Tech trends and business ideas

The "Bing" outing

2009-05-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

Ok. Microsoft is out with its own search engine, oops, they call it a decision engine – Bing.

There will be inevitable exploration of the meaning of the moniker. (Bing has a certain ring to it. It's much better, of course, than the boring "Live Search.") Plus there is the bigger question of whether Bing will make a dent in Google's dominance. But search for clues to another issue Bing brings up: Will it end the Microsoft-Yahoo search flirtation?

Anyways, Bing seems like it would be more useful than a Google or Yahoo search. If you're searching for something you'd like to buy, for example, Bing theoretically will serve up reviews, as well as places to buy the item and related accessories, laid out in a prettier and more organized way than just a simple vertical list of links. On a whole, a big positive for Microsoft: The depth of the searches seems to offer more opportunities for ad revenue.

Of course, people think simple is best, which is part of why Google's so successful. Early impressions suggest Bing will lure some people who want to achieve a specific goal when doing a search, but that users' trust in Google to bring them the most relevant results in the most basic of manners won't wane. The trick will be to get people to think of Bing, too, when they think they might want an enhanced search. Microsoft will be spending a lot of money on the Bing branding campaign, take CEO Steve Ballmer’s word.

So this brings us to what this means for the long-running Microsoft-Yahoo partnership possibility. Is it still going to happen? After all, would Microsoft invest so heavily in Bing if it really thought a deal with Yahoo was imminent?

My new find "Twitter search"

2009-02-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

What makes Silicon Valley so much fun? Nothing is invincible there forever.

The motto posted on Twitter’s search page is intriguing “See what's happening — right now." And many people do exactly that. During a live event or amid breaking news, a growing number of people are turning to Twitter search to follow the conversations among its users.Very quietly, one of Twitter's most powerful applications has become its ability to allow people to conduct real-time searches. But the fact that Twitter's potential to disrupt the search market is being seriously discussed shows just how quickly the sands can shift under the feet of even a colossus like Google.

Typically, when such goliaths are slain, it's because they failed to recognize the threat and make the necessary changes until it was too late. So, it'll be interesting to see how Google — or even if Google — feels the need to throw some kind of counterpunch. In theory, Google has created a culture to keep it flexible and innovative. On the other hand, its track record of new products has been a bit lackluster.

There's always the chance, of course, that Google will quickly deploy real-time search and simply crush Twitter. But that's harder than it sounds. Twitter already has an estimated 6 million users and is growing rapidly. It would be hard to convince someone to switch to a new microblogging service at this point, and it might be just as tough to get users to search Twitter through Google when they can just do it through Twitter itself.

It might be tempting for Google to try to take some of those billions of dollars stuffed in its mattress and overwhelm Twitter and its investors with an offer that dwarfs the reported $500 million Facebook offered for the company. But such a move could also attract a healthy once-over from antitrust regulators. “Then again, I wonder how buying a zero-revenue company factors into antitrust rules” – exclaims Chris O’ Brien.

On Screen Protectionism?

2009-02-19T15:52:00.000-08:00

When devices and apps talk to each other, content owners balk even at the screen format. Or so it seems from the recent pullout of Hulu from Boxee application. The advance of The Great Media Convergence — the content you want, at the time you want, on the device you want — would seem to be inexorable, based on its universal appeal to the consuming audience and the evolution of the enabling technology. But getting past all the entrenched powers is going to be a long struggle, and the early adopters on the front lines will have the wounds to show for it. To see how this disruption is driving the entertainment overlords into defensive positions based on arbitrary distinctions, just look at the current contretemps between Hulu and Boxee.

What happened? Boxee is media center software that makes it easy to watch online content on your television via a connected computer or device like AppleTV. Hulu beams TV directly to your portable computing devices, giving you more of the cerebral-gelatinizing shows you want, any time, anywhere, for free. That, is how Hollywood wants to see online video — as a supplement to "real" TV, not, heaven forbid, as a free living-room alternative to paying for cable or satellite service. To Portable Computing Devices or FROM your TV and not TO your TV. To your dumb-ass laptop, you smelly, hairy, friendless, gamer-freak nerd. (Sorry, I hate to talk about you that way, but that's how they think of the Internet. I think you smell great.) To Your TV is something completely different, and from the content providers' point of view, completely wrong. ... I'd guess Hulu had a deal to show 'content' on computers, and the 'content providers' balked when those computers started talking to their precious televisions.

Of course, media-center computer owners can still watch Hulu's shows on the big screen — they just have to do it through a conventional Web browser instead of Boxee's cleaner interface. It's difficult to see how there's even a claim by the content providers at all. They put the content on Hulu so that anyone watching the content via the Internet on a computer within the geographic restrictions should be fine. Boxee is just an application on a computer. It's functionally identical to watching the content on your computer screen. The only real difference is that the 'screen' is a television instead of a monitor. But the mechanism is identical. It's difficult to see how the content providers can claim any right whatsoever to say that you can watch the content that they purposely put online only on a specific type of screen.

Convergence may indeed be inevitable, but this is just the type of annoying and arbitrary turf protection we'll continue to see until the entertainment industry figures out a way to make the future its friend.

Come out of the cocoon, Mr.Ellison

2009-01-30T19:01:00.000-08:00

Bob Evans of Information week in his open letter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to wind down its sinful 22% software maintenance cost –

“No one's asking you to slash the 22% fee irresponsibly and give away your ability to create great new products and support the ones your currently have. But the longer you dig in and tell CIOs that you're not interested in the wicked expense challenges they're facing, the longer they're going to remember that when the current recessionary climate fades and new alternatives gain strength. As Manjit Singh, CIO of Chiquita Brands, suggested to InformationWeek, what about some alternative tiers for which you charge less and in turn provide less? Singh proposed a 12% fee that would offer bug fixes but not upgrades -- is that not an idea worth considering? Or 12% for support 9-to-5 rather than 24 hours?

Or 15% with support delivered by a third-party network of Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL)-authorized teams? Mr. Ellison, it's easy to see why you like the current system, where someone pays, for example, $4,000,000 for a software license and then pays you $880,000 every year for "maintenance." And maybe CIOs will continue to find that's a fair exchange of value. But maybe they won't -- as you know better than just about anyone, the IT industry is an archetype of creative destruction, where faster/better/cheaper alternatives relentlessly stalk, attack, and kill older/slower/more-expensive models. Perhaps the model you and Charles Phillips and the entire Oracle global team have built is so extraordinarily singular that it will endure forever and remain unassailable from the forces that have ground down every previous eternal model in the technology business. But may be not.”

Oracle is not immune to challenges of the times. No company is. Sooner they recognize and change, the better ! Hubris loses in the end, always.

When the going gets tough, the bad get going

2009-01-29T19:05:00.000-08:00

Former disgruntled Fannie Mae Employee and Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Makwana, 35 is not the kind to just pack up and leave quietly. After being fired from Fannie Mae, Makwana was apparently pissed off…very pissed off. Proving that you can be highly intelligent and still be stupid before packing off for one last time from his workstation, he proceeded to imbed malicious code on Fanny Mae servers, which had it kicked into action like it was supposed to on January 31, would have destroyed data on all Fannie Mae servers. The script was thankfully spotted by chance before it went off. For his little stunt he is now facing up to 10 years in prison, though currently out on a $100,000 bail. Well done genius.

In a recession, companies are often forced to take steps that leave a broad wake of unhappy and stressed workers, and according to a global survey, disgruntlement-driven damage is the No. 1 security worry of IT decision makers. The studies estimated that data theft and cybercrime breaches last year cost businesses worldwide more than $1 trillion in data loss and recovery expenses, and it warned that companies are more vulnerable now than ever. This could be a wake-up call because the current economic crisis is poised to create a global meltdown in vital information. Increased pressures on firms to reduce spending and cut staffing have led to more porous defenses and increased opportunity for crime. The economic downturn across the board is motivation enough for those who harbor hostility towards their ex-employers for their current sorry plight. It could be possibly on a lot of people's radar right now.

No. I don’t work for a IT security solution provider and have no vested interest other than to spread a word of caution.
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Does web content aggregation violate copyright laws?

2009-01-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

Content aggregation is not entirely risk free.

I am referring to the recent settlement between GateHouse Media, publisher of community newspapers and New York Times Co., parent company of The Boston Globe and Boston.com site. In context is a suit over the appearance of headlines and first paragraphs from GateHouse news publications on Boston.com's new hyper-local sites. In its lawsuit, GateHouse claims that Boston.com is building community-oriented sites that rely on the work of GateHouse reporters thereby violating its copyright and trademark laws by taking Gatehouse's newspaper headlines and lead sentences published on its home pages. GateHouse’s major worry is about the empowerment of Boston Globe’s readers that gain the ability to access GateHouse content while by-passing ads appearing in GateHouse home pages – and the extended fears of consequential loss of its ad revenues.

The settlement envisages GateHouse will set up technical barriers to prevent Boston.com's scraping spiders from automatically scarfing up its headlines and RSS feeds, and Boston.com will honor those barriers.

To me, on a first glance it's the perfect lose-lose solution. Boston.com readers lose an opportunity to be exposed to GateHouse stories, and GateHouse loses the traffic from those external links. And everyone loses if more sites take similar steps to restrict the entry points to their content. May be, the arrangement is not binding on others or it may not even set a legal precedent. But could it not persuade a Judge in another similar case to lean on the direction and terms of this verdict? Have web advertisers got on board without visualizing the extra mileage that linking freedom provides? To rephrase the question – would they have come to GateHouse Media if told that the extra ad mileage is snapped shut because of linking restrictions?

I think it’s time to dust up and endorse Russel Shaw’s (of ZD Net) earlier proposal to pass a “Freedom to Link” Act !

"Happy Birthday, spreadsheet"

2009-01-14T13:24:00.000-08:00

PC Mag columnist and tech critic John Dvorak on spread sheets.

"2009 marks the 30-year anniversary of the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet program. And society as a whole has deteriorated ever since its invention. It was the spreadsheet that triggered the PC revolution, with VisiCalc the original culprit. Can anyone say that we've actually benefited from its invention? Look around: I think we've suffered.

For one thing, the spreadsheet created the "what if" society. Instead of moving forward and progressing normally, the what-if society questions each and every move we make. It second-guesses everything. Because of the spreadsheet we've been forced to "do the numbers" whenever possible; once the numbers are in the spreadsheet, the what-if process can begin.

In fact, the spreadsheet has resulted in the rise of the once-lowly accountant/bean counter to a position of influence—and often the executive suite. How often in years past—the pre-spreadsheet era, that is—did an accountant take over a company? When and why did the CFO become a title? These people, at best, were once known as comptrollers.

I don't blame any of these folks for taking advantage of the spreadsheet and the evolution of what-if. But why give them the keys to the car when you knew they couldn't drive? Look around and see what's happened. You can thank the spreadsheet for all of this junk. Happy birthday."

Well, putting an accountant in the driver's seat is certainly not advisible if the business seeks innovation $$ and relies a lot on open pipe R&D. They would never come to terms with something that yields return over the long term, something that is an exclusive preserve of the visionary. But guess who gets called in when you need those dollars to kick it in? Go to an investor and the first thing he would ask is "show me the RoI" ; and the bean counter is ushered in - that is to say, spread his sheet :-)

Google says "No, I don't pollute the planet enough"

2009-01-13T04:40:00.000-08:00

A recent report by a Harvard physicist estimates that a Google search generates about seven grams of carbon dioxide based on the electricity required to keep the company's servers running.

The headlines about the study quickly proliferated around the globe, with the UK's Inquirer chiding, "Googling pollutes the planet." Well, sure, but so does just about every other human activity. And it is in that context that Googling and Internet usage must be judged.

In short, the Google says it's not just me. Here is a good comparison of google choking with other gas guzzler - the boring automobile...

Cisco in your living room ?

2008-12-29T18:55:00.000-08:00

For several years, Cisco Systems, the leading provider of the routers and switches that handle Internet traffic on the way to your front door, has been looking for ways to get into the house. Looking at the increasing sophistication of home networks, Cisco sees a sweet spot for its expertise if it can just get consumers to start associating its name with Apple, Sonus, TiVo and others aiming to help people access video, audio and online content on an assortment of devices scattered around the house. A daunting task, but in the new year, the push will begin in earnest. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the New York Times reports, Cisco will introduce a line of entertainment products for the home, including its own wireless digital stereo.

The appeal of the residential market is obvious. With sales directly to consumers representing only 2 percent of Cisco's $40 billion total in the most recent fiscal year, the growth possibilities are tantalizing. And the company can leverage not only its own plumbing technology, but its acquisitions of cable-equipment supplier Scientific Atlanta and home networking company Linksys as well. Plus, whatever Cisco starts with now will serve as a beachhead on the way to the big prize -- bringing easy, high-definition video conferencing to the family room.

Is Amazon a solipsist...?

2008-12-29T05:48:00.000-08:00

Amazon claims 2008 holiday season has been its “best ever”.

It laid out some stat for support - The online retail giant said it sold more than 6.3 million items worldwide on its peak day, Dec. 15, or the equivalent of "a record-breaking 72.9 items per second." Last year, the company claimed it sold about 5.4 million units on its peak holiday shopping day, which in 2007 was Dec. 10.

Unclear is how a shortened holiday season affected Amazon's results. Because Thanksgiving fell on a later date this year, the shopping season was about five days shorter than a year ago, meaning consumers had to crunch more shopping into a smaller window of time. Amazon's statement came during an overall slump in holiday sales and global economic turmoil. Data released by MasterCard SpendingPulse unit showed total retail sales, excluding automobiles, fell from the year-earlier period by 5.5% in November and 8% in December through Christmas Eve.

Why does the word “solipsist” come to mind…?

The cleantech myth bashing

2008-11-24T16:29:00.000-08:00

Vinod Khosla at his buzzkill best. He is beginning to like “black swan solutions” that cause technology shock as he believes that many of the current concepts of cleantech investing are just "greenwashing" and not a solution to the climate issues. He’ll find a lot of backers from among the puritan VCs.

He finds photovoltaic panels in the booming $20 billion PV market are not scalable and not sustainable without subsidies. The Prius Hybrid cars? Not a solution to the energy or the climate problem nor did they meet the Chindia test - since they don’t seem to compete with the $2,500 Tata Nano. He calls hybrids "an inefficient carbon solution". Biodiesel, Clean Coal and Zero Emission Buildings are not the solutions either. Carbon capture and sequestration also do not serve the purpose as they are not economical. Solar PV, wind and biofuels are “little markets”.

Now wait a minute.... Can they deal with the financial crisis and reduce emissions at the same time? Take the Big Three automakers in Detroit (or its users). Who will expect them to invest in fuel efficient engines as they fast slide into insolvency? Isn’t gas available at $2 a gallon now?

Makes no sense.How about the VCs that have sunk some real big money? Poor fellas’ they get killed often by the publicity they give themselves. They had better learn to swallow some wily pride. At least it’s non fattening!

The Yahoo! crystal gaze

2008-11-20T07:34:00.000-08:00

I can’t say this about fortunes of the company, but there is hardly a dull day at Yahoo!

Jerry Yang, founder and outgoing CEO said this earlier in a memo to the troops - "All of you know that I have always, and will always bleed purple. I will always do what I think is right for this great company. While this step will be an adjustment for all of us, I know it's the right one."

He exits not only bleeding, but battered into a stunning shade of aubergine after months of public pummeling for passing on a Microsoft buyout and failing to firm up a viable alternative strategy as the stock tanked. The initial burst of enthusiasm that sent the company's market cap up by about $2 billion in early trading reflected a consensus that this was a step that had to be taken before anything else could happen, and a later partial retreat showed those hopes tempered by the reality of the challenges that still face Yang's successor.

So now what? Attention has quickly turned to speculation on a successor, and the perception that Yahoo's problems are systemic bodes ill for any in-house candidates, like President Sue Decker. "The next hire has to be a statement; it can't be from inside the company," said Rick Munarriz, an analyst with the Motley Fool. "You don't need a Yahoo again. The first thing they should do with the new CEO is cut him open and if he bleeds purple they kick him out."

But then there is the big Carl (Icahn) pushing for someone -- anyone -- who will get the deal done so he can cash in and check out.

Why wouldn't they bitch it?

2008-11-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

For all those skeptics of Cloud computing economics, Nick Carr has a tell all with a NYT illustration. It’s a long post. I am pint sizing it here.

“The history of computing has been a history of falling prices (and consequently expanding uses). But the arrival of cloud computing - which transforms computer processing, data storage, and software applications into utilities served up by central plants - marks a fundamental change in the economics of computing…

In late 2007, the New York Times faced a challenge. It wanted to make available over the web its entire archive of articles, 11 million in all, dating back to 1851….That's not a particularly complicated computing chore, but it's a large computing chore, requiring a whole lot of computer processing time….Fortunately, a software programmer at the Times, Derek Gottfrid, had been playing around with Amazon Web Services for a number of months, and he realized that Amazon's new computing utility, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), might offer a solution. Working alone, he uploaded the four terabytes of TIFF data into Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) utility, and he hacked together some code for EC2 that would, as he later described in a blog post, "pull all the parts that make up an article out of S3, generate a PDF from them and store the PDF back in S3." He then rented 100 virtual computers through EC2 and ran the data through them. In less than 24 hours, he had his 11 million PDFs, all stored neatly in S3 and ready to be served up to visitors to
the Times site.

The total cost for the computing job? …Gottfrid told me that the entire EC2 bill came to $240. (That's 10 cents per computer-hour times 100 computers times 24 hours; there were no bandwidth charges since all the data transfers took place within Amazon's system - from S3 to EC2 and back.)”

Amazing economics. Now why wouldn’t they (high cost, license based, on-premise enterprise s/w makers) bitch it?

Speculation time?

2008-10-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

When stock prices take the kind of beating that we're witnessing, the emergence of potential bargains always leads to a sort of fantasy league for takeover speculation, in which analysts and pundits play at making matches between the vulnerable and their possible suitors. These hypotheticals should always be taken well salted, but they still can make for interesting thought exercises.

The player is Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek, who gave fresh legs to a possibility -- that Microsoft might snap up RIM. The logic - Microsoft would have its own smartphones to compete with Apple's iPhone and the devices running on Google's Android platform.

Peter Misek feels RIM is a massive strategic fit for Microsoft and they have a standing offer to buy them at $50 (a share). RIM's shares traded at close to $150 just a few months ago, but stock price slides so fast lately and it's within a few bucks of that offer. The way things are going, that's hardly a stretch as it would make the deal worth just over $28 billion, and Microsoft is flush enough to pull it off without having to tap the credit markets. The question is whether MSFT really feels compelled to get into hardware wars or if it's satisfied to compete on the platform side with Windows Mobile. Neither company graced the speculation with a comment.

Meanwhile, up at RIM the folks I guess are trying to stay focused, getting the just unveiled iPhone competitor launched ("BlackBerry Storm") and as rumor has it, they are already working on the next two generations.

Googlogic

2008-10-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

Has Google lost the fine art of going to market?

Chris O’Brien of Mercury News asks whether Android is going the way of Google’s open social initiative (to counter Facebook). The challenge starts off way Android figures down the list of operating systems for smart-phones. At the top of the heap are BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, the iPhone and Symbian. This last one is produced by a consortium of the largest cell phone manufacturers in the world, including Ericsson and Nokia.

Given that Symbian will soon become open-source, Android’s pitch appeal – one of developer freedom, pales. Throw in the fact that a group called the LiMo Foundation is developing a Linux-based operating system for mobile phones, and Android becomes just one of three open-source options after counting in the restricted freedom allowed to developers by Apple’s iPhone. And then came Chrome browser from Google stable. It turns out that even that will take a while before it becomes the choice browser in Android phones.

So why is Google doing this? Here’s how I can explain it.

Google sees everything as a media real estate. Be it the web pages where its ads are served up, the videos on youtube and now to operating systems and open source applications. It can’t have enough of walls to stick its bills. It is fearful that some day it will exhaust its relevance if web goes out of fashion and so it wants an upper hand on anything that remotely seems like competition. There you get it. Competition. Google feels it’s easier to chase than to lead. So up comes a feature rich product that the world loves, say iPhone, Google wants a slice of that. It goes ahead and develops Android – the open source operating system. Microsoft leads the browser market? Google wants a piece of action there. In comes Chrome browser. Google can’t afford to lose consumer mindshare. It just has to be there, at the core of people’s mind. Think media mileage, consumer outreach, think Google!

Didn’t we express shock when Google paid $3.1 billion for YouTube? Now we wonder the same way how Android or Chrome browser will make money. May be, we’re wrong. It’s advertisement for Google, the way Google builds its brand value. The money it makes the old fashioned way – by serving ads. And that’s not going to change anytime soon!!!

Except if a web equivalent of Wall Street meltdown threatens redefining the space…

I want my clear blue sky and unadorned wall back

2008-10-05T03:32:00.000-07:00

What had started out as simple TV advertising between programs have become so intrusive that almost every two minutes there is a commercial break. Consumers armed with remote controls zapped away commercials in snarky if not sadistic glee. So what do broadcasters do to ROI insistent advertisers?

They innovate by subtler intrusion. The Times Online reports that the boffins at ITV have come up with a new approach called "automatically placed overlay advertising" using technology from Keystream that can spot large "clear" areas in video content -- an empty blue sky, for instance, or an unadorned wall -- and superimpose a logo or message, embedding it into the programming.

And you thought set-top boxes that allow us to record programs and then jam the commercials mean that we’ll get uncontaminated content! As viewers get cleverer, broadcasters get smarter. Now it’s the turn of the viewers again to invent new ways to get back that clear blue sky and that unadorned wall on the screen ;-)

"I know what you did last time you were around"

2008-09-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

For those who value privacy over personalized pitches, opting out of online behavioral advertising is challenging enough. While shopping offline, you could get away wearing a ski mask. The customer analysis systems though, will know what to do when they see that.

It does nag to watch the growth in behavioral advertising online, the practice of tracking users in their Web travels in an effort to deliver more relevant ads. But things are getting out of hand – with the kind of high-tech targeting and profiling that's increasingly showing up in the brick-and-mortar retail world.

Get a load of system used by Israel-based Aroma Espresso Bars. Next to the cash register is a digital display. If you order a coffee in the morning, it may pop up an ad for a croissant. Buy a sandwich at lunch, and the screen may suggest a beverage or dessert. What's more, the suggestions can be tied into inventory management; if croissants are running low, that coffee customer may see a muffin promo instead. In the outlets with the system installed, Aroma says, sales of desserts and beverages featured on the screens have increased as much as 68 percent.

Sounds harmless enough -- just an automated version of the sales clerk's usual upselling exercise. It doesn't start to get creepy until the next step. YCD Multimedia, an Israeli company that sells digital display systems, is starting to equip some of its point-of-sale systems with tiny cameras and facial analysis software that can determine a shopper's sex, race and approximate age and choose which ads to display accordingly. All of sudden you have software doing something we like to discourage among humans -- making gross assumptions about individuals based on crude observations and generalized data. Start extrapolating and you find yourself in the middle of another personalization vs. privacy mess. Wait until the systems are able to observe and analyze more of your characteristics as you stand at the register. At the fast-food outlet, when it sees a person of girth filling its viewfinder, will it suggest super-sizing or a salad? At the coffee shop, will an advanced expression analysis tool see that you are sleepy and recommend a double shot?

Sooner or later, retailers are going to want capture facial-recognition information, link it to a purchase history and have their digital display systems greet you by name and pitch you accordingly. Corporate partners start sharing, and the next thing you know large chunks of your personal information are floating around in another huge database.

No way out. Or is there?

Regulate enterprise vendors first

2008-09-24T01:32:00.000-07:00

I can’t really hazard a guess on the coming regulatory overkill. It always does following a massive crisis as the one that is now blowing across the Wall Street and rapidly spilling across the world at large. It’s no longer an American crisis or developed markets crisis, it’s a global crisis now sweeping across economies and industries. Similarly credit tightening does not just entail a crisis of liquidity that folds up investment banks; it’s a business crisis that scuppers momentum out of every enterprise - big or small, global or local.

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If there is one breed that still feels a bit casual about it is that of software vendors. The large enterprise vendors like SAP, Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft all of them have developed software package applications for different verticals even as the industry itself has been evolving. SAP talks about being able to support 28 industries. It also suggests 100% solutions in each. Yet if you look at its solution maps, it has several "white spaces". It talks about extending them with its partner ISVs and SIs with NetWeaver platformed xApps or has future R&D plans for them. So where is it really? Who will watch them?

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How did they do that? Ask any investment banker about the logic behind a CDS, ABS, MBS, CDO, CLO or such alphabet soup, he will still be wringing hands. But the tech vendors seem to `get it’ all and boy they ran with it – screaming vertical capability! Why haven’t the earliest developer / functional analyst that studied the prototype of subprime mortgage and the excessive leverage blown the whistle on the wobbly nature of the foundation?

Answer lies in casualness of approach. To hell, with outcomes. They are concerned with operationalizing a functionality as advertised. So if they provide the plain vanilla financial, CRM, pay roll or HR package to an Investment bank, they claimed I-banking vertical capability. Business transformation – does it also mean driving a healthy business to bankruptcy in a matter of days? Or is it Paramedic filling in for surgeon? God save the patient.

Onward to enterprise collaboration

2008-09-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

Too much noise on enterprise collaboration (EC) suite Beehive from Oracle Open World (OOW) in San Francisco.

The expression EC is indeed an oxymoron according to specialist Oliver Marks. Do people collaborate in any enterprise, really? Don’t they bitch one another? Have marketing ever been in love with production? Have the CFO ever appreciated salesman’s travails or ever bothered how sales bring up the topline numbers quarter over quarter? Nothing can be farther from reality.

But yet that’s what Beehive seeks to do – to extract the synergies of having people work more closely together saving money and be more efficient. Often large enterprises have no open editorial environment beyond just news being gathered from all around. At a price of $120 per user seat this is not a system for most small or medium sized businesses but rather a secure solution that can be integrated with existing enterprise infrastructure. Should work well with office workflow systems since the design fits clients that ask for ‘collaboration that works within the structure of our existing business’. The new openness allows integration with SAP or other competitors, and a set of web services that will run on different server platforms - Solaris, Linux, Microsoft.

Oracle take great pains to point out that they are addressing existing customer needs in providing a system that reinforces regulatory needs. Mark Brown, Senior Director of Beehive Business Strategy, cited the recent leak of politician Sara Palin’s private email and increasing regulatory compliance of the financial industry as examples of the need for tighter infrastructure oversight.

Great. But as a true blue consultant, I worry about sales hurdle. How will the CIO get its budget past the CFO? C-level people are either too secretive or even paranoid to freely use collaboration suites that leave a trail. (They can’t say “this was not what I meant” or say “I told you so” later if the stuff sucks). They are more comfortable with over-the-phone-requests that come with in-built “that-wasn’t-me” flexibility. Will they let in a feature that they will never use at such an expense? ;-)

Accenture as Detroit parts supplier

2008-09-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

So we hear Chrysler suing Accenture for failure to deliver on $900 million in promised savings from a low-cost country sourcing initiative. We know Accenture more as a IT outsourcer and not anywhere near a supply chain strategist. Is there something called vendor due diligence or is it all about Detroit firms losing their minds over perpetually falling fortunes? According to the article, "Chrysler paid at least $7.7 million to Accenture for help buying parts in low-cost countries such as China and India. Chrysler thought doing so would save $900 million. Instead, Chrysler saw virtually no savings, court documents say."

Does anyone know what else Accenture is into? Fixing perils of globalization? Saving a crestfallen financial world up next?

Indian IT outsourcing vendors better watch out - might as well get into these new `horizontals' ;-)

"Let the economics deliver"

2008-09-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

By now your grandma will know that the one big cost component in setting up data center is power. Not for computing, for cooling the whirring machines. To get around this, companies have begun setting them up as far as Siberia, so that they can cool server farms by simply throwing open a few windows.

Now Google dips into its vast patent filings and executes a wonder – a floating data center. Yes, a data center that is powered by waves, cooled by water and no property tax to pay because there is no property. It uses a technology called Pelamis wave energy converter that generates electricity into a grid from offshore wave energy. The search giant filed for a patent in February that was approved Aug. 28. The patent outlines a concept that would not only be savvy engineering, but deliver great returns. Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge calls Google’s patent a “startling new take on data center engineering.” Larry Dignan says “I’d call it brilliant engineering, but the financial engineering could be even more impressive.”

Being a SaaS lover and a cheapskate, I would just wait for the economics to deliver ;)
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iPhone check

2008-08-24T01:05:00.000-07:00

Total strangers sidle up to the iPhone owner with a look of wonder and start asking questions about the gadget… Among friends and colleagues, the iPhone owner assumes the mien of a knowledgeable conjuror, wowing everyone with the neat tricks the gadget performs.

That’s not entirely surprising, given the extent of media coverage that the July 2008 global launch of the iPhone 3G has received in international media: stories of mile-long queues outside stores, across countries and continents, have routinely made headlines.
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But can it cook? check out this popcorn!

Like it for a colleague

2008-08-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Students at Minho University in Portugal are working on developing better interaction between industrial robots and humans, and apparently the first step involves designing a machine that would likely become the first androidcide victim of workplace violence. Here's a video demo of the bot doing some assembly work in cooperation with a human partner, and as you'll see, it manages to embody all the qualities of the worst lab partner or cubicle mate you ever had: It points out your mistakes in a condescending and irritating voice, it's interminably slow at completing its own tasks, and at the end of the job, it offers insincere thanks. Understandably, there's a long way to go here. Maybe next they can get it to inject random political opinions and gossip about other robots.

IT sanctuaries

2008-08-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

India’s IT companies becoming sanctuaries for visually challenged. The initiatives are certainly charitable and let’s not go into IT vendors’ workaday compulsions arising from acute talent shortage, spiraling wage costs, dire predicaments resulting from high levels of attrition and a seemingly endless economic turbulence that urges them to cut corners to survive.

Just as an aside. Any let ups in SLA non-compliance by these IT vendors will now likely merit a compassionate review by clients, as well. Just kidding! Here is Michael Krigsmann listing out twelve early warning signs that signal IT project failure. You can see he is compassionate already :-)

Where Microsoft scores over Google...

2008-08-14T01:05:00.000-07:00

...it's a war !

If you wanna see how wartime Georgia looks, don't go to Google Maps, at least for now. At the moment, it is no more than a blank slate. When the war broke out, some folks noticed this for the first time and suspected that Google had removed the map data for some reason. Not so, says Product Manager Dave Barth. It's just that Google wasn't happy with the map data it could come up with and has been holding off until it gets something better. User feedback has now convinced the company that some data is better than no data, said Barth, and updates are in the works.

Microsoft's Live Search Maps is a much better bet, right now.