The World is Flat wins the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award. Thomas Friedman has a vision for the final edition of The World is Flat: anybody will be able to update it. He is looking at actually turning the book into an open-source product - like putting it up on the web like Wikipedia and let people manage it. It may be a concern for its publishers besides the risk that opponents of the book or its message about the benefits of globalisation will try to hijack the wiki edition. But it is a vision that is perfectly in tune with the picture of a globalised and interconnected world that Mr Friedman outlines. The rapid evolution over the past year of what is known as "Web 2.0" - a flowering of internet companies and strategies, based on the growing availability of cheap or free software online - has made it possible for budding entrepreneurs and big companies to experiment with strategies without having to "bet the firm".
A version of the book that can be constantly updated may also be the only way to guarantee that it remains current. The book's premise is that, at the beginning of this century, the world entered a new phase of globalisation, based on disruptive social, political and technological events ("flatteners", as Mr Friedman calls them) during the latter part of the 20th century.In this flatter world, companies and individuals will be able to collaborate and compete more successfully, whatever their size and wherever they are. Those that fail to adapt will suffer, he says. Mr Friedman says the evolution towards an interconnected, flatter world has accelerated since the book was completed nearly a year ago.This month, for instance, the audio version of The World is Flat became the top-selling podcast album on Apple's iTunes audio downloading site, says the author.He notes that when he started this book in March 2004, podcasting didn't exist.
Innovation is not happening as much as it should in the enterprise software industry- Even on-demand is seen in some quarters as an extension of what was getting done in the past. Most of us feel strongly about it– read Vinnie Mirchandani's perspective on this- similar is the case in the opensource world as well. Most of the software sale that we get to see are incremental sales/minimal functionality extension – we do not necessarily see new waves in adaptation of enterprise software. I strongly believe that SOA & composites would force structural changes and unleash innovation whereby 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. Grady Booch points out that in the enterprise space, a considerable amount of innovation is happening in two dimensions: - on the edges of the enterprise and - in the spaces between enterprises He sees that on the edges, energy is being spent in frameworks that live above middleware (domain-independent ones, such as Ajax, as well as domain-specific ones, aligned around specific industries) and those that work in conjunction with devices [classical mobile devices and devices with RFID tags. In the spaces between, there is the formation of systems of systems (both legacy and new systems). In the context of such Web-centric systems, services have proven to be an essential mechanism in both dimensions. On the edges, services deliver behavior in a manner that transcends the underlying technology. In the spaces, services provide a powerful means of semantically rich communication between systems of various kinds. On the edges, services deliver behavior in a manner than transcends the underlying technology. In the spaces, services provide a powerful means of semantically rich communication between systems of various kinds.
The innovation that is happening in the personal computing space is amazing. Brian Livingston points to the fact that the days when Web browsers made you wait just to update the screen are ending. Today a Web page can be just as responsive as any program you run on your PC. The biggest upheaval AJAX will cause will be new powers in word processing, especially for documents that different people must write, edit, and approve. Microsoft Word has long enabled co-workers to insert comments into draft documents. And collaborative environments such as Microsoft's SharePoint Services are making possible "shared workspaces" so multiple individuals can simultaneously edit documents safely. None of these methods, however, are as simple to set up as a standard Web browser, which can quickly access a file from anywhere in the world. That's the promise that AJAX brings to the party. InetWord is a Web-based way to efficiently edit HTML files and office documents. One of InetWord's most serious competitors is another AJAX tool named Writely. In its current beta stage, Writely allows anyone to register for a free account and start uploading files. The document's creator can give editing privileges to any number of other people. The service is optimized for editing HTML files, but you can also upload Microsoft Word and OpenOffice files, which are converted on the fly into HTML format.Best of all, editing by multiple individuals is supported by Writely in real-time. There's no risk that edits made by one person can wipe out the changes made by another. InetWord focuses on sharing document with yourself and by hosting a file, allowing the user to edit from multiple locations, while Writely is more focused on dynamic collaboration. Writley shall be word what hotmail was to outlook. If you work with other people to create, edit, and approve documents, Web-based applications like Writely now offer an alternative to in-house content-management systems. Look at the comparison post on online word processors.
Gamasutra thinks that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of a major era in world history. It may take fifty years, it may take a hundred, but the age of copyright is drawing to a close. This is not about the google controversy. While not sure if a world without copyrights is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s inevitable. With Guttenburg’s printing press, the concept of intellectual property was born. Over the next two centuries or so, copying books went from being high praise to being a crime. When photocopiers became commonplace - when enough people feel that it’s OK to do a thing, that thing ceases to be wrong in their own cultural context. The Fair Use doctrine evolved with respect to copyright materials. The law changed. It’s now OK to photocopy parts of books for educational, non-commercial use. In effect, the authors and book publishers had to give some ground in the face of the overwhelming tide of public opinion. There’s no intrinsic reason why someone should continue to get paid for something long, long after the labor they expended on it is complete. Architects don’t get paid every time someone steps into one of their buildings. They’re paid to design the building, and that’s that. This is the age of new techniques. Travesties like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act don’t promote the progress of science; they actively discourage it. So do software and biotechnology patents. The patent system was intended to allow inventors to profit for a limited time on particular inventions, not to allow huge technology companies to put a stranglehold on innovation by patenting every tiny advance they make. The lawsuits, the spyware, the DMCA: these are the death struggles of an outdated business model The urge to create is too strong in all of us, and consumers will always be willing to pay for novelty and for excellence. These methods may not matter. It may mean that nobody gets mega-wealthy any more. What it does mean for sure is that the giant dinosaurs that currently dominate the distribution channels had better learn to adapt or die. Nicholas Carr highlights that far from experiencing disintermediation, business is undergoing precisely the opposite phenomenon - hypermediation. Transactions over the web, even very small ones, routinely involve all sorts of intermediaries, not just the familiar wholesalers and retailers, but content providers, affiliate sites, search engines, portals, Internet service providers, software makers, and many other entities that haven't even been named yet. These middlemen need to look at new models - It's no coincidence that the most profitable internet businesses - eBay, Google, Yahoo - play intermediary roles. They've realized that, when it comes to making money on the web, what matters is not controlling the ultimate exchange (of products or content or whatever) but controlling the clicks along the way. That's become even more true as advertising clickthroughs have become the main engine of online profits.
Think Secret speculates that Apple's Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.Following the expectation that apple iBook may host intel chips, comes the next one - The new Mac mini is also said to sport a built-in iPod dock, a feature that was scrapped from the Mac mini Apple first introduced one year ago. The Mac mini may be positioned as the living room command center. Apple’s Front Row 2.0 and Apple's DVR application are likely to be a "TiVo-killer." Apple's media center intentions have become startlingly clear in the past year since Apple first delivered the Mac mini and customers first started connecting the system to home theaters and installing it in automobiles. With the hardware, software, and iPod sales behind it, Apple now seems poised to firmly plant its footprint in living rooms. The Digital Home and Digital convergence are hot topics – these are expected to change the lifestyle of people atleast in rich countries to start with and more importantly open up new opportunities for business in allied areas. Intel envisions that PCs will be “all-in-one hi-fi devices”, “entertainment PCs”, and “vaults” for digital content.Intel's vision is that consumers will start to use their PCs at home to download, store and manage films, songs and games, in order to transmit all this fun stuff wirelessly to TV screens and stereo speakers throughout the house. consumer take-up of digital technology in the home is at a 'tipping point' which could lead to a dramatic increase in sales for converged devices that integrate video, audio and computer technology. The industry has talked up the idea that computers will finally move from the home office to the living room for many years, but Ballmer said he thinks this theory may be about to become a market reality. After all the the critical mass has to come from the PC, or a next-generation video device. Positioned as the mac for the masses – clearly a major change in direction is bound to happen. The Mac Mini clearly has a glorious future.
Alex Bosworth writes, as the software industry changes from shrink wrapped product development to a service model, not only does the model for developing and distributing software change, but also the model for how a company must conduct itself changes.He points out that every search, every click, the time spent lingering on a photo, the choice of wording and revision in an essay, the pattern of trips taken, the record of purchases made are all easily captured and stored forever by a web-service. Unlike the user of a packaged software product, there is very little control a user of a web-service has over this data collection. GMail may appear to delete email when 'trashed', but closer inspection reveals no firm guarantee the email ever disappears from their data centers, and certainly not at the time a user clicks delete forever. Detailed personal data that lasts lifetimes, bits don't have a built in expiration date. He points to TiVo users complaining about about embarrassing profiles. Software services have increasing potential to profile and people on a much grander scale than what television a person might want to watch.Rogue nations can profile and target people for imprisonment or reprisal based on web-service data mining as Google has the potential to deliver personalized advertisements. Social software offers a new degree of concerns, as these aim to graph your entire network of friends and acquaintances. Suddenly services don't simply know as much information about you as you release yourself, they also know what your friends think about you and information about them as well. Social software is at such an early stage, it's hard to think of all the abuses this information could create, however abuses of this information trust already exist. Sony slipping DRM rootkits on their CDs can erase a lifetime of good will. The only way to restore or create trust is by over time and repetition creating a pattern of ethical decisions. Look at RFID privacy related issues, online tracking facilities, spyware – we are indeed in a cocooned web world. James Governor points to the customer respect report and notes that IBM, SAP, Microsoft and not one of the Web 2.0 leviathans, Google, Yahoo, eBay is on the list as "excellent" & wonders whether or not customer respect is not an essential part of a succesful online business model!!.Surprising considering the fact that an the list looked different an year back. The most important thing for services and users of services to realize is that trust is an extremely valuable commodity that is hard won and easily lost.
Charles and Louis-Vincent Gave, along with Anatole Kaletsky have written a brilliant and easily read 150 page book called Our Brave New World. John Mauldin highlights some important points made in the book : Until proven wrong, the trend of tech-dominated NASDAQ is higher, while the trend of the GM's, Ford's, Alcoa's, US Steel's and the like are downward in broad terms. The 'platform' companies sell high margin design; the others sell low margin manufacturing. In the post-industrial age, we need to own the former and to be short of the latter. The book echoes the simple understanding that, in the words of Lord Keynes, 'The facts have changed, and when the facts change, we change.' The 'facts' of the world have indeed changed, and we want to own design firms, software firms, pharmaceutical firms, firms that sell high end services, companies like IKEA (if it were public) that sell high end goods but have all of the manufacturing hoved off to the cheapest place of manufacture and can drive costs down while holding margins high. The facts have changed and we need to understand that." "Platform companies" are the wave of the future. We are not talking here about tese type of platform companies.The platofrm companies referred in this post are companies which design and market, but let someone else manufacture. Thus they have lower capital costs and are less subject to economic downturns, as they have no factories to shut down or workers to lay off. There are no legacy costs and no unions to fight. If anything, given the nature of the global economy, there aren't going to be many products insulated from the global pricing structure - even services. So, platform companies are the new growth companies - not by virtue of what they sell, but by virtue of how they are organized. This means we shall see more & more of product development in software gettingoutsourced. So it’s the age of solectron’s and competitive advantage comes in terms of flexibility, speed of response , customer delight – all pointing to the supremacy of business models and the ubiquitous nature of processes.
We covered the advancement internet reach surpasses the reach of the radio.Chris Anderson says he does not read mainstream publications and anything relevant to his interests therein will be anyway pointed to by his regular blog reads .He does not think that the mainstream media value is lost; but external editors in the form of network of bloggers do a good job. He sees his job as an editor to be one of a pre-filter - & the bloggers are post filters. So mainstream editors just control part of the attention chain, but the wise crowd controls the rest. The blogs that have earned their way to my feed list are doing is adding value to commodity information in atleast three ways: 1. Add value with a unique perspective or analysis. 2. Add value with unique information. 3. Add value by providing a unique filter/lens on content available elsewhere. The magazines that have a place in this world, are those that offer something one can't get elsewhere & do one or more of the following: 1. Add value with unique perspective or analysis (above and beyond what's already out there). 2. Add value with unique information (often obtained through the privileged access still afforded the mainstream media). 3. Add value with unique presentation, especially using immersive forms that don't work well on-screen, such as long-form narrative and lavish packaging (including photography, infographics and other design elements). While discussing the the future of news in the Covergence, RSS And iPod Age & the futue of newspapers, we emphasised the point that the future of newspapers is to change from a news organization into a news community. As we noted here, it is clearly the case that Internet's distinctive role in politics/business has arisen because it can be used in multiple ways. Part deliberative town square, part raucous debating society, part research library, part instant news source, and part comedy club, the Internet connects voters to a wealth of content and commentary about politics/business. After all the new forms of media are part of emerging trends.
I digged this – A visual sense of various scales as published here.
- 1.616x10-35 m 1.616x10-35 m - the planck length,(the smallest measurement of length that has meaning)
- 1x10-15 m 1x10-15 m - one fermi
to - 12,756.2 km 1.27562x107 m - diameter of Earth at its equator
- 26,000,000 kly 2.4x1026 m - distance to farthest known object (quasar SDSS_1044_0125).
There are several more listed herein. Sometimes these data can give us so much to reflect upon - the amazing variety that we encounter in somthing as direct as scale. Notice here - most of the bewidering scales that are talked here are right in the realms of nature - clearly nature has no match.
We recently covered Digg trying to catch up with Slashdot in terms of traffic. Alexa now reportshigher traffic for Engadget and Digg compared to Slashdot. Digg started with the notion of how to leverage the collective mass of the Internet in various ways: applying it to content, using it to rank content, using it to make content more palatable to the masses. Automated systems take time to crawl the net. Editorial systems have the human factor. They may decide they're not interested that day, or they'll do it tomorrow. In Digg’s case, there's no barrier.The larger the critical mass of users and the collective wisdom applied to digg, the better and more relevant the stories get. There are systems set in to prevent abuse of digging. Coupled with a unique ranking system and power of collective wisdom, Digg gets more powerful. The founders note that Digg started with an application, and are using components of social networking to expand the value of the site. In the case of social networking, it serves one very distinct purpose – introduction.Truly amazing story.
Chris Anderson points to a well researched paper by David Blackburn on the economics of P2P file-sharing,which amongst other things finds that it does indeed depress music sales overall. But the effect is not felt evenly. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading. Blackburn finds that it is unrealistic to believe that the effects of file sharing are constant across all artists as the costs and benefits of file sharing differ with the ex ante popularity of the artist. This suggest that ex ante unknown artists are likely to see more positive overall effects of file sharing than ex ante popular artists are. By adopting an estimation procedure which allows for the effect to vary according to measures of artist popularity, file sharing has had strong effects on the sales of music. In particular, new artists and ex ante relatively unknown artists are seen to benefit from the existence of their songs on file sharing networks, while ex ante popular artists suffer for it.And while the average effect across artists is essentially zero, the average effect on sales is not zero, as more popular artists not surprisingly tend to have higher sales. Thus, this paper finds that file sharing has had large, negative impacts on industry sales and that the RIAA’s strategy of suing individual file sharing users has led to reduced file sharing activity and sizeable increases in sales. Furthermore, the differential effect of file sharing on the sales of artists of different levels of ex ante popularity has led to a dramatic shift in the distribution of sales among artists, as new and less popular artists are now selling more records while star artists have seen their sales shrink, compacting the distribution of outcomes). Chris points out that Blackburn does a little mathematical magic to simulate what would happen if file-trading were reduced by 30%. Artists who are unknown, and thus most helped by file sharing, are those artists who sell relatively few albums, whereas artists who are harmed by file sharing and thus gain from its removal, the popular ones, are the artists whose sales are relatively high. The Long Tail implications of this are pretty clear. For the majority of artists further down the tail, free distribution is good marketing, with a net positive effect on sales. Which is yet another reminder that the rules are all too often made to protect the minority of artists at the top of the curve, not most artists overall. To me, it looks like lot more financial sophistication is needed to get better returns on albums – we need to note that P2P file trading is not zero cost & the record companies ought to look for a different pricing model – charge premium for big names and sell at higher prices in the peak season ( Blackburn notes that the sales of recorded music appear to follow decay patterns and seasonality patterns similar to those of motion pictures) – the first few weeks upon launch & as a comment in anderson’s blog noted , there is a greater case for record companies to look into dramatically cutting the prices for tracks in the long tail. Does the same apply to Bollywood films - not directly as Bollywood films have different economic models - but the longtail patterns are distinctly felt. .
The Page Rank model(the closest parallel that I can think of in terms of reach and power is the Coke’s original formula) is indeed a very powerful framework – the benefit of which is felt by all in the web world but little understood. Earlier I covered John Battelle writing about the 1996 Sergey and Page's crawler configured from stanford homepage working outward. Inspired by citation analysis, Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page's rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge - you not only have to count a particular page's links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. Together, Page and Brin created a ranking system that rewarded links that came from sources that were important and penalized those that did not. Page and Brin's breakthrough was to create an algorithm - dubbed PageRank after Page - that manages to take into account both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of the linking sites. I digged and stumbled upon the original Stanford presentation authored by Larry Page, a piece of history that Stanford is clearly proud of that includes the basis of the Google PageRank algorithm. This is a fascinating read for anyone who has ever been interested in Search Engines & Optimization. The slide show in simple terms explain valuable information about how page rank is determined (do not miss the notion that a link transfers page rank depending on how many links are outgoing from the original page). Also note the simplicity with which it is explained – this has become a google trait for years to come. In practical terms, the relationships governing pagerank are best captured here@ prweaverblog. Some may find the pigeonrank mechanism interesting but am sure that all those interested would find the detailed paper on Pagerank computation - the authentic one, lot more interesting and for some inspiring - how small ideas & brilliant execution can help grow business worth several hundred billion doallr marketcap or own private aircraft.
Bill Gates in an interesting interview with Informationweek talks of a various issues centered around Microsoft Research. Excerpts with some edits and comments: Microsoft research has always had a pretty broad set of activities and are growing ( Microsoft is filing for 60 patent applications a week till recently) with the addition of the fourth center in India. Gates claims, Microsoft will actually have more than matched the kind of relevance that Google can deliver in a short time ( I wonder what he is referring to and how is it measured, given Google’s dominance.) & notes that the role of Microsoft Research in that has been phenomenal. He notes that there's so much data in the sciences that without the kind of software management that we have, both in our products and in our research, that they won't be able to make the rapid advances that they should. Nowhere is that more true than in biology, life sciences. The ability to connect these data sources together using very state-of-the-art web service and visualization approaches is pretty exciting. “Science," is not just about people designing cars, think about people designing planes, think about people thinking through the design of a Web site. It's not just new medicines, although that alone would justify all this work. It's not just modeling the environment, although that alone is a supercritical thing that we absolutely need to do, and advanced computer software will play a key role there. It's sort of the digitization of the world applied to science and business and commerce. If anything, you could actually say the fact that we need software understanding to advance the sciences means the shortage is all the more acute, because you need people sitting in these computer science classes that then go off and really focus on life sciences, and focus on environmental sciences. Software is becoming this key thing; in the way that math was historically. The world at large needs more scientific understanding. The fact that these understandings allow us to make advances in medicine, and understanding economics, and the environment should make the field all the more attractive. Gates makes some excellent observations - the very brightest people often study in multiple fields & notes that he studies physiological psychology and economics. He says Microsoft is always on the lookout for somebody who loves software but knows it so well they're seeing how it can be applied in different ways. In an interview process, it's one of the best things to ask somebody about some problem that they're working on that they're passionate about, to see their depth of understanding and how they go about it, rather than asking them some very specific questions. He also holds the view that multicore computing would enable focusing on more advanced areas like speech, very advanced search. He adds that when you use Live there will be some services up in the Internet like storing your files on the Internet, being able to back those up over the Internet, being able to have documents translated for you with a service on the Internet. The fascinating things as he sees is even though Microsoft is really just a software company, it influences the direction of hardware, & needs to constantly understand the direction of hardware. Gates is definitely trying to position Microsoft as a great corporation aka the IBM’s & Bell lab types – Kevin once mentioned that every year, Microsoft spends more on R&D than it cost to send a man to the moon. No doubt Microsoft’s bold moves to reorient vista development, the impending office 12 launch, imprints in CES and a slew of other initiatives about to be made widely available is giving it a perceptively better impression but on Innovation and where it matters it may need to do a lot better.
Jim Collins has written a very small but sweet piece on Peter Drucker. Excerpts from the article: Peter F. Drucker was driven not by the desire to say something but by the desire to learn something from every student he met - and that is why he became one of the most influential teachers most of us have ever known. Drucker never forgot his own teaching: Ask not what you can achieve but what you can contribute. Jim thinks that If he had been granted another 95 years, he would have continued to produce. At age 85, when asked which of his 26 books he was most proud of, he responded: "The next one." In intervening years he published at least eight more volumes, and at age 95, shortly before his death, he released yet another. He had a remarkable ability not just to give the right answers, but more important, to ask the right questions - questions that would shift our entire frame of reference. Throughout his work runs a theme that highlights a fundamental shift, away from achievement - jettisoning with the flick of his hand, as if he were waving away an irritating gnat, any consideration of the question of what you can "get" in this world - to the question of contribution Undoubtedly an inspiring personality!!
Shekhar Gupta sees the just concluded Bihar election as a forerunner of a major change about to happen in the polity of India . He writes that politics in India is in grave danger of being trivialised by yet another factor—psephology. If every electoral verdict were to be reduced to simple arithmetic, it would not only become dull and predictable, but also irrelevant. This Bihar election marks the arrival of an aspirational wave in the most backward Bharat where no more than 12 per cent of infants are immunised at birth, where birth rates are higher than the most backward countries of the world, and where per capita income is one-third of the national average and even one-sixth of some of the richer states of India. A resurgence of hope and aspiration in the Hindi heartland is an event to cherish and celebrate.The voter in Bihar is defining for all of us a welcome new notion of empowerment in India’s political heartland: social equality combined with religious tolerance, security, and economic upliftment and opportunity. Shouldn’t it be reasonable to believe that this very welcome infection will inevitably spread to UP as well?
Came across this site called web2.0 validator. Based on the thirty second rule, given an URL, the site validates and gives a score on web2.0 conformance. Popular sites like msn.com, google.com score 2 or 3 on a maximum of 16/17. The interesting thing about the site is that all the rules of web 2.0 are provided by users of this site. Some of the rules look downright funny : • Uses the prefix "meta" or "micro"? • Attempts to be XHTML Strict ? • Has a Blogline blogroll ? • Refers to mash-ups ? • Appears to use AJAX ? • Appears to be built using Ruby on Rails ? • Refers to VCs ? No
The definition of web 2.0 changes on a daily basis and the site checks randomly against the most recent rules decreed by it's users. Adaptivepath site scores 2/14. No better way to mock at Web 2.0!!
I read during my flight out of Seoul, Newsweek’s very insightful article on how may global enterprises are forced to hedge their bets on china following massive investments and suffering extremely poor returns. A must read for all talking about the rise of china – to understand the nature of growth and investments that are happening in china. I can confirm that I am repeatedly hearing such stories all around( my initial surprise turned into realistic assessments to a certain sense of tiredness in hearing such views repeatedly) on investments made in china in my varied interactions. I believe that when it comes to discussing Asia – I find that amongst all western observers - Stephen Roach is clearly ahead of the pack – others look at the blistering growth here and write rosy words – Stephen does several notches better. In his latest bulletin Stephen Roach writes that there’s nothing flat about this unbalanced global economy. The image of a “flat world” is most appropriate for the endgame of globalization, adding that ideal state is decades into the future - if that. While IT-enabled connectivity has shrunk the world in many new and important respects, the world is struggling mightily with what this connectivity has brought. China and India are reshaping the global economy as never before. The 40% of the world’s population that lives in these two countries is only just getting a taste of economic prosperity. They are pushing ahead rapidly with very different development models. China has done it the manufacturing way catering to external demand, whereas in India it’s been more of a services and internal consumption story. The theory of globalization teaches us that this is a “win-win” development. Globalization may well be win-win in the long run, but in the here and now it is profoundly asymmetrical. It has given rise to a multitude of new entrants on the supply side of the global equation but very few new consumers on the demand side. With the important exception of India, Asia remains very much an external demand story. With the rest of Asia now increasingly integrated into a China-centric supply chain, the region remains far more skewed toward US-centric external demand than internal consumption. India’s consumption-led growth dynamic is encouraging, but its per capita spending far too low. The hyper-speed of an increasingly asymmetrical globalization is hardly the stuff of a flat world. China is now looking to services, whereas India is counting on manufacturing to fill the void. The question is, Can they pull it off? I still have my doubts about India’s manufacturing strategy,( he earlier wrote, The Indian manufacturing model, continues to suffer from three major deficiencies - a lack of infrastructure, a low national saving rate (a little over 20%), and anemic inflows of foreign direct investment,given the nation’s seemingly chronic shortfalls of infrastructure, FDI, and saving. At the same time, he argues that china is relatively clueless when it comes to understanding a services culture – He concludes that globalization at this point in time is far more about disparities between nations than the assimilation of a flat world. Definitely important points to ponder.
In the November edition of HBR, senior editor Gardiner Morse has an excellent piece - a brief forethought on “information graphics”. Morse takes on the circle and arrow drawing brigade influence in business circles to demonstrate the process and flow sequence. He writes,"Business communications are lousy with circle-and-arrow diagrams that range from the dumb to the deceptive". Morse eggs on presenters, readers and listeners to examine clearly next time when you find yourself preparing a circle for presentation, ask yourself if the process that you are describing really works the way you say it does and turning his attention to readers and listeners, the next time when a presenter touts a circle to make a point, find the bogus link and put him on the spot.
Well – personally speaking, I am not a great fan of jazzy slides/presentations- I get to see hundreds of them – they are in a make-believe world – trying to outdo each other. In this world of digital interruption characterized by continous partial attention where clearly user experience management is a quality and not a discipline, we are all conditioned to think that Jazzy graphics in slides are better than meet and depth. I have seen innumerable CEO’s struggling with content and presentation linkages in slides while under preparation – still persist with Jazz and animation to provide the rich experience to audience.One of the recent presentation that I liked is this from Steve Jobs. I personally find the Lessig method attractive with emphasis centered on: - Simplicity & sophistication characterizing the slide content - Emphasis on readability as against background artistries. - Built in punchlines for good communication across, emphasis on ideas.
Dick Costolo, CEO of Feedburner has an excellent post on how feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued, and consumed.From all feeds being derived from a blog,today,however,there are innumerable feeds that are unrelated to blogs. Commercial publishers have embraced feeds wholeheartedly; most web services and many search engines now provide subscribed results; and podcasts and videocasts are entirely feed-based while not necessarily tied to blogs. Feeds provide three critical benefits to any digital media: 1. A notification mechanism for updates to a specific channel of content 2. The ability to subscribe to content, creating a persistent link between publisher and subscriber 3. A semi-structured version of the content While some complain about feed overload, some see a revolutionary impact of feeds in general and some see increasing business usage of feeds, the reality is that we can leverage the benefits of feed structure to allow publishers to provide a feedback loop to the Web site; the feed can become input to content on the site. Since feeds are now widely searched, shared, and passed around via web-based aggregators or opml reading lists, it’s probably wise today to distribute a more limited collection of broadly subscribed feeds. Items are already pulled from feeds today in a variety of both publisher-friendly and publisher-annoying ways. Blog search, of course, pulls items from disparate feeds in order to deliver specific search engine results. Since the results themselves may be subscribed, we quickly see items from one feed hopping into another mixed feed in a way nobody would find contentious. Blog spam, to visit the other end of spectrum, also sees tools that take advantage of the simple structure in RSS/Atom feeds to enable hucksters to rip, mix, and ring the cash register by creating blogs that are seeded with content that will attract high cost-per-click ads to sit alongside the content. The blog spammer thus monetizes the item without involving the publisher, and perhaps more annoying, the original content is made to seem the property of another. By following the atomic unit of content around as it’s ripped, mixed, and republished, the content is afforded the widest variety of distribution paths to reach the largest possible audience, which in turn creates the greatest opportunity for monetization. Read his full report available here. Microsoft has published an excellent perspective about the evolving feed mechanisms. It sees feeds transforming from unidirectional To bidirectional Feeds. These simple sharing extensions (SSE) are a specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows. SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds. Just as RSS enables the aggregation of information from a variety of data sources, SSE enables the replication of information across a variety of data sources. Data sources that implement SSE will be able to exchange data with any other data source that also implements SSE. From the user's perspective, this means that you will be able to share your data (such as calendar appointments, contact lists, and favorites) across all of your devices and with anyone else that you choose, regardless of infrastructure or organization.Clearly we are unto a new world of feeds and it is amzing to see the advancements and transformations happening centered around feed mechanisms in the past two years and clearly more changes are ahead of us.
WSJ writes that industrialized countries other than the US recognize the importance of human capital for economic growth, and they have ratcheted up recruitment of the world's mobile talent. Meanwhile, the U.S., the undisputed leader in attracting global talent, has erected barriers for skilled migrants and watches passively as they stay home or go elsewhere.America has seen the number of legal migrants, who tend to be more educated, fall by nearly a third over the past few years . Now is not the time to scale back foreign recruitment. The explosive growth of higher education in many developing countries, particularly in Asia, has caused a perceptible, if gradual, shift in the global talent pool. China and India are producing more engineers than all industrial countries combined. Larger developing countries have new opportunities to attract jobs for skilled workers and keep them at home. Today's skilled jobs are increasingly service jobs, and, unlike manufacturing jobs, service work is skill-intensive rather than capital-intensive. With the rising educational attainment in many developing countries, and the low capital costs of outsourcing service labor, developing countries have an emerging competitive advantage. Foreign talent has helped make the U.S. economy the world's most productive and innovative. Time spent in the U.S. by foreign citizens has also been a crucial means by which American values and institutions have been transferred around the world. Raising barriers to talented foreign students and workers might yield short-term political gains, but the long-term economic consequences will be much less salubrious. While the concerns are obvious and well thought out,recently elaborated by Richard Florida so tantalisingly - I do not know of any other country in the world which can absorb immigrants in the scale that the US traditionally does and there are not many societies outside of the US that can be so open minded and welcome immigrants and allow them to seemlessly fuse into local ethos.
Amy Wohl sees most traditional software vendors have positioned SaaS mainly for the SMB market, primarily for two very good reasons: (1) For easy penetration. (2) To avoid cannibalisation. She argues that SaaS appeals to large enterprises as well & points out that the ASP market (the precursor to the SaaS market) at its initial days did not excite SMBs - particularly the idea of buying software on line and they weren't ready to act on it. Lots of enterprise buyers who readily understood the benefit of on-line software and they were often the first buyers, especially using it for short-term projects, projects that included non-employees (contractors, suppliers, customers), or remote offices (and individual users) that did not themselves have substantial IT support. As more and more of the SaaS offerings were new, net-native applications, architected to exploit the on-line environment (rather than repackaged traditional software), more SMBs found the offerings interesting too. The applications themselves are specified and scaled with enterprise buyers in mind. Some of the enterprise applications we see are very niche oriented & others have more horizontal applications and more customers.
I think that the enterprise buyers are a little cautious in making more investments in traditional enterprise software and also a little wary of SaaS as well.The enterprise software industry is plagued by low innovation, high cost structure and exorbitantly high maintenance and rollout fees. Occasionally we see some vendors looking at initiatives like time based pricing, a significant move.As I wrote earlier this would certainly others are bound to imitate –particularly in the SME segment. It needs to be seen how the pricing is structured including collection mechanism and how Tibco’s traditional partners react to this. Also to observe is the fact what happens to defaulters and enterprises that jump in and out of the schemes. The locking cost, jump out & switching costs need to be understood in greater detail. In traditional economics, leasing may be cheaper than rental pay structures. The pressures of competition & pricing makes companies try out new models – these sometimes force companies to think for the customers as well – no more proof is needed to be convinced about massive changes that are bound to happen in the enterprise landscape. the maintenance revenue led party may not last long.The straightforward calculations about existing customers continuing to pay very high maintenance revenue year after year may prove to be wrong moving forward and in fact may choose to converge into one homogeneous platform and look at saving lot more costs. The real test of one's ability to hang onto customers will not come when maintenance contracts expire but when the major software companies, transition to so-called "service oriented architectures," a fundamental change in the way applications are deployed, integrated and accessed. In the transition to the industry makeover, we are seeing some thrust towards hosted model solutions. In the era of consolidation, the industry needs to get rid of this problem of huge upfront money and twenty percent plus maintenance tariffs, buyers will not be open to some of the most innovative solutions out in the market today - I wrote along similar lines on licensing -Clearly the structure, style and measures of performance of software industry - particularly enterprise software industry is set to change dramatically.
With this acquisition, Cisco muscles into the STB market, and gearing to get into the home networking as well. There is now no competitor with matching reach and skill base like Cisco. Cisco already has great Storage Networking technology in-house, modulating and re-aligning may be a challenge, but reality is that in this changing digital life, consumers would want to view, listen, communicate over varied mediums covering almsot all digital gadgetries at home as well.The services can be extended to support a lot more features. The STB segment is a very important niche, with potential to grow manifold times in the coming years & Cisco has certainly done a great job in identiifying the space and is all set to become a significant player here. As News.com captured it so well - for a long time Cisco has been talking about network convergence, the idea that data, voice and video traffic will one day travel over a single network. The vision has already come to fruition within the carrier's network. Most cable operators and phone companies carry their internal traffic over an Internet protocol, or IP, network that uses Cisco routing and switching equipment. Now the trend is finally making its way into the home, as cable companies and phone companies start offering customers a triple play of services that includes high-speed Internet access, telephony and, finally, video-all over an IP network. We covered Geoffrey Moore's View on Cisco's future from his perspective where he rightly predicted that the options for Cisco as:
Cisco- integrate the network to transform it into a platform for web ervices - enter systems management beginning with security - annex enterprise storage - use visionary consulting to influence the emerging architecture Geff Moore writes that Linksys One is an appliance-like offer that will be resold through telecommunication service providers (SPs), both traditional and non-traditional, as a hosted service. This does not require Cisco to develop deep SP expertise, and it gives it a leveraged entrée into the small business market through a channel that is already a trusted source of services. Moreover it brings to market a next-generation platform from which one can readily envision launching a broad array of services. Meanwhile, its acquisition of Scientific Atlantic gives it’s a second SP play—by resurrecting the CLEC vs. ILEC play. Only this time the C in CLEC stands for Cable-enabled. The ILECs are still deeply engaged with the traditional telecom switch providers—Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, Seimens, Ericsson—and while the company will no doubt continue to knock on those doors, the exercise is a bit like pushing a rope uphill. The cable folks, on the other hand, are absolutely delighted to get help with their own version of the voice/data/video triple play. What Scientific Atlantic brings to the table is the possibility of an end-to-end platform play with Cisco controlling both ends. As we noted earlier, much of Cisco’s growth has come through acquisitions, almost 100 in its decade of existence. But this one stands apart – for the size and the new terrain that it leads Cisco into.
Steve Rubel points to Nov first week Nielson Ranking of news sites and finds Wikipedia there - and that's a first for any open citizen-powered site - truly interesting. I was a little curious and went to Alexa to check on compartitive traffice of other popular sites and found that Cnet.com has caught up with about.com in traffic.
Closely following Larry Augustin’s views on opensource, Marc Fleury writes that the business model of software MUST include R/D. He sees that FOSS development models are economically sustainable, have lower expenses associated with them, specifically in the QA arena and that for-pay licensing-based software, while greatly profitable, can be undermined by cheaper models. Marc who earlier wrote about VC investments in open source now writes that JBoss sees FOSS is about a better way to develop, distribute and support software. Today's software have tons of room to grow in terms of technical maturity, the economarket dynamics have tightened since the bubble forces The dirty little secret of the enterprise software model in today's maturing market place is that, with the notable exception of a few players , the days of the hugely profitable sotware license are gone. In With the traditional software development model, your cost of sales, marketing and distribution is so high that these models completely depends on the for-pay license. An optimally functioning FOSS business model needs 20 cents of sales and marketing to acquire 1 dollar of maintenance, where a traditional software company will have to spend around 2 1/2 dollars. Professional FOSS businesses can sustain sales and marketing costs out of the maintenance revenue stream. This model produces earnings (EBITDA) according to the P&L of stable software business models, those in mature subscription-based phases. The P&L of these business sustain R&D of 20%, where we are today at JBoss. Thus Professional FOSS, in theory and practice, sustains the research and development expenses associated with the classic business model. On innovation as a proof point, JBoss and the FOSS community in Java have been pushing the frontier with EJB3, annotations, light-weight containers, IoC, SEAM etc and a lot more in the pipeline. The days of fat profits in licenses may be gone but software is moving ahead, as vibrant and innovative as ever. Look at where Jboss mostly operates in the enteprise layer - the answer lie there.
Paul Graham thinks that he does not see any deliberate plan to suggest there was a new version of the web in naming it as Web 2.0. Some views are better read without any inference thrown in - Paul's writing are always like that. Excerpts : The proponents just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the "2.0" referred to whatever those might turn out to be. The 2005 Web 2.0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows during the Bubble, full of prowling VCs looking for the next hot startup. I wouldn't quite call it "Bubble 2.0" just because VCs are eager to invest again. Pointing out that the Internet is a genuinely big deal. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom. It's to be expected that once we started to pull out of the bust, there would be a lot of growth in this area, just as there was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression. The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO market is gone & Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The startups are different this time around. They are to the startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media. Graham concludes that as Google is a "Web 2.0" company – it shows that, while meaningful, the term is also rather bogus. It's like the word "allopathic." It just means doing things right, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that. Also read a related note here.
Ross Mayfield asks that if a knowledge worker has the organization's information in a social context at their finger tips, and the organization is sufficiently connected to tap experts and form groups instantly to resolve exceptions - is there a role for business process.Quoting Clay Shirky "process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity", he adds that there was an exception to process and an expert designed a way for people to work together in one context that should fit all prior contexts. The problem is, the process becomes calcified and accepted as the rule. After all, it's a rule, and in corporations we follow them, even if it fails us or simply doesn't make sense. Because of constant change in our environment, processes are outdated the immediately after they are designed. The 90s business process re-engineering model intended to introduce change, but was driven by experts which simply delivered another set of frozen processes.Claiming some some staid corporations are abandoning process all together,he believes that at best a process should serve as a reference model - something that others can reference when completing a task & can be leveraged for innovation, a boundary condition for experimentation at the margin and concludes that the first organizations bringing it to an end will have a decided competitive advantage. Jeff Nolan provides the best perspective( I fully agree with his views on this topic)- He points out that the automation of processes is not perfect, certainly, but like democracies it is better than the alternative. There are a great many things in the modern enterprise that will benefit from ad-hoc and freeform collaboration but in no way will these technologies displace the fundamental machinery that companies rely on day in and day out.. and that's all process based. Tom Davenport viewed that the speed with which some businesses have already adopted process standards suggests that many previously unscrutinized areas are ripe for change. For companies that don't have process standards in place, it makes sense for them to create standards by working with customers, competitors, software providers, businesses that processes may be outsourced to, and objective researchers and standard-setters. Setting standards is likely to lead to the improvement of both internal and outsourced processes. In a computerworld interview Tom adds When business processes become commodities, all the rules change in ways that can revolutionize business. For virtually anybody, a standard process can be a starting point—a point of departure from which to design a new process. When people are designing organizational charts, they often look at other organizational charts. It also simplifies the commodity stuff that people do. There are so many processes in an organization that don't confer any competitive advantage, and doing them in an innovative way wouldn't make much difference to revenues or profits. So you might as well do them in a standard way. And application packages all assume some sort of process by which they're used. Process activity & flow, Process performance, Process management - these are among the evolving standards that business needs to relate to their business functions and activities to leverage process advantage better. Barry Briggs makes the best assessment when he calls this decade as the decade of process. He rightly sees that in many ways business process is by far the most important and valuable form of collaboration since while e-mail, instant messaging, and shared workspaces facilitate communication, business process achieves business goals. When a customer buys something on the web site, a process is set in motion which at its conclusion results in the customer receiving goods and the enterprise, money. Where the eighties were known as the decade of productivity applications - spreadsheets, word processors, and so on, the nineties as the decade of email and the Internet, this decade, starting now (isn't it interesting that software waves start around the middle of the chronological decade), will be the Decade of Process
Jim is someone whose writings, I had been following for more than a decade –he is a man of terrific stuff. Fully deserves to win this – considering the caliber of previous recipients of the award include the likes of Tom Demarco.
In my visits to atleast twenty different national capitals in the part of the year that has gone by; it is almost impossible not to notice that the young people are in a race with each other to embrace technologies faster – not surprising in this iPod generation & presence era,given that technology can only improve,the trend is irreversible. Instat recently reported that the youth market in the Asia-Pacific region is becoming a significant driver for growth in the region’s mobile phone market. Around 10-15% of all youth disposable income is spent on mobile products in developed countries, displacing spending on traditional youth products like clothing, toys, and comic books, etc., the high-tech market research firm says. In the Asia-Pacific region, spending by youth on mobile data is estimated to grow at 15.3% annually from 2004 to 2010. Guardian reports that today's teenagers use technology to stay in touch with friends at all times - turning their bedrooms into "connected cocoons". Through personal computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles, teenagers are spurning antisocial angst for a culture of "connected cocooning"- a phrase coined by MTV to describe how the current 16-to-24-year-old "MTV generation" is permanently plugged into a network of digital devices, bringing the world to their fingertips in a way no previous generation has ever experienced. Such limitless communication is having a revolutionary impact on the way young people interact, socialise, work and play. MTV's recently released Generations report on the lives of the MTV (ages 16 to 24) and VH1 (ages 25 to 44) generations defines how technology has driven differences between these age groups. Young, early adopters have become used to instant gratification, the report found. Globalisation and consumerism do not deter. Instead, brands define and give a sense of belonging. Devices and their uses displace the real and the virtual, creating a world where you can be who you want to be. And joining the digital march isn't just a personal choice; to play a part in youth society, it is imperative to be switched on, charged up and always connected. For the older generation, the pace of change has been quite frightening. The VH1 generation grew up in a period where there were still a few certainties. The family was still together & with a sense of belonging. With most of these certainties seem to have gone - one has to try to mix and match identities to assert who you are. The MTV generation doesn't have fixed values, so they are more open to new technologies. Wi-Fi access to Nintendo gamers ia an important related development. This phenomenon is creating pressures for a variety of industries - The toy industry is responding to age compression,wherein kids are getting older younger – and is creating a revolution in the toy industry. Realizing that today's kids are sophisticated and tech-savvy,they are fighting fire with fire by building their own lines of "youth electronics." No doubt as we covered earlier, mobility has created revolutionalry sort of changes- already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks and increasingly technology and mobility shall certainly act as the most dramatic change agent in the society.
Ajax, a conglomeration of technologies that cover everything from presentation and object modeling to data interchange and retrieval is attracting wide attention.Microsoft thinks Ajax apps are too hard to build, and the company's Web platform team is trying to demystify Ajax with the development of an easier-to-use Ajax-style programming technology code-named "Atlas" that it's planning to bring to market during the first half of 2006. Look at Adam Bosworth talk about Ajax. A prototype of the technology is available here. Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft's product manager refuting the claim that Microsoft is unready for web 2.0, shares some inside perspectives on Ajax. He sees that there are two important things happened recently to revitalize interest in Ajax. - First, a wider number of browsers have provided support for the technologies developers need for Ajax- style development, and - Second, there has been a new focus and interest in delivering better user experiences for customers. For the Web there are two challenges to this. - The first is the limitation of application development within the browser, - The second is development complexity. Microsoft hopes that Atlas would help make Ajax- style development easier, and more approachable for a broader range of developers & believes that Atlas will be as good as is gets on the browser and will enable the broad masses of developers to easily take their Web applications to the next level. From a benefits perspective, Ajax enables better user experiences on the Web, which can help businesses gain a competitive advantage, providing the emotional connection that users have when they use an application, leading to brand loyalty and more. Richer experiences are able to provide big business benefits. From a technical perspective, compared to traditional web apps, the primary advantages of Ajax-style Web applications include more interactive user interfaces by executing code on the client, automatic updates without requiring the user to refresh the page, and better performance from fewer round trips to the server, among many others. Ajax-style development enables developers to optimize the user experience by gaining more control over what happens on the client versus the server. Brian makes the right observation that there is a larger focus on generally better experiences - Ajax is just a component of the story. It is about differentiating offerings, standing out from the crowd, and providing awesome experiences–and that need will drive the technology.
Bob Cringely thinks that Google may not be interested in operating systems but could be playing to its strengths and could effectively take over the internet. All by seducing, he says. Dismissing Google’s interest in becoming a Super ISP, Bob writes,its interest in fibre could be for building Googlemarts – these containers could host within thousands of opteron processors and many petabytes of data & the idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid and adds these may be placed at around 300 locations which serve as the Internet peering points globally.They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google. Huge upside : Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, good backups, data never goes away unless deleted. This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware. Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. Cringley thinks that this is similar to Wal-Mart strategy – just as Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over, Google won’t trample over ISP’s. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.
My Take: It is very difficult to say if Cringley is right – he may not be totally wrong. But as I its time Google outlines its vision. Like in any other industry the responsibility of pioneers and leaders are lot more than just looking after themselves - they are trendsetters and rolemodels in the industry. But Cringley's idea warrant serious examination. I do not necessarily think about this as GoogleVs Microsft/Yahoo issue alone – but if you extend things further- it could be the case local processing intensities may improve- opening up a new wave of distributed computing – the network and infrastructure ecosystem would be forced to upgrade/transform massively- triggering and cascading huge opportunities for infrastructure and service players – once the public infrastructure gets upgraded like this – several other industries including the enterprise software sector may look at leveraging the new infrastructure in lot many more new ways – This would lead to A NEW INTERNET ECOSYSTEM per se – If cringley is right – we are in for A HUGE CHANGE AHEAD – WITH HUMONGOUS OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL PLAYERS OPERATING IN THE ECOSYSTEM.
We recently wrote that Apple's move to Intelmarks a tectonic shift for Apple, which has used processors from IBM and Motorola throughout the life of the Mac. However, the company has changed architectures before, shifting in the 1990s from Motorola's 68000 family of chips to the PowerPC architecture jointly developed by IBM and Motorola. Think Secret speculates that Apple is planning to release its first entry-level iBook laptops with Intel processors next January. While not sure of what processors or price points the new models will debut at,it is thought Apple will expand the iBook line with one additional model and will lower prices - to entice current Windows users and prove to the market it will be more competitive with the likes of Dell, Gateway, HP and Sony. It is more likely the initial release of products with the new processor will be consumer-based products only and not professional, high-end lines, such as PowerBooks and towers, as some Web sites have reported. Apple will almost certainly tap Intel's forthcoming Yonah processor for the iBooks, a successor to the company's Pentium M. The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks. Rolling out a consumer system like the iBook as the first Intel Mac also makes sense from a software development standpoint. Analyst Stephen Baker at NPD Intelect believes for Apple, they need a nicely configured $699 notebook to be competitive at the entry level he said. "They can play up the value of the bundled software and Mac OS X and really have a strong case for consumers to buy their product & notes the intensifying competition in the consumer notebook market. While launching Tiger recently, I wrote that clearly this move adds to the Mac's general superiority over typical Windows computers as the best choice for average consumers doing the most common computing tasks. There’s no doubt that Apple's move to Intel could usher in a new era of success. While on this do not forget to read the misconceptions regarding the so called Apple-Intel Deal.
While covering the future of microsoft,I wrote that Wiki's, collaboration and the blogosphere all are certainly getting good traction at levels - all segments of enterprise and consumer included - and with the impending power of broadband and hosted models creating a new tapestry very different from what exists today. We also covered the definitive need for using proper email etiquettes to minimise email stress effect within organisations. We also covered the perspective that Email destroying the mind faster than marijuana. Businessweek writes that Email is stretching and morphing from a point-to-point medium into a broadcast Medium . The article points out that Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. Clay shirky predicts that while e-mail will remain the prime tool for notification and one-to-one communication, "a huge percentage of collaboration will occur outside of e-mail, with a continued rise in these other tools,". J.P.Rangaswami of Dredsner feels that there's an enormous untapped value to be gotten by getting collaboration right and adds that while email is not on its way to floppy disk-dom, it has certainly come under threat before. The Lotus Notes juggernaut of the early 1990s never displaced e-mail. Nor did attempts to build collaborative platforms during the boom, but e-mail has hit a wall, creating an impenetrable scale of conversations people don't need to be a part of and shipping around mounds of information they can't possibly digest. In the long run, perhaps the biggest death knell for e-mail is the anthropological shift occurring among tomorrow's captains of industry, the text-messaging Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so "ovr," "dn," "w/e (over, done, whatever)." Businessweek finds that some Organisations are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another's work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS and more elaborate forms of groupware such as SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams' use on projects. Despite the brawniest corporate filters, more than 60% of what swarms into corporate in-boxes is spam. Since so much of what's received involves scams about millions languishing in nonexistent bank accounts, interoffice status contests, and people plopping unwanted meetings onto Outlook calendars, the e-mail blow-off factor is rising.
Open Source is in the news a lot more now. Recently Larry Augustin wrote about the failing enterprise software model. I had always been questioning the business model behind opensource. Opensource proponents are beginning to articulate their views on different aspects. We also covered Kim Polese view on opensource support model.In the light of some twilight vendors looking at opensourcing their products, Murugan Pal offers some well thought out tips on migration and support pricing for opesnourcing. He notes that commercial and proprietary software vendors charge one time License (L) and annual Maintenance/Updates (U) plus Support (S) fees. In open source model - one may not be able to charge for newer versions ('Upgrades'). Typically, the maintenance and support costs are 18 - 22% of license cost. When you migrate to open source or SaaS model the L becomes zero as the software itself is free. Customers prefer at least two third cost savings on a 5 year TCO before making a software migration. He proposes an update & subscription model matching to 12% of typical license costs derived from: [( L+L*5*20/100)*1/3*1/5 - mapped per year on a 5 year TCO of L+U&S after two third cost savings]. He also offers some advise on the migration steps that include decisions on the business model and licensing type factoring in the community, licensing type impacts on all stakeholders, making the product easier to download and use, technology audits, documentation, bluewash and fostering community support. Next step - extrapolate these ideas into the Kim Polese model and see how the nature of number on support looks like.
Looks like Nokia under a new leader is trying hard to get the Wow factor back. Nokia is acquiring Intellisync. With this acquisition,Nokia positioned to deliver the complete offerings for the development, deployment and management of mobility in the enterprise.Intellisync offers email and PIM synchronization, and device management software with enterprises and OEM as its primary customers. Recently, Intellisync has pushed hard into mobile carriers - providing the backend email infrastructure for Verizon Wireless, and device management for Sprint, amongst around a dozen wins. More recently the company has also begun to offer mobile application and file synchronization for mobile users of corporate CRM applications, for example, and recently launched a subscription-based corporate wireless sync service aimed at SMEs. It has been at the forefront in enterprise mobility applications and device mobility with its wireless messaging software. Intellisync technology allows for synchronization of data and files with high levels of accuracy and security across complex software applications.
Nokia's acquisition validated the booming mobile email market. For a long time Nokia was criticised for its lethargic response to RIM, recently it inked an agreement with Microsoft to support ActiveSync, rolling out its own business email platform, and finally delivering on BlackBerry support on its own phones.Gartner’s king has the best take - Long term, you could very likely see a Nokia device with a RIM base client but with an Intellisync e-mail or a Microsoft device with Intellisync device management and an RIM e-mail client. In a world where carriers can literally mix and match mobile hardware and software, it is highly doubtful , if RIM will be able to respond as competitively. We can expect some more quick actions in the wireless email market space.
Greg Papadopouloswrites brilliantly on the continued operation of Moore's law and predicts that microsystems replace microprocessors. He argues that continuing to throw transistors at making single processors run is as ineffective as the energy efficiency of a gigantic SUV. We get very poor computing return for every watt we invest. Outside of portable applications, this extreme energy wasting has really only become a concern when the industry realized that it was getting very difficult to remove the waste heat - to cool the engine, as it were. More engineers are needed to create the design, more engineers to test that the design is correct, and whole new layers of managers to try to coordinate the resulting hundreds and hundreds of folks on the project. Bugs increase, schedules are missed, and innovation actually decreases. The result: microprocessors are dead. Just as the '80's discrete processors were killed by microprocessors, today's discrete systems - motherboards full of supporting chip sets and PCI slots with sockets for microprocessors - will be killed by microsystems: the just-starting revolution of server-on-a-chip. Almost the entire server (sans DRAM) is reduced to a single chip (or a small number of co-designed ones, just as the first micros often had an outboard MMU and/or FPU). These microsystems directly connect to DRAM and to very high speed serialized I/O that are converted to either packet or coherent-memory style network connections. Inside the microsystem, you'll find a full SMP : multiple processor cores, crossbar switches, multi-level caches, DRAM and I/O controllers. Moore's Law is VERY much alive. we are now dying to get to 65nm (Niagara is 90nm) so we can get even more transistors on a chip in order to integrate more and bigger systems. Just as the microprocessor, harvested the pipeline inventions of 60's and 70's, microsystems are going to integrate the system innovations of the 80's and 90's.By 2010 microprocessors will seem like really old ideas. Motherboards will end up in museum collections. And the whole ecology that we have around so-called industry standard systems will collapse as it becomes increasingly obvious that the only place that computer design actually happens is by those who are designing chips. Everything downstream is just sheet metal. The apparent diversity of computer manufactures is a shattered illusion. In 2010, if you can't craft silicon, you can't add value to computer systems. You'd be about as innovative as a company in the 90's who couldn't design a printed circuit board
Jon Udell writing about CalISO’s electronic marketplace finds it using Web services on an enterprise service bus to receive bids and send notifications and highlights that none of this is visible to the customers drawing power from the grid. While customers assume that there’s a competitive market and and for them suppliers are interchangeable. After all SOA is all about bringing in process flexibility. Jon urges given the state of maturity of SOA & Web Services - customers should beat up on vendors whose SOA products aren’t interchangeable at the level of basic standards. The same holds true for services - with traansforamtion enabled by tearing down the walls between IT & Business. The only acceptable solution could be the QoS lock-in. Providers that don’t make their customers’ data available in a common XML format, or whose services can’t easily be second-sourced, will meet growing resistance. When SOA-style services finally become commodities in b-to-b markets, there are reasons to hope that those markets could work quite well. Self-describing data flows will lend themselves to rigorous analysis. Formal interface contracts will enable equivalent services to substitute for one another. Service consumers will be able to easily check quality metrics published by service providers. This is actually the wat to extract business value out of SOA implementations. I agree with Jon that the transparency made possible by SOA could influence the b-to-b landscape in profoundly positive ways. With a tinge of realism it must be noted that Information silos don’t crumble just because XML formats arrive on the scene. Jon makes the right call that customers must light up the dark corners of service interoperability.
ITU sees that we are on the brink of a new computing and communication era, one that will radically transform our corporate, community, and personal spheres. With continuing developments in miniaturization and declining costs, it is becoming not only technologically possible but also economically feasible to make everyday objects smarter, and to connect the world of people with the world of things. We are heading towards what can be termed a “ubiquitous network society”, one in which networks and networked devices are omnipresent. Early forms of ubiquitous information and communication networks are already visible in the widespread use of mobile phones today: there were over 1.8 billion mobile phones in circulation by the end of 2004, and the number is set to surpass 2 billion by the end of 2005. Mobile data applications such as SMS, i-mode and Vodafone Live! have brought Internet-like services to the pockets of many mobile phone users. But what if much more was connected to a network: a fridge, a car, a cup of tea? At the dawn of the internet revolution, users were amazed at the possibility of contacting people and information across oceans and time zones, through a few clicks of their mouse. In order to do so, however, they typically had to sit in front of a computer device (PC) connected to a global network. Today, they can also use mobile phones and portable laptops. The next logical step in this technological revolution (connecting people anytime, anywhere) is to connect inanimate objects a communication network. This is the vision underlying the Internet of things. The use of electronic tags (e.g. RFID) and sensors will serve to extend the communication and monitoring potential of the network of networks, as will the introduction of computing power in everyday items such as razors, shoes and packaging. Advances in nanotechnology (i.e. manipulation of matter at the molecular level) will serve to further accelerate these developments. Computing through dedicated devices will slowly disappear, while information processing capabilities will emerge throughout our surrounding environment. With the benefit of integrated information processing capacity, industrial products will take on smart capabilities. They may also take on electronic identities that can be queried remotely, or be equipped with sensors for detecting physical changes around them. Such developments will make the merely static objects of today dynamic ones - embedding intelligence in our environment and stimulating the creation of innovative products and new business opportunities. The Internet of Things will enable forms of collaboration and communication between people and things, and between things themselves, hitherto unknown and unimagined.
The controversy comes to an end. The NYT reports that representatives from the United States and nations that had sought to break up some of its control over the Internet reached an accord that leaves the supervision of domain names and other technical resources unchanged. They agreed instead to an evolutionary approach to Internet management. But the accord, a document of principles that delegates from more than 100 countries worked out here after more than two years of sometimes fiery argument, also established a new international forum intended to give governments a stronger voice in Internet policy issues, including the address system, a trade-off that the Americans were willing to accept. The Internet, a largely decentralized way of linking many computer networks and retrieving data almost instantly, is dependent on a centralized master file that decodes its address scheme. That master file is under Icann's jurisdiction. The text also defines Internet governance as "more than Internet naming and addressing," including public policy issues like the security and safety of the Internet, as well as developmental issues, affordability, reliability and quality of service.
- First, the U.S. simply had a very strong hand and played it well. Changes to the governance structure ultimately requires U.S. agreement since possession is even more than the proverbial 9/10th of the law. The U.S. had loudly indicated that it was not prepared to make concessions. - Second, the European Union may not have been as committed to change as it publicly indicated. Given the opportunity for compromise, the EU decided to back down and accept a deal that all could live with. - Third, the delegates have found a diplomatic way to leave this issue for a future fight. The creation of the governance forum sounds much like WSIS itself - multilateral, multi-stakeholder, non-binding, U.N. created, and able to address a wide range of Internet and technology policy issues. - Fourth, the deal may not be as great for the U.S. as the current spin suggests. The U.S.would certainly be happy about the outcome but the the future of the Internet governance issue lies whether the forum emerges into a powerful venue for change and whether/how ICANN responds.
Influx Insight points to the fact that content is breaking free of its tethers with increasing abandon. In future, one will be able to purchase a chapter or a passage of book, view your favorite TV show, long after the network has cancelled it and you can already create your own custom versions of software applications. Content is breaking free of its shackles and is being distributed to the edges. These changes are transforming the way think of media, as tidy little boxes that sold airtime and airspace in neat little formats. In the new era - formats, delivery and opportunity are now only limited by the creativity and imagination of the content distribution channel and the advertiser.The world is waiting, because both the incumbent media giants and the new players, need the same thing, ideas. No wonder search technologies have to keep pace.That signifies the next wave curling lines—be it blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts or digital editions— forcing publishers abandoning preconceptions.
Michael Schrage writing on R&D and innovation observes that growing market competition, not growing R&D spending, is what drives innovation. A successful innovation policy is a competition policy where companies see innovation as a cost-effective investment to differentiate themselves profitably. Scobeleizer meets with Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse. Scobelizer writes reacapping the meet that Douglas Englebart’s eyes told him that taking 25 years for the world to get the mouse was too long and his career would have been a lot more interesting if people could have gotten his ideas quicker. Ideas move around the world a lot faster now due to blogs and video (imagine trying to explain what Halo 2 was going to look like if all you had to describe it was ASCII text).Dare Obasango makes the best observation about the meet and the ideas exchanged when he writes that while he agrees that it takes too long for innovations to make it into the mainstream. Ethernet, SQL databases, and object oriented languages running on garbage collected VMs, are all two or three decades old but only started really affecting the mainstream in the last decade. AJAX which is all the rage this year was invented last century. Dave Winer first started talking about payloads for RSS in 2001 but podcasting only took off over the last year. Certainly we are closing the gap from innovation to adoption but it definitely could be better. Blogs and other forms of mass communication being available to the general public will only accelerate this trend.
We have covered in this blog,specialised searches, the recent search advances and the evolution of vertical-horizontal searches. I have consistently questioned the very high marketcap of Google and its sustainability. Cory Treffiletti writes, Search will continue to expand and become a ubiquitous tool offline in the same manner it already is online. He points out that it saves time and energy, and that's why investors are still jumping at the category and why analysts still predict ridiculous growth of the companies that are working in search. From a point-to-point navigation tool currently, where search is going will become even more important as it helps the consumer navigate content from every other device and through all other types of content. Search has already extended out of the computer and onto the mobiles with SMS search and in future, - Search will be built into mobiles as true service, integrated into the operating system of the phone itself and allowing you to access contact information, phone numbers and special dates on your calendar. - Search will be built into the car, specifically local search that will cross-reference global positioning system to determine where you are and what types of restaurants, stores and other destinations are in your immediate vicinity. - Search will be built into house, allowing one to locate your house keys, by reading the product tag built into them. Search will most certainly be built into the television, allowing one to navigate the content from media center/ digital video recorder etc besides others. He concludes that Whatever online download service you use, search will be very important in that product, too. Pretty powerful argument indeed.
Applepeels thinks that it is a distinct possibility that Bill Gates(Microsoft) ends up making more money than Steve Jobs does off of the first Intel based Mac. Based on last year PiperJaffrey estimates - Apple sold 138K Mac minis in the first quarter after introduction. If Mac mini becomes the first Macintosh to ship with an Intel processor and if Apple sells 50% more of them than they did last year in the same period - that would put the estimate of Apple's Q2 FY06 Mac mini shipments at 207,000. If 50% or more of these Mac users install Windows on these systems and since they likely don't own a copy of Windows, they will end up buying one. They have probably already got a Mac so getting a system with If the estimate o the gross margin on the mini product is 18%. He concludes by writing that 207,000 Mac minis sold at an average price of $549 for a total revenue to Apple of $113,643,000, the 18% gross margin comes to $113M, the total gross margin dollars for Steve on his first Intel product come out to be $20,455,740. At around 200$ per seat for Mac- the max.sale on license comes to 23 million US$. Add to this more money that Microsoft would make based on the sale of other desktop products.
Google claims that Google Analytics tells the visitor arrival, stickability & exit. This would enable getting a sharper focus on campaigns and initiatives and improve sit content and quality. Marrying simplicity and sophistication is always a challenge when it comes to web analytics. The enterprise scale Google Analytics offers high-end web analytics offering claims Google.This Offering more features than Awstats,Shortstat, Measure Map, Mint and the like., Google has stormed into the bastion of paid web statistics services. I can clearly see myriad of options are available in the Analytics admin panel; this includes options to add more admin to view the statistics, options to add goals, options to give profile permissions etc.
Marc Benioff’s Memo :This is a time of seismic shifts in our industry. The internet is disintermediating the status quo, and old models of software cost and complexity are being replaced with new models of affordability and ease of use. The software industry is going through a transformation that is unlike anything it has seen in two decades, and the emergence of the PC itself. This transformation goes by many names: On-Demand, Web 2.0, Software as a Service. But they all point to the same conclusion: The era of the traditional software “load, update, and upgrade” business and technology model is over. It is time for “The Business Web.” New Internet-based companies are showing how services will replace software for both consumers and corporations. Sand Hill Road venture capitalists are no longer funding software companies; they are only funding service providers. Exciting new companies have emerged like salesforce.com and Google who have real businesses that can challenge and win against the old guard companies, and are. Customers love these new services, and are finding tremendous success as never before. A new range of start-ups are showing how this is just the beginning of the business web - that there are new technologies coming to replace traditional word processing, spreadsheets, and other staples of business with Internet services. But his rant against Microsoft new initiatives looks at best funny to read.
Larry Augustin writes,"The traditional enterprise software business model is broken. A rabid search for new customers and revenue growth has caused sales and marketing costs to spiral out of control. In fact, Rick Sherlund at Goldman Sachs estimates that in 2005 software companies will spend 82 percent of new license revenue on marketing and sales efforts. That's up from 66 percent in 2000. While tech continues to benefit from "mini-waves" of technology shifts (e.g.,wireless), there are not the rapid, landscape-changing shifts that drove feverish growth in the 90s. In addition, many of today's technology trends actually serve to reduce aggregate IT spending.
This quest for additional revenue has created an untenable cost structure for the industry - one that doesn't serve vendors or their customers. In essence, vendors spend a lot of money to convince customers to buy, and then charge them a lot of money for the license which covers the sales and marketing costs. We're charging the customer just to sell to them. The sales cycle of a traditional enterprise vendor is just too long – close to one and a half years to close a deal. All along, the software vendor is convincing the customer to buy. New license growth in enterprise software companies today is stagnating. By changing the revenue mix from primarily new licenses to primarily maintenance on already proven products, a typical enterprise software vendor's top line would drop by 25 to 30 percent. But the decrease in price and increase in market size will enable growth in those previously unreachable markets, creating a vibrant and growing company that will eventual pass its former revenue numbers.
Augustin is the creator of SourceForge.net and serves on the boards of directors of open source vendors JBoss, SugarCRM, Pentaho, Medsphere, and the Open Source Development Lab, which is the keeper of the keys for Linux. Given his backgorund, Augustin's prescription - [may be it is the case of(prescription being worse than the malady)] as the solution revolves around the much hyped open source model. Granted - Augustin certainly brings forth eloquently the issues centered around the problem.
Upon Drucker's Death, was reading his book titled The Daily Drucker. The Daily Drucker is for anyone who seeks to understand and put to use Drucker's powerful words and ideas The 16th November piece runs like this:
The pioneers of management a century ago were right : Organizational structure is needed. The modern enterprise needs organization. But the pioneers were wrong in their assumption that there is - or should be - one right organization. Instead of searching for the right organization, management needs to learn to look for, to develop, to test, the organization that fits the task. So goes the point. And ends with the action point: Reflect whether your organization is transparent, if decision making authority is clear, whether authority is commensurate with responsibility, and whether each person has only one master.
Despite the widely felt impact of mobility, I always used to wonder in my innumerable trips to various asian capitals the very poor levels of usage of mobile data services - I could hardly see blackberries being used in mobile crazy cities like Bangkok or Shanghai. Pyramid Research finds this as an important survey result across the BRIC nations. Four of the most populous countries in the world hold the greatest potential for the sale of infrastructure and terminal equipment, as well as mobile data content. Of the roughly 1.05 billion new subscribers that will be added to worldwide mobile networks over the next four years, Pyramid Research estimates that 42% of them will come from the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China. The BRIC Mobile Data Adoption Study helps to quantify the market opportunity by assessing current consumer adoption levels and usage patterns for mobile data. mobile operators across the BRIC countries and the U.K. assume that subscribers are aware of and/or understand how to use the mobile data services available to them. The report attributes the poor adoption to not being properly educated by their carrier on how to use mobile data services.
Informationweek reports on the changing landscape of the database market. Business will find more and cheaper options the next time they need to deploy a database. Database conversions are notoriously difficult, and cheaper products may lack the features and scalability that become increasingly important as databases grow. The Ingres database got a new lease on life last week with CA's new plans around it. Even while the database market consolidates-cheap, new products are popping up. Microsoft’s latest version of SQL Server, shall put price pressure on Oracle and IBM. Oracle last month began offering a free version of its Oracle 10g Release 2 database - limited to single-CPU servers and 4 Gbytes of data. IBM recently debuted a no-cost, stripped-down "Express" version of DB2. And MySQL AB, the open-source database market leader, launched MySQL 5.0, which could compete more directly with commercial database software. Iweek righlty points out that the recent database-industry acquisitions (IBM bought Informix, which already owned Cloudscape and Red Brick; Oracle grabbed TimesTen) obviously haven't stifled innovation at the low end. The growing list of open-source or low-cost products includes Berkeley DB from Sleepycat Software, the Firebird open-source version of Borland Software's InterBase, Postgres optimized by Red Hat for Linux, and the ANTs Data Server in-memory database from Ants Software.The up-and-comers are winning converts. Instead of being sequestered in behind-the-scenes test environments, these alternative databases are increasingly taking on real-world tasks. Open-source database usage grew at a rate of 20% last year and expected to quadruple from $250 million today to $1 billion by 2008, including license and support fees. Sales of commercial relational-database software, in contrast, grew 10% last year . Clearly open-source databases will push into midsize and even upper-tier business applications over the next two or three years and the market shall see a different mix-up of players.Sensing what is coming, Oracle is clerly looking ahead. The renewed competition in the database market shall significantly influence the Consolidation Vs Federation debate.Oracle would have you shoot for 80 percent consolidation and 20 percent federation, whereas IBM would push that ratio just as far the other way. Two paths to more meaningful views of enterprise information and richer, real-time business intelligence have clearly emerged. The federation camp, represented by IBM, focuses on middleware for integrating heterogeneous data sources and optimizing queries that span many systems. The Oracle consolidation camp zeroes in on a standard database platform - and on providing methods for moving data from one database to another. All this indicate that my earlier concerns on stack level consolidaton restricting choices may find a natural solution.And organisations pursuing cheapware strategy would find plenty of choices. This is truly a happy situation for the customer buying/evaluating databases.
Richard Walters has written a well researched article on mobility and its impact on society. Its so good, am excerpting parts of the article with some edits and comments:
Tools such as e-mail and instant messaging have been around since the dawn of the internet era, but it has taken a wireless communications revolution to turn them into a constant and inescapable fact of life for a growing part of the population. WiFi networks - assure the digitally addicted of a permanent and ubiquitous connection to the wider world. Mobile phones have turned text messages into the communications tool of choice for teenagers in Asia and Europe. For those in the grip of these new networks, life has changed. There’s no such thing as solitude any more, no fragment of time that cannot be filled with digital chatter. MIT plans to let its students continually broadcast their whereabouts to anyone in their personal social network, overlay that information on a map of the campus or town, and you could keep track of your family or friends all the time. when you free students of the need to sit in lectures - or office workers of the need to be at their desks - and place them instead in a free-flowing, virtual community “Real estate value will be based not on the square footage, but on usage,” goes some prediction. “We won’t be working from home - we’ll be working from anywhere.” The mobile phone is already morphing into an all-purpose messaging device, capable of catching and transmitting many of the minutiae of daily life, from the short snippets of text messages to impromptu photos. Laptops are becoming windows into digital media. The virtual world is no longer behind a TV screen or on the PC: it’s with you all the time. The persistent chatter and, increasingly, the songs or TV shows being streamed over these networks are starting to seep into many aspects of everyday life. In Japan, the mobile-wielding, mini-skirted Japanese schoolgirl became a symbol of the technology’s power to disrupt social norms.For the IT executive, this has lengthened the work day. Yet, this has done little to make workers more productive. The main reason for all these extra unproductive hours “seems to be a fear of what will happen if you don’t check your e-mail before work and in the evening”. Paranoia is rife. Among the connected white-collar classes, it is now no longer done to leave the mobile - or the BlackBerry, or Treo - behind or let the battery die. Permanent access to multiple forms of communications is also producing an addiction to multi-tasking among members of the professional classes that is inevitably eating into the quality of work. Technological advances on a wide range of fronts - faster wireless networks, longer battery life, more powerful processors and memory chips - are conspiring to turn the small voice communicator in your pocket or handbag into a high-powered computer, capable of processing, storing and displaying all types of media. That may make it the next iPod, a screen for catching up on TV shows you missed last night, or a way to tap into all the photo-sharing websites and personal blogs that your nearest and dearest use to chronicle their lives. This permanent exposure to digital media and communications could really start to change the way you experience your life. And as with the arrival of that last great intruder on personal time - the television - it certainly has its detractors. Please read this full article published in Financial Times.
Ray Ozzie writes,We bring these innovations to market at a time of great turbulence and potential change in the industry. This isn’t the first time of such great change: we’ve needed to reflect upon our core strategy and direction just about every five years. Such changes are inevitable because of the progressive and dramatic evolution of computing and communications technology, because of resultant changes in how our customers use and apply that technology, and because of the continuous emergence of competitors with new approaches and perspectives.
The Key Tenets of the new model:
- The power of the advertising-supported economic model.
- The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.
- The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that “just work”.
These three tenets are causing a shift in the software landscape that started with consumers and is progressively working its way toward the enterprise – changing how software is monetized, how software is delivered, and what kind of software is ultimately embraced.Regardless of past aspirations, this is the right time to be focusing on services for two specific reasons: the increasing ubiquity of broadband has made it viable, and the proven economics of the advertising model has made it profitable. It can be argued, for example, whether or not Hailstorm was the ‘right’ undertaking. But regardless, the effort would certainly have benefited from having a known-viable services business model for which to design.
Notwithstanding Bob Cringley’s claim that these leaked documents are external marketing document – the memo itself is in my opinion a must read for all IT strategists and analysts.
I recently covered the developments centered around the internet rootservers and wrote about the need for multilateral control of these. 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 probably win. 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. In a subsequent coverage,on breaking the US grip, I wrote that 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. 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. 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 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 efforts to refine its approach 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 The WSJ is endorsing a fragmented Internet, without a single "root file" that describes the locations of everything on the Net. Countries can set up their own root server, tweaked to allow access only to those sites the government deems nonthreatening, and simply order every Internet service provider in the country to use it instead of Icann's. The change will be seamless to most users. Root servers could spring up in different countries. In time, the Internet might look less like the Internet and more like, say, the phone system, where there is no "controlling legal authority" on the international level. Some may allow users to specify which server they wanted to query when typing in URLs. As a technical means of content control, going "split root," is too compelling for governments not to give it a try. But the user experience would likely be much the same as it ever was most of the time. ISPs, as well as most vaguely democratic governments, would have an interest in ensuring broad interoperability. Just like phone companies handle interrouting, the same principle would apply in a split-root world. This solution would be far better, in the long run, if they did so on their own, without a U.N. agency to corrupt or give them shelter. I agree that it's time to start looking beyond the age of a U.S. dominated Internet as breaking up may be hard to do, but in this case, the alternative would be worse. As the WSJ opinion piece rightly points out the changes that are coming probably won't bring about the end of the Information Age, but merely signifies a new stage in its evolution.
Tristan Louis writes that it increasingly appears that Google is filling up holes in their offering,in an attempt to match its competitors. His assessment of Google’s offering with that of Yahoo, Microsoft & AOL throws interesting results.He finds while Google is the leader in search, apart from Catalog and Usenet search, Google does not offer services offered by others or currently under development. Interestingly, Google does not have any offerings in the Audio (nor a Podcast offering) and Encyclopedia space (although Wikipedia results sometimes pop-up in search results.) This seems to highlight two potential areas where Google will introduce new products: an audio search engine, which will include podcasts, and some type of partnership with Wikipedia to fill the reference space. Google has generally been the first to market with many of the search collections and it works more as a competitive threat to its competitors, forcing them to invest more in their search product and, in the process, improving the quality and breadth of search data for every user on the Internet. This is a good thing but not revolutionary unto its own. Do take time to read Tristan's well developed charts. While assessing Non-search services & developer services he finds that Google does innovate in some spaces but has largely innovated in order to gain entry in markets that already existed. While google breathes innovation,competitors are generally quick to notice and are catching up & concludes that in the near future Google may come up with offering like: - Some type of clustered search offering - A calendar product, which will probably inject new life in that space - An auction offering, tied with an internal payment system - A web hosting service that will scale from small entities to large ones and will include Gmail as part of the email offering - Some type of access service, probably using their WiFi solution
As I wrote recently its time Google clearly explains its vision that it is executing for the next 2-3 years – very important that there should be a plan to grow and sustain the 100+Billion USD marketcap (incidentally bigger than the GDP of some oil producing Asian nations – the likes of Indonesia.) contrarian views about Google’s valuations definitely need a closer examination. I think this issue needs some serious evaluation as I had been pointing out for sometime like here, here about google's ability to sustain its leadership and support the very high marketcap. Google has to come out in the open about its plans for spending the money say building its own Internet,online index,along with monetizing models in more specific terms. Its time that we get to see and know things beyond the likes of generic macro views like that of George Colony, which focusses only on what and not the how.I would like to let's say hear Google's vision of Web 2.0 or even beyond.Like in any other industry the responsibility of pioneers and leaders are lot more than just looking after themselves - they are trendsetters and rolemodels in the industry.
Several western organisation executives always wonder what would be the best place to set up business in India. Many think Bangalore is the place to be in.I have repeatedly said that Indian Offshoring Is Not Just Bangalore alone. Several people hype bangalore - its time an objective assessment of its attractiveness comes out. With simmering controversies coupled with massive problems of infrastructure and stable manpower availability have set many corproates thinking. Bibek Debroy & Laveesh Bhandari publish the results of the exercise of ranking Indian States on economic freedom. Economic freedom is about personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, protection of person and property and availability of legal and monetary arrangements that not only protect property rights of owners, but also ensure enforcement of contracts. The rankings are based on officially published government data and therefore cover only twenty of the thirty five states ( a cursory glance shows that these states would anyway be far behind anycase). Broadly, there are three heads for measuring economic freedom - size of government (revenue expenditure, administrative component in state domestic product, power subsidy, government share in organised employment, taxes, stamp duties, divestment); legal structure and security of property rights (stolen property recovered, violent crimes, economic crimes, vacant judiciary posts, completion of investigations by police, completion of trials by courts); and regulation of credit, labour and business (minimum wages, man-days lost in strikes and lockouts, share of unorganised labour force, number of SEZs, license fees for traders, market fees, implementation of Industrial Entrepreneurs' Memorandum, power shortages, pendency of cases and persons arrested under corruption-related laws). All variables are naturally normalised.
Tamil Nadu tops the list and Assam is at the bottom. The scores show that Tamil Nadu is at the top by a significant magnitude and Assam (at the bottom) is also a fair distance away from Uttaranchal. For comparisons, the table also reproduces the 2004 ranks and scores. One notices significant improvements in Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and West Bengal and significant deterioration in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Orissa and Chhattisgarh. Things to flag not only the deterioration in ranks, but the absolute decline in scores in states like Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Orissa, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Uttaranchal and Assam.Important finding published by a well known expert as the key author of the report. Must read for all those interested in investments in India.
Nicholas Carr writes Michael Porter overturned much of the conventional wisdom about business, in his book competitive strategy showing that the governing assumptions reflected a much too narrow conception of competition. Companies don't just battle their direct rivals for the profits in a market, Porter argued; they also contend with suppliers, buyers, substitute products, and potential new entrants. Together, these five forces of competition shape the structure of industries, determining how much profit is generated and how it's carved up.He argues that as the power of unions and government regulators has waned, the public itself has become a force shaping industries and influencing the generation and distribution of profits. I agree that in the flat world, where citizen democracy, assertive customers, long tail and blogs rule the world, enterprises need to certainly factor in the sixth force in articulating the business strategy as the balance of influence and power has clearly shifted in favor of the masses.
In this contribution economy & new ecosystem and in the age of web content and masses arises Digg.com, the new phenomenon in the online world. Bweek writes,Digg.com features news about the tech industry, filters stories from all over the Internet and presents them in a linear Google News-type interface. All digg's content comes from its users, who scour news sites, blogs, and other online sources for interesting tidbits. The items users submit - usually in the form of a short writeup and a link - go into a queue, where members vote on their favorites. The 15 stories that attract the most votes - or "diggs" - are featured on the site's front page, which is updated several times an hour to keep the news fresh. It's this innovative "by the people, for the people" writing and editing system that sets digg apart from other Web sites. And it has some people calling digg the future of news. The 11-month-old site already has 80,000 registered members and 500,000 daily visitors, with 100,000 visitors being added every month. Paul Kedrosky points to Alex chart on Digg Vs Slashdott traffic. Digg started with the notion of how to leverage the collective mass of the Internet in various ways: applying it to content, using it to rank content, using it to make content more palatable to the masses. Automated systems take time to crawl the net. Editorial systems have the human factor. They may decide they're not interested that day, or they'll do it tomorrow. In Digg’s case, there's no barrier.The larger the critical mass of users and the collective wisdom applied to digg, the better and more relevant the stories get. A system we call karma helps prevent abuse of digging. Coupled with a unique ranking system and power of collective wisdom, Digg gets more powerful. The founders note that Digg started with an application, and are using components of social networking to expand the value of the site. In the case of social networking, it serves one very distinct purpose - introduction. The power of user generated content and economy of people is exemplified by Digg. As we wrote earlier, Wikipedia, OhmyNews are enjoying great success and noted that this raises a key point: All of us will have to take on more responsibility. To get the most out of the new cooperative tools and services, we'll have to contribute our time and talent in new ways - such as rating a seller on eBay or penning a short essay in Wikipedia. The rewards will be more personalized products and services that we don't merely consume, but help create. Ultimately, all this could point the way to a fundamental change in the way people work together
We covered recently that the next versions of Microsoft's mail-server and PocketPC software, due in a few months, will include support for BlackBerry-style "push" e-mail. Getting mobile e-mail to work is far harder than it looks "The complexity is masked by this very simple, user-friendly device," says Blackberry executives. One possible outcome is that RIM and Good, a competitor will end up fighting over the lucrative corporate market, while the less-demanding consumer market becomes commoditised. But with hundreds of millions of e-mail users worldwide and, despite their apparent ubiquity, only 2.5m BlackBerry devices in circulation, it is still early days for the mobile e-mail business. No doubt, Blackberry is a technology marvel, the productivity improvements that Blackberry brings to work is probably immeasurable. Blackbery looks years ahead in technology - but still fact remains there are overwhelming limitations of the device - the device is cranky, the software malfunctions, the user interface is pathetic, the phone facilities are so poor - for example in my blackberry , I can't even send a businesscard from a Blackberry device - features are very limited and hot keys are not intuitive. But with all this can i live without Blackberry - having used to it - no way, but competition and improvements are highly called for - after all the allegiance is to the technology and not necessarily to the company. RIMM is charging premium prices for a service that is no longer differentiated and in all its probability push e-mail shall become a commonplace application shortly. Despite the "blackberry thumb" taking a toll on a number of regular blackberry users. which affects a small number of users. With Nokia moving aggressively in this space,and with Microsoft adding mobile e-mail functionality should prove much easier than a new Blackberry server, i.e. it is an easier sell. And then there's the patent case against RIMM. Microsoft may indeed move to acquire RIMM despite a 12 plus billion marketcap. Not withstanding RIMM’s financial strength and market share, the competitive landscape will be quite different and we shall certainly see Nokia and Microsoft become significant players in the wireless e-mail market space.
Peter Ferdinand Drucker is dead. In an obituray WSJ wrote, Mr. Drucker invented management - not as a practice, but as a field of study. It was he who first asked managers to decentralize their operations and treat their employees like humans - in the 1940s. The concept of "knowledge work" is his coinage, from the 1950s. Business Week magazine has hailed Mr. Drucker as "the most enduring management thinker of our time," and Forbes magazine featured him on its cover in 1997 under the headline: "Still the Youngest Mind." He was dubbed by Wired magazine as the "arch-guru of capitalism." In a 1999 Wall Street Journal opinion piece,Joan Magretta and Nan Stone wrote: "Before Peter Drucker, most people thought about their businesses with a manufacturing mindset, defining a business based on what it produced. Today, the marketing mindset prevails. It was Mr. Drucker's critical insight that instead of buying a 'product' the customer buys the satisfaction of a need." It is indeed an end of an era - future shall never see a person of his stature, insights, depth & range of thinkings and hardwork.
We have covered extensively in this blog about user generated content and contribution economy . Bessemer Venture Partners Nivi speculates that there is actually a trillion dollars of untapped value in the user generated content vs scope matrix(which he calls web 2.0 matrix).He points to Ethans four fundamental ways to ways to determine relevance in search results (quite similar to yahoo’s approach) Viz.
1) Market/collective/algorithmic - Call it the law of large numbers, the wisdom of crowds, or statistical truth, but PageRank and similar "hubs and authorities" algorithms figure out, on average, what everybody thinks of a given site. 2) Expert/editorial - Yahoo's roots are in the directory/taxonomy/recommendation based organization. 3) Personal - Based on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, give them results that most closely match their tendencies. Amazon's A9 is the best current example. 4) Social - Based not only on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, but on those of all the people they know. This is a fascinating middle ground (possible sweet spot?) in between personal and collective/algorithmic - you've got enough critical mass of opinions on key topics to hopefully eliminate outliers, but you've got a close enough connection to the user that you can bend your results to match their point of view.
Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop, and the long path that’s led to his interest in the topic is the topic covered by Ethan Zuckerman. Ultimately, Nicholas believes that in all the problems we’re considering at a conference like Pop!Tech, education is part of the equation. If you can change education, it’s a key to peace, prosperity and widespread social change. Over twenty years ago, Steve Jobs gave Seymour Papert and Negroponte some computers - Apple IIs - and put they put them into a lab in Senegal. The lab wasn’t sustainable and didn’t survive, but a later lab in Costa Rica did, primarily because a local foundation was formed to support it. Nicholas sees a connection - if not a cause - between this success and the fact that Costa Rica’s main export is microchips. A prototype shows that there's a stiff rubber gasket around the edge of the machine, which can double as a stand. The keyboard on the mockup was detachable, but will probably fold out on a hinge. The system is designed to work in three modes: laptop mode (screen up, keyboard down, handle behind as a stand); book mode (screen on the front, keyboard on the back, comfortable indentation for holding it in the left hand. Pressing on the keyboard "accordian-stype" - as Negroponte puts it - allows for page scrolling); and game mode (screen in the front, keyboard in the back, held sideways, like an oversized PSP. Two trackballs, surrounded by four way buttons, on each side of the screen act as controls, and function keys on the back act as additional buttons.) The display, though, is harder. The first idea was a projector - a screen would be a white sheet of cardboard, and the image would be created by a small set of LEDs. It’s too fragile for use in the field. So Negroponte went back to looking at LCDs. Much of the power consumption of a LCD display comes from running color filters. The cost structure: Negroponte became engaged in the idea of building a $100 laptop, which he says is not so difficult to do. 50-60% of your laptop cost is marketing, distribution and profit. The remainder - a quarter of the total price - is the cost of the display. The remaining quarter is processor, disk and everything else. How do you get those costs down as low as possible? The answer, beyond the display: don’t use a fat operating system. The processor speed is largely used by bloated operating systems. Five years ago, he says, his laptop ran faster and more reliably than it does today. Software developers are paid to create new features - if developers got paid to remove lines of code, we’d have a very different world. Read the note further about display choices and how to run the supply chain. Also visit Novatium site for its vision of reaching similar system to masses.
The remaking IBM theme is attracting a lot more coverage & analysis, perhaps rightly deserved. Tom highlights that IBM is gearing towards becoming a vendor of highly automated business processes. Companies that need to add a business process within their industry will one day be able to buy one off the shelf, so to speak. IBM is collecting best practices within each industry, within each business process, and using applications, middleware, and its integration skills, to create ready-to-go business process modules that can be rapidly slotted into a company's operations. As covered eearlier, in Sam’s new vision for IBM - Instead of merely selling and servicing technology, IBM is putting to use the immense resources it has in-house, from its software programmers to its 3,300 research scientists, to help companies like P&G rethink, remake, and even run their businesses - everything from accounting and customer service to human resources and procurement. "We're giving our clients a transformational lift," says Palmisano. He is out to transform the very nature and image of IBM with vision to carry IBM beyond that 20th century legacy, beyond computing while making IBM as indispensable to clients today as it was during the heyday of mainframes.
Tom quotes Irving Wladawsky-Berger as saying that IBM does not need to be in the apps business because it can get the apps from others.The approach would be to pull together the right apps, and the other software and hardware components to create automated, highly optimized business process modules.To become a business process vendor requires the adoption of many industry standards within many different industries-a long, slow process. "Once we have the standards in place, such as agreement on document formats and many other categories, we will then have the building blocks that we can use to build the business process modules. The Internet was based on common standards, it was more of a standards revolution rather than a technology revolution." I agree with Tom that to remake IBM into a business process vendor will require huge amounts of R&D to figure out how things are done today, how business processes can be best optimized, develop the tools to design and implement automated business processes, and many other related issues. IBM rightly thinks that the intersection of technology and business process services holds great promise. As it sees the giant is trying to come out with a new set of services that includes technical assistance but adds strategic advice about business methods. Palmisano dubs the concept "business process transformational services," and claims it represents a massive market nearly a third as large as the $1.2 trillion spent annually on IT. An interesting company and exciting approach to watch - no doubt.
Close to Shai Agassi dismissing possibilities of innovation powered by opensource we see Kagermann commenting on the topic – In an interview with Infoworld, he states his belief that business applications are not a field for open source. He sees that the Linux operating system is well defined and developed by a community used to programming. Applications are another story, particularly business applications. Designing applications to run business processes requires very strong governance and rightly expresses doubts if a community can achieve this. Strong guidance and expertise are needed to convince customers that the way you design business applications is the right way for the future. Read my recent note titled – dim view of opensource here.
Some other good points made by Kagermann -
“Value-based pricing is not about going to customers and asking them to measure the benefits they get from using our software and then having them give us a certain percentage of these benefits. This won't work. No customer will accept this method of pricing because we would be essentially asking them to share internal information about their business success. What we plan to offer are different price tags on different modules depending on their impact on business success”.
“Companies will compete more on business model innovation, which is empowered by IT. The question many of them ask is how they can differentiate themselves from their competitors? I tell them that such differentiation can't be achieved with today's architectures without considerable investment and sometimes modification to applications”. Also read his views on SaaS which more or less ties up with what I wrote not a very easy path lay to embrace Software-as-a-Service model as overwhelming issues impact adoption. Also read this this as well.
We covered the view The landscape for SOA is wide open and it shall be influencing virtually every aspect of software development and application bringing changes in the nature of usage, development - encompassing customer, product vendor and service offerings.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.While covering on the topic of complexity we observed that the 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. We also noted that SOA deployment are huge exercises, if implemented in the right spirit. Like any other enterprise initiative, SOA deployment needs careful planning, deep collaboration, lots and lots of change management and a measurable objectives with well defined checkpoints identified in between are essential in any SOA deployment engagement. While covering Jeff Schneider’s perspective of four big SOA models we observed that no big vendor today has been able to clearly articulate their SOA approach and how these may transform theirs & customer landscape in say five years form now quite convincingly but Jeff has spotted the right traits.
Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates correlates trends between the rise and adoption of ecommerce and SOA and lists Top Ten SOA Principles:
1. SOA is real. It is not a quick fix & is a ten year journey that requires considerable planning, just like an e-commerce implementation. 2. SOA will only work if organizations lead with manageability. SOA by its very nature demands the aggregation of IP from many different sources. Scalability within SOA will come from management – not development. 3. SOA will only work if it is implemented within the context of a business process orientation. 4. SOA is predicated on leveraging business services that represent the component parts of your business. 5. SOA requires a container that creates a composite application. 6. SOA requires standards across all vendors implementations of SOA. and a few more. A good collection , I should say.
We recently covered Microsoft has had to maintain its Windows and Office empires, building ever more features into them to keep existing customers coming back for more. At the same time, new businesses emerged on the Web, threatening the relevance of those monopolies. As companies such as Google and Salesforce.com grew, Microsoft had to respond. Still, the new generation of Web services is designed to augment its traditional products, not supplant them.
In a confidential Oct. 30 message to Microsoft's top executives, Gates made it clear that he considered the new Windows Live and Office Live online services, unveiled two days later, only the start of a fundamental shift in the company's business. The messages indicate a new level of seriousness and urgency in Microsoft's embrace of online services. Ozzie finds microsoft's "end-to-end execution of key scenarios has often been uneven" and points to "a set of very strong and determined competitors," such as Google, Yahoo! and Apple, that are "laser-focused on internet services and service-enabled software," much of it centered on ad revenue. Gates and Ozzie also described Microsoft as uniquely positioned for the new era - citing significant opportunities if units across the company can successfully expand beyond traditional businesses and into new online services. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves." Ozzie wrote that Microsoft leaders will work with him to assess the company's product plans - making changes if necessary to embrace the new online services strategy. Technological advances are allowing rivals to offer, through online services, many of the same features previously limited to the PC-based software that is Microsoft's specialty. The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a 'services wave' of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. The three "key tenets" cited by Microsoft's Ray Ozzie as driving the changes at the company: - "The power of the advertising-supported economic model. Online advertising has emerged as a significant new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services." - "The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model. A grass-roots technology adoption pattern has emerged on the internet largely in parallel to the classic methods of selling software to the enterprise." - "The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that 'just work.' The PC has morphed into new form factors and new roles, and we increasingly have more than one in our lives - at work, at home, laptops, tablets, even in the living room."
With Inktomi, AltaVista and Overture acquisitions and native technology, Yahoo has built its own new Web search system, which now rivals Google's in speed and accuracy. James Fallows writesWith X1 - Yahoo is able to provide a good desktop search product, with Flickr, a system for storing, sharing and commenting on photographs; a scheduling application called Upcoming; and the mail utility Oddpost, on which it is basing a new e-mail system. Last year, Yahoo overtook Hotmail to become the world's most-used free e-mail service & its new e-mail system, scheduled for release next year, applies AJAX technology to mimic the speed and power of a normal desktop.
Yahoo in the long term has plans for search seem quite different from Google's. Yahoo views the very scale and sprawl of its operations - the seemingly random assemblage of sites and functions, the 200 million active users in more than 20 countries - as a crucial competitive advantage. Look for an interesting comparison of search results in the same web page. Yahoo is modeling itself after the entertainment industry. It believes its future largely lies in building the equivalent of online theme parks featuring fantasy sports leagues, music, sites for new TV shows and other branded content and services. Yahoo wants users to come often and stay a long time so it can put more and more ads on their screens. Google is thriving on the Web's vast sprawl rather than trying to occupy one corner of it. Yahoo sees the search playing three acts: - The first is the 'public' Web, where if different people type the same query they'll all get the same results. - The second is purely personal search - finding a file or photo, usually on your own machine. - The third is the "social" or "community" searching, in which each attempt to find the right restaurant listing, medical advice site, vacation tip or other bit of information takes advantage of other people's successes and failures in locating the same information. The different is in Yahoo's systematic plan to build "community intelligence" into nearly all aspects of its operation - and in turn, to entice users to spend more and more of their time on Yahoo sites, where they can see Yahoo ads like that can be seen at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com. A query from this page will return results from three sources. One is "My Web," or pages each user has marked and asked Yahoo to save for later reference. (These pages are saved by Yahoo itself, on its servers.) Another is "Everyone's Web," the general Internet. Finally, there is "My Community's Web," pages marked as interesting or valuable by members of a social network. Yahoo sees its roles as really about getting the average consumer to move their lives online. With Yahoo’s ambitious investment plans along withwhat appears to be a well set direction towards the future,it may well become possible.
Manjeet Kripalani writing on the the shortage of talent quotes L&T chairman Anil Manibhai Naik as saying - "Everyone is growing fast, and India is facing a talent shortage." As she writes, enterprises across the world are rushing to take advantage of the country's cheap and abundant labour force. But now India's domestic growth is taking off, creating unprecedented demand for workers with the right leadership and technical skills. "The engines of the services and manufacturing sectors are going simultaneously, and that's creating the shortages," says Shirish Sankhe, a partner with consultancy McKinsey & Co in Mumbai. Multinationals - from Pepsico and General Electric to Citibank and Accenture - are a part of the problem. As they seek to tap into India's growth, they have helped fuel an explosion in wages, especially in the tech and outsourcing sectors.For years they have offered Indians top salaries, opportunities to work abroad, and prestigious credentials, but as both domestic and foreign companies push deeper into new areas such as retail and industrial engineering, the bidding for qualified labor is heating up. Today, salaries for senior managers at some Indian companies nearly equal those at multinationals. Look at the scenario depicted : India's talent shortages started appearing last year in technology and outsourcing, and attrition rates in those businesses today top 25 per cent annually. Pay for qualified managers in tech has shot up as much as 30 per cent, and now everyone, including big foreign companies, is scrambling.Salaries are going up everywhere - Textile factories to banks. Private firms are starting to offer courses for everyone from flight attendants to engineers.More private colleges are springing up, and some 450,000 new students are enrolled in engineering schools this year, up from just 250,000 last year. More than 35 million jobs shall be created uin teh next ten years by 2015, India's airlines will add 440 new planes by 2010,some 250 new malls expected to come up over the next three years. Some companies are looking abroad for solutions. Many industries are luring Indian expats from the West, especially those with skills in areas just taking off in India, such as retail and pharmaceutical research. My Take : Obviously for India - among the top five primary forces to monitor - Infrastructure, Education, Healthcare, Agriculture would definitely find a place. India needs to do this fast enough - otherwise it may once again lose the opportunity to march ahead. As Vijay Kelkar points out countries go through a sequence where, at first there are many young people, then incomes go up, then birth rates go down, and then there are few young people. Every country also goes through a “demographic transition” where old people live longer, and richer people have fewer children: which puts a squeeze on the working population. But that middle period - when there are many young people - is a powerful opportunity for growth. After all India has a per capita GDP of $650, one of the lowest in the world. and If and only if India plays its cards right, it can be at $10,000 per person in 2035, roughly 30 years from now.
Slashdot is sort of apioneer in online community discussions forums and a very powerful one at that - its usage and relavence are clearly increasing over time. Jeff Bates thinks that the most interesting thing about Slashdot in terms of its effect on the traditional media is that it really is, and was, a harbinger of things to come. When the site was started, now we're talking almost six years ago at this point. The blog simply didn't exist. Slashdot is kind of the grandfather of blogs in many ways. It's different in that there isn't just one voice. There's kind of the voice of the site, but it's not just one person posting on there. At first, traditional media was unaware of the fact that it existed. And what has most interested them, in talking to people at lots of different media organizations is how involved the community of people are on the site. He adds that co-founder Rob Malda and he have always kind of viewed running Slashdot as, "We run the pub." We run the menu. We know what we're going to serve at the bar, but really the real meat of it is people coming in and talking about things, looking at things. And I think that that part of it is the part that's most unique. ... I think it's that community involvement that has been the biggest shift for traditional media to come to grips with. In his mind he sees a good slasdot post as being able to state things well, actually being able to write and form coherent sentences, which is a surprising task for many people, far more challenging than one would think it is. But also having good links, not just having one link to the story but if there's supporting information. This is the World Wide Web. Let's use it for that.
James McGovern thinks open source provides the enterprise with numerous advantages not afforded with traditional commercial software where users can feel more like a customer and not a like a prisoner.The value proposition of gaining access to source code before using the software will allow the enterprise to avoid the fury of acquisitions of software and the enterprises not only can gain loose coupling by adhering to industry standards and approaches such as service-oriented architectures but loose coupling is also gained by not being shackled to every strategic decision made by your vendor. James finds Liferay Enterprise Portal very easy to install and out of the box came with 3x the number of portlets than most commercial portal offerings, capable of connecting to many databases and application servers. Zero vendor lock-in he says was quite liberating. Liferay has proven itself as being highly scalable, customizable and most importantly secure and worthy of consideration not just for large enterprises but small shops as well.They have avoided vendor lock-in and the tactics used by other open source software vendors by making documentation freely accessible without requiring registration, payment or other constraints. High quality timely support is freely available via email listserv's and it has a business friendly licensing model that allows enterprises and software vendors to modify and distribute with zero license fees. He thinks moving forward that the most agile of enterprises strive to turn significant chunks of their IT infrastructure into commodities. This is the only way that they will ultimately reduce total cost of ownership. This is best accomplished by slowly adopting open source alternatives and ultimately contributing to it. My own views about opensource are fairly well known -I shall however try and add my perspective on Liferay deployment in the next 6-8 weeks when a liferay implemetayion that some of my colleagues are involved in makes enough progress.
Jay Greene provides an excellent perspective about Microsoft's recent foray into hosted model. Excerpts with edits and comments added:
With Web services clearly the next wave in computing, - don't count Microsoft out They are famous for starting late and winning in the end. Microsoft recently announced a net strategy that is perhaps the most important Net strategy announcement since it launched the so-called browser war against Internet pioneer Netscape. Here Microsoft is creating two families of Web services, one for consumers, called Windows Live, and one for small businesses, called Office Live. Both are online counterparts to its Windows and Office software franchises, respectively. It also plans to make it easy for customers or independent software developers to build their own Web services that interact with MS technology. Unlike traditional programs, such as Microsoft's Office productivity suite, which reside on a PC, Web services run on Web sites and can be accessed via any browser. Gates sees the the Live era as just starting and projects it as a new way to look at software and a better way to create opportunities.
Its new services are based on widely accepted industry standards, rather than its own proprietary technologies. Microsoft has created a Web site, Live.com, where people can create personalized Web pages and gather many of the things they enjoy doing on the Web. In addition to headlines about their favorite sports teams and local weather, surfers can get e-mail, use instant messenger, and check out feeds from blogs and audio podcasts-it lets users post content from their own PCs, such as documents they've recently read, giving Live.com features that don't exist at popular services, such as My Yahoo. Most of Microsoft's offerings will be free, though some will require paid subscriptions. Office Live offers a similarly wide array of services - this time for small businesses. Microsoft will give away Web sites, software for designing them, and Web-based applications to manage businesses, such as collaboration programs. It hopes to pay for that basic level of service with ad sales. Users can subscribe to additional applications, such as project management or time and billing management for a fee. And the services link to Office programs such as Outlook so that users can work both online and off. Microsoft has had to maintain its Windows and Office empires, building ever more features into them to keep existing customers coming back for more. At the same time, new businesses emerged on the Web, threatening the relevance of those monopolies. As companies such as Google and Salesforce.com grew, Microsoft had to respond. Still, the new generation of Web services is designed to augment its traditional products, not supplant them.
The "Lessig Method" of presentation is not an official method per se, but many people who know about the work of Stanford law professor, Lawrence Lessig, have been inspired by his presentation style and informally refer to his approach as something unique indeed. David Hornik sees Lessig's presentation as a fantastic combination of content, art and brand. Dick Hardts presentation on Identity 2.0 is modelled on Lessig's style - an impressive style of presentation indeed. Few things about the style adapted from comments in the note: - Simplicity & sophistication ought to characterize the slide content - Emphasis needs to be on readability as against background artistries. - Built in punchlines for good communication across, emphasis on ideas - Pause/ altered pace in the presentations throughtout between continual flow of image, words and animations. - More preparation time – that includes unlearning conventional approaches, assessing and reassessing multiple type of options and constant evolution all these matter. Consultants/ Entrepreneurs should start by watching at a Lessig presentation before creating the slides. The thing is note is the way emphasis is on a point as against a whole argument, giving flexibility to the presenter to hold/extend on points for discussions. The slides are take off points for ideas/discussions and not a repository of all points.
To me this article looks like a good PR exercise and nothing other than that.There is no qualitative comparison based on data or on a fair and balanced assessment of models – So am not writing anything beyond stating that it is not so easy to just ramp up(impressive indeed -going by published numbers) and claim success when everyone in the industry is doing it– as success and domination are a factor of multiple forces those that come into interplay. (Note : All posts in this blog are strictly my private views, not related to where I work.) I just want to point out two things:
- Mindset change needs to happen across the board in any large/global organization to compete on the basis of different models - Based on publicly available information - almost all the Indian HQ software service majors are announcing better than expected results, guidances are getting revised upwards and that stronger players amongst them shall get more and more strong. A few of related ideas that I had blogged about ( there are a lot more) are available here, here, here. One way to look at the success and significance of US headquartered firms on the offshoring strength would come out by asking the question - where is their Tier 1 management sitting and executing. Closer to customer or in an impressive building near the freeway are all fine but if advantage is centred on global delivery it is time the issues are examined from that perspective as well. I would be keen to see global majors customers coming and demonstrating in public forums the accretive advantage their firms have enjoyed by leveraging global delivery models and how smooth and easy the experience was.
Seeing from other perspectives, we are not going to see same type of game repeated again and again. Overall while assessing the market, clearly there is a larger trend that is discernable - The name of the game is changing – We will soon change to the improvements in clients businesses that can be enabled by IT 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.
More innovation and efforts to try out new things are happening in the web services market. We build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs – something children can do even before they learn to speak. When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task? Amazon after launching its successful web services offerings, now extends into Amazon Mechanical Turk providing a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call - the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work. Visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site,and try it out for yourself.
Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes,"There's a method to Google's madness, and there always has been. Google has been a thrifty shopper in the past, picking up small sites, software developers, and online technology companies. Now, with its coffers widening with every passing market-thumping quarter,Google is likely to make a big splash with its greenery". With more than 95% of its revenue coming from advertising, Google can either broaden its reach by scooping up more virtual billboard space or try to diversify its egg basket by making inroads in software and services, argues Rick. I agree with the logic about suitability of Tivo to be part of Google- the more you think about TiVo, the more you realize that it's the ideal bride for Google. Actually, it was rumor mill fodder seven months ago. After all Tivo also makes some money by selling ads. TiVo ads wouldn't be all that different from Google's paid search listings.- both can serve up perfectly targeted ads because TiVo knows what you're watching, just as Google knows where you're surfing. While there may be a few such suitors, its time Google clearly explains its vision that it is executing for the next 2-3 years – very important that there should be a plan to grow and sustain the 100+Billion USD marketcap (incidentally bigger than the GDP of some oil producing Asian nations – the likes of Indonesia.) contrarian views about Google’s valuations definitely need a closer examination. I think this issue needs some serious evaluation as I had been pointing out for sometime like here, here about google's ability to sustain its leadership and support the very high marketcap. Google has to come out in the open about its plans for spending the money say building its own Internet, online index,along with monetizng models in more specific terms. Its time that we get to see and know things beyond the likes of generic macro views like that of George Colony, which focusses only on what and not the how. Like in any other industry the responsibility of pioneers and leaders are lot more than just looking after themselves - they are trendsetters and rolemodels in the industry.
In Part I of this posting, we covered some perspectives in support of opensource examined from changing demographics, business environment and Microsoft's fresh views about Opensource .In this part, I share my views on opensource: Open source solutions at the bottom of the stack – typically workhorse infrastructure elements are getting well entrenched . I wrote earlier, large areas of infrastructure will be conquered by open source, but there will be huge area of applications that the commercial companies will maintain. Neither side will conquer and many pitched battles will be fought. Byron Sebastian’s arguments about development becoming cheaper & therefore opensource will raise faster is not right - this may apply to both commercial software and open source. Perhaps they mean that commercial software will be subject to more competition, not that commercial software will cease to exist. The commercial software business can learn lessons that open source teaches about software development without having to change the fundamental business model.But even a layer above – lets say starting even at database level – we see the hold loosening and as we move up certainly – opensource becomes one among multiple options. Opensource requires lot of organisational support and hence we are seeing open source advocates leaning on the - naturally big companies use the opportutnity and want to occupy this space as well - this opens an interesting issue again - whats the business model for opensource- how would be this be a sustainable, dependable model for large enteprises criticaly dependent on IT. I tend to take a dim view of open source relevance - see Opensource -where is the business model, Opensource : Costly & Litigatious, Open Source : Reality Check. Look at Kim Polese view business models of the open source support companies – where the contours of what need to be done to support open source components become quite clear and a not seeing several players in the opensource world thinking along these lines – it would be a major impediment to consider adoption of opensource in enterprises if the support model is not made widely available and the economics and technology upgrade rate demonstrated as beneficial . But I do see the need to have a significant role for opensource at desktop.The idea for opensource may be good for desktop related software or some maintenance related software, entertainment software like games, utility tools like anti-spyware, messaging software and infrastructure software like- app server, database servers, email servers, messaging middleware. These are all product types where a developer could influence a small deal at any enterprise – small or large. Sales and Account management should focus on continually mapping the account – mapping influencers, buyers, naysayers, decision shy ditherers.
Bob Cringley writes that retiring baby boomers are going to invigorate open source. He points out every industry has its moments of transition, its highs and lows, and they can be frequently linked to aging products and aging producers of those products. Non-commodity products have lifecycles. So while higher profit margins can come from products based on older technology, that trend continues only for a certain time before it falls off a marketing cliff and suddenly nobody is buying the stuff. That's why companies spend the money to bring out new product lines because failing to do so kills companies. While assessing the effects of demographics and business environment change, he adds that we're likely to have an influx of talent into Open Source projects, supplanting the mid-20s geeks that have been pushing that business. Gary Beach wrote that Microsoft might be able to make even more money with an openVista version. He adds that microsoft shareholders might embrace the idea because the future research and development and headcount costs of openVista would arguably be lower, allowing the company to invest in other areas like higher-margin servers, mobile devices and home entertainment. Matt Asay,the new executive at Alfresco, writes after listening to Jason Matusow that a monolithic view of Microsoft is as inaccurate as it is useless. Microsoft is clearly not taking a passive-aggressive approach to Opensource. Jason’s keynotes/sessions of OSBC Boston are available here. Jason largely debunks the popular but erroneous belief that open source (and the web) enable true "Long Tail" distribution strategies. Matt says that Jason argued convincingly that Microsoft is starting to understand and apply (at a pace faster than most of us would have thought possible) the lessons of open source. While Microsoft will have difficulty separating itself from the Office and Windows umbilical cords, and these will ultimately strangle its opportunities for growth ("Live" notwithstanding) and opensource may give it the needed breath to maneuver. I shall provide my views in Part II of this post.
The internet's deflationary effect is felt on every industry it touches – starting right from the financial services, travel, transportation, printing & publishing, telecom, media & entertainment and a host of other industries. Some airline operations are case studies for extrapolation beyond the aviation industry. Imagine southwest without these technology applications . Look at new features like this – it is clear the airline industry is on the verge of massive change.Looking at the airline industry, the first air ticket was sold via the Internet almost 10 years ago, in December 1995, by Alaska Airlines. The USA Today article heavily excerpted here points out that ten years back 50 sales a week looked like a great deal, but this year, about 42% of all travel sale transactions in the USA - airline seats, hotel rooms, car rentals, cruises, tours and other services - will take place online and are expected to touch 55% in a couple of years. U.S. airlines are now focussed on developing ways to use the Internet, with the aim to cut distribution costs even further in the next five years than they have in the last 10, and increase unit revenue by developing applications that will induce Web-surfing travelers to pay slightly higher average prices. With the marketplace,there are lots more of those cheap seats available than there were a decade ago and new promotions make the challenges more formidbale. Now, carriers in their pursuit to cut costs even further are backing new third-party websites, and employing new software on their own websites that allows them to partially bypass the big, expensive ticketing networks used by most travel agents. Those four big computer reservations systems — Sabre, Galileo, Worldspan and Amadeus — collectively are known as global distribution systems, or GDSes. Search engines like Kayak.com and Sidestep.com scan a wide number of airline-operated and third-party travel websites for the best deals. Then, for a modest finder's fee, the search engines transfer consumers directly into the selected airline's website. The airlines also are boosters of new third-party websites, called GNEs (GDS-New Entrants, or "Genies"). Airlines feel that the "legacy costs" built into the big GDSes make them too costly for financially distressed carriers to continue using. American Airlines CEO Gerard Arpey says the world's largest airline won't continue selling tickets via some or all of those old systems unless they can get their costs close to American's cost of selling tickets directly to consumers. The GNEs, run on much less expensive and more efficient network servers, are giving airlines negotiating leverage.GDS views its system as more hip technologically, narrowing the cost gap vs. the GNEs & claims more revenue benefits -in some cases, lots more - per ticket sold than do either the GNEs or the airlines' own websites. Just as the big GDSes are trying to narrow the cost gap vs. the GNEs, the GNEs are trying to narrow the revenue gap vs. the GDSes. In various stages of development are new applications that will let GNEs and airline sites offer different fares and services to virtually every traveler who logs on to the sites, based on their known preferences, previous travel purchases, income levels and frequent-flier status.
Autonomy buys Verity in a cash deal totaling around $500 million. Search technology developers combine to take on rivals Google, Microsoft . Buying Verity increases Autonomy's scale and diversifies its revenue streams. The combination of Verity and Autonomy will provide customers with a broader and more powerful set of solutions that address the increasingly demanding requirements of information access. Verity acquired ultraseek from Inktomi couple of years back.Verity and Autonomy can rationalize complementary product capabilities and distribution channels on a global basis. Support for existing products would be maintained says Verity – I have always felt that these two products are naturally compatible as well . I do not want to write more on this as I know both these two companies well except to say that I expected Verity to make the purchase. The all cash deal shows who could take stronger position in the bargain. I think this is part of consolidation streak and clearly almost all companies aged upwards of six-seven years in the <200 Mn$ sales are surefire hurts/beneficiaries in the consolidation fever and almost all enterprises less than 500 Mn$ would be evaluating options, except for very niche players and those seeing growth. This wave of consolidation is not neccessarily a great development from a customer perspective - in terms of pricing and support. I also beleive that this would unleash a lot more entrepreneurism in the market - people and money are floating out now. Players upwards of 1 Bn$ sales would be looking at this from a different perspective of identifying the potential catch - I guess the name of the game is changing.
Michael Malone writing on the forbes fumble points out that that there are an estimated 20 million bloggers out there. And counting for drop puts in the long run there may be 200,000 serious bloggers out there, scattered throughout the world. That's 200,000 entrepreneurial startups, 50 times that of the number of new dot-coms a decade ago and argues that this is more than enough critical mass to kick off a boom. He explains that while it could be the case that most of these bloggers aren't making much money- they don't have much overhead either - and they are slowly groping their way toward workable revenue models (I would like to add here for some blog presence may not be aimed at direct personal benefit - say a CEO blogging). He expects that once they do, the venture capital industry is ready to swoop in. With the Huffington Post and the soon-to-be-announced Pajamas Media, we are also seeing the birth of the first larger business structures in the blogosphere - and the first serious interest by major advertisers. That will be the key: when General Motors takes out an ad on Instapundit, the blogosphere will ignite so fast that it will make the dot-com buildup seem like slow motion. He points out how Forbes repeatedly misses out on the tech thing, going as far to call it one of the best technology counter-indicators . Malone foresees that five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news, and has created a whole new group of major companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies. At this point, the industry will then undergo its first shakeout, with the loss of perhaps several million blogs - though the overall industry will continue to grow at a steady pace.
In my recent travel read this book. Robyn Waters, former vice president of Trend, Design, and Product Development at Target – sees it as a myth that trends can only be spotted early by überhip Bohemian types who are ever so much cooler than everyone else. The Trendmaster’s Guide features her favorite tips and examples for understanding and anticipating trends. Every letter from A to Z offers an insight to help readers navigate the unknown and prepare for whatever their costomers want next. It’s a quick read that packs a lot of insight between "A is for antennae" and "Z is for Zen." A "trend tracker" is someone who is alert for indications that help his or her business to stay up to the minute whereas what she calls a "Trendmaster" uses that information to determine where that minute is going. You have to just watch the travel and airlines industry to watch trends and how rapid changes an happen. One reader wrote,” The fact remains, however, that her insights will seem "new" to those readers who were previously unaware of "the invisibility of the obvious" and may have been captive to what Jim O'Toole calls "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." As a result, they have failed to recognize seemingly insignificant indications of emerging trends which (sooner rather than later) determine success or failure in any competitive marketplace.”
However trends identifiedby the likes of Nasbitt are of a different league – For example a quick recap of the trends identified by him: (1) Becoming an information society after having been an industrial one (2) From technology being forced into use, to technology being pulled into use where it is appealing to people (3) From a predominantly national economy to one in the global marketplace (4) From short term to long term perspectives (?? I am thinking increasingly the opposite seems to be getting prevalent across the board) (5) From centralization to decentralization (6) From getting help through institutions like government to self-help (7) From representative to participative democracy (8) From hierarchies to networking (9) From seeing things as "either/or" to having more choices etc..In life everyone has to see patterns, take decisions and realign - trendwatching shall become more and more important in the days to come
The Person of the Year Award,is given to an outstanding professional having a positive influence on the growth and popularity of podcasting in the previous 12 months by the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference Awards Committee. Doug Kaye, the creator, host and executive producer of the popular technology podcast website IT Conversations, has received the Person of the Year Award. In 2005, in an effort to produce a greater amount of quality content for his listeners, Doug brought together a diverse team of volunteer podcasters to assist in recording, editing and producing audio sessions from technology conferences and events around the country. Team ITC’s podcasts are widely recognized for excellence in both audio quality and depth of content. Doug recently launched an even more ambitious effort to recruit and train volunteer podcasters from around the world to record and produce podcasts from any spoken word event including conferences, lectures and meetings. Through the non-profit “Conversations Network,” Doug’s goal is to record and archive content globally from as many events as possible. Respected among his peers, Doug has done a tremendous amount of work to make a wide variety of quality audio content available via podcasts. IT Conversations can be found at http://www.itconversations.com A well deserved award - Doug getting recognized for his contribution to the industry – after all he built the first scalable platform for dissemination of technology-related programs.
Dion Hinchcliffe has posted a very insightful and wonderful piece on the issues he perceives with Web 2.0 – he thinks that if we can address these, 2006 will be a banner year for Web 2.0 1. Excessive Hype 2. Lack of Simple Definition 3. Aging Poster Children 4. Needing A Permaconnection 5. Ajax as the Official Web 2.0 Experience 6. Excessive Attention On The Technology 7. Really Bad Adherents 8. Blogging Instead of Doing 9. Not Facing Hard Truths 10.Adopting The Lightweight Creation Model - Like the agile methods are making some smaller companies deliver better software, the big guys need to reinvent their development shops and that's a hundred times easier to say than to do. In my opinion, expect a new generation of companies to build Web 2.0. Every new internet movement popular enough to generate buzz also generates a backlash. While http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 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, it is for a reality check. 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.
M.R.Rangaswami when asked recently is Bangalore the next Silicon Valley said that’s like asking, "Is Detroit still a car town?" His view is that there’s nowhere else in the world [other than Silicon Valley] where you can get an attorney and a VC together and fund a startup in 30 days & this won’t change unless the customers shift. That’s possible for some markets such as cell phones. Those markets may shift to Shanghai or Bangalore. But until that happens, people will come to where the customers are and that’s still the U.S.
P.V.Indiresan writes, "Indian IT industry builds glamorous offices but expands without giving sufficient thought for the burden it places on infrastructure. That carelessness is the bane of Indian culture: Indians (and Indian businesses) are personally clean but dirty the surroundings; they have little civic sense. The pioneers of the Silicon Valley were different; they were far sighted. They took care to construct their buildings 400 feet away from the main road. That simple precaution, one that cost comparatively little, made future expansion simple and (more important) feasible. In contrast, there is a seven-star hotel on the airport road in Bangalore that is built right up to the verge of the narrow road. That hotel's greed has made it impossible for the airport road to expand or carry more traffic". He adds insightfully that the semiconductor industry in the US did not locate itself close to San Francisco city but miles away in the Silicon Valley. Nearer the city, the explosive growth of the industry would have all but destroyed San Francisco. By moving away, the industry made San Francisco safe from unbridled expansion. In the US (and in Europe too) those who can afford to do so live in villages (that is what suburbs are); only the poor live in cities. In India, it is the other way around; the rich crowd into cities, the poor live in villages. That is at the root of the contrast between the way Bangalore has developed and Silicon Valley did. That difference is not accidental; it is the result of the way governments operate in the two countries. I agree with the view that while it's true that the barriers to innovation and development are dropping, it still takes more than a few tech businesses to become an innovation hub. I had always felt that Bangalore was overhyped. There is no scope for comparison - with unfolding developments, the cherished dreams of some optimists about Bangalore may never materialise.
Bill Burnham writes it looks like there has been a major outbreak of RSS inspired "Feed Overload Syndrome" and it's spreading faster than the Avian flu. He pr0vides some means to combat the syndrome, becoming a real issue with the blogosphere population: 1. Direct Multiple Feeds to the Same Folder. 2. Subscribe to meta-feeds. Metafeeds are RSS feeds that are composed of posts from a number of individual RSS feeds like technology updates & subscription options exist for keyword based meta-feeds from sites such as PubSub and Technorati. (I think this may be the best solution) 3. Increase your publisher to distributor ratio. A very coarse way to segregate feeds are as publishers or distributors. Publishers tend to publish relatively few posts that are longer than average and filled with original content. Distributors (also called linkers) tend to generate many posts a day and typically republish short excepts of other people's post with a short commentary of their own. (This can in a way inhibit your ability to assess multiple perspectives on the same issue/theme – some blogs like this could be providing a combination of both.The freshness and variety may be a casualty here and the power of the blogosphere -Viz true democracy may appear to be dented this way.)
I covered in this blog several months ago a perspective on China Vs India race. Dan Fineman then wrote that India's development model might never reproduce the multi-year, double-digit GDP expansion the Tigers and China registered in their peak years. Hypercharged investment fuelled by underpriced capital propelled those growth spurts. Lower investment and savings rates could limit India's expansion. But India's model should prove more sustainable than the typical East Asian strategy adopted by China. India is developing more efficient corporates, healthier banks, more robust service industries and a bigger consumption base. China has won the sprint. India is training for the marathon Stephen Roach last year wrote that the road to economic development is a long and arduous journey and India is India is now at a key fork in that road. Now after a visit to the country recently he writes, India is on the cusp of something big. He sees the most exciting thing about India is the potential for an increasingly powerful internal consumption dynamic - an ingredient sorely missing in most other Asian development models, including China. India’s constraints - infrastructure, saving, foreign direct investment, and politics are well known, but this is improving. The consumption story - the organic sustenance of sustainable growth and development casts India in a very different light. India’s per capita income and consumption levels are about half those of China’s. But it is growth at the margin that always drives powerful macro and market trends. The potential comes from the structure of the Indian economy: Private consumption currently accounts for 64% of Indian GDP - higher than shares in Europe (58%), Japan (55%), and especially China (42%). He argues that the increased vigor of private consumption provides a powerful leverage to the Indian growth dynamic that is rarely found in the externally-dependent developing world. In Roach's eyes - there was one key difference between visiting Chinese and Indian maals - the locals were buying in India. Indian companies all have very sophisticated marketing and product development plans. And all of the banks were very focused on consumer-oriented growth strategies, especially in the mortgage finance and credit and debit card businesses. The competitive juices are coursing through the veins of India’s consumer industry. Unlike other Asian economies, India’s entrepreneurs are eager to compete. With a foundation of consumer support that is broadening and deepening, the underlying Indian GDP growth dynamic could now shift toward the upper end of a 7-8% range. He sees that the Infrastructure in India is showing palpable progress and warns that without the foundation of private consumption, this is not a sustainable growth dynamic for any nation, including China. India, by contrast, has the balanced-growth foundation that China would die for. He also notices that over the past 25 years plus, China has repeatedly outdistanced India by its brilliant execution of resource mobilization - putting together the pieces of the greatest export machine the world has ever seen. But now transition time is looming for China. It must come up with new sources of growth such as those that are evident in India’s consumption-led model. India lost the first round of the race with China by a wide margin. The jury is still out on the endgame. I was pleasently surprised to see the change in tone in Roach's writings - he used to be critical about the sustainibility of the meek progress made by India and seems to be getting positive about the country. All I can say is that direction alone won't do - the degree, pace and intensity of growth is very important and we now need to begin talking and comparing from that perspective India also needs to aim big and aspire for qualitative global leadership in key areas - like patents, no.of nobel laureates, demonstrable advances in science & technology etc.
Erik Keller writes in a sandhill op-ed piece,"everyone got spoiled in the last decade as much of the growth of enterprise software was driven not as much by innovation as it was by a technical refreshing of corporate America as it moved to embrace PCs and replace proprietary mainframes with Unix-based servers & address Y2K issues.In many ways, the largest innovation in enterprise software was conditioning the market to buy your stuff even if it didn't work. The next phase of technology inflection curve will come not from unbridled end-user spending growth but from a balance of cost-cutting and revenue-generating products that facilitate better operational margins for buyers. This would call for innovation from the technology community in two forms: product and business model". He points out that the industry is singular in its inability to ensure that our 98 percent-plus of our customers will be able to use our products easily, on-time and on-budget. Until the industry can rid itself of this problem of huge upfront money and twenty percent plus maintenance tariffs, buyers will not be open to some of the most innovative solutions out in the market today - I wrote along similar lines Clearly the structure, style and measures of performance of software industry - particularly enterprise software industry is set to change dramatically. On a related note Vinnie writes , we are seeing the new web emerge where broadband meets mobile and Wi-Fi. He adds,"From Indian BPO offerings to open source from Scandinavia to "software as a service" from Silicon Valley, the froth of innovation and creativity seems like Florence during the Renaissance. Enterprise CIO’s are concerned that 60% to 80% budgets go towards maintenance & upgrade and consolidation could bring in high vendor lock-in costs". Most large software companies spend only 15% of their revenue on R&D, most of this goes toward bug fixes and replatforming—not real innovation. Just as software innovation of the last decade in the areas like eProcurement, CRM came from smaller vendors, the trend continues - RSS, predictive analytics, and more sophisticated security where the biggies aren't the innovators. He is right again - fact remains that there shall be several smaller companies that would co-exist as part of the larger enterprise ecosystem. I do not see how the large platform players can do away super special players( there are many of them - some have existed for decades - though a majority of them for just under a decade) or provide justice with specialized smaller companies like rules engines, collaboration systems, content management systems, document management systems, procurement solutions, business intelligence - even CRM, SCM solutions from so called platform players fail to excel – after all companies like Oracle & SAP tried and could not so far make good success in content management, portal,collabaration systems, middleware solutions, PLM solutions etc. Similarly till about recently even SAP(leaving aside oracle) was not seen to be providing the best solution in CRM or SCM.There is near unanimity that procurement solutions are better addressed by standalone players –It is paradoxical of the space – innovation and genuine requirements would demand a place for smaller players – albeit playing the role of being a small but important players in the enterprise ecosystem. Do not miss Vinnie’s practical (I must add well thought out) advice to limit software related spending. Ray of hope comes from David Thomas of the Software and Information Industry Association wherein he brings home the point business modelsin the software industry show signs of a tremendous change. Vendors are adapting new pricing and licensing policies to meet customers' value expectations. The percentage of vendors offering subscription models as their primary pricing method is up to 40% this year, an increase of 7% over last year. In a couple of years the number is expected to reach 60%. While vendors are addressing market realities to keep their industry vibrant and with consolidation fever ahead - one could clearly hear the voice :wherther customers would benefit a lot because of this, add the need to make more innovation happen and absorb faster - till the haze cleares, it is clearly alarming!!!
I came across this interesting investigation from a Windows user who found a rootkit on his system. Systematic investigation unearthed that it had been installed by Sony when he had played the digitally protected music on a CD he had bought (Get Right With The Man bu Van Zant). Going by the article, it appears to me that Sony seems to think that techniques used by hackers and crackers are fit enough to take protecting its legal copyright – The technique used by Sony is clearly a flagrant violation of privacy in many ways. Some technical background information - Rootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden. Rootkits that hide files, directories and Registry keys can either execute in user mode by patching Windows APIs in each process that applications use to access those objects, or in kernel mode by intercepting the associated kernel-mode APIs.Mark, the author of the article conclusively finds that the rootkit and its associated files were related to the First 4 Internet DRM software Sony ships on its CDs. After reading Mark’s classic detection process, I agree with him that not only had Sony put software on his system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files. While the media industry’s right to use copy protection mechanisms to prevent illegal copying is legal,based on what Mark has presented this is a clear case of Sony taking DRM too far.
I wrote a brief article for sandhill.com on the next generation architecture in the enterprise software industry. In this dynamic business world, enterprises look towards constantly improving, realigning & automating their operations to remain nimble and be ever-ready to meet market challenges. Customer demands, market dynamics, and technology advancements are pushing solution frameworks to be aligned towards an experience of end-to-end process fulfillment. Enterprise customers have begun to appreciate the significance of product architectures in determining the effectiveness and suitability of solutions in scaling up to meet such requirements. All other things being equal, the success of software vendors would be to a large extent dependant on these strengths. Such architectures need to assimilate emerging technologies and support evolving business requirements. The very high life cycle cost of enterprise applications imposes limits on the ability of configured software to meet varying business demands. The fast emerging next generation architecture can substantially help in overcoming such limitations.. Across the spectrum of industries, sectors, regions, enterprises – there are underlying unique nature of processes,( granted that there may be a significant degree of common denominator) calling for specific solution approaches and frameworks. The current approach of architecting solutions towards accommodating conflicting, overlapping & unique requirements invariably leads to complex solutions propping up bloatware in the process. Provisions made for minor constituents /stakeholders force the majority to tolerate unwanted set of functionalities. Focused, lean products addressing specific constituencies would allow customers to adapt software that meets their own, individual needs. The next generation of application architecture must gratuitously support business processes cutting across application boundaries. An ideal composite solution shall integrate business processes, applications and data, and extend incremental functionalities to "plug the gaps" to produce a cohesive, composite application that ensures semantic, transactional & contextual integrity across the business process. Wide and varied technologies, formats & protocols need to be managed for cross-applications and would obviously force specific solutions to be rolled out. The architecture will need to provide support for integration at various levels - business process level, application integration level, and application extension level to enable enterprises to maximize the benefits by facilitating the tying together of varied applications in a way that the resultant composite application is better than the sum of its parts. In the world of composites, application boundaries disappear and applications gradually imbibe such architectural capabilities . Futuristic enterprise products will provide in depth support to industry functionalities and offer tight integration capabilities with vertical solution that are of best-of-breed ‘bolt-on’ product types. The next generation of enterprise architecture must bestow the business with large scale consolidations happening within the industry. The basis of competition shifts from plain market muscle, promotions and fast moving abilities to providing future proof architectures and good support to business processes through repository centric integrated offering benefiting the business across the extended value chain. Read the full article here.
Standard mechanisms to orchestrate business processes in Web services applications known as BPEL 2.0 standard will have to wait until next year for final OASIS approval.Amendments to enable human interactions as part of this technology will wait even longer.This being delayed until the first half of 2006 while technologists at OASIS continue sorting through approximately three dozen issues, whittled down from a list that had totaled around 230. Considered critical for applications such as transactional and B2B systems, the XML-based BPEL technology has wide industry support.BPEL has functions such as language constructs to enable if-then-else statements for the 2.0 version. Dynamic, parallel invocation of services also is an important addition,for adapting the number of steps in a process based on the number of partners participating in a transaction, according to IBM. Version 2.0 is aimed at improving the way that Web services are used to call out to partner links to enable more flexibility. One of the noted weakness in BPEL2.0 is that it is orchestrated automation and perhaps provides limited flexibility for accommodating human workflow mechanisms. IBM’s BPEL4People is defined in a way that it is layered on top of the BPEL language so that its features can be composed with the BPEL core features whenever needed as this paper explains in detail. BPEL identified as one of the hot technologies for 2005 is an important component in the development of In order to work effectively a BPMS often requires that the underlying software is constructed according to the principles of a service-oriented architecture. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services provides a means to formally specify business processes and interaction protocols. BPEL4WS provides a language for the formal specification of business processes and business interaction protocols. By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. BPEL4WS defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion of automated process integration in both the intra-corporate and the business-to-business spaces. It is often the case that to make a suite of existing legacy systems to fit with a BPMS is often difficult. business process management solutions, a hot rage these days critically depend on this standard to be finalized fast. As this clarification shows BPEL is an interchange language allowing systems that otherwise don't talk to one another to understand some basic system-to-system issues. It's analogous to SQL in that way. It's not a standard language where a business analyst would to start to define a process.I agree with the view its not a lingua franca bit its evolution shows fair amount of legitimate cooperation among otherwise competitive vendors, & the fact that it has now been adopted and is being managed by OASIS - all that says this is a good thing and something to keep on top of.
Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld "All views expressed are my personal views are not related in any way to my employer"
