distribution focus for the major film studios, turns the attention away from broadcast syndication after-markets or TV output deals, and towards the much more lucrative opportunity presented through pay media and direct distribution through retail DVD sales, underscoring how digital technology even fragments distribution at the high-end of the video food chain. We earlier wrote that With Internet TV startups the cost of distributing video over the Internet for a program is much lower than broadcasting shows to millions of homes simultaneously, regardless of who actually sees them. Many special-interest shows might prove economical for the first time, while others already recorded might find fresh audiences. Finally, and crucially, over the past decade, the Internet has become the primary media and entertainment source for consumers worldwide, taking their time and attention away from broadcast and into broadband—media that offers them powerful communications tools, highly targeted content and communities of interest, dramatic choice and control, and commerce vehicles that are unmatched by traditional media and retail. A range of technology and business process drivers are forcing this opportunity:
- Global broadband reach
- Home and wireless networks that make it possible to move high-quality video media over open networks.
- Powerful and open media formats that deliver rich, interactive media experiences that have not been possible on television (e.g. Macromedia Flash), and compressed and downloadable formats that deliver DVD-quality experiences that can be secure and portable (e.g. MPEG-4, Windows Media).
- The convergence of the consumer electronics (CE) and personal computer (PC) industry, with an emerging explosion of open, consumer media devices
- Patterns of distribution on the Internet that are disruptive, decentralized, and favor massive new economies of scale for any size Web site or content owner
It is likely that we are at a tipping point in the convergence of television and the Internet, where content can flow freely over the open Internet. The powerful and irreversible entrepreneurial energy that has built the Internet over the past decade will now direct its energy into a new generation of Internet TV entrepreneurs seeking to build the next big thing in global media. All this reinforces the points that we wrote about earlier - the consumer electronics industry must work more closely with the service provider industry.These are both vying for the consumer's dollar, but they will both lose out if issues of standardisation and obsolescence are not dealt with more quickly than they have been in the past. Broadband, Mobile's first cousin is really creating froth and action in the digital market. With new innovations like the Video iPods , it is clear that the entertainment industry shall never be the same again - it is set against a huge tumultous but exciting shift.

The 300 Billion USD Plus TV Industry - Audience Shift & Chaos Scenario

Jeremy Allaire writes that a range of macro forces helping to force a collision between the Internet and the world of video and television distribution. We earlier covered in the blog, the consumer electronics industry is experiencing a "profound change" as fast internet connectivity increasingly allows previously packaged content to be delivered on a subscription or service basis. The consumer market is entering a period of rapid transformation as it moves away from the models which have historically dominated the personal enjoyment of audiovisual media. Jeremy views that the coming transformation promises to reconfigure the video industry in the image of the Internet. The Internet’s forces of openness, global reach, consumer control and participation, and Long Tail economies of scale will create a multimedia universe that no one can fully comprehend. One of its next major frontiers is the realm of video and television production and distribution, promising to radically amplify the already significant fragmentation that digital technology has wrought on the TV food chain.
In the first phase of adoption (e.g., within closed and proprietary distribution systems such as digital cable and satellite, or controlled retail distribution of DVD products) the impact of digital technology has been dramatic and mostly positive. Bill Gates perspective fits in very well here - "TV started as analog, went to digital broadcast, but now is making the evolution to IPTV [Internet protocol TV, which uses Web technology to deliver programming]. And when you go to that generation, you can do something dramatic. Software can improve the TV experience".
Digital technology has ushered in all-digital linear broadcast networks, with an expanding spectrum that can support hundreds of broadcast channels, and now potentially thousands of video-on-demand (VOD) offers. It has brought forth significant reductions in the costs of producing video, and even lowering the costs required to achieve good production values (CGI, broadcast graphics, etc.). This in turn has spawned many new production companies and programming efforts, mirroring the growing range of options offered by cable, satellite and telephone companies. While the choices are stronger than ever for consumers, and the opportunities for distribution for producers and programmers are immense, this wave of digital technology is also forcing fragmentation in the underlying economics of video and television distribution. As we wrote earlier,since the Internet is
open to any digital content, the television will merge with other activities allowing users to multitask among TV facilities. TV programs can reach the mass audience without going through a gatekeeper, be it a telecom, cable provider or satellite service. Video would be served directly, like everything else on the Web. "Most flat-panel TV sets will have Internet connections in their future". Part II Shall follow.

Category :Future Television ,Emerging Trends

Web 2.0, Innovation & Enterprises

Lee cautions that whilst one of the most exciting benefits of Web 2.0 is the idea of individual empowerment and self-representation, enterprises can benefit from this technology in big ways. Addressing the needs of organisations obviously starts with an understanding of how they work and what their issues are (hint: draggable AJAX GUIs are not necessarily high on their list of points of pain). It also requires a much greater focus on engagement and the 'people' issues associated with what is essentially a process of structural change augmented by technology. There is a need for a brokerage role to help companies take the best of innovation occurring in the wild and translate it into usable, workable (sometimes boring) applications that empower their people to work and communicate better than before. Products can scale, but Web 2.0 products are in such supply that one would hesitate to dive into multi-million-dollar funding commitments unless sure of the product readily available. On the other hand, whilst pure consulting and services are bigger ticket items, it can prove hard to scale a service business. But it appears that there is a huge opportunity for hybrid strategies that can deliver on the value proposition of both approaches, and take advantage of open source software, in the area of enterprise social software. But it also needs the other Web 2.0 competencies that we are seeing among the better product developers: all the traditional interface, usability and technology skills plus new ones such as social network analysis, group behaviour profiling and ideas drawn from the meeting point of social sciences, information and knowledge management, technology, network and organisational theory. Earlier I wrote that 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.Lee who has reported some early success concludes that what is going on with Web 2.0 is really promising, but cautions that applying this stuff to change the behaviour of organisations takes longer than the attention span of bubble investors. We are in it for the long haul. I can't agree more.

The Web World Metrics

The Weblogs/AOL deal values blogs at $600 to $900 per inbound link. While I do not find any great repeatble pattern for valuation that can be culled out from here, I agree with Fred Wilson that these numbers may be some sort of guidepost to monitor the investment thesis and make sure the opportunity is playing out the way investors think it will. Web based businesses are centered on content and related data and the management team and investors need to monitor that data closely to keep a handle on the business and its progress. Fred Wilson writes that his form would like to make initial investment sometime between the formation of a business and the first dollar of revenue coming in the door.Even after revenue starts rolling in, alternative metrics help in monitoring the growth and health of a business – essentially different metrics for different type of enterprises.
Besides Page views & unique visitors per day, week, month , with RSS, its important to monitor how much consumption happens via that channel. He writes that amongst their investments monitoring measures vary.
- For Indeed, the measure is the number of searches per month.
- For Del.icio.us, the measure is the number of postings per month.
- For Tacoda,the measure is the amount of behavioral data being captured in the TAN network.
The rankings in the blogosphere centered on plain technorati scores or pubsub scores may only matter the least - the web and the blog world is a very different world calling for varied measures of performance.

Category :Web Valuations

Organizing & Digitizing Content To Enhance Value

There is a spending wave happening in the Enterprise content management space with enterprises investing in content-management technology to convert that information into even more valuable assets and make it available to all its stakeholders. Driven by the need to cope with government regulations and a surfeit of unstructured data, companies are ramping up their spending on enterprise-content-management systems, according to a recent InformationWeek Research survey. Such systems embrace multiple technologies, including document management, Web content management, records management, and archiving. SOX has been a major driver for adopting enterprise content management. The law, which requires companies to document and test internal controls over financial reporting, has challenged companies to move beyond spreadsheets toward building dedicated repositories for collecting information on internal processes. While many US companies plan to spend more than $500,000 on content-management technology and services this year, most of them are unsure of the ROI on these investments. Document management is the most common component of an enterprise-content management-implementation. DM covers a broad range of technologies, including document and content capture, workflow, document repositories, computer output to laser disk and electronic-report-management systems, and information-retrieval systems. Web content management , record management or archiving and retention and document capture and imaging are related areas seeing more activity. The growth of unstructured content such as E-mails, images, and handwritten documents is a driver of enterprise-content-management adoption. In the health-care industry, adoption of electronic patient records and storage of electronic images such as X-rays is leading hospitals and other providers to invest heavily in content management. Public-sector organizations, with their reliance on paper forms, are a natural for content-management implementations. State and local governments are spending heavily on geographic information systems to let citizens use mapping-based applications, which depend on content-management systems to organize geospatial data such as topographies, addresses, and images. I beleive that the ROI assessmens can become easier when enteprises begin to embrace the next phase of evolution: Information Lifecycle Management, a strategy for aligning IT infrastructure with the needs of the business—based on information’s changing value.ILM is an ever-growing and evolving process. In order to realize the benefits of the ILM process, IT must continuously review the usage patterns of its storage resources and ensure adherence to policies and procedures. The new SRM /ADM tools, makes monitoring the process easy. New advances in ATA and SATA disk will play an important role in helping IT administrators with ILM, giving them the ability to stage backups and snapshots inexpensively. Software innovations around SRM and ADM have also increased the ability to identify data, classify data and move data to the proper location over time. One may also note that the enterprise majors Viz SAP, Oracle , Microsoft etc have no/minimal presence in these niche areas in enterprise space- we may see majors making some moves here - oracle recently acquired the assets of ContextMedia recently.

Apple Video iPods – Crossing New Frontiers

We recently covered the speculation about the Video iPods ahead of the actual launch. We also covered earlier Bob Cringley's earlier perspective wherein he wrote that Mac Mini +iFlicks shall be positioned as the integrated digital distribution framework of video, similar to iTunes and iPod – Just like iTunes is where Apple really stands to capture massive long-term value, iFlicks + iTunes may position Apple as the digital media distribution pioneer with potential domination in this space. He points out now that with Video iPod in place Apple has sealed deals to distribute TV shows and music videos, but not movies, allaying some fears from some quarters in hollywood. The price can be seen as high because the cost of goods is presumably close to zero (the show is already paid-for, though there may be some residual payments. There are no manufacturing or inventory costs. Marketing is effectively free if it is done on the network show, itself. That leaves distribution as the major cost. But it isn't enough to shake the very foundations of network TV points out Bob. Will more join besides ABC & Disney ?The experiment going on here is all on behalf of the major movie studios, the very outfits that haven't yet signed on to distribute their movies through iTunes. The studios want to see how the market accepts these TV series distributed in this format, whether the ability to download the shows has a material impact on their broadcast viewership (ratings), and most especially whether we see a surge of pirated copies of "Lost" - copies that can be traced back to iTunes distribution. If these shows are able to demonstrate incremental revenue increases that don't harm their existing revenues or pose an unreasonably increased piracy threat - then the studios and other TV networks will sign on and Apple will be in the movie and TV businesses, big time. Next step – With DVDstations one can plug video-enabled iPod into their kiosk and download an HD movie in 90 seconds or less.This is a compelling model, placing the equivalent of a completely automated Blockbuster video store in a few square feet. The video-enabled iPod becomes the vessel for transporting movies from store to home – Apple can sell iPods to people who like movies but don't typically carry their music with them - a whole new class of iPod customers. While different views exist about Apple's Plan with the video iPod, I agree with Bob that in pursuit of replacing televisions, DVDstations may begin to appear in Apple retail stores, Apple may persist with Sony for television.

Offshoring : The War Of Business Models

If the type of work that can be done over a wire, then probably every job is at risk says Nandan Nilekani, the chief executive of Infosys Technologies. Nandan points out that what's happening is pretty fundamental and in the 1830's, India and China were 50 percent of the world's G.D.P., and then they missed the entire revolution of industry and relates current advancements as part of this the process. Nandan is spot on when he says that underlying secular trends like technology and demographics can’t be stopped or wished away, calling them, megatrends. Winners in his view are those who accept the impending reality and focus on how to take advantage of it. The war between offshoring and the blue blooded consulting houses need to be seen ad a battle of business models. The disruptive offshoring model is to be seen as a threat to the existing business model and older companies will have to reconfigure themselves to look more like us if they're going to be globally competitive. Nandan is at his best when he says that he sees that the challenges for offshoring companies are about hiring and growth and building a brand; for established western players t's about restructuring the work force and points out the difference between the associated excitement and pain.
My Take:All the talk of western outfits scaling up offshore talent enough and challenging India headquartered majors look like a long shot – several western analysts make this mistake that these god sent western organizations can just come and walk over the India headquartered firms once they scale up!! But I do agree with the concerns that the very insightful Vinnie highlights in terms of need to focus on productivity, increasing the gap on customer satisfaction index and the reflecting the benefits of certification in all dimensions of work, based on the Arcon group & TPI presentations . Legitimate concerns indeed – but turn the tables- the western firms as well can never get these correct in right measures either in the near future- there is no evidence that they can show superior ranking in such measures – in fact logic and reasoning would suggest the opposite – as they scale up the challenges would be far more intensive.The well established head for western firms- high end consulting, relationships and a small offshore tail as against the reverse that we see with India headquartered firms are basically different models. Its clearly Advantage India Headquartered Offshoring Firms. I looked at what analysts generally supportive of western firms saying about impending competition for offshore enterprises 24-36 months back and seeing the growth recorded and indications of growth for the near future, I have no doubt whatsoever about the new disruptive model going from strength to strength in the next 3 years. It is battle beyond simple economics- its pride, leadership, sense of accomplishment & the burning desire to win this game that is seen in the Indian IT industry today that would continue to help them to cross barriers and overcome competition .

The New Media Networks

with broadband penetration reaching record highs in many nations across the world, bambi francisco notes,Internet media companies will need more than just content and traditional distribution to attract the audience of the next generation. They need the tools and platforms to arm their audiences - ultimately the viewers/readers in charge of finding and promoting the talent from within their own ranks - so they can distribute the content through their social networks, blogs and connected links on the Web. New media companies, like Fox Interactive, may need a bunch of tools, like instant messaging and voIP to get the people chatting amongst themselves and to get the buzz going about a particular piece of music or home-grown documentary that's worth getting excited about. The new media networks will need blogs-and-podcasting-hosting services.The new media networks might even need online publication aggregators, photo, video and media organizers, a search engine, a music subscription service, etc. "

Enterprise Software : Term Licensing Ahoy

Just came across this eWeek article on software licensing preferences & trends.Enterprises are veering around the view that limited-term licenses offer lower risk to vendors and to customers compared with long-term perpetual licenses. Despite the advent of multicore CPU’s clearly enterprises are not making a significant move to processor-based licensing, finds a new study. More and more enterprises and vendors are moving toward concurrent-user licenses, which allow a set number of people to use a software package at any given time. Here the buyer monitors software usage to ensure that they are in compliance with the license terms and aren't exceeding the total number of concurrent users they have paid for. The preference of the enterprises is towards some kind of digital compliance model rather than a self-tracked compliance model enforced by a written contract. In recognition of this shift,more and more software vendors are moving toward subscription-based term licensing terms & fees (annual or monthly)and away from perpetual license terms. The trend towards subscription based pricing is expected to continue as more and more enterprises prefer that option. The one license enforcement model that is clearly dead is the hardware dongle or USB device attached to the computer that enables users to install and run applications. Product activation and network licensing would become important elements of license enforcement mechanism in future.
The limited term license can lower the entry price and broaden the market to a wider ranger of buyers who might not be able to otherwise afford the software. Improved cashflow for both product companies and customers are among the clear benefits. With some customers, this approach could help them to get releived of gulity lick-ins(made out of wrong choices or respond to changing market conditions). I agree with Ken Berryman when he says that software companies have to pay more attention than ever to their pricing strategy because industry maturation, consolidation and globalization have slowed industry growth down to about 5 percent or 6 percent a year, equivalent to gross domestic product growth. He contends Software companies have to "improve tactical pricing performance to rapidly identify market changes" to take advantage of opportunities and to avoid pricing that puts them out of sync with customer demands and business conditions, and adds that the cost over the lifecycle of the application would become an important consideration for new software adoption by enterprises. Clearly the structure, style and measures of performance of software industry - particularly enterprise software indstry is set to change dramatically.

Software Stocks Performance: Key Warning Bells

Bill Burnham based on his experience provides a list of the Top 10 Early Warning Signs that a software stock is about to crater.
From a finance perspective – Capitalizing software development expenses( - software development capitalization is the heroin of software companies), DSOs greater than 95 days (typically viewed as a measure of how efficiently a company collects its accounts receivable. High DSOs can potentially indicate two types of trouble at a company – with Sales & Finance) and the reporting speed, EBITDA margins and positive cash flow statement(atleast increasing trend if in investment mode)
From an operational perspective – Missing ship dates, declining deferred revenues , movement of top sales guys, competitors underperforming . These need to be assessed all together - seen in isolation can be misrepresenting reality.
I think add the innovation factor(the ratio of revenue from new rollouts), quality of leadership, standing amongst peers, expansion in the range of activities –geographical, channel partners and new service offerings , articulation in clear terms of how the next eight quarters are going to be and possibilities of hold on to its position of leadership/standing amidst peers in such a period, rate of growth better than peers – all are set of associate indicators.One view I heard from a software CEO in a meet today is that only companies that can not innovate would become an easy prey for decay and acquisition and those companies able to sustain and improve on innovation would be able to improve its standing to be more powerful and if acquired - the realisation to shareholders would be substantialy higher.

IIPM, Blogosphere & Outrage

Kaps provides the best coverage of the events targetted against Rashmi and Gaurav. I think that the blogsphere is being unnecessarily brought into disrepute by some personal comments made against Rashmi. Going through the links available here,it is clear that Rashmi has become a victim of unneccessary personal attack - totally condemnable. Guys - if you feel offended - you can publish a counterview, send a note, then send a notice and take right steps further onwards. Cybergoondaism is not on - this would bring disrepute to the entire blogging community - though it may be clear for any impartial observer as to which side is overreacting and behaving unprofesionally. STOP THIS.

Web Services Brokering & Shelfware

Dave Linthicum points to an important next step in web services evolution and adoption brokering, or, allowing consumers of services to find producers of services. He points to a few instances of brokers today, including Strike Iron, Jamcracker, and SalCentral - these brokers are also similar to directory and governance systems we are defining in SOAs today. Just like monetized Web sites one shall be able to create a service, register it with a broker. The on-demand application service providers are beginning to sell their Web services versus simple browser interfaces to applications. The key beneficiary could be the smaller players, hitting it big time as they create that killer service that everyone wants to leverage.
Web Services deployment is seen as almost universal and initiatives like CRM, SRM, SCM & regulatory pressures like SOX and focused efforts like quality initiatives leverage web services substantially. Web Services can clearly bring to organisations more flexibility, better returns and can amplify the power of delivered IT value inside enterprises - the challenge to any CIO is a minimum two fold - understanding the true significance & identifying the right solution fitment to their context and be seen as protected in the present and future and at a different level truly differentiating between genuine solutions and me toos . Dave offers a sensible approach towards building web services: Granular solutions, scenario planning, usage tracking & design quality. I am bullish about this taking off – to an extent this should find a decent market/volume share.
With initiatives like this and with potentially more and more widely distributed – array of services are made available the industry stands to gain a lot more. With the profound impact web services may have on business, the upside for brokerage and near retail sale of services could only gain momentum.

Enterprise Software Industry : Structural Changes Ahead

I wrote a note for Sandhill.com on the impending structural changes in the enterprise software industry. While bruteforce consolidation is happening in the enterprise software industry, many raise the issue of lack of pointers to the next big thing happening in the industry. Skepticism abounds in terms of the dire need to make use of substantial unused capabilities of existing systems & solutions. The next big thing that could engulf the enterprise software industry could be the change in the industry structure - one that could keep all in the industry quite engaged for years to come. The consolidation frenzy and the uncertainty and slow evolution of the enterprise software market towards a stable model is causing so much attention and concern across the board. A careful examination shows that well evolved industries move towards a decentralized/tiered model – currently the enterprise software industry is highly integrated vertically and its ecosystem is not well set today. In this changing world, going beyond the packaged solutions, extend the idea a bit – enter the idea of SOA & Composite applications - the applications can be mashed up in multiple ways to create new frameworks that can be assembled as & when needed to make business in an always ready-to-respond mode towards changing external conditions. The composite applications address more complex business scenarios by combining discrete functional applications or service modules and encompass business processes that typically cross departmental silos synchronizing in the process varied information for effective functioning of the enterprise. BPM, Portal applications – early entrants of such frameworks inside enterprises and these core technologies will continue to act as the forerunners for adoption of composite applications. Application as a concept neatly disapperas with SOA.I also see that Composites can bring about a huge change in the setup of the ecosystem – we can see leading edge applications coming in from mega vendors & startups alike. Product engineering too shall also see a positive influence - facilitating development of software in modular pieces, enabling rapid delivery of new functionalities. One or two of the well established software vendors may fail in the adoption to this new model – its not a continuation of the current engineering efforts. Several independent developers could start writing specialized programs that plug into the composite apps framework. Professional services, sales network can begin to take a different shape far different from the vertically integrated model that we see today. The partnership between the product vendors and system integrators shall also change – the emerging equation may put more demands on the integrators and force product vendors to spend more on developing vertical solutions. Composites will potentially change the landscape –of enterprise market and the dominant business model (form & structure included) of the enterprise software industry will change as well. Please read the full note here.

Category :Enterprise Software

Mobile Reach : Mindboggling Latent Potential

I recently covered Mary Meeker's perspective - There are 1 billion Internet users in the world today but 2 billion mobile phone users – and Asia is ahead of the US in both categories with 36 % versus 23 % of users and 41% versus 11 % respectively. As it stands, 175 countries signed up to a commitment to give more than half the world’s population access to information and communications technologies by 2015. If governments took the right approach to taxation, that goal could be achieved within five years, yielding huge benefits to developing countries and their people, finds GSM world. GSM association finds that taxation acts as a barrier for users, preventing potentially hundreds of millions of people from affording mobile communications, and holding back economic growth and social development in many countries, based on a multicountry survey.

The study’s key findings are quite insightful and thought provoking - Taxes are disproportionately high in many developing countries – In one third of the 50 developing countries, Direct/Indirect taxes on handsets & services account for 20% of TCO. The study highlights that by eliminating the black market itself, close to three billion USD tax revenues could have been earned bu governments last year. The report finds amongst other things that
- Just one percentage point of lowered tax culd boost the number of mobile users in that country by more than 2% by 2010.
- Eliminating the special taxes could boost the numbers of mobile users in the 19 affected countries by 34 million (or 8%) by 2010.
- The removal of all sales and customs taxes on mobile handsets and services could prompt an increase in mobile penetration of up to 20 percentage points, according to an analysis by London Business School of the data in this study.
Mobile phones play a major role in reducing the cost of doing business and driving entrepreneurialism across the many developing countries without a widespread fixed-line infrastructure. Mobile phones make it much easier for farmers, fishermen and a host of other business people to find buyers and sellers for their products and services. The mobile industry has made considerable strides in driving costs down through lower handset costs and innovative service solutions for lower income groups, as well as extending mobile coverage to 77% of the world’s population. More still needs to be done. In the light of the findings of this study, more governments now need to take up the baton and re-evaluate the impact of their tax policies on mobile communications. Governments and mobile operators should work together to determine the ideal tax levels for their particular countries.Clealry no force on earth - governments and industry included have the right to hold back powerful technologies like the mobile from reaching the masses.

SOA Adoption - Formative Now & A Long Journey Ahead

WebMethods survey finds that more than half of the respondents (webMethods customers) were already conducting more than 10,000 Web services transactions per month. Web Services deployment is seen as almost universal and initiatives like CRM, SRM, SCM & regulatory pressures like SOX and focused efforts like quality initiatives leverage web services substantially. WebMethods reports that about six percent, were even handling more than one million Web services transactions per month.The survey indicates that firms remain bullish on SOA, with accelerating deployment of Web services paving the way to broader SOA adoption. Specifically, over 80% of respondents indicated that they currently deploy Web services within their enterprise, even though the majority of customers consider their SOA strategies still formative. Lack of widely accepted methodologies and related business case analysis tools outpaced concerns regarding technology considerations as key challenges(Consulting & service companies - smell a huge chnace here). Lance Hill of webMethods identifies that while users recognize the benefits of Web services as part of a broader service-oriented architecture strategy, a real gap remains in the knowledge assets that enterprises can use to transform their early-stage ambitions into long-term operational realities. Coupled with rapidly maturing technology, this practical need for real-world methodologies, education and the sharing of best practices is poised to emerge as the key enabler for more widespread SOA adoption over the coming year. Reuse, lower cost of integration and faster rollout are seen as the key drivers for SOA rollouts and low knowledge of SOA, concerns on ROI & lack of governing standards are seen as the constraints. I must add SOA plans call for larger preparation, efforts and massive mindset change is a pre-requisite for success. I wrote sometime back that in terms of potential SOA clearly can bring wonders to organisations in providing more flexibility, better returns and can amplify the power of delivered IT value inside enterprises - the challenge to any CIO is a minimum two fold - understanding the true signifance of SOA inside their respective enteprises - identifying the right solution fitment to their context and be seen as protected in the present and future and at a different level truly differentiating between genuine SOA solutions and me toos - almost all packaged software guys today say that they are pioneering SOA/SOA compliant , a good diligence exercise may need to be made to get at the right technology elements. Britton Monasco has an interesting perspective on the survey results as well. While early indications about poor adoption of SOA within enterprises were available, the survey result takes our understanding to a new level. Clearly the industry needs to do a lot more to help enterprises adopt SOA and potentially benefit - Guys, this is a huge opportunity indeed for both the industry and the business in general.

Tommorow's Audience & Today's Traditional Media

The Pew study on Internet use highlights significant patterns of disparity between online and traditional media. Excerpts :
26% of Americans age 65 and older go online, compared with 67% of those age 50- 64, 80% of those age 30-49, and 84% of those age 18-29. Tim Porter finds that the Internet age gap is the reverse of the U.S. newspaper gap. He is totally right – the average age of an American newspaper reader is 53, and 20 percent of them now say they read the “newspaper” on the Internet. Schooling and digital attraction seem to have a direct correlation. This young force is the foundation on which the traditional newspaper media can gain strength for survival. The trend here is clear – newspapers need to digitize – and do that fast. The mess in mass media meant that Newspaper Circulation Continues Decline, forcing Tough Decisions. The newspaper industry,already suffering from circulation problems, probably will show industrywide declines of 1% to 3%, - possibly the highest for daily newspapers since the industry shed 2.6% of subscribers in 1990-91.The biggest publishers may show the largest decline.The U.S. newspapers face the prospect of an accelerated drop in circulation. The slide is fueling an urgent industry discussion about whether the trend can be halted in a digital age and is forcing newspaper executives to rethink their traditional strategies. Warren Buffet, a longstanding director and shareholder of The Washington Post "sees no clear way for papers to stem recent circulation declines or turn Internet operations into highly-profitable enterprises". The future of newspapers is to change from a news organization into a news community.

The Power Of Network & Emerging Society

Just finished watching this lovely talk & interactive session by John chambers titled ,”The Power of the Network to Change the Way We Work, Live, Play, and Learn”.

John Chambers provides rich evidence of the way Cisco Systems has leveraged its core philosophy into a durable high tech success story. Chambers' basics:
- Catching market transitions;
- Supply an educated workforce capable of teamwork;
- Providing the appropriate infrastructure; and supportive government.

He sees that in this globalized world of ibusiness, working this wisdom into a viable marketplace plan "is like a multidimensional chess game". He takes the argument further to demonstrate how only the paranoid survive, and Cisco's top 10 network IT competitors from a decade ago are gone. The networking business is indeed a competitive business – look at the marketcap swing of big competitive players like Juniper & Sycamore. Chambers accentuates the fact that decades ago, Cisco was imagining a future where there would be "access anywhere anytime via any device," and that Cisco weren't just going to build routers and switches, but went into storage, wireless, and security." His customer focus punch - "if you listen to customers in the right way, they'll tell you what market transitions are going on." He says while Cisco may be proud to be an American company but jobs will go wherever the best infrastructure, innovation and supportive government is.

You have to give it to Cisco – for holding on to a tight leadership position where things can change more rapidly, for an irrepressible appetite for acquisitions(some may say killing the promising), ability to spot upstarts and quickly move in to acquire or compete with them, coming out of tough times so well and more importantly despite all the acquisitions and tough times maintaining the image and branding of showing only correct results (its not for cisco to be forced to rewrite books of accounts, or be vulnerable for SEC investigations or turnover of key executives on such suspected charges) – Cisco's record stand tall. While some may still point out about impending new typesof competition and a noticeable lack of spark in its new initiatives and arguably under leveraging acquired assets.

Japan : Quotable Quote

Bill Emmott, Editor of The Economist says quite brilliantly,“Growth countries do not always just continue growing–they produce the seeds of their own destruction. Echoing Jared Diamond's views on How Societies choose to fail or succeed, Bill writes that he felt it was time to say the opposite: that decline countries do not always decline, that out of their decline they can find the sources of their recovery. And that is what he reckons to be happening in Japan now: the sun is beginning to rise again.” Hopefully leaders in European capitals outside UK are listening.

Mary Meeker – Updated Internet Trends

Mary Meeker recently came with bullish finding about the internet scene in china. She presented the Updated Internet Trends at the Web2.0 conference(Courtesy :Peter Merholz). Some salient points:

- Global N. America share @ 23% of Internet users in 2005; was 66% in 1995
- S. Korea Broadband penetration of 70%+ - No. 1 in world
- China More Internet users < age of 30 than anywhere
- VoIP minutes in Denmark now exceed landline voice minutes

- The market cap of 5 leading Internet companies (Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo! And Yahoo! Japan) stood at $178B at the NASDAQ peak on 3/10/00 versus $261B now
- There are 1 billion Internet users in the world today but 2 billion mobile phone users – and Asia is ahead of the US in both categories with 36 % versus 23 % of users and 41% versus 11 % respectively
- 4 major computing cycles over past 50 years - Mainframe , Minicomputer, PC, PC Internet (Narrowband)
- In entering 2 most profound cycles ever - PC Internet (Broadband) & Mobile Internet, we see
1) Broadband becoming pervasive
2) Internet-enabled mobile devices becoming pervasive - in effect, becoming
small / functional computers
3) Global technology innovation may be at all time high
- Mobile-PC Becoming New Client-Server Model?
- First ten years (1995-2005) of commercial Internet were a warm up act for what is about to happen & the growth points shall be centered around
- Broadband
- Mobile
- User experience
- Search
- Personalization with more effective targeting
- User-generated content (RSS, blogs, reviews, video, images, audio…)
- Music
- Payments
- Ubiquitious connectivity
- Interactive entertainment
- VoIP & a few others
The marketcap and promise is really awesome - while the upside always appears to be better in any growing movement, it is clearly time for a reality check for closely assessing valuations and investment flows.

Managing Innovation Across The Extended Enterprise

In this age of outsourcing and partnering, the leaders of many companies have been asking themselves, “Should we outsource our innovation?” According to Tony Davila, Marc Epstein and Robert Shelton, writing in their excellent book, Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It and Profit From It, that’s the wrong question. The questions to ask are, “In which parts of our innovation should we partner? How much should we rely on partners, and how much should we take on ourselves?” Clerly, partnering is a smart innovation strategy. Gone are the days when large companies can rely entirely on their internal R&D labs to generate all of their innovations. Today, outside partners – including customers, universities, channel partners and others – are an essential part of the innovation-savvy organization’s portfolio, according to the authors:
“Partnering is a standard and potentially valuable part of the innovation toolbox. Reaching outside for additional resources, ideas, expertise and different perspectives can be highly valuable when combined with the internal ability to understand and use what your partners bring.”
They cite a number of successful examples of open innovation partnering structures. Bringing a new product to market is such a complex process today that it inevitably requires collaboration with many organizations, and that each partnership requires special care and handling to ensure that it operates effectively. We had been regular on this theme like as in here wherein we covered Von Hippel's view as in Democratizing Innovation wherein he argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses - the custom semiconductor industry is one example- that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it.
We also covered in respect of the tech industry that names like HTC, Flextronics, Cellon, Quanta Computer, Premier Imaging, Wipro Technologies,and Compal Electronics, are fast emerging as hidden powers of the technology industry & that they are the vanguard of the next step in outsourcing - of innovation itself. When Western corporations began selling their factories and farming out manufacturing in the '80s and '90s to boost efficiency and focus their energies, most insisted all the important research and development would remain in-house.
Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book A Whole New Mind, argues that the "left brain" intellectual tasks that "are routine, computer-like, and can be boiled down to a spec sheet are migrating to where it is cheaper, thanks to Asia's rising economies and the miracle of cyberspace." The U.S. will remain strong in "right brain" work that entails "artistry, creativity, and empathy with the customer that requires being physically close to the market." A richer perspective on innovation and outsourcing is available as part of the noteAsian Century Of Innovation.
Too often organizations are confronted with the question - how do you manage innovation and most importantly how do you to plan for it. Answers to these are at the core of the book outlined through set of methods and processes for managing and benefiting from innovation. The key element to have this ecosystem would be the soft culture that lay within the enterprise – this can force managing innovation as a planning process which operations can adhere to. A little would lead to more – both in spread and depth – that’s the key to build on innovative culture within enterprises. Supplementing and complementing core, support processes across the extended enterprise with shared values is the key to sustaining innovation and reap success.

The Rise Of Digital Indian

( Via ContentSutra) A study by JuxtConsult, an internet research consultancy finds:

- Digital is the new ‘symbol’ of emerging lifestyles among urban Indian net users
- Digital is increasingly dominating net users’ lifestyle choices.
- Digital friendly features top their gadget buying agendas.
- Netizens are fairly ‘integrated’ Indians in their media habits.
- More of them prefer to ‘invest’ rather than to ‘save’.
- They associate success very highly with ‘monetary’ success, but essentially look up to Indians as their role models.

For urban Indian net users, the digital age is slowly but surely dawning. They are using digital means of entertainment more and aspire to upgrade to a lifestyle that is digitally driven. Digital is increasingly dominating net users’ choice of passing time at home. Net surfing is the most preferred pastime at home already for one in every five net users. It is the third most popular pastime at home among them at 21 per cent and not far behind of the top two choices - watching television and listening to music. The three digital forms of entertainment together are dominating home lives. Social ‘interaction’ has to fit within this way of life, or else it gets left out. The lifestyle of net users is gearing up gradually towards a more ‘integrated’ and ‘digitized’ way of living. And that is increasingly determining not only how they spend time at home or when they go out, but also what products, value added features and brands they choose and prefer. The marketers who are using the net to reach to these consumers must catch these lifestyle trends to fit in and remain relevant, or they face the threat of being left out of the shopping basket of these netsumers.Amazing advancements pointing to impending transformation in lifestlye - we can expect more to happen in a country which has the largest population of young people in the world today.

Category :Digital India

Breaking The US Grip On The Net (Or Its Arrogance)

We recently covered the simmering discontent amongst the various governments for the US government's proposal to keep control of the root servers for the internet. The haughty stand taken by the US government forced me to endorse calls for multilateral control of the internet. Guardian now reports that the EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium. For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting on it. But with the internet now essential to various countries' basic infrastructure - the question of who has control has become critical. And the unwelcome answer for many is that it is the US government. The US wanted to retain indefinite control of the internet's foundation - its "root servers", which act as the basic directory for the whole internet. As the ownership issue got nowhere - the EU took a bold step and proposed two stark changes: a new forum that would decide public policy, and a "cooperation model" comprising governments that would be in overall charge. I agree with the concerns raised by Milton Mueller that an overseeing council "could interfere with standards & could create complications in surveillance mechanisms. No doubt that the idea of the council appears vague, but fact remians these can be fixed over time. I think that the refusal of the US to budge only strengthened opposition(Clearly the US bungled – it had natural leadership to hold control – it could have retained this through multiple but different means) , and now the world's governments are expected to agree a deal to award themselves ultimate control. It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce. The US may still be the best bet to hold control of the root servers - but it needs to invest in time and effrots to refine its approcah and take all others along -they have so far demonstrated fairness in running the system, but clearly the US needs to polish its approach in multilateral discussions.There are still dozens of unanswered questions but all the answers are pointing the same way: international governments deciding the internet's future. Clearly the internet will never be the same again.

Microsoft : Tough Challenges Ahead

We recently covered Robert young's view 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". While writing on the topic Future Of Microsoft, I wrote that Microsoft is lucky that currently there is no one alternative that can dislodge it in key arena's - starting particularly in the desktop segment. This blog also highlighted Bandwidth's likely impact on Microsoft. Knowledge @wharton looks at issues that make Microsoft scared of Google. The article points out that Google’s search engine is so ubiquitous that it is now a part of the lexicon of hard-core knowledge workers and casual web users alike. Google also has become a gateway to the Internet and taken steps to develop various desktop applications. All these raise the specter that Microsoft may witness the erosion of its control over the platform for the next generation of software application development. Microsoft recently announced a major reorganizationdesigned to streamline the company's huge bureaucracy and make the firm more nimble. Microsoft has also suffered the embarrassment of watching key employees defect to Google. Microsoft's success has been due in large part to its realization two decades ago that control of the operating system on personal computers would give it a great amount of leverage over PCs. Most companies in the 1980s saw the operating system as a pure commodity product, but Microsoft understood that it held the keys to the kingdom. This dominance of the Windows operating system means that if you're a developer of a major software application, you need to deliver a product for Windows. This means software developers must use the programming capabilities provided by Windows - its API." As dreamt by Marc Andreessen, the core platform could be moved to a higher level, & technology gurus could establish a web-based platform that runs in the browser and is written in the language of the browser rather than the language of the operating system.
The API of Google Maps lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages using JavaScript.Google is not the only company offering products and services that run on a web platform. Most of these applications are written in the web browser. Meaning these can work equally well on Windows, Mac or Linux. The operating system may eventually become the commodity that people in the 1980s thought it would be, and that's bad news for Microsoft.Kevin Werbach says as the Internet becomes more of an essential part of the computing experience and the network becomes a central link in the user's experience, that poses a challenge to Windows and software programs like Office, which has higher profit margins than Windows itself. Google for most part is OS agnostic and takes the control away from Microsoft. It's not clear how much Microsoft actually believes that the web is the platform of the future. The internet tidal wave is certainly going to shake up Microsoft in more than can be visualized.

Youth, Blogs & Publishing Revolution

Owen Gibson reports that the extent of the personal publishing revolution has been revealed by a Guardian/ICM poll showing that a third of all young people online have launched their own blog or website. A generation has grown up using the internet as its primary means of communication, thanks to an early grasp of online communities and messaging services as well as simple technology allowing web users to launch a personal weblog, or blog, without any specialist technical knowledge. On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant generation gap, and rather than using the internet as their parents do - as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online - most young people are using it to communicate with one another. In the US, as the Pew Internet study points out despite concerns about what teens may encounter online, the vast majority of parents believe that use of the internet is beneficial to their children. The report highlights that more than two-thirds of parents of online teens believe that overall the internet is a good thing for their child. Less than 5% of all parents think the internet is a bad thing for their son or daughter. This trend towards online communication has already manifested itself among music fans, with enthusiastic new communities forming around the latest bands often before they have even released a single or been heard on the radio. The explosion in cheaper high-speed internet access, which allows quicker access to music and video files and is typically charged at a flat monthly rate, has led to an upsurge in the time web users spend online. Some will have started personal sites with rudimentary personal information or centered around music or sport, while others have become mini publishing magnates before leaving school. Advertising is rapidly migrating online. Online advertising market will double in next four/five years.

Category : Youth

The US, India & Innovative Edge

Craig Mundie finds that the U.S. still has a tremendous innovation capability and is unlikely to lose it to countries such as India and China. He rightly points out that innovation in some large scale can not abruptly shift from one part of the world to another. As he sees it that Innovation will happen in India due to its well educated workforce but may lack the VC ecosystem and points out the Indian business needs new model of capital formation to sustain and grow the innovation track and finds challenges ahead for the country on commercializing these finds I think Mundie seems to have a certain pulse of the reality and the state of progress within India.
Most of the IT majors have invested heavily in Indian talent, residing both within the country and outside. I can say that qualified data suggests that atleast in the enterprise software space – lot of engineering and testing are happening in India and may in the days to come closely compete with the US in terms of the nature and volumeof work. Craig himsef travelled to visit Microsoft reseach unit setup in India -just one of the six spread globally. It is a fact that India is making a lot of strides in R&d. While it is generaaly well known that all knowledge related work would slowly move towards India,and that several western corporations in the high tech sector are already moving research work in considerable volume towards India,I was wondering what's the view on this from the indian research fraternity.Raghunath Mashelkar provides his perspective. He writes,India's R&D has the potential to reach the Top. His key thoughts run like this:
- Five years ago, he predicted: "The next century will belong to India, which will become a unique intellectual and economic power to reckon with, recapturing all its glory, which it had in the millennia gone by" and concludes that if India plays its cards right, it can become by 2020 the world's number-one knowledge production center, creating not only valuable private goods but also much needed public goods that will help the growing global population suffer less and live better. I wrote recently :
- While the potential may be high , India needs to learn from the US to focus on applied reseearch more aggressively.Reseach in the emerging areas of digital/mobile technologies, Silicon, Conductivity,Communication, Sensor systems, Bio-technology etc. Anything less than being seen as world leaders in innovation in each of these categories would not be seen a full fledged success.
- For all its proclaimed prowess, India has not been able to produce nobel prize winners- The academia, industry, government linkage looks very weak and needs to be improved several times over.
- India needs to attract lot of foreign talent to work out of India in cutting edge areas - India should be seen more easy to do business with and should host and participate in lot more scientific activities - conferences, exchange programs etc.
On balance, Craig is mostly right - The innovation pace in the Indian ecosystem has definitely got to improve – as I see it not so far moved fast enough to claim good positions in the Opensource,Ajax world – the rising waves- surely here capital is not the only deterrent. But can India do it - I think so - even offshoring - which has catapulted india into a global major in services is in large measures a bye -product of innovation !!

Category :Innovation, India

Google Feed Reader

Google launched Google Reader today.Google now joins the highly crowded RSS reader market – Google's recent moves clearly showed that this was coming as its recently personalized home page and sidebar apps had RSS/feed readers built inside them. Google says ,reader makes it easy to find and subscribe to online feeds to help users organize and stay up-to-date on the ever-increasing amount of web information they consume on a daily basis. Google says like any other offering,there’s a clean, easy-to-use interface and includes a comprehensive feed finder, multi-media feed displays, and algorithms that can assist users with automatic content prioritization, plus easy sharing capabilities with email and "blog this" features.RSS feeds besides Atom feeds would be fully supported. My first OPML import taken from Bloglines failed - not sure why - but the look and feel looks good. I guess it is an acceptable norm for mini failures (without any relevant error messages appearing) during beta or launch in this changing world. This is said to be part of Google's ongoing effort to combine Google functionality with personalized web content to make information more relevant and useful to users. With aleady launched Blog Search(this did not manage to win good reviews so far) and with blogger.com, Google has moved into the centerstage of the blogosphere. Clearly warning bells must be ringing in competing product boardrooms(garages!).

Update : The interesting question is what's next for Google - With Google Factory Tour and direct tour slides failing to provide specific inputs on what lay ahead of Google in the immediate future, I find this list of google subdomains registered quite insightful.

The Emerging Web 2.0 Wave

(Via Scott Rosenberg ) John Battelle while opening the Web 2.0 conference said that last year, the mood at the conference was simply, "We made it" - we survived the Internet industry's dark winter. This year, he said, it's more like, "Something really important is going on - let's not screw it up." O'Reilly added: "We are definitely running the risk of another hype cycle." The whiff of bubble-mania that was in the air at the conference's first edition a year ago has now blossomed into a heady eau de dot-com. it seems likely that a certain number of people will get rich, a certain amount of money will be wasted, several important new companies and technologies will emerge and some indeterminate number of investors will be fleeced. I agree - the key difference however is the clear sign thar some can genuinely make the cut in the Wweb 2.0 world and become really successful.

Changing Nature Of Software Rollouts

Jeremy Zawodny blogs about Jason Fried's sppech at Web 2.0 Conference. Jason notes that traditional software development is expensive, resource-intensive, and born of a Cold War mentality and advises to "think about one downing, instead of one upping, and underdoing competitors"–beating them with less. Protoype the app quickly. Don't build a ton of features, build a few really great deep features and then move on from there. Don't worry about up-front functional specs and fully documented requirements. Faster development and better products are the result. Say no by default. New features must beg to be added. Make sure there's a real demand for 'em. It's an agile development model.The hidden costs of "new." When you add a feature, it's re-training, updating docs, howto, training, may be the terms of serivce, and so on. Zdnet notes that he suggests 30 hours per week per person, which "forces you into building better products and being creative with your time." And, if you have less time, you have less time to think about abstractions, such as functional specification documents, which Fried characterized as a waste of time. "Instead, build the product and start from the user interface customer experience first; then wrap with the technology," Fried said. "The interface screens are the functional specification." Release a major update 30 days after launch. Have stuff planned for this, just keep in your pocked for the 30 day update. Builds momentum and good will with your users.
My Take: Use it while you build it. What a dreamy world - I would like to be part of this world.Of course well expressed and quite timely - These ideas may have appeal in the design and development of small utility like products – no doubt that these would influence all forms of software development- but enterprise implementations and industry strength software development have to respect the classical rollout – press releases like this not withstanding. Though I certainly note that multiple month rollout plans are becoming less and less and increasingly enterprise rollouts are becoming faster and faster. The direction is right but large scale transformation of the likes outlined by Jason in the enterprise may not happen that fast.

Patents In The New Age battlefield

The number of patents issued in the past 10 years has
risen to 958,000 in 2004 from about 642,000 in 1995, in part because of breakthroughs in digitization and the life sciences. In the United States to Europe and Japan, more patents were sought in the past 20 years than in the previous 100, evidence that protecting the rights to an idea is itself growing in importance. Patents "are becoming the highest-value assets in any economy," said Jerry Sheehan, an economist with the OECD in Paris. In the information economy of the 21st century, the most priceless resource is often an idea, along with the right to profit from it rather than natural resources. The right to profit from a breakthrough idea can be so valuable that the contest over the concept can be more decisive than the competition for consumers, as Sony and Toshiba demonstrate in their tug of war over whose next-generation DVD patents will win out, long before the discs come to market. One view is that,it is a mistaken belief that software patents actually protect large vendors. While covering Microsoft's recent frenzy of patents acquisition, I wrote that, it may be time to abolish software patents. Microsoft has filed very high number of patent applications in the US, which are under review currently - the pace of filing: 60 fresh, non obvious patentable ideas every week. Reason for sudden increase in applications - Microsoft says it finds that others file about two patents for every $1 million spent on research and development. If Microsoft was spending $6 billion to $7.5 billion annually on its R&D, it would need to file at least 3,000 applications. Abolishing software patents would be a very good thing,as increasingly the current system actually impedes the advance of software technology, at the same time that it works quite nicely to enrich patent holders.
The skyrocketing volume of patent applications makes it increasingly difficult to assess whether the underlying ideas are valuable, nonessential or even valueless. Critics also say the current system encourages using the courts to sue other firms for using ideas you registered first. Today, the process for capitalizing - either financially or socially - on innovation and creativity is staggering under the strain of a digital revolution of a speed and scale never seen before. Some hold the view that the technology companies are beginning to realize they have more to gain by releasing patents to the general public than by hoarding licensing income. The real problem is how to fashion a system that promotes innovation, not mere accumulation. If savvy entrepreneurs can manipulate the system by locking down valuable ideas, true pioneers will find it too tough to win rewards for their inventions. Some may take the view that imitation is the best form of flattery but the patent acquisition binge is bound to go up. Patents may well become an important index of popular technolgy adoption in the days to come.

The Growing Maturity Of Web Services

(Via IT Architect) IT architects trying to deploy a Web services-based SOA find that Web services lack security, assured delivery mechanisms, and the necessary underpinnings to implement complex business processes. These are changing as Web services start to grow up. While the standards for guaranteed delivery are still being defined, the industry has at least come to a consensus on how to proceed. Mechanisms for publishing and subscribing are only now being standardized, and standards aren't yet set for orchestrating Web services to define unified business logic independently of data access logic. SOAs that transcend organizational and departmental boundaries will create new network perimeters to secure XML services, authenticate users, and enforce policy-based security architectures. At the same time, the routing infrastructure will likely need to be made Web services-aware to prevent certain long-lived transactions-namely those that subscribe to information services-from overwhelming the data network. Such an enhanced routing network will also be better positioned to ensure QoS for other critical Web services
Paralleling the rise of SOAs has been the rise of Web services. Yet while Web services may be standards-based and less expensive to license and implement than Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) solutions such as IBM's WebSphere MQ and Sonic Software's SonicMQ, they're also known to suffer from significant performance problems not experienced by MOM-based solutions. Web services still rely on the text-based XML protocol, which means a natural language parser is needed to decipher and transform SOAP-based messages-a processor-intensive task. Various standard bodies are working to bridge this gap.. Prior to XML and Web services, requests were issued through messaging software that required data to be inserted into all requested fields. Many transactions do not require every field, however, forcing developers to insert null characters and unnecessarily expanding the message size. With XML, the data can be described, allowing it to only provide the required information in a request. This ability to label parts of the XML message has reduced the number of cycles needed to process those "truncated" transactions from two or three seconds down to a tenth of a second in known implementations. Enterprises who have deployed Web services report dramatic changes not only for IT, but in the very way the business works. The most commonly cited benefit is reduced IT costs & faster application development.Strategically, companies have also been able to streamline their business processes through Web services and SOA.

Video iPod Getting Ready?

The next logical step in iPod evolution may materialise faster. Industry analysts believe Apple is set to show off a long-awaited video iPod that can play music videos and other visual programming. For months, industry watchers have been looking for Apple to roll out an iPod that can play videos in addition to music - and thwart any incursions on its music-player market dominance from the likes of Sony Corp. Apple maintains a stranglehold on the market for portable digital music players, with about a 75% share. During its last fiscal quarter, Apple said it sold more than 6 million iPods, bringing total iPod sales to more than 22 million units. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said that a video iPod would definitely have a "wow factor" upon its release but that it would need to cost less than $400 and have a sizable library of downloadable videos available when it launches in order to avoid becoming a niche product.Munster, though, added that a video iPod would "open the door for future product innovations as the company continues to branch out" into other areas of digital and mobile entertainment products.

The Changing Nature Of Advertising

John C. Dvorak writes, Advertisements in special-interest publications generally have a better impact due to it s targeted nature of medium. Google has taken this targeting one step further by aiming ads at people who literally state an interest with a search term. While the mechanism isn't rocket science, - the amazing thing about it is that it took so long to develop properly. The earliest attempts at such advertising were offensive fake search results, if you can recall a few of those concepts that came and went. It's becoming more and more apparent that mass-market advertising is so sickeningly ubiquitous that it's become an offense to many. Half-hour TV shows have only 20 minutes of content, with the rest commercials and promotions. People flock to HBO to get away from this problem. The biggest feature of TiVo and DVRs is the ability to kill commercials. MythTV has a plug-in that when you are recording a show takes the commercials out of the base recording automatically. Radio is worse. Radio today is almost impossible to listen to because of the long commercial breaks. No wonder people are listening to podcasts more and more. While the ITV folks will go on about all its other interesting features, it's really about the shopping when you boil it down. The problem is that unless you are on a shopping channel, you are rarely shopping when you are watching TV. So the effectiveness of targeted ads on TV has to stink when compared with a special-interest magazine or the Internet. While the first ITV trials were done in the 1960s and this is as far as it's gotten. Google has actually made ads workable and nonintrusive overnight, while the advertising industry has just made their products more and more annoying and he predicts a bleak future for the industry. John C. Dvorak may evoke extreme reactions in certain segments of the industry -but clearly he has new ideas to discuss almost week after week - these pieces are also generally well researched.

The Return Of Henry Blodget

(Via Marketwatch) One of the Internet's most notorious figures has launched a Web log. Merrill Lynch's Internet analyst at the top of the bubble - later disciplined over conflicts of interest - is the man behind http://www.internetoutsider.com. "Wading back into the Web waters after a few years away," Henry Blodgett wrote,"Thanks in advance for including me." In his first posting, he suggests that Microsoft (MSFT) may well have to pursue a merger if it wants MSN to survive. There's also a link to a 12-page research report titled, "The Web War is Over - And Microsoft Lost.". Definitely an important addition to the blogosphere.

Browser Or Desktop Apps – The Next Rage

Jonathan Schwartz writes, "The rise of PC software changed the distribution power in business - the distribution network was no longer the physical distribution network, it was displaced by the logical distribution called Microsoft Windows". Consumers used what came bundled into Windows, and got a new slug of functionality each time you upgraded. With the rise of the internet, companies can now bypass Microsoft's legendary distribution power. From eBay to Google to opentable.com, the rise of industry standards allowed services to emerge on an open network platform
With Microsoft about to announce a series of launches in the next few quarters, Jonathan revisits the topic and finds that there are a couple of trends running counter to this looming force -
A. For example - the set top box never gets frequently upgraded & probably may never get upgraded, and suggests that at a certain level, convenience has more value to consumers than the hassle of upgrading, a teenager would be more endeared towards iPod Nano compared to a PC.
B. Users may give up desktop apps in place of browsers
I fully agree with Jeff's view that people use their desktop to create while they use a browser to consume. While there are a number of applications that fully make sense as a hosted app, the bulk of desktop productivity apps just don't make sense as hosted, especially as mobile computing becomes synonymous with desktop. All talk of citywide wi-fi coverage looks impractical when even cell signals are not stable across locations.

New Career: Expert Technology Witness

Expert technology witnesses help educate judges and other people in courtroom on the specifics of technology. Lawsuits over who can profit from ideas and innovation are increasingly a foundation of the technology industry. As a result, competition that once played out in the marketplace is now routinely carried on in the courtroom. That has touched off a quiet race among companies to assemble teams of expert witnesses - the technical specialists and technology-savvy economists who will help sway judge and jury on the intensely complex merits of a patent case. The demand is so great, that some, apparently, have turned it into careers, New York Times says
A thriving industry in expert witnesses, who are paid as much as $1,000 an hour, has become part of the fabric of the global patent system and the increasingly contentious legal combat that surrounds it. Federal courts now routinely have an early role in hearing expert testimony related to claims. In many cases, the federal courts, after holding preliminary hearings, reject a portion of a lawsuit, based on expert testimony, before it goes to trial.Pending patent legislation now under discussion by Congress could move much patent litigation into an arbitration system, where the process is more compressed and the role of expert witnesses is thereby reduced. This is clearly an important fraternity that needs to be nurtured. As the tech sector is seeing lot more action - several related affairs like mergers & acquisitions, IP infringements, security concerns all need a good support system for resolution in litigatious developments.

Time For Multilateral Control Of The Internet

The UN's WSIS Prepcomm in Geneva has ended on a divided note. The US Government's Ambassador Gross statement - The UN will not be in charge of the Internet - Period. had been countered with anearly unanimous global response from nations for some sort of government control of the Internet on a multilateral basis. A number of alternate proposals are on the table – mostly non –supportive of the indefinite continuance of unilateral US control of the root zone authorisation. For non Americans, the unilateral control of the root zone by the US is EQUALLY UNACCEPTABLE – PERIOD. There is no indisputable universally acceptable view that the security and stability may happen only if the root zone authorization lay with the US. Status quo is no solution –we have to create a new internet framework – one that is equitable and protective of the collective interest of all nations – the US included. Some rile at the practicality of transferring the root authorization – the fact is that if all in the world except USA were to switch to a new root,despite US opposition to such a move, it is clear that the other countries would probaby win. The informed US citizens may defy a US govt directive to register with its zone authorization framework. I think that the US is in a bind and plainly stupid in taking such public positions on sensitive issues like this – when enough safe & credible alternatives exist.

New Service-Oriented World Gets Easy VC Funding

The world is moving towards the model where enterprise application services will be delivered on-demand, and changing business, which means changing the applications, will just be a matter of adopting new services to support the new processes. VCs are investing there, in innovative start-ups who are able to exploit this trend.
The smart money is flowing towards a few areas, all SOA related:
- Firstly towards start-ups that are embracing the management and adoption of the service providers for use within the enterprise. Anybody who's building the infrastructure to create a flexible architecture that is able to leverage services inside the enterprise, or outside the enterprise.
- Second, towards start-up service providers themselves. The bad news is the ship has already sailed for CRM and ERP on-demand, but there are many innovative service provider plays still left, such as on-demand background checks, on-demand trading systems, etc
- Finally, those who have figured out how to apply security in this space. This means identity management capabilities in support of services. This does not mean traditional approaches to security warmed over for SOA.
I just look ahead and visualize and see Composite applications as the end-products of a service-oriented architecture. I am a big votary of composites Composites and its potential To Transform Enterprise Application Landscape. The attraction lay in the fact that embracing composite applications should lead to a new degree of alignment setting in rewarding business with immense benefits. Also traditional 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 and hence the development of composites shall be an attractive proposition for investment by VC's.

Web 2.0 – Hegemony Of The Amateur?

Nicholas Carr writes, The Internet is
changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening. In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies that alter the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

I think Nicholas carr has rightly picked up the holes in the Web 2.0 hype- but cut the rhetoric, I do believe in the idea of Web 2.0 and that its time has come – for the simple reason that the web has to see advancements and it has to begin to impact normal life in more ways & means that what it is today and I do not subscribe to the media vs blog battle and that the media is losing the battle – the media may be seen to be losing as like other industries it has not looked in terms of cutting costs through means like offshoring, globalization – theres no one single global newspaper, global TV channel – also it has faced maximum technology changes in its ecosystem. – but to say that the web has threatened it to the extent of killing is wrong – as this note shows, adaptation is the key to succeed – online Wall street journal earns more than print version. So in essence it is just good models always win – with or without Web 2.0.

Web Based Office Suite: Soon A Reality

Richard MacManus writes, "Long-term, the writing is on the wall for desktop office applications. He predicts that once the current crop of alpha and beta web-based office products reach a level of maturity, they will be ready to challenge Microsoft for the minds and pockets of consumers. One of the keys is achieving the level of functionality that Microsoft Office undeniably has. But there are also issues of online security and reliability that web-based apps will need to address, in time. Office apps are just too important to corporate productivity for CIOs and IT managers to entrust their businesses with web-based apps, without complete confidence in their functionality (ability to do the job efficiently) and performance (security and uptime). The time for the web-based office will come. When broadband is ubiquitous, web functionality is richer, issues of security and reliability have been put to rest, and most importantly of all - when Corporates are ready to make the jump. It may be few years down the track.
I fully agree with Richard's view. Way back this blog covered the point of view that Increasingly available bandwidth should scare Microsoft more than any other company. In a follow on note , I wrote,I am still baffled why Microsoft (other than for being selfish about its interest) as to why Microsoft is not considering providing a hosted solution - when enteprise application software vendors are beginning to provide and stepping up aggression in pushing. Microsoft may end up to be a palse shadow of its present –that would be sad indeed – but the risk is indeed high for Microsoft. Microsoft is lucky that currently there is no one alternative that can dislodge it in key arena's - starting particularly in the desktop segment..

The Top Brands

Forbes has published this years Top Brands through a careful screening for brand-owning companies that beat their peers in earnings growth and valuing the remaining 40 brands using a discounted cash flow model that also factored in the percentage of the business being driven by the brand. The brands whose values increased the most within their respective industries during the past four years are declared the best brands.

The Top 10 are:

- Apple
- Blackberry
- Google
- Amazon
- Yahoo
- Ebay
- Red Bull
- Starbucks
- Pixar
- Coach
Important point to note – 7 out of top 10 brands are from the tech sector and in fact the top 6 belong to the technology sector. Proof of technology's ever widening reach or fast growth /potential.While the selection method may look a little strange, the beyond the balance sheet approach seems to have a certain novelty.

Software Platforms As Marketlectures

Greg Gianforte, CEO of Rightnow Technologies writes, Platforms usually aren't platforms anyway. He sees these as "marketectures" that exist purely to rationalize bad acquisitions and adds that . one reason that vendors do the platform dance is that it generates hype and to create fear, uncertainity & doubt that are always useful when you lack a solid value proposition. With platforms, you make the third-party developers and integrators responsible for actually doing something with that platform with potential to collect a lot of cash and still have absolutely zero accountability for what happens to your customers afterwards. The reach for established platforms can be very high - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said they have 80,000 developers signed up for Amazon Web Services, plus "over 800,000 sellers on the Amazon platform and 47 million customers"


Greg sees alternative to platform madness in two forms : On demand delivery model and open source. He sees On demand eliminating the need to create a proprietary technology platform as a competitive differentiator. The IT stack only exists to support applications. By taking the entire IT stack (OS, DB, app server, web server, etc.) off the customer's hands, the on demand model renders identity of the stack's individual components meaningless. The applications themselves must be capable of being integrated, customized and scaled as required - but the underlying "platform" should not be the customer's headache . Open source commoditizes the stack. MySQL replaces Oracle. Linux replaces Windows. TomCat and JBOSS replace Webshpere and NetWeaver. ( My Note : None of this has ever happened with any one of my vast contacts across continents – Even Linux has replaced Unix/Solaris but not Windows in few cases) Vendors that are still trying to differentiate themselves in these commodity businesses are clearly headed in the wrong direction. Yet that is exactly what platform vendors continue to do.
Greg is right that software vendors should listen to their customers, deliver results, and charge a fair price for their products. Anything else is just a smokescreen for failure. I do not agree with Greg’s view on On-demand & Open source. Gartner recently released a report,On-Demand Services Won't Dominatethe Future of Business Applications and noted that despite market hype, these services are likely to account for less than 10 percent of business application use through 2010. My views on SaaS are available here and here & on open source here, here, here, here. I have enormous respect for Greg's views - he articluates things very well coming out of deep thought - I agree with Greg on his strong views of clever marketing parading as platforms, but his prescriptions as alternatives clearly fall short -far short at that and I do not see them rising i the near future to reach respectable heights.

Larry Ellison As The J.P. Morgan of Silicon Valley

Daniel Gross writes, Ellison is becoming the J.P. Morgan of Silicon Valley. Excerpts with edits and comments added:

Morgan helped rationalize the chaos of early 20th-century capitalism. At the beginning of the last century, the United States emerged from a boom-and-bust cycle. Urbanization, the rise of immigration, and the advent of new technologies spurred businesses to create a great deal of excess capacity: in railroads, telegraphs, steel, cars, shoes, you name it. The result was a slew of bankruptcies and profit-killing competition. Morgan used his capital to merge competitors into giant unitary entities like AT&T and U.S. Steel. Less ruinous competition, more profits.
In the last few years, Larry Ellison has emerged as a slightly grizzled survivor, the rational, cool-thinking consolidator who arrives after the storm to buy out the victims.Ellison is now performing a similar function for the highly fragmented software industry. Fueled by venture capital, public investors, and insatiable demand for information technology, thousands of software companies rushed into the market in the 1990s. Then came the meltdown, and the enterprise software business—applications like databases and inventory-management software that help companies run their businesses more effectively—shifted into lower gear. Hundreds of companies, many of them well-capitalized, were left to fight bitterly over a market that was smaller than anticipated. Ellison saw more clearly than other CEOs that software wasn't so different from railroads or automobiles before it. Software may have seemed the ultimate New Economy business—clean, with low distribution and manufacturing costs, and infinitely scalable—but it behaved like an Old Economy one. For Ellison, No industry remains in this fragmented form. The railroad industry didn't, the automobile industry didn't, nor will the computer industry. There'll be far fewer companies. For example, there aren't that many auto companies in the world. There doesn't need to be, nor will there be thousands of software companies. To Ellison, the solution was obvious. Make like Morgan. Remove or eliminate some of the competition by consolidating. After all, it's tough to win customers away from rivals, because companies despise switching software. So, why not just buy the competition? Oracle, with its cash hoard and relatively strong stock, was a natural consolidator.
Every reader of Soft War knows how inscrutable Larry's mind is and I still beleive that he would be judged more sharply ten years from now on - the sharper definition that emerges then would characterise him a lot better. One CIO told me that he is ever worried as to which side of the bed he would get up that morning as it may influence the day - I have also heard some a top business guy saying that he need not be worried so long as he is invested in oracle products and he is insulated from external developments in the marketplace. I have some views about the bruteforce acquisitons that he is announcing here and here, here, but there is no denying the fact that no boby could move in as swiftly, boldly and make clean sweep of acquisitions - after all siebel when acquired had more than two billion dollars in cash and thousand of customers to count but could not gather the courage to make bold sweeping moves like what Larry and co could do.

Web 2.0 & The Guru Of The Participation Age

We recently covered the Web 2.O Meme Map published by Tim O'Reilly. Steven Levy has an excellent profile of Tim. He identifies Tim O’Reilly’s recipe for success as laying in Harnessing collective intelligence. Tim has come out with a detailed article titled Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, an exhaustive notes on the web2.0 evolution and future direction. Tim concluded that Web 2.0 shall be characterised as:

- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
The key themes may be summarized as being able to expose more and more of web services, harnessing collective intelligence & leverage the long tail. Wired also has a list of what’s on Tim’s Radar:
- Real & Virtual World Blurs
- Ruby On Rails
- Geography Based Mash-ups
- DIY
- VoIP Disruption

News & Generation ASAP

The new Associated Press service for twenty- and thirtysomethings is winning rare reviews. First-person stories behind the story make up only a fraction of asap's content. In its first few hours of public access - it was officially unveiled at noon on Monday - it featured an interactive map explaining an ownership battle over a copy of the Bill of Rights, a photo gallery set to audio, depicting the changes to New Orleans' French Quarter after Hurricane Katrina, and constantly updated spot news pieces, adapted from the AP wire to cater to the asap audience. asap emphasizes interactivity, news as an experience and challenging the status quo of news presentation. The site comes at a time when the news industry is grappling with the question of how to engage young readers. Repeated findings emphasized the fast that the young group can be engaged by fundamentally rethinking news choices and the way news and advertising content are presented. For some of asap's stories, that means tying audio commentary to photos of a news event. For others, it may include interactive maps, blogs or video clips of a scene surrounding what's reported on the wire. asap is also about brevity. asap new site has a dedicated staff of 20, Anthony says, but its news pool includes all of the writers and photographers employed by its parent wire service. Contributions from AP correspondents - in written, video, audio and picture form – will make up 40 percent of asap's content. Some of that will be first-person, story-behind-the-story commentary by AP writers and photojournalists in the field. A good strategy of nicheification in the media sector.

Category :Generation ASAP

The Great Con Game & Rip -Off

Scobeleizer points to an interesting post by Triston Yates on an important theme - service providers forcing more and more customer spend. Tristan Yates writes about his first hand experience as to how US federal defense contractors growth helps big US headquartered service providers make tonnes of dollars - not deserved in this instance. The mega defense contractor referred in here - hired IBM for rolling out a knowledge management project. Tristan writes that IBM consultants showed jazzy & well structured presentations and forced good telecoms promising the best in design and development of the KM portal - their initial consultants deputed worked hard to make the vendor selection process ineffective and veered the choice only towards IBM suite of products. He adds that subsequently IBM components were replacing many of the other vendors' components in the planned architecture. The high funda sale meant that the local IT team got jittery in involving in the implementation – that meant more merry for IBM – it recruited local consultants recruited from online job sites and sold them to the defense contractor at 300 % plus margins and they were blowing quarter million dollars a week . As against getting IBM experts on the job, the company got a bunch of java programmers in return. IBM stayed for more than seven months,at a burn rate of quarter million dollars a week. Tom highlights that besides the services burden, - there were the licensing and support fees for other IBM components. IBM, which had promoted itself to lead vendor and integrator, had overpromised, overcharged, and underdelivered, charges Tristan. The end result was an overly complex enterprise portal with a few off-the-shelf portlets and a few integrated applications. Many application integration efforts had to be abandoned. It’s unlikely that those apps will ever be in the portal, and the jury is still out on whether the portal will be a success. None of those slick knowledge management presentations seen at the beginning of the project bore any resemblance to the outcome, and that original consultant was nowhere to be found. As IBM is seen as the vendor with the strongest capabilities, at least on paper, they were seen by the execs as the lowest risk choice – helping IBM to sell its servies, software & hardware. His contention is that these are commoditised product/offerings and do not deserve very high prices.

I do not have any knowledge about the defense contractor or the consultants engaged in here – but I have seen / heard several stories like this in the past involving almost all major big IT service providers ( multi million dollar fiascos engineered mostly by service providers marquee names) – directly from customer executives and end users. A few things run in my mind:

- There’s no shortcut to good vendor selection process, due diligence in selecting the right IT solution elements and service provides.
- Big names need not necessarily deliver the best (while on paper they may be the best equipped) –Insist on pilots and good references – make sure that the team assembled is right and balanced.
- Defense contractors/ big IT spenders need to look at broadbasing their IT vendor base – While security concerns may be well founded – they may be shooting themselves in their foot – by looking just at US headquartered firms (Policy makers look at it – there are only US headquartered or Europe headquartered or Indian headquartered enterprises – not European or Indian vendors – all are by nature global in their operations)
- Leverage offshoring - Defense contractor spendings are directly/indirectly a drain on US tax payer – there is not valid reason ( except in exceptionally few cases) – thorough background check of those involved in engagement would provide reasonable insurance)

Many times CIO’s are carried away by big spends, jazzy initiative names – its time the industry helps them with a framework to measure true earned value of IT initiatives – may be all big initiatives should begin to report about such measures across industry –managing by aggregates (which is what most other measures do) – completely masks the complexity and variety of IT spending and perceived returns.

GEMAYA : Next Generation Online Conglomerates

There’s a new sort of Internet colossus on the rise, and it is poised to wreak havoc on on large service industries across the world. As Internet companies rapidly expand their services, they may become the biggest rivals to retailers, banks, and telecoms worldwide. David Kirpatrick writes,despite the fact that the first phase of the Internet era, widely expected to displace the brick-and-mortar retailers - did not exactly throw such entities out of business, this time it’s not just retailers who face daunting challenges, but service companies too, and in some of the biggest - and most lucrative industries. The emerging small group of integrated online commerce conglomerates broadly aim not only to replace shopping malls, but also TV networks, telecommunications, and the banking system, among other services on a global scale. The list of contenders named GEMAYA: Google, eBay, MSN, Amazon, Yahoo, and AOL are moving towards this. Each has, in one way or another, the ambition to be a one-stop shop for all kinds of consumer commerce and services. Google, and possibly Microsoft and others, will attempt to develop their own online payment services to match eBay’s PayPal. And eBay will almost certainly morph PayPal over time into something that looks more and more like a multi-functional consumer bank. David predicts that Google, and probably others among this net colossi, will also eventually develop what are, in effect, banks. Yahoo and Google, for example, are moving quickly to add video news and entertainment to their offerings. Each is coming at this set of combined opportunities from its own strength—Amazon and eBay from shopping and commerce, Google from search and advertising, MSN from communications and news, AOL from instant messaging and entertainment content, and Yahoo from personalization, communications, and shopping. Probably they’ll never all offer exactly the same variety of services. The more it can be analyzed the more clear it is that the signs are clearly pointing in this direction. The more pervasive broadband usage is among the local population, the bigger and more wide-ranging the challenges may be to smaller, local companies, and the faster those challenges may be felt. As Zoli points out that all of a sudden all these local businesses are competing with a much-lower-cost provider thousands of miles away whose customers reach them only digitally. So as PayPal or Skype or eBay or Google get bigger, they become harder to compete with. While I agree with David's optimism, it would take several decades even in this internet age for this to become anywhere near real - the churn that this could bring about in the US would be far more than that can be felt outside the US - This would be the biggest test for these entities to win first before making impact outside of the US. Also the reigning concern about these conglomorates to justify the marketcap and the cashflow - ability of these firms to scale up to comply with myriad of local regulations across the physical borders.But the concern raised herein, the potential US dominance coupled with the US Governments desire not to lose control of the internet would certainly raise several concerns globally.

Mobiles As Social Phenomenon

Despite all its fancy image , at its core the mobile phone is about connecting people with other people, so they can do business, get to know each other, or enjoy entertainment together, writes the eWeek article. Some look at mobiles evolving into "social computers." Others believe that cell phones - especially when they break up the quiet of polite company with their often-jarring ringtones - are mostly just plain rude. The mobile are just wireless telephones; they're configurable, but they can't compute anything and may become a catalyst to extend the reach of people to other people, in terms of location and context. Not only are people joining fantasy sports leagues, dating services and online group-centered competitive games in record numbers, they're also signing up for "wallpaper" and ringtone clubs, camera-phone photography groups, travel-discussion groups, soft-porn groups—you name it, there's probably a company or special-interest group that will fit your personal interests. The common bond: cell phone.
Digital Chocolate founder/CEO Trip Hawkins, a mobile device content guy, thinks cell phones are not "about content now, -(They're) about (making) new excuses to engage in social context." He points out that about 96 percent of the world's wireless revenue streams from the killer app—voice transmission—and that the simplest communication applications are usually more than enough to satisfy users. This is the cell phone at its social best, he said. Almost all successful online services today - "Text messaging, e-mail, chat, voice, personalization of services – all these are about people connecting with old friends, meeting new friends, and how they want themselves to be represented". The old model was that people grew up in small villages and enjoyed a tremendous amount of personal interaction throughout their lives. Now we live in far-flung houses and apartments—most of us in big, impersonal cities—and we spend a lot of time in our cars and at our work desks alone, so we're starving for personal interaction. Hawkins is at his best (full of insight, I should add) when he concludes that an awful lot of human beings are not happy, and are not sure why, and are bored and lonely. Too often people are popping sedatives and there is a latent need to interact and be entertained constantly – Mobiles and related services provide the perfect platform for this.

The Soft Track As The Hardest To Manage

The development of a software solution is less about technology and more about people. User involvement in XP and agile development, user-centered development, usage centered design all exemplify changing perspectives about software solution. There is an increasing realization that the most important success factor for any software development team is the people that comprise it. Human centered software development may be applicable along many different levels. Whether open source or proprietary, all efforts are are all focused along similar lines. Kevin highlights that the obstacles that we confront involve our inability to understand what users want, translate their wants into a functional and usable system, and manage our teams to deliver what we believe needs to be built.I disagree with him when he writes that licensing or technology may not play a role in these dysfunctions –not true – to a certain degree all these influence adoption. I deal routinely with people with varied cultural, linguistic affilations – I can see that the inherent features of software also influence successful adoption. In any software rollouts the people problems rank as among the most important factor to be tamed .I may add that if we decompose the risk perceptions around projects –half of them may revolve around people. Afterall in any transformation engagements, the soft track is always the hardest one to finish.