Horizon

Blog shifted

2006-04-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

The permanent blog is now at

http://www.jroller.com/page/kshitij

I am not updating this Blog anymore!

Innovation in Maturing Markets

2005-05-28T04:27:00.001-07:00

With market maturity, innovation takes a backseat. Philip Lay, in the recent 'Software 2005' conference, brought forward some excellent insights on the roles and types of innovation in the pre and post Mature Main Street phase of the TALC.

Disruptive innovation kicks of the first phase of TALC, the early adopters. An Example of this is VoIP. I see even RFID and RSS fitting in this category.

Next comes Application Innovation in the Bowling Alley phase. These are immediate raw low level services offered with the usage of the disruptive technologies. Examples include SMS, and I feel the current WAP sites, Weblogs and even Google APIs coming under this.

In the Tornado, the phase where things get rolling really fast, we see Product Innovations, and that is exactly where current consumer electronics and embedded systems lie. Examples include iPOD, TiVo, maybe even Yahoo services under the common ID mechanism. I doubt whether Google would come under this or not, cause its basically just search till now.

Platform Innovation is what Software 2005's industry visionaries and leaders think that software technology as a whole has reached and it is prevalent, as Philip says, in the early Main Street phase. Examples include Relational databases, sighting Oracle among this. I think this is surely where Google, people believe, is headed - its own Web OS platform, but yet unproven. Even J2EE, .NET application development frameworks would fall under this and embedded systems would reach it, hopefully soon.

That was pre Main Street. In the mature markets, Philip sights 2 broad fronts on which Innovations divide themselves up. First is the Customer Intimacy phase and it includes:

Line Extension Innovations are where the product is presented in different flavors for different needs. Examples he has enlisted include Inkjet printers (HP) and Servers (Sun). However I feel Sun really deserves a lot of credit for the plethora of features it has come in its version 10 offering, certainly more than a Line Extension.

Enhancement Innovation is when the product is given minor enhancements as in the case of Mainframes (IBM) and Laptops (Sony) as noted by him.

Marketing Innovation, needless to say, is where the product is just given a feel-good factor with building extra facilities around it. Examples include Dedicated storefronts (Apple).

Experiential Innovation, as in the case of Executive Dashboards (Cognos) and Mediated Internet (AOL), is just an experimental addition to the product perhaps without a real market insight or to test out the market.

The other category of Innovations belong to the Operational Excellence Zone. These are enhancements in the routine operational usage of the system and include:

Value Engineering Innovation: Example, Storage ATA RAID (Nexsan). These fulfill certain non-functional requirements like Security, Scalability and Failover.

Process Innovation, where the workflow is enhanced as per the changing trends and market experiences, e.g. Online Retail Checkout (Amazon)

Integration Innovation is perhaps the most challenging and the buzzword these days. Integration Innovation includes integrating your software with existing systems in place to help transparent portability for the enterprise to your application. It also includes making your application as a plug-in for the existing platforms and also allowing other applications to plug-in to yours by generic APIs. Examples include ERP/SCM/CRM systems (SAP), Semiconductor chips (Intel). This perhaps comes naturally after the platform is well defined.

Business Model Innovation is highly rewarding. Examples include Contextual Advertising (Google) and Hosted applications (Salesforce). This involves recalculating the newer needs of the market and rethinking your existing model to adopt to the change. I feel this particular category of innovation is highly recognized by the financial media as it directly impacts your revenues.

Lastly Philip also lists down Market renewal innovations in the declining stages of TALC. These include Organic Renewal like IBM switching from hardware to software and services and Apple from PCs to entertainment. I hope this particular innovation is not only for the companies in crises, as one might think from the examples, and can be generally applied to any company with some daredevil managers. Simply, Organic Renewal would mean a directional change (and not a complete change) in the line of business by any company in light of new emerging opportunities. Also the change perhaps must be in the same field/area of business, else it would be a disruptive innovation. One more is Structural Renewal, which is more of Financial restructuring, mergers/acquisitions for reaping benefits from economies of scale and joint customers. Examples, BEA buying Weblogic, Visio selling to Microsoft.

'Platformification' of Embedded Systems

2005-05-28T04:27:00.000-07:00

In the recent 'Software 2005' conference, the focus was on the understanding the changing software ecosystem in the US, where software technology has surely reached the 'Mature Main Street' phase in the TALC model, in general. The focus is now on developing platforms, turning disruptive innovations into broader platforms to reap the benefits of convergence. 'Platformification' of the embedded systems marketplace (PDA/Mobile, Industrial Automation, Auto etc) seems to be the next target and I think that really makes a lot of sense. A platform will create a level playing field with business applications makers actually having a set standard to work on for catering to a wide audience. Along with the central platforms providers, the ecosystem around it will include players like the OEMs, Operating Systems makers and chip manufacturers.

Moore's Core and Concept ideas

2005-05-28T04:26:00.001-07:00

Geoffrey Moore, I feel, is the kind of person who builds up from his model or his established standards, like Chris Anderson does with the Long Tail. His 'Technology Adoption Lifecycle' (TALC) model is well established now and on his recent presentation at the OSBC, he mapped the same to Open Source Products and put up the question of where they stand on it, concluding that it is perhaps in the 'Tornado' phase.

In the same presentation, he brought up interesting terms in Product development phase, naming them as "Core" and "Concept".

He represents Core as:

Any process that contributes directly to sustainable differentiation leading to competitive advantage in target markets.

and Concept as:

All other processes required to fulfill commitments to one or more stakeholders.

He reinstates that as markets mature, offers commoditize. So the Core turns into Concept for the company as they start to search for newer cores. I agree with him on that, in case of Open Source, focusing on concepts is of prime importance and let the user of the Open Systems define their core and work on it, using the functionalities or standards of Open Systems as a base. Open Source work best at platform providers or library implementations for common use and proprietary software are better at addressing core functional requirements.

I think Open Source would remain as the standardized enterprise platform enablers (for applications like servers, browsers, databases) and as library implementations for a long time. It would not do as well for end-products. It would continue to provide services, customizations to proprietary firms for development of the final product for end users.

Long Tail vs. Bottom of Pyramid

2005-05-28T04:26:00.000-07:00

Got this Chris Anderson piece via EMERGIC:

Is the bottom of the pyramid the Long Tail? The similarities are notable. Both theories are based on the notion that if you break the economic and physical bottlenecks of distribution you can reach a huge, previously neglected market. They both recognize that millions of small sales can, in aggregate, add up to big profits. And they're both focused on ways to lower the cost of providing goods and services so that you can offer them at lower price point while still maintaining margins.

But despite the fact that it took me a trip to India to clear my head on this, I think there is a key difference between them that makes them fundamentally incompatible. The Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) argument is essentially based on commodification. Take existing goods and services and make them an order of magnitude or two cheaper, either to buy or to make but ideally both. Typically, this means reducing goods to their bare essentials and delivering them on a massive scale. This requires: 1) low price points; 2) minimal marginal costs (reduce consumables and packaging to the bare minimum); 3) "de-skilling" services so non-experts can deliver them; 4) the use of local entrepreneurs.

The BOP model is focused on taking a single product or service and finding ways to make it cheap enough to offer to a larger, poorer, market. This is why I think it's essentially about commodification.

The Long Tail, on the other hand, is about nicheification. Rather than finding ways to create an even lower lowest common denominator, the Long Tail is about finding economically efficient ways to capitalize on the infinite diversity of taste and demand that has heretofore been overshadowed by mass markets. The millions who find themselves in the tail in some aspect of their life (and that includes all of us) are no poorer than those in the head. Indeed, they are often drawn down the tail by their refined taste, in pursuit of qualities that are not afforded by one-size-fits-all. And they are often willing to pay a premium for those goods and services that suit them better. The Long Tail is, indeed, the very opposite of commodification.

So the Long Tail is made up of millions of niches. The Bottom of the Pyramid is made up of mass markets made even more mass. Both lower costs to reach more people, but they do so in different ways for different reasons. They're complimentary forces, but fundamentally different in their approach and aims. The Mystery of the Apparently Similar Theories: Solved.

Solved yes, it is. However what one immediate might gather from this is that - As an entrepreneur, one should rather follow the Long Tail's "nicheification" rather than BOP's "commodification" as Long Tail focuses on pure profitability, unlike social welfare centered BOP. But if one follows closely, you will find that both the theories are not actually competing with each other. For developing or under developed mass market economies, Long tail opportunities are quite few... its rather a BOP's commodification haven. Long tail is probably suited for the top class developed economies where it is feasible to quote a premium or equivalent price for goods not in peak demands and people are willing to pay for it to satisfy their unique taste and preferences. While BOP theory necessitates bulk sales from the masses, Long Tail theory necessitates good amount of premium customers, which become the risk factors for both the approaches. Both the theories have different markets and therefore are forces that will co-exist rather than compete.

The future of Digital Music

2005-05-28T04:25:00.000-07:00

Corante has an interesting discussion going on speculating about the trends expected in the Digital Media industry. Some key points which I found worth pondering over:

More User-centric Approach: The underlying operating paradigm in the music industry has been one of wanting complete and unfettered control (both of the artists, as well as of the fans / 'users'), in fact, of often wanting control more than more revenues! The fact that the music biz continues to try and seize control is very disconcerting and so, at this point, the industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age, which clearly is about giving control the 'user' aka the customer. They should all take a page from EBay, Amazon, SouthWest Airlines, Tivo and Netflix and empower the customers. They were used to looking at themselves as the ones in charge of their own kingdoms, and therefore by extension were in charge of what their customers can or cannot do. With that type of attitude still lingering on, it is very hard for them to look under the hood and accept that their core business model and operating mode is being rapidly outmoded.

Subscription model: People are not going to repeatedly buy a massive amount of music using [the iTunes] model - ask anyone that owns one. On the other side of the equation, a model similar to Netflix (or Napster To Go), with people 'renting' music for a limited period of time rather than owning it, will be a model we'll see more of very soon. The artists and writers will make money by taking a percentage of the fees that are charged for renting access to their music. You establish a monthly subscription, you track what is rented and you play the content owners (including writer, publisher, artist and label) a pro-rata share of the amounts collected, based on actual use.

'Long Tail' effects: The 'unpopular' (or lesser-known) titles earn a disproportionately large share of the total revenue; in fact the aggregate revenues of all lesser-known titles are often larger than those derived from the top-rated and most popular titles; which means that even lesser-known titles stand a good chance to be monetized. Finally, you can make money by selling niche music to niche markets because the hurdles of distribution are removed or at least lowered. In my view, the biggest and most lucrative potential is clearly in niche markets, such as channels that offer very specialized music, such as jazz channels, new age music, folk music, ethnic music, that sort of thing - global niche markets whose total populations will add up very nicely.

Complementary businesses: A music rental site could sell merchandise, concert tickets, fans clubs, special event access and other stuff around the core rental business.

Mobile platform - an opportunity: One interesting trend is starting to take place in Asia, particularly in China. At the end of 2004, China had 334 million cell phone users (that's close to the total size of the U.S. population!). Therefore, the potential for the cell phone to be the prime distribution pipeline for digital music in China is absolutely mind-boggling because these consumers are very likely to use their cell phones to go onto the Internet (not a computer), in the not too-distant future. Simply put: I think that the mobile music opportunity dwarfs the PC/Internet music opportunity; and: they are converging.

Ajax? Probably just AX after some time.

2005-05-28T04:24:00.001-07:00

Lately Ajax has been in the news a lot after Google Suggest and Map used it. It is basically a combination of JavaScript, HTTP and XML to render controls smartly on web browsers (not the only thin clients actually). Now its usage tends to import minimum amount of data from the server quickly, so that the user gets the feel of everything almost at the pace of desktop applications in today's broadband world. XML.com and AdaptivePath have more on the same:

One of the classic drawbacks to building a web application interface is that once a page has been downloaded to the client, the connection to the server is severed. Any attempt at a dynamic interface involves a full roundtrip of the whole page back to the server for a rebuild--a process which tends to make your web app feel inelegant and unresponsive. A solution to [this] problem presents itself in the form of the XMLHttpRequest object. This object, first implemented by Microsoft as an ActiveX object but now also available as a native object within both Mozilla and Apple's Safari browser, enables JavaScript to make HTTP requests to a remote server without the need to reload the page. In essence, HTTP requests can be made and responses received, completely in the background and without the user experiencing any visual interruptions. This is a tremendous boon, as it takes the developer a long way towards achieving the goals of both a responsive user interface and keeping all the important logic in the application layer. By using JavaScript to ferry input back to the server in real time, the logic can be performed on the server and the response returned for near-instant feedback.

Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

* standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;

* dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;

* data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;

* asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;

* and JavaScript binding everything together.

Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine - written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user's behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user's interaction with the application to happen asynchronously - independent of communication with the server.

Now the technology is great, due credit to Microsoft for the same. But it was only after Mozilla adopted it too, that companies like Google took efforts into promoting such a thing as its mainstream offering. (They did not want it to be browser specific, especially IE ;) ) No doubt Suggest and Maps are very well done and the age of asynchronous communication is gunna stay.

However its one part of Ajax which perhaps wont continue for long I think and that's the "j" part of it. Ajax is 'Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (or XmlHttp)'. Now JavaScript is a scripting language long known to handle basic validation stuff for applications and building some 'dynamic', 'interactive' menus/controls in the interface. It is a scripting language which has plenty of drawbacks including majorly its non-object orientation schemes. JavaScript was not designed to work for such a scenario i.e. client-server communication and as such is not conceptualized in a very modular fashion. JavaScript code cannot be shared across pages in a neat manner and to program with it, is certainly not a developer's delight. So this is one aspect of the Ajax abbreviation that is bound to change.

So what can replace it? Currently... Nothing. And that's why its being used. Lack of a default standard technology for runtime asynchronous communication between the browser and the server thus far never created a need for such a language and that's why it has not been developed. All the communication was carried out by "Objects" specifically, ActiveX objects, Applets and Flash/Shockwave applications. All these require plug-ins in the browser, and most of them (except ActiveX only on IE) come pre-installed these days.

So any new technology which could replace JavaScript and make it inter-operable with the W3C DOM elements in a page is surely required. What the process would probably be like would be objects being passed onto the client browser and using the browser's specific components (XmlHttp for now) to do miraculous stuff. This object will have to be extremely secure ofcourse and Java style of security for applets is certainly the route to follow. Now the requirement to support this kind of a technology will definitely make the thin clients a little thicker, but that seems to be unavoidable as we are in the stage of a transition to asynchronous communication and introduction of a new standard set of technologies (incorporating many from the existing bunch) to classify an application as a "Thin Client" is certainly welcomed.

Alternatively, I can see a big advantage for Flash, if something like this does not take off. Flash works the same way on all the browsers and it is controlled by a central authority - Macromedia, which decides what goes in and like Microsoft Java, there is no flavor of Flash available. If Flash ActionScript can be made Object oriented and if Flash can make use of the underlying XmlHttp object, it will certainly kick out JavaScript from the Ajax acronym. Not to mention, Flash's visual appeal is much more powerful than DHTML Menus/Controls for most users. Let's see which one (Flash or that new standard OO client-server communication language) becomes part of the new "Thin Client". Or perhaps, Both?

Some search engines thought differently, when will the users do?

2005-05-28T04:24:00.000-07:00

I recently came across some innovative search engines that thought out-of-the-box, trying to grab some piece of the search engine market pie. Firstly, the one which impressed me the most - KartOO. The best thing about this was ofcourse the interface. It linked results like a data warehouse/mining software and shows virtual groupings among the results. Good if you are doing some research on some topics and want to know about particular aspects of certain things. The only problem that I faced while searching through KartOO was that my thinking was too "Googlish". KartOO displays the search text box too, but it additionally gives a map in Flash, about how people think of or associate pages. So the question - when will users learn to adapt to the new innovations? It will surely take some time for the masses to think differently and that's a big plus for the already established Search Engines.

Second in line were "human" classifiers. Like Furl and Topix, which impressed me the most. Furl has a USP which got me instantly hooked onto it. Saving pages for later and bookmarking which I can take along with me i.e. accessible from anywhere. Topix too are good articles intelligently classified into categories relevant and also some local filtering too, if desired. I think the Furl model is the best for initial user appeal. It offers something others don't and for that people start using its other services as visible on their screens ;) For those who question that Furl is a search engine too, should probably think potential and not current status. It's classification is done by humans and therefore "currently" more intelligent than AI operations. Also the classification is done by people who use the service and not managed by people dedicated by the site itself and therefore cost-effective and done in bulk.

Lastly one more effort conducted from a long time is answering questions rather than searching keywords, initiated by AskJeeves, followed by some like Brainboost. This effort I personally feel has FAILED. The results just look like a normal search conducted on keywords. The vastness of questions are left unanswered and probably this may not be the way people will search in the future, even if it quite logical that people think in questions.

Can Papers End the Free Ride Online?

2005-05-28T04:23:00.002-07:00

NYT writes...

Consumers are willing to spend millions of dollars on the Web when it comes to music services like iTunes and gaming sites like Xbox Live. But when it comes to online news, they are happy to read it but loath to pay for it. Newspaper Web sites have been so popular that at some newspapers, including The New York Times, the number of people who read the paper online now surpasses the number who buy the print edition. This migration of readers is beginning to transform the newspaper industry. Advertising revenue from online sites is booming and, while it accounts for only 2 percent or 3 percent of most newspapers' overall revenues, it is the fastest-growing source of revenue. And newspaper executives are watching anxiously as the number of online readers grows while the number of print readers declines.

"For some publishers, it really sticks in the craw that they are giving away their content for free," said Colby Atwood, vice president of Borrell Associates Inc., a media research firm. The giveaway means less support for expensive news-gathering operations and the potential erosion of advertising revenue from the print side, which is much more profitable. As a result, nearly a decade after newspapers began building and showcasing their Web sites, one of the most vexing questions in newspaper economics endures: should publishers charge for Web news, knowing that they may drive readers away and into the arms of the competition? Of the nation's 1,456 daily newspapers, only one national paper, The Wall Street Journal, which is published by Dow Jones & Company, and about 40 small dailies charge readers to use their Web sites. Other papers charge for either online access to portions of their content or offer online subscribers additional features.

"A big part of the motivation for newspapers to charge for their online content is not the revenue it will generate, but the revenue it will save, by slowing the erosion of their print subscriptions," Mr. Atwood said. "We're in the midst of a long and painful transition." Most big papers are watching and waiting as they study the patterns of online readers. Analysts said that the growth in readers was slowing but that readers appeared to be spending more time on the Web sites. "We're always looking at the issue," said Caroline Little, publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online media subsidiary of The Washington Post Company. She said that the online registration process that most papers now require for use of their Web sites, while free, lays the groundwork for charging if papers decide to go that route. "You're getting information from your users and you can target ads to your users, which is more efficient for advertisers," she said. "This has been a dipping of the toe in the water."

This has been an observation or rather a question from my side too for a long time. How long can free be sustained? Can Advertisement completely cover the online production, maintenance, distribution costs? Google is surviving on the online text ad revenue model from some time, is that model sustainable? Or is the age of subscription charges for online services like Email, Search, News about to dawn? Only time will tell, but it seems that the move towards "charging for common services" has to be unanimously supported by all, else it will end up like a no-show (something that USA.net perhaps experienced).

Furl like that.

2005-05-28T04:23:00.001-07:00

I recently found Furl.net from one of John Udell's articles refered by EMERGIC. I instantly got hooked onto it. It is a (currently) free service that helps you organize your bookmarks online and even keep a saved copy of the page on that. It gives out browser plug-ins to quickly "furl" a page and copies all the current contents (incl. Ads) to the saved copy. The reason for this ofcourse is dead links later. The concept is simple, but fabulously executed. It allows to attach keywords, comments and categorize the article. It allows you to publish your bookmarks so that others can refer to it (or not, if you wish so). You can get the "hot" furl additions of the day/week from the site which simply are the ones people are increasingly "furling" for their own. And ofcourse a nice search interface, makes it a complete online bookmarking service with portability (access from any browser on any machine), online storage (well hope they are ready for the bulk loads) and community networking. It seems Furl has hit the jackpot and is definitely more user-friendly than del.icio.us. This fits in nicely in the next generation search engine framework, lets see if the search giants, adapt to this or buy it out. Furl certainly is here for the long term. But in hindsight, I feel there might be some issues creeping upon as some companies/governments might not like the idea of online availability of deleted/removed/banned contents.

The theory of the Long Tail

2005-05-28T04:23:00.000-07:00

Chris Anderson has impressed me a lot with his writings on the theory of the Long Tail. I think I will probably be mildly biased to his theory in some of my future writings and thoughts. The theory portrays how the capacity and opportunities of the niche should not be ignored in the "hit-driven" economies of the world. He points out how almost everything can have a potential market and how customers can pay for them if given a "choice" to own them, use them, subscribe for them etc. His writings suggests that he thinks the benefits of targeting the Long Tail by businesses is now even more attractive with the current technology innovations removing the constraints of shelf space, stocking costs and peer references. More from his own type:

[It is] an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

Most of us want more than just hits. Everyone's taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we're drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternatives have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them.

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots. This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want. We assume, for instance, that there is little demand for the stuff that isn't carried by Wal-Mart and other major retailers; if people wanted it, surely it would be sold. The rest, the bottom 80 percent, must be subcommercial at best. To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country. This is the Long Tail.

Some key advantages of the Long Tail, as pointed by him:

Long is really long: What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough non-hits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits.

Till recently, untapped: When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well - niche and one-off products.

Nothing is worthless: Almost anything is worth offering on the off chance it will find a buyer.

It's not a big investment: In a Long Tail economy, it's more expensive to evaluate than to release. Take away the unnecessary costs of the retail channel - CD manufacturing, distribution, and retail overheads. That leaves the costs of finding, making, and marketing music.

Prices can be really attractive: If the incremental cost of making content that was originally produced for physical distribution available online is low, the price should be, too. Price according to digital costs, not physical ones. Such "misses" cost less to make available than hits, so why not charge even less for them? Imagine if prices declined the further you went down the Tail, with popularity (the market) effectively dictating pricing. All it would take is for the labels to lower the wholesale price for the vast majority of their content not in heavy rotation; even a two- or three-tiered pricing structure could work wonders.

Pirated stuff are not totally free: Free has a cost: the psychological value of convenience. The exact amount is an impossible calculus involving the bank balance of the average college student multiplied by their available free time. By offering fair pricing, ease of use, and consistent quality, you can compete with free.

Subscription services goes hand-in-hand with Bulk of options: Perhaps the best way to do that is to stop charging for individual tracks at all. Danny Stein, whose private equity firm owns eMusic, thinks the future of the business is to move away from the ownership model entirely. With ubiquitous broadband, both wired and wireless, more consumers will turn to the celestial jukebox of music services that offer every track ever made, playable on demand. Some of those tracks will be free to listeners and advertising-supported, like radio. Others, like eMusic and Rhapsody, will be subscription services. Today, digital music economics are dominated by the iPod, with its notion of a paid-up library of personal tracks. But as the networks improve, the comparative economic advantages of unlimited streamed music, either financed by advertising or a flat fee (infinite choice for $9.99 a month), may shift the market that way.

The Long Tail needs some support from the "hits": Offering only hits is no better. Think of the struggling video-on-demand services of the cable companies. There's not enough choice to change consumer behavior, to become a real force in the entertainment economy. By contrast, the success of Netflix, Amazon, and the commercial music services shows that you need both ends of the curve. Their huge libraries of less-mainstream fare set them apart, but hits still matter in attracting consumers in the first place. Great Long Tail businesses can then guide consumers further afield by following the contours of their likes and dislikes, easing their exploration of the unknown.

Search Engine Generation 4: Personalized Search!

2005-05-28T04:22:00.001-07:00

A question first: Is Google - over hyped?. Google is great, fabulous at seaching, I use it all the time. It is the other things that, well, are probably causing some high expectations about whatever it tries to do. Good for the company, but only to an extent. So its the other offerings - Video search, Mail service and all the betas doing the rounds. Beta versions these days are so long, and ofcourse people, especially techies can't wait that long. So they try out these versions and spread the news of the great features and blame the bugs to it being still beta. It's the psychology of people to be biased for the services/products they are a fan of, and well sometimes that can overshadow you from thinking beyond.

I read an article on Emergic, where Rajesh nicely classified the generations of search engines so far witnessed. First was Yahoo's Directories, Second Altavista's crawlers and third Google's PageRanks. Imploring on this, we see the first age was when the Internet was limited and people needed to know only about the best and the famous of all content. Second age came across as the people wanted to know about the rest and search for the latest and hidden things, not covered by plain directories. It was also an age where queries became more important than hierarchical searches. People wanted the search site to intelligently find out what they were looking for (well not that intelligently as we have seen). Google's PageRanks mixed the vastness with popularity of the search results and perhaps was the mix of the earlier 2 approaches. Google was perhaps banking on the fact that a piece of information is repeated searched and the same links for those searches satisfied all. Well that is what is wronged now. Now, people want the results relevent to them as a distinct individual. People want PERSONALIZED searches.

The above article also pointed me to Topix, an engine which claims to employ artificial intelligence to decide the categorization of blog feeds and news articles to present an organized, classified result. Here's more from the company's own mouth:

With so much news from so many sources being continually released, categorizing each story consistently, efficiently and accurately is very difficult. Rather than rely on human editors for this task, Topix.net uses its proprietary technology. The Topix.net team has created artificial intelligence algorithms that continuously monitor breaking news from over 10,000 sources, 24 hours a day. These algorithms read every story as it is released and then categorize each one into one or more of the more the 150,000 'topix.net' pages that we created.

To ensure proper placement of each story, the Topix.net categorization process is multi-faceted. For each story reviewed, the content of the story is geo-coded to determine where the event took place and/or the location of those involved in the story. It is then further categorized as to the subject matter involved. Once this categorization process has run, the story is then placed on the appropriate web-page(s).

Also recently tried out Amazon's a9, which relies on specific things that people want to search about (Books, Movies, Images, Yellow Pages) in addition to the normal web search results from Google. Additionally it allows to keep a history of searches and ofcourse has incorporated the ID Mechanism! Ofcourse Amazon's search is tilted towards the goals of complimenting its own store as well. Didn't find buy the VCD/DVD on the movie information however, which took me by surprise.

The above sites definitely state that search wars are far from over. It is heating up and the biggies are not the only ones to share the pie. So we are ready for Generation 4 of Search Wars and what is it going to be? Definitely, Personalized Search! Here are some of my thoughts on what could go into that and should become a part of it:

1. ID Mechanism:
Yahoo made it infamous! One ID, many services. Convergence play, carry your settings wherever you go. The next search engine's personalized configurations for a user should be transportable and ID mechanism is the only way I currently feel can achieve this. So like Amazon's a9 search. Log on and keep your settings active. Yahoo and MSN are just a step away from this, Google has to start IDs soon. Well seems like it already has maybe.

2. Search history and Drill down searches:
This may sound already 'in the fray" to many. Search within results is already done by many right? Well that is just the basic of what I have in mind. Data has to be classified into many verticals by the search engine itself and along with the initial search results, give the users options of how they can be filtered out or grouped. Like a search on an artist might throw up groupings based on Shopping for albums, Searching for Lyrics, Fan sites, Chronological grouping etc. Filters might be site based, country based or even Page Rank based where Page Ranks are influenced by the user too e.g. I treat CNET's articles as highly important/informative etc. After the user gets into a group, provide a drill down. Grouping on chronology might be further drilled downed and wrapped up as Decade-Year-Month-Week-Day. Groupings on Shopping might be further classified on particular vendors, geographical locations etc. Also search history to go back and forth and ofcourse the famous - "I saw that link yesterday, now I dont remember the search string". Bookmarking is also useful.

3. RSS feeds and AI:
Blog generate loads of content. While users may often subscribe to many, why not provide a way for them to use your search engine to read them. The latest from their subscriptions, filtering for them might be good services. Also classifying the huge data (not how the blogger classifies it) requires great AI. Topix is a start. Further down one might keep track of the likes and dislikes of a user (perhaps by pages rated by them or content filtered out by them) might be useful to classify/auto filter data relevent for the user. AI is the basis of future classification and the less the user has to do to make it work, the better the AI algorithm used.

4. Desktop not the only market.
Almost all users have WAP browsers in their cells and with Java getting embedded, users use them more n more for entertainment stuff. If the WAP world is targetted by the biggies, customers will search while on the go, and those searches would normally very high localized, personalized, quickly delivered content. Also unlike the desktop, people may be even willing to pay for mobile searches, something they are already doing for games/ringtones/WAP access.

These are some. Probably will extend this article later.

Flash on your mobile

2005-05-28T04:22:00.000-07:00

Macromedia had announced sometime back that it had signed up a licensing agreement with Nokia for providing Flash Lite support on Nokia's Series 60 phones. While I was overwhelmed by the news of Flash's entry to mobile phones, been keenly waiting for it for over a year myself, I was slightly dejected by the fact that the adoption might not be for all phone makers. Nokia, no doubt, is the current market leader, but it is diminishing constantly to Samsung, Motorola and the like. I hope Macromedia makes its product available for other phone makers too, else Flash might end up the EDGE way, with not many handsets around, making the technology not a mass hit. I would have rather preferred it going the J2ME way. Oh well, but its a start anyway. But it seems, I was not the only one waiting, there were others too in the queue. Russell Beattie keenly awaited it for 2 years, as he puts it. More from the link:

Flash Lite 1.1 still has some issues (like no file support - you can't save state, and the fact that it's based on older Flash 4.0 tech) and that the developer tools are still oriented towards designers not programmers, but still it's a great announcement. From what I've seen of Flash Lite, the applications developed are smaller, more compelling and quicker to program than their J2ME MIDP counterparts. Flash Lite will add another "middle-layer" programming platform to the Series 60/Symbian OS. Python will be great for hackers and maybe corporate developers, Flash will be great for consumer media-based apps. I can't believe it took this long to happen.

This is a great announcement, I can't wait to start seeing the Flash content flow. First thing, Macromedia and/or Nokia needs to make it a one-click option to grab the mobile player from their sites - the press release insinuated as much, and I hope it happens soon. My other wish is for Macromedia to create an IDE for Flash Lite - I can't deal with freakin' timelines. Give me drag/drop controls and a text editor for the Action Script please!

Completely agree with him on the first point. Flash will be for entertainment WAP sites or downloadable entertainment application. I can sense the Movie and Music industry going all Wappy with this tool and Games to follow. J2ME will be more for business applications, Yes. Unfortunately extensions of business applications has only been restricted to the PalmTops so far. I sense the change as soon as the memory on standard phones increases dramatically.

For the second point, I must admit I never thought in that direction. Me, ofcourse being a Java Software Engineer, I would love Widgets and coding a la Eclipse or Visual Studio style. If Flash is anytime wanting business applications makers to take it seriously, it has to provide this kind of development environment. All in all, Good Luck Macromedia, hoping to see Flash on my mobile soon!

Trends materialize: Yahoo and Music

2005-05-28T04:19:00.000-07:00

I had already anticipated this move long back, of Yahoo doing good in the Music industry in one of my previous articles and along comes news of Yahoo's plans of launching of a Music Player and Music Store to add to its plethora of services on the net. Yahoo is so well placed right now with its ID mechanism in place and doing wonders. Its Mail, Briefcase, Groups, Messenger, Launch, Geocities, Games, Chat, Mobile, Photos are so well integrated that every user just tends to explore it many a times without reason.

Anyway, back to Music, CNET has more:

Yahoo's full-fledged entry into the digital-music retail business could help shift a market that has remained tilted strongly in Apple's favor. Yahoo has already built a large and loyal following for its streaming-music and video service, and could parlay that into music sales. Indeed, the company's Launchcast radio services was the highest-rated Webcasting service online in January, according to ratings firm Arbitron and ComScore Media Metrix, attracting more than 2.2 million people that month.

However, Apple's dominance has been challenged by other giants, ranging from Sony to Microsoft, without substantially decreasing the iPod maker's market share. Last week, Apple said it had sold more than 300 million songs through its iTunes store since its launch.

"You have to look at how to create a linkage between a device and the online service," GartnerG2 analyst Mike McGuire said. "But given Yahoo's traffic and their very active communities, the potential (for success) is there." Yahoo has begun to streamline its music and multimedia properties over the past few months, changing the name of its Launch site to Yahoo Music and consolidating its entertainment businesses in a Santa Monica, Calif., office near Hollywood. The new MusicNet-powered music service will be integrated into Yahoo's existing infrastructure, possibly including features such as links to its popular instant-messaging program, sources said. MusicNet's technology allows companies to offer subscription services or per-song downloads, and is used by Virgin Digital, America Online and others. Sources close to the company said the new service is likely to launch by the end of the month.

Now things like these make me lament on the fact that I haven't updated this blog for almost 2 months now. Something I hope to be correcting real soon. Well this is a start!

Trends materialize: Yahoo and Music

2005-03-09T08:09:00.001-08:00

Anyway, back to Music, CNET has more:

Yahoo's full-fledged entry into the digital-music retail business could help shift a market that has remained tilted strongly in Apple's favor. Yahoo has already built a large and loyal following for its streaming-music and video service, and could parlay that into music sales. Indeed, the company's Launchcast radio services was the highest-rated Webcasting service online in January, according to ratings firm Arbitron and ComScore Media Metrix, attracting more than 2.2 million people that month.

However, Apple's dominance has been challenged by other giants, ranging from Sony to Microsoft, without substantially decreasing the iPod maker's market share. Last week, Apple said it had sold more than 300 million songs through its iTunes store since its launch.

"You have to look at how to create a linkage between a device and the online service," GartnerG2 analyst Mike McGuire said. "But given Yahoo's traffic and their very active communities, the potential (for success) is there." Yahoo has begun to streamline its music and multimedia properties over the past few months, changing the name of its Launch site to Yahoo Music and consolidating its entertainment businesses in a Santa Monica, Calif., office near Hollywood. The new MusicNet-powered music service will be integrated into Yahoo's existing infrastructure, possibly including features such as links to its popular instant-messaging program, sources said. MusicNet's technology allows companies to offer subscription services or per-song downloads, and is used by Virgin Digital, America Online and others. Sources close to the company said the new service is likely to launch by the end of the month.

Now things like these make me lament on the fact that I haven't updated this blog for almost 2 months now. Something I hope to be correcting real soon. Well this is a start!

Past, Present & Beyond: 2004 in Review: Cellular Explosion

2005-03-09T08:09:00.000-08:00

The Mobile industry jumped leaps and bounds this year. Camera phones proliferated, the race towards 262k screen colors, getting in MP3s players, video recorders, 3G, Wi-Fi, mergers and ofcourse Windows and Linux make their way inside. From CNET...

Hybrid phones make a splash.
By late spring, cell phone makers were introducing Wi-Fi phones, bringing new threats and opportunities to wireless carriers and traditional phone service providers. The highly anticipated hybrid phones let people make connections through a local wireless Internet access point, switching over to a cellular network whenever necessary. The result: greater flexibility in mobile communications. Hybrid handsets can use both data and voice applications, with most of the attention focused on data until recently. But that's changing, thanks to technology improvements for managing call transfers between Wi-Fi and cell phone networks and the increasing popularity of VoIP on corporate networks. Early versions of Wi-Fi cell phones failed miserably because of the enormous drain on the batteries--which must support two chipsets rather than one--and because users were forced to manually switch between networks. But at least one phone maker, Motorola, now claims to have solved the automatic transfer problem

Expected? Hell Yeah! Hybridism continues and there's nothing stopping it. These phones will not remain the exception but become the norm. However there's still time for their adoption. So probably 2005 will just make the scene more promising for the future. Except for the cost, there even network bandwidth that one can save from this device. However switching calls without disconnection will be the biggest hurdle. It seems some companies are already claiming that. Also this will flare up more alliances (if not mergers and acquisitions) and make the networks more interoperable.
3G? 4G? Wi-Fi? VoIP?
It was definitely a year of confusion and that is not yet solved. The hybrid solution perhaps is the best bet everyone can have, but what all will comprise the hybrid? Let's see the progress in some of these technologies:

3G: The promise of wireless broadband has been tantalizing mobile mavens for some time now. Cellular providers such as Verizon Wireless, Sprint PCS, Cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile, and, most recently, Nokia, have been baiting these masses by releasing a spate of products and services that they call 3G. This "third generation" of cellular technology, after previous waves of analog and voice-only digital services, is supposed to combine voice with broadband packet data transmission delivering fast Web surfing, streaming video and audio, multimedia messaging, and other services. But while the radio technologies that American carriers have installed are technically 3G, the services are more akin to dial-up Internet than broadband. By focusing on video services too early operators risk undermining revenue per MB says a new report from telecoms watchers, Analysys. Operators in Japan and South Korea come under attack from Analysys for focusing on sophisticated multimedia small-screen 3G services.According to Analysys, the big mistake is that operators aren't developing a cohesive service portfolio strategy. This is a must if other technologies such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX and Flash OFDM (offered by Flarion) are to be integrated with a 3G network.

4G: Nextel said that Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and IBM had signed on to the "4G" trial, which will use equipment from Flarion Technologies capable of downloading data at 1.5 megabits per second. The service will provide high-speed wireless Net access on desktop and notebook PCs, pocket PCs and other devices. Nextel and other top U.S. cell phone providers are upgrading their networks and hope to recover the construction costs by introducing advanced data-oriented services, such as picture mails, streaming television or downloadable music.

VoIP: Sales of [Lucent]'s Accelerate VoIP portfolio are promising, Russo said. There are now 20 customers, including BellSouth (Quote, Chart), which is using the offering to deploy VoIP services in nine states. Lucent's VoIP hand will be strengthened this quarter as it finalizes the purchase of softswitch (define) maker Telica. Another new opportunity is a recent partnership with Microsoft (Quote, Chart) to develop Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) offerings for broadband networks. Deployment of this equipment will allow telecoms to deliver a voice, high-speed data and video bundle to better compete with cable rivals.
Penguin in your hand
Open-source software dialed into the cell phone in February, when Motorola introduced the first platform based on Linux, and said most models will follow suit. It's a major sign of the growing popularity of the operating system outside its stronghold in high-end computers. "We think we'll move millions of units" of cell phones running Linux, Durschlag said. "I think you'll see it take over the majority of our portfolio going forward," including lower-end phones. "What Motorola articulated is (that) the future for their high-end handset lineup is Linux," said Yankee Group wireless technologies analyst John Jackson. "This is a pretty interesting statement from a company with the size, scope and market of Motorola." But in the market for powerful "smart" phones, Linux won't have an easy time duking it out with earlier arrivals from Microsoft, Palmsource and the Symbian consortium, a group that includes Motorola, IDC analyst Alex Slawsby said. By 2006, IDC believes Symbian will have increased its market share in powerful phones to 53 percent from its current 46 percent. Microsoft will have about 27 percent of the market, with Palm at 10 percent. IDC predicts that Linux could take as much as 4.2 percent.

Linux is naturally suited to become one of the best OS for smart phones. It will provide a good deal of compatibility with the desktop and also find good chunk of programmers, who are currently more inclined towards developing application in Java for cell phones as it is supported on virtually every phone. Linux has to make inroads into this market. Microsoft has similar advantages, its Symbian and Pamsource who are in trouble. Palm, it seems, has already started lagging in the hand held market.

Past, Present & Beyond: 2004 in Review: Apple Pie

2005-03-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been cramped with work, getting less and less time for bloging my thoughts. 2005 new year celebrations went by and all blogs and journals in their last week of the past year as well as the first weeks of the new, critically analyzed and reviewed the events of 2004 and came out with their predictions on "what-to-expect"s in 2005. I too couldn't miss out on this opportunity, now can I ;) Though a tinge late, I will share my thoughts on the events which will possibly shape the things to come. CNET has a great series going on the 2004 year review and I will put my analysis on that.

So as for this first part, I will concentrate on the change in Apple's strategy in the year from proprietary and rigid business model to a tinge open, flexible and adaptive model recognizing the change which the industry is undergoing. Well the start has been good enough, lets see what's in store ahead. I will follow CNET's commentary and add my feeds inline. For a change, I will try out a new layout this time :):

iPod dwarfs iMac
Apple Computer, which rolled the dice three years ago with a hand-size MP3 player the size of a deck of cards, came up boxcars. This year, Apple was largely doubling down on the bet it made in 2001. At Macworld Expo in January, Apple took the iPod and made it a mini. Sales of the iPod rivaled those of the Mac for much of the year, before ultimately dwarfing those of the Mac in the October quarter, at least in number of units sold. Expectations for holiday sales grew into the millions as the iPod topped Christmas wish lists.
iTunes - The right vibes?
[In the last year,] Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the company's plans to sell tunes to Windows users. And while the company hasn't magically converted them all to the Mac view of the world, it has made a pretty nice business for itself. Apple has sold tens of millions of songs and more than doubled the number of iPods it is selling. The Mac maker won't say how many of its songs or players are going to Windows users, but it's reasonable to think it's a pretty good chunk, given the relative prevalence of PCs. Apple has clearly established the iTunes Music Store as the standard for legitimate music sales. According to new data from the NPD Group, iTunes retained a 70 percent market share for digital downloads between December 2003 and July 2004, the last month for which data is available. "iTunes has set the standard in online music in terms of sales, usability, and in the quality of its library," said Yankee Group analyst Mike Goodman. "They're the ones who cracked the code, and everyone is following in their footsteps."

While the success of iPods and iTunes is overwhelming, everyone is still skeptic on whether this will be the right techique to sell online music or is there any better option available? Well, as for me, with Microsoft following suit in a similar fashion with Windows Media Center, its definately going to be the standard for atleast the next few years. However players will probably get commoditized and iTunes perhaps would be playable across many vendor music players (even cell phones) and so will be Microsoft's format. And it will be the music industry which would be pushing this need!
Will iMac follow the iPod? and how many other iGadgets on the way?
What iPod established for Apple was a good hold in the consumer electronics market. iMac's share has slipped to barely 1% of the PC market, unless they open up the system, its seems its going towards extinction. What Apple can do with iMac however is open it up, and I don't mean open source. The MacOS is currently available only on Apple hardware. But it should probably open it up to Intel x86 architecture. Also it might want to support Windows, Linux and Solaris on its hardware. Either way it will open up other possible markets for the company.

iPod has proved leadership in its segment. Apple - the brand - has been synonymous with quality and sleekness. It can perhaps come out with more gadgets like these. There were some blogs talking about a cell phone from Apple and iMobile perhaps, but I think Apple would find it better to enter areas yet untapped, in their infancy. I think Addressable Television is one such market that Apple can target. Its new, fresh and currently there is a conflict among standards in that area. Let's wait and watch where Apple innovates next ;).

Outsourcing - In and Out.

2004-12-26T01:06:00.000-08:00

I came across an excellent article describing the opportunities, challenges, changing focus and sustainability of the outsourcing model currently making hay while the sun shines. The articles describes the emphasis on outsourcing companies on improving their productivity, protecting their markets from wannabes and addressing the biggest question of sustainability of their growth. So without much ado, lets directly analyze the same (my comments are inline):

Instead of relying solely on captive centers or third party providers for their outsourcing needs, companies are increasingly turning to hybrid structures, says Ravi Aron, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton. "The debate over one or the other is really fading away, and firms are going toward what's called an 'extended organizational form' which brings together the strengths of the two models. It gives companies a way to say what they want done but also say how they want it done." Essentially, the client firm's managers act as very senior managers of a third-party provider. For instance, New York-based Office Tiger, a BPO solutions provider that has set up operations in Chennai, India, has a system through which companies can make day-to-day changes to processes, adding in verification layers. "I call this 'virtual prowling,'" says Aron. "In most captives, you are able to have a senior manager prowl the floor. So when a third-party provider gives you fine-grain analysis capability, you can still monitor all of these things." Thus, the client firm can see which teams are excelling at which processes - and start picking the composition of new teams based on that knowledge.

Well what else can I say but "Hybridism" has made its way here to, and why not? Offer the clients selective services and they feel more secure and dynamic. Being transparent about the process does give one's customer the feeling of being in command and would inculcate greater trust relationship important for the long run.

Even firms that swear by captive centers acknowledge that there is scope for more outsourcing. Peter Nag, vice president and head of the global program management office at Lehman Brothers, notes that Wall Street firms often go to captive sites in part because there's a disconnect in domain knowledge between the young managers in India and their older counterparts in the U.S. "We were able to offshore about 20% of our technology within the first year. But we couldn't get beyond that, because we had project managers in their 40s working with people in their 20s. Our projects were complex and proprietary, and we needed a high degree of control. But captive doesn't equal not outsourcing - they both do work and outsource, and it can open the way for more outsourcing once high quality work is proven."

I feel domain knowledge transfer is one aspect of outsourcing that scares the West. However it becomes unavoidable in the case one has to reap the benefits of cheaper labour. Domain expertise commands high prices among firms specializing in outsourcing, however even a long client relationship is hard to shift from and hence one protection plan for the firms handling the outsourcing work is to build strong long term relationships.

Ask companies why they outsource, and no matter what they say, their answers can largely be summed up in two words: cheap labor. But therein lies the problem, says Aron. "A lot of companies look at their potential gains from going to India and salivate over the labor arbitrage opportunities. What they should do is architect their plans backwards from the interface of the market." In other words, says Aron, companies should look at the ultimate destination of the process they're outsourcing and align workflows to integrate with actual customer needs. "They're beginning to understand that it's important to have discipline in knowing what to measure and why. Several firms have achieved operational flexibility through outsourcing - in other words, if their work volume suddenly goes up, they can look to their Indian operations to staff up cheaply - but very few have really been able to leverage outsourcing for true business impact - ability to price products at a premium, enter new markets, build in switching costs, etc." The myth, says Aron, is that companies with spaghetti-like, poorly managed processes in the U.S. and elsewhere are those that get the most out of outsourcing. "Firms that get the greatest value from outsourcing aren't those whose operations shops can't deliver in America; it's the ones that already run a lean op shop here and know how to calibrate incentives to customer needs and reap gains from going to India."

Outsourcing is evolving into an essential IT service rather than a mere fad for helping firms reap short-term gains. It is here to stay, like it or not. However its rate of growth depends on how best it can balance the quality-cost ratio. The talent pool in the BRIC countries is high, but the management of the same requires discipline. Bring in the metrics can ensure some of that and help both parties get the best benefits from the process. This is only being realized lately and the companies have now woken up to the fact.

Outsourcing firms should always be trying to measure the extent to which they have customized processes for client needs, adds Aron. "The more you have calibrated it so that it fits the customer's way of doing business, the more say you have in that company's internal workings. You can start telling the client, 'Here's how we can bring more gains to you.' That's when you get more strategic, formulating and diagnosing issues instead of just executing them." Right now, says Aron, most companies are positioning themselves in just one space - developing solutions or operating solutions. "They should be moving up into designing organizational processes and - at the very highest level -- formulating and diagnostics work, typically done by a few people but with the highest revenue per FTE. Many firms made the jump from body shopping to applications development. The challenge is to move even higher."

Moving up the value chain in outsourcing is tough. It leads to true globalization in the operations of a firm. The West would definitely want to avoid that and become more and more dependent on their Asian counterparts. But the process is a natural outgrowth of the redundant operational work that is highly desirable. Crossing this particular milestone will be the biggest challenge for all companies. The shift is going to be slower than normal and it will be realized once an organization decides to become truly global.

Aron and his students have developed some metrics to rank Office Tiger versus its peer group. The annual increase in revenue per employee reveals the extent of productivity growth. Aron says many companies in the industry's lower rungs score revenue per employee growth of between 2.5% and 9% annually, while those higher up the ladder score in the 9%-18% range. "Office Tiger will easily be in excess of this," says Aron. Another measure is the annual revenue per full-time equivalent employee (FTE) for the "execution staff" in a company. Here, Aron deliberately filters out the company's "support staff." That distinction is significant in the outsourcing industry as the relatively low wages in offshore locations tempt service providers to disproportionately bloat their support staff. Aron says that as high-end services demand increasing amounts of complexity and customization for customers, the average revenue per FTE should be at least $16,000 annually for an outsourcing company to be viable. He says Office Tiger's revenue per FTE "is well in excess of that" without revealing specifics. Aron's next measure to identify companies evolving to increasingly higher levels of efficiency is the ratio of support staff to execution staff. He says that while many companies have ratios of 1.2:1 (support staff to execution staff), it gets to healthy territory in the ranges of 0.4 or 0.33. In other words, that would mean five or six staffers responsible for executing projects would need no more than one or two support staff. Aron says Office Tiger's performance on this score is a lot better than that of others. "It's doing better than companies four times its size."

This is a wonderful analysis. In the software industry, support and maintenance work is always more expensive, more time consuming and more redundant. Bringing down the ratio of support staff to execution staff makes lots of sense. Most of the work currently shipped offshore is maintenance and support for exact this fact. It saves the company a lot of worries from the redundant work and concentrate more on the development kind.

That brings Aron to the problem of labor attrition that has plagued many outsourced service providers, especially of the call center variety. He says the annual attrition rate at call centers is as high as 55% in Bombay (Mumbai) and Bangalore. Sigelman is in comfortable territory here. "We have been operating at an attrition rate of between 10% and 14% in the past few months, which is really equivalent to a structural zero," he says. "You are always going to have people who get married and go off to different cities."

Attrition is an ever escalating problem in BPOs, which is sharper than any software firm. However moving up the value chain and becoming more specialized and domain specific will automatically reduce its intensity I think.

The trend is toward "more offshore activity in countries besides India, such as some of the smaller players like the Czech Republic and Malaysia," Pau notes. Moreover, she adds, there is likely to be a farther eastward push within Eastern Europe, to countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, as work spills over from places such as the Czech Republic and Hungary. A similar expansion is expected in other regions of the world. Several of the nations the A.T. Kearney experts are currently considering for inclusion in their spring 2005 survey are unlikely to leap to mind when Western executives contemplate potential off-shoring locations. Among these are Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana and Uruguay.

Ravi Aron, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton who closely follows BPO trends worldwide, estimates that in the four years from 2000 to 2004, India alone has created 260,000 jobs in this sector. The jobs range from call-center work to sophisticated accounting, research and financial services functions. The powerful Indian industry group NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), estimated that the country earned $3.5 billion in revenues from such work in 2003-2004.

Nor surprisingly, locations as disparate as Dubai, Mauritius and Sri Lanka are making plans to capture some of this economic upside. Dubai, a component of the United Arab Emirates, is setting up a Dubai Outsourcing Zone where wholly foreign-owned companies can operate tax-free. Dubai is also promoting its efficient transportation infrastructure and westernized lifestyle to potential outsourcers. Mauritius, already a destination for tourists drawn to its sparkling Indian Ocean beaches, is working on creating a high-tech enclave and touting the multilingual skills of its population. Because of periods of both French and English rule, many of its 1.2 million people are comfortable in both French and English. In November, Sri Lanka's Board of Investment was a first-time attendee at a Bangalore IT trade show. Officials of the tiny island nation off the southern tip of India - best known in the West for an intractable civil war just halted by European mediation - came to invite Indian BPO companies to set up some operations in Sri Lanka. The lure: Skilled labor and a cost advantage over India of 10% to 15%.

If the chief advantage of outsourcing is cost advantage and if India's pay packages continue to escalate as is the current trend, it is but logical that other countries will start getting bigger pieces of pie too. BRIC nations are already attracting lots, but there are even smaller countries with skills as mentioned above, which are also in the run. Governments of most countries are encouraging this field for job generation and are constantly working towards bettering their infrastructure and policies to support this industry. India, in particular, has an advantage of its largeness. Even the cities currently experiencing the BPO boom have poor infrastructure. And there are many smaller cities which are increasingly sought after for developing them into BPO hubs. For India, infrastructure is the key, as the nation has tremendous advantage of the quantity of talent (as does China) yet to be tapped. But even so, the dispersal of outsourcing work is unquestionable since no one would like to depend on India's already shaky political framework and the constant threat of changing policies disturbing the smooth operation.

The constantly shifting fortunes of BPO hosts are visible within India itself, says Arjun Sethi, who is a principal with A.T. Kearney in New Delhi and leads its technology and transformation practice there. The major metropolitan locations - Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai - are being challenged by emerging destinations such as Calcutta, Jaipur and Pune. Indians overall are also "very aware of China," Sethi says, seeing it both as a challenge and an opportunity. Especially with regard to software application development and maintenance-type IT work, a growing number of Indian organizations, such as Tata Consultancy Systems and Satyam, have set up shop in China, trying to capitalize on the trained labor pool there as well as on a transportation and telecommunications infrastructure that is superior to India's but not more expensive. The Indians bring superior project management skills and are hoping to use China not only as a platform for global BPO work but also as a market for such work, Sethi says.

This perhaps is the only move that Indian companies can adopt to gain some benefit from the dispersal. There is a huge amount of experience advantage for Indian companies and it is only moves like this that can ensure longer survival and sustained growth.

Hybrids - the next big trend.

2004-12-26T01:05:00.000-08:00

Gone are the days when a single approach is going to be adopted by all, a single technology that will attract most (let alone all), a single proposition being exciting for your clients. Customers now don't want to get fixed onto one standard and want a variety of choices available to them at any time to adopt to their changing needs and times. In the current technology industry where changes are part of the plan, it takes a lot to entice your customers to stick to your product range and offerings and trust you that they wont end up adopting to your changing supplies rather than they adopting to customers' changing demands.

The information technology industry especially has seeds of oligopoly sowed in pretty deep and the final consumers often feel forced into adopting a particular standard/format more cause of lack of options or imposed choices. One trend however which has already started to break this jinx is Hybrids. Hybrids - crossbreeds, in technology terms, can mean a product that can adopt to different technologies, inputs producing logically similar results respectively to those varied inputs. What Hybrids promote is their inherent assistance on the path to ultimate Convergence.

So we have hybrids in many technology industries, even outside IT. We have hybrid cars - fueled by oil or electricity. The very basic advantage of such a type of offering is freedom to choose. You are no longer bound to rising fuel prices affecting your monthly budgets. And once this variety becomes a standard, we can also see support "plug-ins" (as the techies might say ;) ) opening up to you even more choices. Then we have cell phones supporting different different frequencies to help you stick on to the same handset during international travels. We should even have CDMA-GSM hybrid for India. Later on we should be able to add VoIP, 3G onto the same, if required.

In IT, the trend is picking up. Solaris 10's support for native Linux applications is one of the biggest hybrid OS coming up. Cool advantage of your linux apps becoming executable on the Solaris box. IBM's Hybrid database supporting data in native and XML format. This feature surely will push the concept of liquid XML database further. Ultimately a single query could be used irrespective of the vendor of the database tool and only depend on your database design. Even iPOD's multi-format support, does allow one to choose between the proprietary formats or the general MP3 standards. Going ahead convergence in the form of Hybrids will probably be seen in the Television arena (Bittorrent, TiVo, Video-on-demand), gaming devices (one device - any vendor format - XBox, PS2, PSP, GameCube, N-Gage, PC), Web Search (text, videos, audios, shopping), computing (take away a part of your desktop as a smaller pocket PC probably :) ) amongst others.

Optimized Data File with inter-operatability

2004-12-26T01:04:00.000-08:00

J. Scott Edwards has presented a nice technique of optimizing data files required by applications without compromising on inter-operability. I think it applies well to applications too, in addition to OS itself, on which he stresses:

My idea is to have all of the information stored on the disk in the native Object format of the program. That way instead of having to constantly convert and interpret data, the application can just access that object directly. And when that data is needed in a flat file format, you have a converter App (object) that can access the internal data and convert it to a flat file type of format. For example, let's say you have some compressed (with Ogg Vorbis or whatever) audio objects on your computer. And you want to burn an audio CD which can be played in a normal audio CD player. You would create a playlist object and connect the output (more on this later) to the input of a Ogg Vorbis converter object and then into the Audio CD burning object.

Though fairly basic, I haven't see many applications using it so far.

The changing face of Journalism

2004-12-18T10:55:00.001-08:00

A couple of days back, I caught up on a nice little show on the indian news channel - Headlines Today, named "Top 5 today" which featured the renowned name in the media - Vir Sanghavi as the host and he were discussing on the changing face of indian and international journalism with reference to the intimate photographs of actors splashed on a mainstream newspaper. A few interesting thoughts he put forward:

Journalism today is more about people than issues. This is a global trend not just with reference to India.
If the photographs were that of a political figure or an industrialist, the media could have been accused of "unethical" journalism. But since it was concerning film actors, its all legal. Actors themselves provide entry to the press to their private parties and want their personal life details to be published in the media. They want to be talked about.
Journalism unfortunately is also a business and businesses have to earn profit. There are some people who practice very wise "ethical" journalism, so to say. Again unfortunately one of them goes bankrupt each year!

Innovation redefined

2004-12-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Rajesh Jain points out to an article by Michael Schrage which puts forward a different view on the definition of Innovation:

Innovation isn't what innovators do; it's what customers, clients, and people adopt. Innovation isn't about crafting brilliant ideas that change minds; it's about the distribution of usable artifacts that change behavior. Innovators-their optimistic arrogance notwithstanding-don't change the world; the users of their innovations do. That's not a subtle distinction.

Sun's Niagara and vision.

2004-12-18T10:54:00.000-08:00

Almost as a continuation of the earlier article, here's how Sun is in such a better position than IBM. It already has its own OS - Solaris, (which I must point out till now is a bit subdued) and that already has the power to exploit the power of its hardware offerings. It is launching its Niagara processor by 2006:

The Niagara chip has eight processing engines, or cores, each capable of running four simultaneous instruction sequences, or threads. Though it lacks circuitry to maximize the speed with which a given thread will run, Sun expects the chip to be useful for replacing large numbers of lower-end servers. Niagara is a crucial part of Sun's attempt to keep the Sparc family of processors relevant in the face of widely used x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and increasingly powerful Power processors from IBM. Niagara was spawned at start-up Afara Websystems, which Sun acquired in 2002. Each processor core on the chip juggles four threads, switching from one to another when one is held up by slow communications with the computer's main memory. Sun is touting the processor as a solution to power consumption woes in corporate data centers. Each Niagara processor consumes 56 watts. By contrast, it's not unusual for a high-end server chip to use between 80 watts and 120 watts.

Also, an older CNET article points out that they are banking on how large central servers will really be the key area for chip manufacturers as thin clients compromise on computing power a bit. I would endorse the view.

Sun's throughput computing plan is designed to vastly increase the power of servers and thus to reclaim momentum Sun has lost to Intel. The technique, which won't result in chips larger than those from competitors, sacrifices the ability to perform one task extremely quickly for the ability to do multiple independent tasks simultaneously.

Sun has changed dramatically in the last year, dropping its argument that its Solaris operating system and UltraSparc processors are sufficient for all computing needs and letting the Linux operating system and Intel processors into its product line. But essentially the company is sticking by one of its mainstay principles: Leave the computing work to large central servers, not to desktop machines.

In McNealy's vision, rather than each person having his or her own desktop computer, many people will share centralized servers. They'll carry not laptops but tokens that will grant them access to their private computing resources. "The shared resource model blows the doors off" the dedicated model, McNealy said.

As an alternative to PCs, Sun has loudly trumpeted its Sun Ray system, which does no processing on its own but instead relies on a central server. Sun is working on a future version called WAN Ray that can use wide-area network technology such as DSL lines or cable modems to connect to the server, McNealy said. Ultimately the idea will work with wireless networks as well.

In other areas, McNealy predicted a day when people will carry cards or chips activated by radio waves from sensors at hotels, gas stations and any number of other places. Once radio frequency identification (RFID) chips cost from 3 cents to 5 cents, "You'll put them on everything," he said.

Sun is really a company I look up to in terms of vision.

Chips don't matter if they don't have software

2004-12-18T10:53:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Schwartz had quoted this in a very interesting article describing IBM's failure to push its Chip segment due to lack of a good software strategy for it. This particular thought is pretty interesting when the Chip industry is at this juncture and Chip manufacturers are trying to either define their own segment, or adapting to a successful segment, or trying to beat the leader at his own game. Intel, AMD, Sun, IBM and many others in the race. Jonathan points out to an earlier article by him describing how IBM found itself quite a laggard in the race. I will snip out some key points...

IBM CEO, John Akers. Akers and his staff had the wisdom to enter the PC market in its early days, but the short sightedness to suggest customers source their PC operating system from a little company in the Pacific northwest. The company turned into Microsoft, and they continue to generously return the fruits of their coup to their stockholders.
A few years back, IBM and HP both hopped onto the social movement called linux. It's a wonderful movement. But the bad news for IBM is that the vast majority of enterprise datacenter deployments are now occurring on Red Hat's linux. And with Red Hat increasing price, while adding in an application server that competes with WebSphere, IBM's finding itself in the uncomfortable position of having lost control of the social movement they were hoping to monetize. They're beginning to look like the IBM of Mr. Akers's era - having missed the forest for a tree, and finding themselves without an operating system. And with most enterprises having picked Red Hat on IBM's recommendation, IBM now clumsily realizes it's invited the fox into the hen house. With Red Hat running on the majority of IBM's proprietary hardware, Red Hat can now direct those customers to HP and Dell. Even Sun.
Now if you're an IBM customer, you've probably received (or should prepare to receive) the pitch from IBM incenting you to move off Red Hat to SuSe. Bringing in SuSe at the last minute isn't having nearly the effect IBM desires - at least from the customers, developers (and press) I speak with. Moving from Red Hat Enterprise Server to SuSe's Enterprise Linux is very complicated (eg, which application server do you pick?), and with IBM's consulting bill, very expensive.
IBM is in a real pickle. Red Hat's dominance leaves IBM almost entirely dependent upon SuSe/Novell. Whoever owns Novell controls the OS on which IBM's future depends. Now that's an interesting thought, isn't it? I'd keep a close eye on the Novell/SuSe conversation. If IBM acquires them, the community outrage and customer disaffection is going to be epic... but where else does IBM go?

And the next quotes are really a belting (featuring in the formal link)...

I'm watching with amusement as IBM prepares to stub its toe with their new, curiously named "OpenPower" low-end boxes. Now, I will freely admit I am entirely confused by what they're doing. Why on earth would you ship a proprietary computer that doesn't run your own operating system (AIX)? If I were trying to freak out my installed base, that's exactly what I'd do.
Second, saying "it's ok, we run linux" is like saying you "run the internet." Sure feels like IBM is trying to avoid specifying the distro. Why? Because they'd be doing demand creation for Red Hat. And why buy WebSphere when you can just use what comes in Red Hat? - "Jonas (Red Hat's app server) is just a toy, it's just for the low end" said IBM's exec at the Smith Barney Tech Conference I just attended in NYC. Notwithstanding the familiarity of that refrain to how linux itself was mistakenly positioned a few years ago, the irony is that IBM is positioning these new boxes as low end boxes. Presumably ideal for running a low end app server, and just using what's in Red Hat.

Ofcourse after such a battering, one would be of the opinion that software commands hardware. Given an option that a particular software runs on any hardware, one would be neutral to all the hardware and probably pick the one with the best price-performance ratio. But if there isn't a software that can't truly utilize the power of the hardware, why go for it? The lesson is an important one and should be noted by the mobile/smart phone/MVP and other handheld chip makers, where the market is gaining huge ground year on year.

Now a markup language for security - AVDL.

2004-11-29T08:48:00.001-08:00

SOAP has proved that inter-operability can be achieved with standardization. Neither CORBA nor DCOM could achieve it, both of them didn't quite have the bulk support as did SOAP. And the raw bases of SOAP are XML and Industry wide acceptance. Now security has gathered much pace these past few years, escalated by flaws found in MS software mostly and also the bigger worms, spam bots doing the rounds. Security is probably the least standardized area of IT maybe. We all have heard of firewalls and IDSs(Intrusion Detection Systems), but there has never been a dedicated protocol, language or framework for it. Every vendor simply defines security in his own way and the clients have to adapt to it. OASIS(Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has come out with a new security interoperability standard AVDL (Application Vulnerability Description Language). Well this new standard seems to have atleast 2 of benefits of SOAP - XML data and broader industry acceptance. More from Net-Security and related...

The Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) is a rather new security interoperability standard within the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) that was first proposed in April 2003 by several leaders within the application security space. AVDL creates a uniform way of describing application security vulnerabilities using XML.

With dozens of security patches and application level vulnerabilities released each week, enterprises must deal with a constant flood of new security patches from their application and infrastructure vendors. To make matters worse, network level security products do little to protect against these vulnerabilities at the application level. To address this problem, enterprises today have deployed a host of best-of-breed security products to discover application vulnerabilities, block application-layer attacks, repair vulnerable web sites, distribute patches and manage security events.

Enterprises view application security as a continuous lifecycle. Unfortunately, there is currently no standard way for these products to communicate with each other, making the overall security management process far too linear, manual and time-consuming. Enterprise customers are asking companies to provide products that interoperate. A consistent way to describe application security vulnerabilities via XML is a significant step towards that goal. Today, these vendors proposing AVDL are actively engaged in projects whereby XML-based vulnerability descriptions will be used to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of attack prevention, event correlation, and remediation technologies. XML establishes a common framework, but XML alone does not ensure vendor interoperability.

AVDL Benefits Throughout the Application Lifecycle:

Developers and Quality Assurance
During the application development and testing phases, AVDL will serve as a standard language used by developers and QA testers to identify and remediate pre-production risks.

Security Operations
During the application production phase, AVDL will improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of attack prevention products by enabling them to read incoming AVDL files and automatically generate policies based on new vulnerabilities, attack activity or patches deployed. In addition to vulnerabilities discovered by application assessment/scanning products, AVDL descriptions will also be added directly to security alerts issued by application vendors and security research organizations. These AVDL inputs will also serve as a consistent communication mechanism for remediation and patching products, allowing them to read vulnerability assessments from different scanning tools to improve the vulnerability reporting process and appropriate vulnerability remediation. Event management tools will be able to correlate vulnerabilities with actual security events and prioritize accordingly.

Auditors
In post-production, auditors will spend less time understanding various reports from disparate sources and more time documenting their findings. Ultimately, customers will benefit from both reduced application security risk and decreased total cost of operations and ownership.

AVDL is already being implemented by companies and government agencies including the central security incident response organization for the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which plans to AVDL-enable its new Security Incident Response Portal.

Patents: The madness continues.

2004-11-29T08:48:00.000-08:00

As if the earlier ones were not bad enough, we have another round of broad patents, this time around on the very basic Web Services concept, going on "Auction". I mean what could be worse than allowing the general public a chance to take a risk of screwing the established organizations. It's really silly that companies are coming together to buy the patents themselves (they will retire it, as mentioned on CNET). This news would surely send the bids much higher and the chances of rigging would just exaggerate now. Craig Smith, the founder of CommerceNet, the company proposing to buy and retire the patents with the help of fundings from other established companies has very humorously put it, "It's a little bit like paying the blackmailer before they have something to blackmail you about."

Solaris - will it finally become the 3rd OS in version 10?

2004-11-29T08:47:00.000-08:00

Solaris is one of the oldest Operating Systems around, but not many talk about it or take it seriously (thanks to the media). Windows and Linux, Linux and Windows, RedHat and Microsoft and SUSE - thats what we all keep hearing about. Solaris is always treated as an also-run along with the likes of HP-UX, IBM's AIX etc. It really wasn't clear whether Sun was phasing it out from its product line or preparing for something big. Perhaps something as big as Solaris 10.

Solaris 10 is great on paper. The new features are quite tempting for me atleast. It seems like a big last effort from the software major to finally make it the 3rd OS of the media world. 1st and the 2nd being MS Windows and RedHat/SUSE Linux ofcourse. I tend to take their names together many times simply cause I think their future lies in them working close to each other and developing a standards based Linux. If they drift apart they are more likely to end up 3rd and 4th, with someone taking over the 2nd position; someone like Solaris.

What I like most about Sun Microsystem's approach to the development of Java was its controlled development. Even though RedHat and IBM kept pushing Sun to make Java open source and extensible, it would really have it better if there was a centralized controlled development of the platform. And it is what Sun chose, and it is what made it special and made Java all work right. If there were different flavors of Java available today as is the case with Linux, J2EE would be a very distant 2nd to MS's .NET platform. But as luck would have it, the 1st and 2nd position in the development platform race is really debatable and infact J2EE commands a better position today, according to me.

So back to Solaris 10, Sun Microsystem will make it Open Source, but in Java style, the development process will continue to be controlled by Sun Microsystem itself. And the story doesn't stop there. Along with making it Open source under a specific license, Sun Microsystem will also launch a patent protection plan as CNET reports:

When Sun Microsystems releases Solaris as open-source software, it plans to provide legal protection from patent-infringement suits to outsiders using or developing the operating system--one of several ways Sun hopes to make Solaris more competitive with Linux.

"You should have a company that can protect you and take that $92 million bullet," Scott McNealy said. Sun also has an arsenal of patents it can use as the basis for countersuits against computing companies, he said, adding that "most people with network-computing intellectual property probably don't want to come after us, because we might go right after them." But open-source developers using Solaris technology need not fear that Sun's patent arsenal will be used against them, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz said. "It is not our intent to say, 'Here is our intellectual property and we'll sue you,'" Schwartz said.

Intellectual-property protection of open-source software has moved to the forefront in the computing industry as the result of matters such as the SCO Group's ongoing attack on Linux. That attack involved a now-scrapped charge that IBM stole SCO's Unix trade secrets and used them in Linux, and it still involves a claim that AutoZone's use of Linux violates Unix copyrights.

This is certainly a first in terms of open source products. Earlier Java had paid Kodak for one of its patents, which otherwise could be called on every product made using the Java technology. But open-source and the protection plan is not the only thing good about Solaris, there are plenty of new exciting features to dig into. But evaluate these features only from an enterprise server point of view. The home desktop PC certainly does not look like the target for Sun's Solaris 10 (even with its x86 offering). The target is corporate servers and workstations. The best of the features (as taken from CNET and OSNews) that I found about the Solaris 10 OS are:

Janus - Linux Application Environment

[OS News] Formerly, Project Janus, LAE is the penguin running on the sun - Linux binaries running unmodified, without emulation, on Solaris. This is one ambitious project that aims at bringing the thousands of Linux applications to the Solaris platform.

[CNET] It is not an emulator but rather a system call handler in the Solaris kernel that dispatches Linux calls to standard distribution-specific Linux libraries. Since Sun uses the actual Linux source libraries, they are comfortable with guaranteeing compatibility and correct execution. The first released certification for compatibility is with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.

No matter what others say, I think this is the biggest feature of Solaris 10. There are hardly any specialized software for Solaris in the market, unlike Windows and Linux (and not counting Java applications ofcourse), and what this would do is throw open the huge chunk of Linux applications to the Solaris OS. What could be better for an OS but constantly increasing add-on applications supported on it. Unlike Linux's Wine (the Windows emulator allowing Windows application to run on Linux), Janus actually uses Linux source libraries and therefore will provide error-free compatibility. However supporting Windows application would be just GREAT because of the extensive applications developed for it. But don't forget that since Wine can now be run on Solaris 10 (through the LAE), Windows applications can atleast be run in an emulator.

Solaris Containers

Virtual Machine softwares like VMWare were started as just software allowing users to boot up different OSes (if they have the processors and RAMs to handle the additional load) for working with them simultaneously. However the use of virtual systems will be much more expansive in the future. And what more can you say, when the media treats it as the best feature of 10.

[CNET] Solaris Containers, a form of operating system virtualization technology that offers most of the advantages of multiple separate virtual operating system images while maintaining a single image to manage. Containers create a private, isolated execution space for each application within the context of a single master operating system instance, each with its own local variables and proxy copies of global variables, IP address, security permissions, file system view and so on. Sun claims that in addition to being lightweight in terms of resource overhead, containers are also extremely dynamic, capable of being created in under 10 seconds. Resource allocation is granular, in single-digit percentages of CPU, physical memory and I/O. Containers are managed by the Solaris Container Manager, which creates and deletes containers and defines container resource policies.

[OS News] Containers are an emerging technology of mammoth proportions. Sun did not promote the containers as much as they could have. This is an extremely important technology as it provides isolation, increased utilization of resources and speedy environment restart, cloning, and other cool features with very little overhead - unlike VMWare and other emulation environments.

DTrace

As a developer, I should have been more impressed with this feature. But I treat the above 2 more important from the OS's corporate acceptance point of view. To put it in simple words, DTrace is a tool through which internal details, like information on what's happening inside the OS when a user application is executed, to optimize or debug the same, can be fetched. It seems like a good tool, but one would only know better when one works with it ;)

[OS News] Dynamic Tracing, or DTrace as the console application front end for it is called, is all the rage in development circles. DTrace is the developer and system administrator's ultimate tracing tool. It allows the user to instrument the Operating System so that it can be observed in action. Want to know how many I/O operations are occurring at any given moment, or what process caused the I/O at any level of the application stack? DTrace and its scripting language, D, can tell you - fast!

[CNET] DTrace is an integrated, real-time tool for performance analysis and diagnosis. It provides granular kernel and application monitoring capabilities and run on live applications as well as in development. It contains integrated event management and scripting capabilities and can deliver detailed information about the operation of a Solaris 10 for performance analysis and application debugging. By substituting a low-overhead integrated monitoring capability for specialized instrumented kernels and so on, Sun puts a robust tool in the hands of its power users. Sun claims that so far it has not seen less than a 30 percent performance gain from using DTrace, though increases are often much higher and can be realized with an investment measured in four to 16 hours of effort. DTrace is also a major tangible value-add for Linux, since it can be used to analyze a Linux program running under Solaris.

Other features include the rewritten TCP for faster network communication. ZFS advanced filesystem, Process Rights Management (Java style again hopefully) etc. which you can catch up in those articles. However the 3 mentioned above are the biggest offering. Full binary and source compatability is also guaranteed. This means that all applications developed for earlier version of Solaris would continue to run on Solaris 10. This seems like quite an obvious feature if you keep changing your applications as you upgrade your Windows OS. But deeper down, it takes a lot to support the old alongside the new, and this I can say with some experience.

So will Solaris 10 be the 3rd OS of the media and the corporate world? In my opinion, YES SURELY if the features promised deliver well. It is Sun's biggest bet on Solaris so far. It seems they have worked on it a lot. It is time for some return on investment now!

Microsoft Takes Lead in Software For Handhelds

2004-11-13T06:40:00.000-08:00

Yahoo and USAToday confirm that Microsoft is outselling PalmSource in handheld software. Now, this really comes to the quality of the software, its user-friendliness, better compatibility/inter-operability with your home PC ;), application variety and ofcourse marketing. If Linux, Sun, Palm now cry over it, it will really be a pity. I think some of MS's rivals are just not pushing hard enough. There is Apple who raced with his iPOD and Google who just exploited on the lesser looked into Search technology. Good luck to them in maintaining their leads. But there are so many markets where MS is just wiping out the others, I would certainly give it a lot of credit on its achievements. More from those articles...

Microsoft overtook PalmSource in the third quarter as the world's biggest operating system for handheld computers, a survey showed on Friday. Microsoft's Windows operating system accounted for 48.1% of worldwide shipments of personal digital assistants (PDAs), up from 41.2% in year-ago period, according to July-September statistics from research group Gartner.

Palm's share dropped to 29.8% in the third quarter of 2004 from 46.9% in the same period last year. Canada's Research In Motion, which produces the hardware and software for its popular BlackBerry wireless e-mail devices, was a strong third, quadrupling its global market share in twelve months to 19.8% from 4.9%.

Worldwide shipments of personal digital assistants (PDAs) increased 13.6% to 2.86 million units. Linux remained a distant fourth and lost market share as it is running on only 0.9% of handheld computers, down from 1.9% a year ago.

The handheld computer market is competing with the faster growing smartphone market, which is expected to double to 20 million units this year. Symbian provides the dominant software in that market segment of advanced mobile phones which can run computer-like applications like navigation software and email.

Symbian looks weak to me, cause its got the same problems as Palm. Windows is already in the smart phone market. Linux is as usual a laggard. One more run for Microsoft soon? Let's wait and watch.

Sun on Linux

2004-11-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

Perhaps one of Sun's biggest bet was always the emergence of multiple operating system. Java - a platform independent language (or even a platform) was always banked on multiple OSs working together towards a combined information delivery model. Perhaps the reason that it was the choice of platform on NASA's Mars Rover proved that consistently. LinuxWorld has an interview with John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun Microsystems over Sun's Linux stratergy and a bit more...

There are two different questions that you have asked, maybe three. What is Sun's viewpoint on open source? What is Sun's viewpoint on Linux? What is Sun's viewpoint on Red Hat? Sun was founded on the principle of open source. We have contributed more lines of open source code than any other entity on the planet except for Cal Berkeley.

NetBeans, Sun Grid Engine, OpenOffice, and Solaris are all technologies that use the open source process, and we will continue to do so. We'll remain a heavy contributor on the open source front, and it will remain a key component of how we develop software.

People don't realize today that a huge portion of Solaris is open source. For example, today we use GNOME as our desktop environment. We use Mozilla. We have integrated Apache. We have SAMBA. All of these pieces of software are a part of Solaris today. Some people think that open source is new to Sun and that we don't get it. We are a pioneer.

Sun, I think, hasn't been very successful with its own product range - NetBeans, Sun Grid Engine, OpenOffice, and Solaris. However it is still banking big on Solaris. Infact the moment he seperates out the internals of Solaris into GNOME, Mozilla, Apache, SAMBA etc. we see all success stories.

We firmly believe that Linux (server and desktop) is an x86/AMD phenomenon. We believe that this will continue. Understanding that it does run on other architectures, that 99% of the volume generated in the Linux space is on x86. We think that Linux will continue to be a big player, including on the desktop where people are concerned about cost and want an alternative to Windows. Linux is something that we'll have to interoperate with because it may exist far beyond whatever Solaris turns out to be. We are in favor of Linux. We think that the Linux movement is great and that the open source process is great. We are leveraging open source in our software stack where it makes sense.

Perhaps the most key takeaway from the whole interview - x86/AMD phenomenon. Linux is so much suited for other platforms, even embedded ones but what it is known for is the x86 market. This I think will have to change sooner and Linux has to be thought more in terms of a machine operating systems (read mobiles, palms, television, cars, machinery, embedded, embedded) rather than just a desktop system.

However, we also believe that there are certain vendors in the Linux camp that are running away with Linux. When it all started there was a level playing field. The level playing field has tilted and the numbers manifest it. We are a Red Hat licensee. We will continue to offer Red Hat on our price list. But Red Hat has the vast majority of the market share. In fact, if you listen to the quotes that came out recently from ISVs, they're saying that it's just Red Hat. This is certainly true in the U.S. and in markets such as financial services. In markets outside the U.S., Novell/SUSE is a player primarily in Europe. But beyond Red Hat and Novell/SUSE, it's challenging to find another Linux distributor who is a serious player. There is Debian, Mandrake, Red Flag, and Yellow Dog, but these distributors hold very small market shares in the free world compared to Red Hat. The original fascination with Linux was that it was free, it runs everywhere, and I can switch from one Linux distro to another. Linux is becoming more and more customized to Red Hat.

This I think was bound to happen. As an application vendor, you cannot go on supporting each and every version of Linux. Today when I think Linux, its only Redhat and SUSE on the desktop and hopefully a general API in the embedded systems. If everyone stresses on making everything generic, you will lose the enterprise interest in Linux (RedHat and Novell) and that will just wash away whatever gains Linux has been able to make in the past few years. Every technology needs Enterprise support. Every Enterprise needs to earn profit. And that profit is only going to come from the uniqueness of the offering (USP) which is unavoidable. The only thing that could perhaps be done by the Linux community is ensure inter-operability amongst its flavors/distributions so that a Linux share can be calculated cumulatively. (and not because every flavor has word 'Linux' in it).

Red Hat has become more and more proprietary and more and more expensive. We are hearing customers say that they are interested in hearing about something other than Red Hat, that they would like to know our systems story and our Solaris story because, guess what - Red Hat is more expensive than anticipated. Red Hat is now also going to be offering an application server. They are going up the stack. Is their best friend, IBM, going to like that? Interesting. Now that Red Hat is moving up the stack to do things like application servers, they now compete with WebSphere overtime. Will IBM suddenly change to more of a SUSE focus? Is it Red Hat or SUSE? It's not just Linux; it's different versions of Linux.

I agree, Interesting!

If Sun were not sincere about Linux, we wouldn't be putting our entire JES (Java Enterprise System) and entire middleware portfolio on Linux. Our entire desktop system (JDS) runs on Linux. Every one of my major software applications runs on Linux, and, by the way, I ship JES on Red Hat on the same day that I ship it on Solaris. Some customers have mandated it. In the future, you'll hear more and more from Sun. My intent is that we need to bring Linux and Solaris together more rather than bash or trash one or the other.

There are many valuable attributes with Linux and Solaris. I tell customers that I am going to offer them both operating systems. The reason that people talk about operating systems so much is that the operating system is a means to a lower-cost deployment, meaning that it runs on low-cost x86 hardware. When Sun didn't have low-cost x86 hardware, it was hard to have that conversation with customers. We now have that. We were behind in getting to Xeon. We caught up and now we are leaders offering Opteron 1-, 2-, and 4-way. In fact, Sun has committed to going beyond 4-way on Opteron. We're trying to say to customers that the things that they believe are valuable - open source, price, etc. we are going to address.

There is a technology available in Solaris, Janus, coming out in Solaris 10 that allows customers to run Linux applications, unmodified, no recompiling. Janus allows customers to run their Linux applications at no additional charge. If you want to take advantage of container technology, the dynamic tracing capability, the new networking stack, the security features, and you have some Linux applications that you want to run, then you can run them on Solaris/x86 at near native performance.

The last bit is really interesting. If Janus turns out what Sun is claiming it to be, all Linux applications (RedHat and SUSE) will become available on Solaris and that would provide a good boost to its application range. A good bet from Sun, I think. Worth a wait.

Addressable Television

2004-10-31T01:56:00.001-08:00

Will of the TVHarmony weblog has posted some excellent thoughts of On-demand Television, on-demand video or whatever you might want to call it (he calls it Addressable Television). I submit to his views completely as I will bring out the highlights of his blog:

I like the term "addressable television" to describe the ability to get television content in a similiar fashion as getting web content. The area of disagreement is which technology is going to "win". Here are the contenders as the group saw it:

* Video on Demand (VOD)
* TV delivered via phone lines (IPTV)
* Video on the Internet (Streaming)
* Downloadable Internet (BitTorrent)

Many of the crowd there found the BitTorrent model compelling, citing the history of the music industry and napster as likely to be repeated for video. I tend to agree that to a certain extend, this is already happening, with people avoiding copyright law and putting up content on the web, and the roadblocks from moving video streams from a DVR to the internet are quickly eroding.

Here's the basic point:

I think the advent of the media-centric PC will cause this trend to accelerate. If my family room is driven by a PC with a DVR, set top box, and web browser built into it, connected to cable for both programming and high speed data, and then connected to a nice big flat panel display, the option to watch a show via live TV, VOD, DVR, or Bit Torrent is just a click of the remote.

While I agree that is a compelling, I think there are hurdles to make this vision work in the long term. I think they will be overcome, but for a large percentage of the population, VOD, especially if it expands to becoming a centralized DVR, is likely going to be the easier solution.

First, I think the battle will ultimately be played out on HDTV. The cost of HDTV is getting lower each day, and more and more people are buying HDTV-ready sets. More and more content is being delivered in HDTV format, and it won't take too much time before people demand HDTV streams as a viewing preference.

Second, I view video's relationship with people different than the relationship people have with music. People listen to music over and over again, but in general, video is a single use commodity for the most part (I have a 3 year old daughter so I can tell you there are exceptions to that rule). This changes the calculus slightly in that the pain to download a video has to be less than the pain to download a music track, or it doesn't seem worth it.

Third, there is a shelf life issue. Music is fairly easy to store and since people listen to it over and over again, it has a long shelf life on a networked computer. A lot of video content has an expiration date and while compelling at a certain moment of time, quickly diminishes in utility and will be tossed away in the dumpster of time. The Jon Stewart/Crossfire video may be easy to find, but try and find one from two weeks ago.

All these issues can be overcome, but content providers have an excellent opportunity to create their own services before the suffer a napster-like meltdown. The Comcast article makes it clear they have their own stake in making it successful. At the end of the day, it's going to take more than litigation and the clear path is an iTunes or Netflix model for charging for content.

I am fully in agreement with the points regarding differences of relationship of the video with people in comparison to music and it's relative shelf life. This is a key takeaway point from the blog. This could mean that people want the waiting time to be reduced to almost zero, so bandwidth is king. Second, the industry itself has to grab onto the opportunity to not end up the MP3 way of copyright infringement. They have messed it up once, they wouldn't wanna do it again.

Trend indications from the CEOs: John Chambers, Craig

2004-10-31T01:56:00.000-08:00

I consider it a good habit to listen to some of the influential people in the software industry, their thoughts on the future progress of the industry. Not only many of these guys' views have an impact on the industry as a whole, but their knowledge and experience make them think before they speak and they many a times are in a position to analyze things better than the media or any other developer. I would have to add that its not always the case too. I have a select set of people who's thoughts are quite in sync with mine on future trends of computing and software in general, chief among them - Bill Gates and Scott McNealy. So, in this particular annual gathering of tech professionals at the Gartner Symposium and Information Technology Expo, I caught onto Yahoo's summarized article on some of the chief issues discussed. My comments are inline.

John Chambers (CEO of Cisco Systems)

Q: Cisco has opened a research and development center in China and launched a venture fund in India. Do you expect most of your growth to be outside the USA?
A: The majority of our job growth will be in America. In China, we're adding 95 jobs in one to two years. That's normal growth. We're a little different (than many other tech companies) in that we want to keep the majority of our jobs here.

Q: Why? Wouldn't sending jobs outside the USA save costs?
A: It's good business to try to do right by your employees. We try to treat our people like we would like to be treated. We want balanced growth globally. We're very open with our employees about that.

Unlike software firms, their hardware counterparts are less likely to catch on to the outsourcing burst I feel. This is because while you just need connectivity to be able to develop, maintain, test software offshore, its not that easy for hardware. Especially in case of India, the hardware leaps are just not progressing at the same rate as software. The infrastructure setup is partly to be blamed, but overall the industry has not picked up much due to shortage of local demand.

Q: Cisco has made a number of announcements related to security, including partnerships with Microsoft and IBM. So far, security has largely been relegated to software companies, and some analysts say hardware makers need to do more. What role should hardware makers play?
A: There should be relatively open standards so that a consortium of companies (can work together). We work with our software application partners and even our competitors. We can get along with IBM and Microsoft and Sun (Microsystems). The industry as a whole has to work on it. It's our biggest opportunity and our biggest challenge.

Somehow many of the industry problem always ends up at this stage - lack of standardization. It's a cat and mouse game and I feel MS mostly gets to eat the blame. It's the evolution of a standard that no one is really stressing on. We see different (development) platforms (frameworks) in the market today, all claiming "platform-independency". It's thanks to the interim protocols (like SOAP) and languages (like XML) which atleast allows for some inter-operability.

Craig Barrett (CEO of Intel)

Q: Intel is now planning to stop focusing on increasing processor speed (the gigahertz speed of a chip) and instead putting effort into making chips faster in other ways. Why?
A: We have run into this power barrier. Every time you add more transistors, and you toggle them faster, you use more electric current. (Using other ways of increasing chip speed) means I get to bring you more and more functionality each year without making your laptop any hotter or making you put a bigger fan in your desktop.

Enter Nanotechnology. I see Intel focusing on replacing silicons with those nanofabrics coming up. Even the move towards 64-bit (though a failure earlier) can be seen. We have to make a jump to the next before its too late. We need to go to IPv6 (supporting the IPv4 simultaneously), and we need to go to 64-bit computing (providing native 32-bit software support simultaneously).

Q: You've said that presidential candidates George Bush and John Kerry are ignoring some key issues in their debates. What should they be talking about?
A: They should be recognizing that the competitive landscape of the world has changed, and that the U.S. needs to choose to compete. We (need to invest in) education, research and development and infrastructure. The government (shouldn't) do things which make it more difficult to do business, like expensing stock options. The K-12 (school) system is broken. U.S. kids fare very, very poorly in math and science compared to their international counterparts. Overall, 25% to 30% of the math and science teachers are not qualified in their subject major. In the inner cities, it's 50%.

And they wonder about why asians are eating into their jobs? Well this particular fact came as a bit of a surprise for me. In this case, the outsourcing is not only because of a cheaper alternative but also an intellectually better alternative. It's a win-win situation for the asians.

Scott McNealy (CEO of Sun Microsystems)

Q: In September, Sun began selling computing power for $1 an hour to anyone who wants to use it via an online service. Availability is limited as the service ramps up. Have companies signed up?
A: Right now we're having a hard time (meeting demand). (The division) has an open checkbook to buy as much capital as they need. A big Wall Street customer needed 1,000 computing cycles to do a trading simulation. Ultimately, I'd rather go wholesale and have Bell South, MCI, AT&T sell (computing power). But until they get their act together, we're going retail. We can also give you your desktop as a service. We can beam your desktop down to wherever you are. We're still trying to figure out how much to charge for that.

It would be amazing if this thing pulls off. It would redefine outsourcing on a new level. Even the price currently seems tempting. Services are the future of software and this is a good start.

Q: Why hasn't computing as a service taken off before now?
A: You had a 20-year IBM monopoly, a 20-year Microsoft monopoly. That changed what a properly enacting market economy would let it happen.

I would disagree on this one a bit. Currently it may be a Java monopoly on the enterprise application development end which Scott might be making most of. But no matter who is the leader, innovation can never be stagnant. It might just take some time to make it profitable. IBM and MS too will make computing a service.

Q: In April, Sun entered a partnership with Microsoft, a longtime rival, to share technical standards. How is that going?
A: Beautiful. Look, here's a picture. (McNealy pulls out a photo of himself posing with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.) We shake hands kind of like two boxers before we beat the stuffing out of each other. Instead of a street fight, it's a civilized fight.

LOL.

A good thought from Linus Torvald.

2004-10-31T01:55:00.000-08:00

In an excerpt from an email interview with Linus Torvald, I came across a good little advice from him for start-ups and I think it really is quite logical, though a little uncommon,

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.

And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.

In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.

How Microsoft lost the API War.

2004-10-23T02:35:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty old article, but pretty interesting none the less. The lessons to be learnt from it is still valid in the present scenario. Joel Spolsky notes down some of his thoughts on how Microsoft eventually lost his stronghold developer support on Win32 API. I think it was always eventually on cards, but definitely some of the decisions of MS, lead to a speedier defeat. My comments are inline.

Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.

Remember the definition of an operating system? It's the thing that manages a computer's resources so that application programs can run. People don't really care much about operating systems; they care about those application programs that the operating system makes possible. Word Processors. Instant Messaging. Email. Accounts Payable. Web sites with pictures of Paris Hilton. By itself, an operating system is not that useful. People buy operating systems because of the useful applications that run on it. And therefore the most useful operating system is the one that has the most useful applications. The logical conclusion of this is that if you're trying to sell operating systems, the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software for your operating system

I quite agree to this. Infact my thoughts are quite in sync with Joel. It's the reason MS' Windows is so hard to replace, even with a better OS, let alone a not so user-friendly one. Infact, the open sourcing of Linux and IBM's Eclipse was the only possible move to attract developers to adapt to the new thing, which otherwise would end up in the same state as Unix today.

Why Apple and Sun Can't Sell Computers? Because Apple and Sun computers don't run Windows programs, or, if they do, it's in some kind of expensive emulation mode that doesn't work so great. Remember, people buy computers for the applications that they run, and there's so much more great desktop software available for Windows than Mac that it's very hard to be a Mac user. And that's why the Windows API is such an important asset to Microsoft.

Quite in sync one could look at the mobile market. It was dominated by Symbian, but the lack of applications (plug n play, if you may) on that platform, I think didn't make it a must-have for your mobile. Java hit the market at the right time, and now we see all kinds of download and install (plug n play) games (mostly) and application (in the near future) on that platform, making Java an absolute must-have for that, like MS' Windows.

There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp.The most impressive things to read on Raymond's weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1. In fact if you poke around in the AppCompatibility section of your registry you'll see a whole list of applications that Windows treats specially, emulating various old bugs and quirky behaviors so they'll continue to work.

A lot of developers and engineers don't agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It's why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work.

The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don't make things any worse, let's just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with.

Being a software developer myself, I do know that backward compatibility can sometimes kill you. It is a great feature which will impress your current clients, but can really proven to a stringent constraint on your future developments, if you have not already designed your system for that new requirement or enhancement which becomes quite logical and important now. So while I am all Yes for backward compatibility, I am also greatly sympathetic towards the developers who have to keep the old going.

Microsoft Lost the Backwards Compatibility Religion.

Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle. The first big win was making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product. And the sky didn't seem to fall, not inside Microsoft. VB6 developers were up in arms, but they were disappearing anyway, because most of them were corporate developers who were migrating to web development anyway. The real long term damage was hidden. With this major victory under their belts, the MSDN Magazine Camp took over. Suddenly it was OK to change things. IIS 6.0 came out with a different threading model that broke some old applications.

Yes, this was a deadly blow. Everyone around me too started shouting, "Ok, with the next release, even this would not be compatible". It does break a fan's heart when things aren't just what they had gathered all their coding experience in. They feel cheated, they feel their CV value has fallen, they dread learning the new. But on MS' side again, I would have to accept the move, that it had to come sometime. It was just real bad timing. .NET came up when J2EE was shouting "platform-independency" out loud. And this issue in MS, just made them more happy to shout anti-MS slogans too. .NET was a big bet, and it is somehow finding inroads. But with .NET on the developers side, it had to start from almost ground zero again, influence developers back in their camps which can't happen that fast.

Microsoft needs to give you a reason to buy Longhorn, and what they're trying to pull off is a sea change, similar to the sea change that occurred when Windows replaced DOS. The trouble is that Longhorn is not a very big advance over Windows XP; not nearly as big as Windows was over DOS. It probably won't be compelling enough to get people to buy all new computers and applications like they did for Windows. Well, maybe it will, Microsoft certainly needs it to be, but what I've seen so far is not very convincing. A lot of the bets Microsoft made are the wrong ones. For example, WinFS, advertised as a way to make searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making searching work. Don't make me type metadata for all my files that I can search using a query language.

I will have to disagree with Joel on this one. Searching has to be re-invented. Simple search now wont work. With storage and bandwidth increasing leaps and bounds these days, the new age is saying, "Archive, Arhive, Arhive... search, search, search". Google is banking on it big time. And so will many others. Searching has to smarter, more organized, give you a more holistic picture rather than just throw you a 1000 odd links. Google's desktop which I experimented with a few days back, did a good job of searching faster, but not to my expectation of searching smarter. Well, but with nothing else in the competition so far, it is good. Imagining the File System itself configured for smarter search seems like a good option to me. And I wouldn't like MS to make the change after a linux flavor has already done this kind of a thing.

A lot of us thought in the 1990s that the big battle would be between procedural and object oriented programming, and we thought that object oriented programming would provide a big boost in programmer productivity. I thought that, too. Some people still think that. It turns out we were wrong. Object oriented programming is handy dandy, but it's not really the productivity booster that was promised. The real significant productivity advance we've had in programming has been from languages which manage memory for you automatically. It can be with reference counting or garbage collection; it can be Java, Lisp, Visual Basic (even 1.0), Smalltalk, or any of a number of scripting languages. If your programming language allows you to grab a chunk of memory without thinking about how it's going to be released when you're done with it, you're using a managed-memory language, and you are going to be much more efficient than someone using a language in which you have to explicitly manage memory. Whenever you hear someone bragging about how productive their language is, they're probably getting most of that productivity from the automated memory management, even if they misattribute it.

This is such an interesting thought. Yes, I am one of those people who thought it was an OO v/s non-OO battle. And yes, one of the most attractive feature of Java and VB (my favorite languages so far) and even Groovy from what I have read so far, is that freedom from memory management. It frees the developer from a lot of hassles and gets him into more logic based programming, rather than optimization based.

Now Microsoft has so many developers cranking away that it's not enough to reinvent the entire Windows API: they have to reinvent it twice. At last year's PDC they preannounced the next major version of their operating system, codenamed Longhorn, which will contain, among other things, a completely new user interface API, codenamed Avalon, rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of modern computers' fast display adapters and realtime 3D rendering. And if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's "official" latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment, WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a slide from Microsoft labelled "How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and Avalon?" and asks, "Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and Avalon?" A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer.

That could might as well be a final blow to the API-centric world of computing. More so the loyalty of the programmer on MS technology could be forever lost. It's not too hard to figure out the impact of this on the development community and perhaps MS is banking too much on its existing size of MS technology developers to get the stuff in before it's too late. But sorry to say, there is always a limit to a communities' patience which once crossed, wouldn't be able to stop the disruptive change that could follow.

Every developer has a choice to make when they plan a new software application: they can build it for the web or they can build a "rich client" application that runs on PCs. The basic pros and cons are simple: Web applications are easier to deploy, while rich clients offer faster response time enabling much more interesting user interfaces. [In Web applications] You can use any programming environment you want because you only have to get it up and running on your own server. Your application is automatically available at virtually every reasonable computer on the planet. Your customers' data, too, is automatically available at virtually every reasonable computer on the planet.

But there's a price to pay in the smoothness of the user interface. Some of them will be solved very soon by witty Javascript developers. Two new web applications, Gmail and Oddpost, both email apps, do a really decent job of working around or completely solving some of these issues. And users don't seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer. So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application. Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.

Can never disagree to that, and this is what I meant when I started my comments saying, that ultimately proprietary API has to end. There are just too many users of too many applications which require a common cost-free framework to work on. In comes the Web, and formats like HTML, WML, XML... and so on. Web is so attractive these days, and the additions to the common DOM model, if followed religiously by browser developers and content providers will spell an end to the API world and bring some standardization in place. We are getting towards it faster with the bandwidth speeds touching a new high averages and it certainly is going to happen... sooner than you think.

Some findings on Nanotechnology.

2004-10-23T02:34:00.000-07:00

I guess this articles are only for people like me who are newbies to the Nanotechnology world. I came across a BBC News' article about the discovery of a new nanofabric called Graphene. More from the same...

Called graphene, it is a two-dimensional, giant, flat molecule which is still only the thickness of an atom. The nanofabric's remarkable electronic properties mean that an ultra-fast and stable transistor could be made.

Scientists have been trying to exploit this for computing because smaller transistors mean the distances electrons have to travel become shorter, meaning faster speeds. Conventional transistors rely on the semi-conducting characteristics of silicon which provide the switches that change the flow of current in computers and other electronics.

"All the recent progress has been on nanotubes for transistors. These are sheets of graphite molecules wrapped in a cylinder - like a chocolate cylinder you stick in your ice cream," explained Professor Laurence Eaves. "Although these are interesting, because they are one-dimensional, they have limitations. Graphene is a plane transistor - flat sheets.". Professor Andre Geim, who leads the research team, explained that the material they have discovered could be thought of as millions of unrolled carbon nanotubes which have been stuck together to make an infinitely large sheet, an atom thick. They showed that electrons could travel sub-micron distances without being scattered, which means fast-switching transistors.

He added: "People have been trying to make transistors faster and smaller. There is a Holy Grail of electronics that engineers call ballistic transistors - ultimately faster than anything.". A ballistic transistor is where electrons can shoot through without collisions, like a bullet. In other words, they have what is called a long mean free path - the distance a molecule travels without colliding into another. Greater distances with nothing to collide with means faster speeds. Fewer collisions means less energy is lost or given off too. Although they have not demonstrated a ballistic transistor yet, their experiments have shown that the material could, in theory, produce one.

I also ventured further into the quest for a little more knowledge on this emerging new field and can across a beautiful presentation from the same site. Some excerpts from the same presentation explaining the gist of Nanotechnology and the diverse uses of it:

Nanotechnology concerns materials and working devices that are engineered at the scale of atoms and molecules. Advances in nanotech will impact electronics and computing, medicine, cosmetics, foods, the military, energy ? all walks of life. By 2020, $1 trillion worth of products could be nano-engineered in some way.

"Nano" comes from the Greek "dwarf". It is used in the metric system to refer to "billionth" - a nanometre (nm) is a billionth of a metre. Put another way, this is about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. Normal office paper is about 100,000nm thick. Nanotechnologists will typically work in the range 1-100nm.

The gecko can walk up glass and even hang upside down. The hairs (spatulae) on its feet are so small they can exploit forces that pull molecules together, sticking the gecko to the ceiling. Nanotech can make sticky tape lined with gecko-like synthetic hairs that do the same job.

Pilkington coats the surface of its Activ glass with titanium oxide nano-particles. Sunshine on these special windows triggers a chemical reaction which breaks down dirt. When water hits the glass, it spreads evenly over the surface, instead of forming droplets, and runs off rapidly taking the dirt with it.

Carbon nanotubes are sheets of graphite (carbon) that are rolled up on themselves. Just a few nanometres across, these ultra-strong cylinders can make composite coatings for car bumpers that better hold their shape in a crash. The tubes can also absorb hydrogen, which should enable more efficient storage of future fuels.

The clothing industry uses nanotech to make stain-repellent fabrics. A chemical process during manufacture forces liquids to bead up when spilled on a garment for easy wiping away. Socks that are made with nano-silver particles give anti-microbial protection, preventing bacteria and fungus that cause itchiness and smells.

It all seems so disruptive to me. Certainly a bright future for this area of technology.

Why Yahoo is buying others email products?

2004-10-23T02:33:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on Infectious Greed reports Yahoo taking over Oddpost, Bloomba and maybe Snappermail will be on the list too soon. The strategy mentioned there, sounds good, buying proven technologies in different fields like server-side services and client-end interfaces, not to mention enhanced support for mobile devices if they take over SnapperMail. There is one more point missing in the article, that of patents. Not only developing similar technology would take a lot of time for Yahoo, there are even patent issues which will be automatically taken care of (assuming that the companies that it is taking over, has already taken care of it). Well what more can I say but Yahoo, my favorite mail client, seems to be in for some MORE enhancements.

Some emerging companies, some emerging products...

2004-10-17T07:29:00.002-07:00

.... and their emerging markets. Rajesh Jain notes down Red Herring's recent listing of companies to watch out for. As expected most of them are IT companies and many Bio-Tech companies. A few I was impressed with...

Nano-muscle: Aiming high at NanoTechnology. Tiny engines eventually will power many of the tasks that require human or bulky mechanical force today. NanoMuscle?s micro-motion actuators will fit into automobiles by the hundreds and power children?s toys on very little power. It is aiming for Asian expansion in 2005.

Taser International: A controversial, revolutionary technology for subduing criminals using an electrical shock has made Taser International a household name in the U.S. The company?s European business will launch with a major deal in the U.K. and it is set to ride the momentum from that early win and expand to the Continent. Beware of its misuse by kids ;) But this product has huge potential even in India, considering the increase in crime rate across the world.

Konarka: Usage of alternate energy sources is bound to increase. The devices of this company taps solar power to power up multiple devices. Flexible and thin photovoltaic cells will fit on the back of mobile handsets, the cover of a laptop, and the dashboard of a car to provide a power boost when needed. Konarka?s plastic solar cells, the first of which will be introduced this fall, are a promising competitor in this growing market. The company will continue its European expansion in 2005.

Innocentive: Outsourcing research might not have been done on a huge scale till now, basically to keep it under wraps maybe. But a companies which looks forward to hire only the best, top-quality scientists to work on a variety of research, sure will raise eyebrows. he smartest companies know they can?t hire a significant share of the knowledge in the world; InnoCentive is the ultimate in intellectual outsourcing, connecting more than 50,000 academic and independent researchers to clients on a project basis. The private firm is growing its international network of researchers and satellite offices around the world.

Falcon Waterfree: You got to see this to believe it. Simple concept, a unique bet. Falcon Waterfree Technologies? products save water and reduce water-borne pollution. With populations around the world moving into densely populated cities, waterless urinals will be an important component of sanitary policy in an age of water scarcity. The company will open small-scale manufacturing facilities near its key markets in 2004 and 2005.

Ember: Wireless is surely the future, so make the most of it. In the future, electronic items in our environment, from the light switch to the machinery we use at work, will be talking amongst themselves. Wireless connectivity chips will add to this conversational ability and Ember is a promising entrant in this market. The company, which just received an additional $25 million in funding led by Vulcan Capital, is considering Asian expansion in early 2005, followed by a European presence.

Genecor: Nice variety of products, bio-tech at its best. One of the oldest companies we?ve looked at in the past year, Genencor earns $380 million in revenue annually through sales of its bioproducts for industrial, consumer, and agriprocessing markets and infectious disease, as well as its cancer-fighting products. With 600 staff members already overseas, the company is aiming for larger Indian, Russian, Latin American, and Chinese presences in the coming year.

Broadband on power lines

2004-10-17T07:29:00.001-07:00

My concepts were certainly in for some correction when I read about the FCC (Federal Communications Commission ) clearing internet access by power lines in the US. While conceptually it sounds alright, just metal wires running around, I always thought the electrical disturbances would be just too high for any sort of communication to reach the ends, and here they talk about "Broadband" on it. Well this kind of thing might even be a boost for India, let's hope everything converges and gets connected soon with these sort of innovative policies. Some excerpts from the article...

Clearing the way for homes and businesses to receive high-speed Internet services through their electrical outlets, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules on Thursday that would enable the utility companies to offer an alternative to the broadband communications services now provided by cable and phone companies. So far, the technology has been limited mainly to experiments around the country, although a commercial version recently became available in some communities near Cincinnati.

Known as broadband over power lines, or B.P.L., the technology uses a special modem that plugs into electrical outlets. So far, it has been offered at speeds of 1 to 3 megabits a second, which is comparable to broadband service over cable modems or conventional phone lines - though not as fast as the 5 megabits a second achievable through the residential fiber optic lines just now being introduced by the Bell companies.

An obstacle to the use of power lines to carry communications traffic has been the electromagnetic interference the technology can cause to various types of radio signals. The commission ruled that it would tolerate a small amount of radio interference in certain areas by the new service in exchange for making the broadband market more competitive.

While some regulatory and technical issues remain, the technology offers enormous promise because the power grid is ubiquitous. The costs to the industry to offer the new service would be comparatively small, and the possible returns on those investments could be high. If the utility companies do begin to offer the broadband service more widely, they would also be likely to enter the telephone business by offering phone services over the Internet, just as phone and cable companies have begun to do.

Mr. Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, said that the new technology would not only offer greater competition in the broadband market, but would also allow consumers to easily create networks in their home through electrical outlets. And adding communications abilities to power lines would permit electric companies to better manage the power grid, he said.

Flash Retriever

2004-10-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

With all the data recovery tools in the market, this one is a bit aside the crowd. Certainly with the number of flash memory chips rising, and people forgetting to remove that crucial data before a complete format, here's Flash Retriever.

Google's Desktop

2004-10-17T07:26:00.001-07:00

Google launched its desktop search tool's beta version a couple of days back. With MS taking off its WinFS file system, which will probably index files on multiple parameters and allow faster search and retrieval, from the scheduled Longhorn release, it would really require MS to get some good search tool out soon.

I got a chance to test the search tool a bit. Its capabilities is amazing. It indexes text files, word docs, xls, ppts, pdfs etc.and presents them in its convenient search interface which everyone has become habituated to these days. The tool requires an initial indexing of the file system, which it surprisingly claims to do when it detects that the system is idle. The offering seems to be currently only for the Windows OS. Though the search is pretty good, there was an immediate drawback that I found. It does slow down the system considerably. Especially for a person who works with multiple files all the time, I guess the tool has to update each file as it is modified/saved, and the constant monitoring of this might put a load on the system. It is quite a logical problem, so the question really is would you want to put an additional pressure on your working, for the sake of a better searching mechanism? Well currently, for the mess people create on their system due to the lack of organization of their content, I think they might go for it.

Thankfully there were options whether or not to index HTTPS sites and IM talks (only AOL currently) on your machine which might not be required for people wanting a bit of privacy! But this raises one more question - with some software storing data in their own proprietary formats, there might be a requirement of a general API to put them onto the search wagon too. Like say Yahoo's Messenger archive or Outlook mail archive etc. Certainly there will be some confusion regarding that soon.

Content in print still hard to displace

2004-10-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

Google is launching some 'Google Print' service which will allow certain page excerpts to be shown to the user based on a search query and if he/she finds it interesting, can order the book from selected retailers. The concept first bit me. Why not make it an e-book and complete the transaction then and there. But it seems the paper books, if you may, are still indispensable when you want to escape the glare of the Computer screen. There is a need for devices which can give a feel of a printed content and yet be digital. It will surely make things more convenient and environment friendly too !

Software Development Rules

2004-10-09T01:18:00.000-07:00

Barry Biggs has nicely put down some good rules for developers (the architects of software). Rajesh Jain has picked the best amongst them and I totally surrender to his selection:

1. Great software is built by small teams. If you're building a great BIG software product use lots of small teams. The team leaders should be able to carry on a civilized conversation with one another; conversely, they should not be trying to torpedo each others' careers behind their backs.

2. Great software projects always, always have one person who gets the big picture. He/she codes. Repeat: he/she codes. This person is called the architect.

3. Software "architects" that don't code are not software architects. Sorry.

7. Test/QA is not there to find your bugs. (Read that twice, please.) You are there to find and fix your bugs. (Read that ten times.) Test/QA is responsible for telling manager(s) and customer(s) if your code is any good, and if it's ready to ship.

11. Every coder must spend at least one day per year listening to a customer complaining bitterly about his/her product.

The last point however has a contradiction for some type of software, in the article, When Listening to Customers Makes Little Sense:

Conventional wisdom teaches us that listening to customers is at the core of any innovative enterprise. But the highly creative folks at Juniper Networks, the telecom equipment provider, think otherwise.

"Customers will take you down a status quo path every time," says Christine Heckart, Juniper's vice president of worldwide marketing. "They are after linear improvements. Customers can help you do that. But if you want to hit an inflection point and get non-linear improvement, the worst thing you can do is listen to a customer about what they want. Customers can only think about solutions for problems they know about."

This is a keen insight for a company like Juniper whose every existence depends on constant innovation. "Everybody's job here is to wake up every day and innovate because 100% of our revenues come from innovation. Five years from now 100% of our revenues will come from products that aren't here now. If we're not constantly innovating, our very survival is at stake."

But yes, at the very end, however innovative you can be, its the customer which will eventually pay you !

Sun settles Java suit with Kodak

2004-10-09T01:17:00.000-07:00

One of issues which needs immediate attention from the IT community is the problem with patents. I think they are really hindering the growth of ideas in the software world. This particular suite really emphasis how aggravated the situation has become right now. Infact the original patent seems to generic, it can even sue MS's .NET and many others developing os-independent platforms. Its plain madness and it's costing the companies a lot. Any idea without implementations seem to be a load on the industry. If patents continue to exist the way they are right now, in future, developers and designers would only think of concepts and file for a patent, never work, waiting for others to think of the same and sue them when they come out with their offerings. Nope, I disagree with the total nonsense going on currently. Yahoo has more:

Sun on Thursday announced that it settled the lawsuit Eastman Kodak had brought against it, but the charge that Sun's Java violated software patents held by Kodak brought to light the major impact patents can have on software techniques.

The patents apply to a technique for allowing two pieces of software to agree how to interoperate -- a key concept in object-oriented programming that dates back to before the patents were filed for the Simula language, which was created in the 1960s, Eunice said.

"This is one of the things when you hit your head and say, 'How can this possibly be valid?' If Java infringes, then what doesn't?", said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata.

"I think [this case] continues to create a real cooling effect overall on innovation," hurting open source development, for instance, said analyst Thomas Murphy, vice president at Meta Group.

Murphy suggested that trademarks or copyrights be used for software instead of patents because they are not as overreaching as patents.

I totally agree with Murphy, and hope that trademarks/copyrights do replace patents. Actual implementations instead of mere conceptual thoughts that you and I both may have had, but just forgot to file it.

The future lies for strategy games

2004-10-09T01:16:00.001-07:00

Games are known for their shortest attention lifespan and virtually shorter "shelf-life". New replace the old and even different replaces the similar. Its one genre of software that never fails to impress the users more. I have come across various games right from shooters, role playing, arcade, racing, city building, tycoons, but many fail to make a significant impact for a longer play time. One genre that keeps coming out with brilliant creative ideas in games is Strategy. Right from Age of Empires (my personal fav), Commando to newer Sims and Rome: Total War, it has never failed to amaze me about the potential that games can achieve. I think these games, even have a learning edge, kids do get to learn a bit about historical politics, art of war, relationships etc. from these games. Infact the learning curve has to be there in each game to convince the sociologists to accept the game fever in kids. Today I came across an article on the new Sim 2 hitting the market. Its really something I look forward to, to experience it myself.

The Scobleizer's note to Bill Gates

2004-10-09T01:16:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know him, Robert Scoble is working professional at MS and part of the Channel9 Forum who keeps blogging about the latest happenings at MS labs. He's truly optimistic about MS efforts and product line and me being a MS fan too to some extent, sure like to hear something which comes directly from the stable. Well he writes down a mock letter to Bill Gates, where he emphasis on the need for MS to consider RSS-ecology more seriously and come out with support products for the environment aggressively. Some of the nice thoughts in the article:

Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family. We want to be famous to 15 people. We want to share our lives with our video camcorders and our digital cameras. Get into Flickr, for instance. Ask yourself, why is Sharepoint taking off? (Tim O'Reilly told us that book sales of Sharepoint are growing faster than almost any other product). It's the urge to create content. To tell our coworkers our ideas. To tell Bill Gates how to run his company!

Now that everyone is creating content, we want to consume it. That's where news aggregators come in. NewsGator. FeedDemon. NetNewsWire. Bloglines. Radio UserLand. RSS Bandit. SharpReader.

And services that help us find content. Feedster. Technorati. Pubsub. Google. My Yahoo. MSN.

And services that help us organize our content. Deli.cio.us. My Yahoo. Outlook. And MSN? Google?

And systems that help us deliver our content. Bittorrent. iPodder.

It's interesting, at Gnomedex (a geek-centric conference) about 90% of the audience uses a news aggregator already.

It's time for another memo Bill. Just don't take so long this time.

Right on, Gates!

2004-10-02T01:59:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of MS's product quality contrary to popular beliefs, and the one person I love to hear speaking about his own company and his valid viewpoints is Bill Gates. His recent conference recorded on OSNews highlights many of the points I agree to, regarding the Linux factor on Windows and general Windows development track:

Gates said that it's always possible to crack anything. However, it is better to have such technologies around and hope for the best, rather than not publishing online music or movies just out of fear that someone will crack their security. In the first case you have some piracy and some sales, on the second case you only end up with piracy.

Gates also mentioned that Linux is taking over Unix, not Windows. The problem with Unix is that the OS companies involved (SGI, Sun, IBM, HP, SCO) never managed to get together and adhere to common standards and direction, he said. When a Unix brand would get a bit better than the other on a particular thing, the others would "conspire" behind its back to bring it down. It's this fragmentation and lack of business relationships that has destroyed Unix to the rival Linux.

As to how Microsoft is going to beat Linux according to Gates, it seems to be via its software's value, rather than the price. Bill Gates is trying to create software that needs little maintenance and little support.

As for consumers, in small/poor countries Windows piracy is high. In other words, Windows is free for some of these people. And so is Linux. Having two products that are essentially "free" in one way or another, it all comes down again to the actual value of the software.

So true, I totally agree.

India's own RSS Portal.

2004-10-02T01:12:00.000-07:00

Rajesh Jain has launched 'Blogstreet India' a search engine for RSS and much more for the Indian RSS sites. And my site ain't on it yet :( ... lol. But I hope the adoption of RSS, though started a bit late by megasites like rediff and indiatimes, gains pace amongst Indian portals. Its a platform which can do away with newspapers.

Mobile Gaming, Applications and the J2ME delivery model.

2004-10-02T01:10:00.000-07:00

I am a big supporter for Java technologies, and the wide adoption of J2ME is by far the best thing that has happened to mobile arena, from a developer point of view. I can download custom games from all over the WAP world. Its really Java support, so apart from games, there is a huge potential for business applications to be developed for the cell phones which keep increasing their processor and memory configurations. GPRS, WLL, VoIP and even WiFi connectivity can be exploited by these applications to create a thin client (like mobile browsers) and from then on, its only imagination that restricts software development. The recent '2004 Austin Game Conference' recorded some thoughts on the Mobile Gaming platform:

The popular interests in mobile games, from the business end, arise from the huge potential market and the frustration of the high barrier of entry in the conventional console/PC game market.The Smart mobile handset is already the largest computing platform ever to exist and is still growing at explosive rates in emerging markets.

Different from the traditional console/PC game market, the mobile game market is essentially controlled by the wireless service provider (the operator). The operator decides what devices it supports and what data services are offered to its subscribers. It also provides integrated authentication and billing services for mobile content providers, including game developers and publishers.

Most importantly, the operator provides crucial marketing support for mobile games. Consumers have a strong tendency to purchase services for their phones directly from their wireless operator. Although Java programming-based mobile games can be downloaded from many third-party portal sites, such as java.net, more than 90 percent of the actual purchases come from the wireless operator's online catalogs. As Ms. Braff pointed out, the current prices and revenues of mobile games do not yet justify large scale TV advertisement campaigns. So, to get your game in the operator's catalog is critical for its commercial success.

J2ME is by far the most popular application development platform for mobile devices. It is primarily available on GSM handsets and is supported by all major GSM manufacturers, including Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony-Ericsson. In fact, J2ME is even supported on Nokia's CDMA devices and Motorola's Windows Mobile devices. The J2ME handset manufacturers have a combined market share of more than 80 percent, and J2ME is available on more than 250 million handsets.

There are some changes that can be made in the delivery model of J2ME applications. Rather than an explicit need for registering one's midlet to each and every subscriber, the model should be something which allows the consumer to reach any application on any WAP site and when downloading, a clear confirmation message (highlighting in detail the costs/charges involved and to be added to the billing amount) can be shown and depending on the acceptance should the transfer be allowed. This would require an introduction of a protocol specific to downloading services, which can be made generic to WAP and not to J2ME in particular. The charges can include the application owner's charges and the service provider charges added like a brokerage.

I just wonder where Microsoft is at this juncture? its .NET portability is craving for new platforms, mobile might be an interestingly competitive platform. If I were it, I would concentrate on it before J2ME business applications start flooding the market.

India: Using its own to serve its own?

2004-10-02T01:09:00.000-07:00

Developing countries are being tapped for their cheap labour by global companies to send out mass redundant work to these countries for a cut in their production costs, but just a few companies in the developing countries really focused on serving their own with the same cheap labour for their same poor population. India's highest growing FMCG and durable goods industries are mostly dominated by Global majors, its about time India churns out quality from their masses, which the MNCs are able to do with quite a bit of consistency. BusinessWeek notes attempts from Tata Motors on that front with the $2200 car and the general need for such innovations in India.

Waiting for VoIP in India.

2004-10-02T01:06:00.000-07:00

With recent changes in TRAI regulations bringing in a common license for Mobile, WLL and Net connectivity, I wonder when VoIP too will be allowed entry. VoIP, I think, can shatter the already price-hit Cellular companies, but its technology that you just cannot avoid for making things cheaper, better and more useful. Jon Udell notes down how technology can provide more services, if things are just allowed to be integrated. A nice account of the case for convergence, I think.

RSS Aggregators - Need for order in the madness.

2004-09-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

Many people now are getting into the RSS phase of retrieving news, views from sites rather than visiting them directly. I collect the feeds through InfoAggregator in my Outlook. The big problem that I (and some of us) face, and which soon will be encountered by many, is the sheer size of content generated from the various subscription. A big problem is the duplication of data and news amongst Newsgroup. There is a need for smarter aggregators which can identify related content and group them to make it more organized and comprehensive. If I am not interested in a particular topic, I should be able to just remove all the related content of it and also be able to dig deep in the ones I am interested in. Search and filters help to an extent, but its really a pain to just scan through repeated content.

While we are on the topic, here's a thought. News is free. Everyone can access news on the net without any subscription charges. Advertisements are the only revenue for these sites, but there are many Ad-blockers in browsers these days to hide those. Newspapers (hardcopy) on the other hand aren't free, but the content they cover is the same which is available for free. In a few years, the digital divide are going to render them meaningless. Here's an opportunity for Newspapers to come with some form of a reader device, probably the size of tablet PCs and start streaming content from the site to these devices. The only problem would be the light emitting from the screens, which everyone wants to escape. There is a need for a technology to render the text and pictures as a paper print on the computer screens just like an actual printed sheet. A world with RSS feeds and thin clients reading feeds can eliminate newspapers completely.

RFID - Boom or Bubble?

2004-09-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

RFID is lately picking up quite a bit of pace with the biggies trying to be pioneers. Everyone from IBM, Microsoft, SAP, HP and Sun are trying hard to get their plans on road. Also plenty of large retailers to the likes of Albertsons, Procter & Gamble,Wal-Mart etc. are showing keen interest. Some of the issues hindering the progress are patent issues and privacy concerns.

Sony's next move

2004-09-15T09:31:00.001-07:00

Sony's acquisitions of MGM is sending shocks across the entertainment industry. Having control of 40% of Hollywood movies produced, it certainly has an upper hand in shaping the future of the industry. While many see it gaining an edge in the introduction of its format of Blue-ray Disc, I am more excited about the new Video-on-demand streaming service which it plans to launch with Comcast. This is a much better strategy than Tivo's.

New Mozilla Rocks!

2004-09-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

I belong to that category of users, who don't switch easily for everyday applications once they get used to a satisfying one. Internet Explorer was my favorite from quite a long time because of its various user friendly features (and of course a natural integration with MS Windows). But reading about the new Mozilla FireFox 1.0 feature list tempted me to give it a try. And I was more than happy that I did.

Some of the very pleasant features I found immediately after 2 days of use of it are:

1. Importing bookmarks, history lists from already installed browsers. This works wonderfully when one wants to transfer his environment, preferences and just not start up from scratch.

2. Tabbed browsing. One window, multiple tabs which not only keeps the taskbar free, but also informs you about the status of pages getting loaded. Even the shortcuts for maneuvering and handling the tabs are pretty well thought of.

3. Integrated Search box for many popular sites, with Google as default. Integrated RSS support! Allows you to monitor the topics without diving into the site.

4. Developer friendly. Its source code view will actually point to the location on the laid out page where that code is doing the rendering part. Also media on the page can be easily accessed. This is an interesting concept.

5. Themes and Plug-ins. While many applications may have it, these features are promoted with all fanfare and the product site itself got the best of them. I have downloaded pretty many which do AMAZING STUFF!

All in all, making me shift to a new browser as a default in just 2 days, is surely worth an applause from my side at least ;-)

Yahoo and Music

2004-09-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Yahoo is in a great commanding position in the technology industry than many realize. All we ever hear about is Google, Microsoft, Apple and Linux fighting with each other. But none of them have an ID mechanism in place, with a huge fan following, like Yahoo! Google recently has started to identify its users through GMail and Orkut, but Yahoo has been reaping the benefits of this field since a long time. Yahoo knows more about its users today than anyone else. It knows which ID chats, plays games, talks to whom, mails about what ... AND listens to what. Its launch audio streaming was recently merged with the Yahoo Messenger offering, and it has generated good feedback. Recently, it acquired MusicMatch, an online music vendor. As Yahoo itself mentions it, the Launch service will now provide end-to-end solution in music. I am anticipating a good aggressive offering from the Portal into the online music arena.

Zoom ... seems promising

2004-09-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

ET notes down the expectations from the upcoming new TV Channel, Zoom which promises to bring a change to the Indian household viewing. Coming from a reputed news publication house, Times Group, with reputed brands like Times Of India, Economic Times, Femina, Planet M, Filmfare, all of which are trendsetters themselves, this particular launch is watched as eagerly by the industry as will probably soon be by the Indian households. The channel's focus revolves around the 'lifestyle' genre, targeting the urban youth in India's ever growing metropolitans. With the target audience already tired of the hindi soaps doing the rounds, its interesting how this particular venture is gunna shape up.

The Indian cats and dogs

2004-09-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is one of the first non-techie article. I have been reading a bit of Rashmi Bansal's articles on rediff, tracking the cats and dogs series, helplessly agreeing to the views which are quite strong. She describes the Indian I.T. company's stupid intake policies and the Asia's best b-school's highly biased entrance test. It's really a worry factor that the best are not given a good chance, but rather than these companies and the institute, it's the basic education system in India that has to be blamed.

Abroad universities offer so many subjects, courses; and the entry criteria as well as the study methodology are quite practical. The government definitely has to learn from its faults and flaws in the education system, and make it much more industry oriented. It should approached the top business houses and the big recruiters to know what they seek from young freshers and inculcate that kind of knowledge and experience to better an individual prospects for a good chance of them being recruited or even better start their own small firm.

TiVo - concept in question !

2004-09-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

I have been hearing a lot about TiVo, and I am sure that something like that in India would surely be a big hit! The show times definitely does not suit your free hours for your choice of programs. Yahoo today posted an article on one of TiVo's basic drawback, piracy. If the show is recorded and played back anytime, it does mean that the broadcaster has actually sold his film once and for all. A TV broadcast may be his first and last sale of the program.

However I wonder whether instead of allowing the user to record and playback the content, cant the content itself be pay-per-view on-demand. This would suit the convenience of everyone - the broadcaster and the viewer. Continous income and convenient viewing pleasure. Recording just wont work! Its so PRIMITIVE.

Patents need a revisit.

2004-09-14T08:12:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Blachford writes how large companies are manipulating the patent laws to their advantage. He envisions MS, who is currently rushing in to register more and more patents each year (around 3000 expected this year), can ask for royalties and payments for originality of idea/concept. While many developers love to hate MS, I would always take a broader stand that any company can exploit the patent laws cause of many of its flaws when taken in the I.T. context.

Firstly, as Nicholas mentions, a patent allows the inventor a 20 year monopoly on his idea. This is insane in the world of Technology where new formats/tools/processors are introduced every month. Imagine patenting Wi-Fi/WiMax, RSS, Plasma/TFT displays, MP3s & so on. That would just take away the freedom, adoption, proliferation of standards which can work wonders as they are now doing.

Secondly, the very concept of patent on an idea which is as generic as a use of a software in particular way is ambiguous. I sometimes even wonder how a company can claim a particular piece of code as being copied/imitated/cloned/stolen, cause no one can actually claim when the company claiming it has actually used that code.

Thirdly, in an era when many accuse MS using its market monopoly for malicious strategies, patents will only inflate the issue. A company need not produce the concerned product; just register his idea because he thought about it first. An actual implementation and the list of features as a whole, or a particular design in its exactness, can however be filed for a patent, but mere ideas are too vague for any person to claim a right over for 20 odd years.

I think an urgent need to ratify the patent laws is required and all the major technology companies have to be made part of the process of determining whether or not patents are required at all. This has to be done quickly so that the people who have already filed patents do not feel cheated.

Microsoft - a leader or a follower

2004-09-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Microsoft, the market leader for packages software, producing the world's leading Operating System and Office Suite, a company I really admire for its unmatched focus on usability and user-friendliness of any software it develops, be it the OS, Office Suite, games (AOE & X-box), browser or the media player. Microsoft is a company feared by many for its aggressive marketing and business tactics.

Of late, MS's new ventures into improving search (in a Google style), coming out with its music store (in an iTunes style) and others have put a doubt whether the company is trying any area that worked for someone? From a market leader, one would expect innovation, and it is trying to deliver that on some fronts like the WinFS (though it seems to be shelved for the release of Longhorn, but certainly something I am looking for to). However the ventures it has gone into lately have given some indications that it might fear the competition doing to it, what it did to them. Though being cautious is justified, it's the urgency it is showing that's uncomforting.

It is doing well on the .NET front, though it could have introduced something similar to MONO itself. That would not only have allowed it better management of a good framework, but also earned some acknowledgements from an otherwise irritated open source community. Innovations are always more exciting and have a bigger opportunity for runaway success than enhancements, and that's where MS should be concentrating on more than imitation.

Enough of text, lets go to speech

2004-09-06T08:48:00.000-07:00

With the increasing amount of emphasis placed on user interfaces these days, people are trying out brainstorming ideas to make a difference. While going through an article on SAP, speech enabling their applications, introduced me to another technology maturing behind the scenes - VXML. VXML or Voice eXtensible Markup Language (as webopedia defines) allows a user to interact with the Internet through voice-recognition technology. Instead of a traditional browser that relies on a combination of HTML and keyboard and mouse, VXML relies on a voice browser and/or the telephone. Using VXML, the user interacts with voice browser by listening to audio output that is either pre-recorded or computer-synthesized and submitting audio input through the user's natural speaking voice or through a keypad, such as a telephone.

VXML is an industry standard format for generating voice dialogs and menus on the fly. Text-to-Speech tools have always aided me to leisurely chew in on long pages of textual knowledge. Something I can let my eyes relax to. But the converse has always been a challenge for the industry due to the specific vocal attributes of different individuals. But such difficulties and limitations required only time to get addressed and now this particular technology is in a maturing phase.

For developers, there's an introductory article that gives a feel of what all is involved in this VXML language and some sample codes. The part I liked about is was the implementation of the "grammer" much as in the textual XML world. It defines some valid commands that can be used in a VXML file/document and so on.

And nowadays, in any emerging area of technology, Microsoft seems to have a sniff of it and gets in a hand at it every time. And in this case, it's no different. The upcoming OS - Longhorn has a lot of built in functionality for "Speech APIs". A short introduction of the same is provided at developer.com, which made me interested.

Even though am not any expert on this, the stuff I have read so far, seems juicy enough to make VXML an acronym to watch out for!

The place for open source in the near future

2004-09-05T03:27:00.000-07:00

Adam Geitgey records how open source is still not able to produce good games. He attributes this to the fact that game development has come a long way, and an average new-age game requires a lot of quality work on animation, AI and general usability. He argues that open source does not make any sense for game development since games have a long development time and a shorter shelf life.

I totally agree with him. Infact, through this idea, he has actually thrown light upon the area where open source cannot work and where it can. Open source has a longer development time than other commercial closed source software, cause the development time per person is based on his willingness and not forced upon him. Also since any user would require sufficient time to get some knowledge of the system, open source works best when the life of the particular piece of program that is being developed is of a considerable longer duration, with incremental development by enhancements and improvements in terms of performance, security etc.
Open source won't have any future developing customized software, catering to a particular company or an industry vertical. It also won't be able to succeed in developing entertainment software like games and animation software. Commercial software will continue to rule in these areas for a long time to come.

One area where open source, I think, will dominate and has a welcoming future is development of libraries. These are required by many applications, to simply their development, so that they can concentrate on the actual application being developed and can trust the internal handling/functionalities to a code trusted to have worked well. Also for the need of standardized software, an open source API developed by the community, will also be backed by the industry to have a level playing ground.

Many authors (Larry McVoy, Neil Gunton, Susan Kuchinskas, ComputerWorld, HKNET ) have questioned the open source development model, for its sustainability in the long run. Let's face it, it has to earn the developers some money. Almost all these authors are of the view that while open source can take care of the base system, it's the customization, application development and special services on top of the same that will earn them money, and that has to be closed source. By those, I don't mean consultancy services for just working with the application, which I think will form lesser and lesser proportion of the total earnings for the companies. Services will be in terms of system customization and special support application development which will be charged instead of given away freely.

Java Platform's multiple language support

2004-09-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

I was aptly reminded by one of the early commenter at the blog that my earlier conception of Java platform supporting just a single language was not entirely correct. I had come to know through the articles on IBM's website, that the Java framework does support multiple languages like Groovy, Jython, JRuby etc. This is possible by writing compilers for these languages that convert the code to bytecodes like the Sun's JVM does for Java in a way that the code is accessible across all other languages supported by the particular JRE. However since only the Java language was supplied for the Sun's J2SE and it is this JRE that is the most commonly used, many Java developers (including me for quite a long time) do not know the existing of the support of Java as a platform for multiple languages. With this feature also included in the platform, Java has become an even bigger competitor for .NET.

Of the languages introduced, I find Groovy the best alternate language to Java. It is basically a scripting language and can reduce development time I guess. However the clarity of the code might be a bit of a problem as the classes and code are not as easy to identify as Java's (maybe more so cause I am pretty comfortable with Java). But Groovy can be a good supporting language to do UI stuff which you may have to develop for multiple devices and minimize the time to develop the same.

RFID: A Mystery?

2004-09-04T04:28:00.000-07:00

Date: June 05, 2004

I had been hearing news about RFID for quite some time and mostly thought of them as tracking devices, never really digging deep into what makes it, how it functions or what its impact would be in the days to come. I asked a question on the EMERGIC site and got a well deserved response... glad I asked!

Surprising to me, there was an RFID Journal and a privacy seeking group opposing its use. Now I wouldn't want to favor or critize the technology cause I am still in its nascent stage of understanding but here's what I did find interesting on those articles...

- Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify individual items. There are several methods of identifying objects using RFID, but the most common is to store a serial number that identifies a product and perhaps other information, on a microchip that is attached to an antenna (the chip and the antenna together are called an RFID transponder or an RFID tag). The antenna enables the chip to transmit the identification information to a reader. The reader converts the radio waves returned from the RFID tag into a form that can then be passed on to computers that can make use of it.

- The reader sends out electromagnetic waves that form a magnetic field when they "couple" with the antenna on the RFID tag. A passive RFID tag draws power from this magnetic field and uses it to power the microchip?s circuits. Passive tags have no battery. Instead, they draw power from the reader, which sends out electromagnetic waves that induce a current in the tag's antenna.

- typically a tag would carry no more than 2KB of data

- They can cost as little as 30 cents or as much as $50 depending on the type of tag and the application. Generally speaking, finished smart labels that can be applied top products typically cost 50 cents or more.

- RFID is a proven technology that's been around since the Second World War. Up to now, it's been too expensive and too limited to be practical for many commercial applications. But if tags can be made cheaply enough, they can solve many of the problems associated with bar codes.

- With today's bar code technology, every can of Coke has the same UPC or bar code number as every other can (a can of Coke in Toronto has the same number as a can of Coke in Topeka). With RFID, each individual can of Coke would have a unique ID number which could be linked to the person buying it when they scan a credit card or a frequent shopper card

- these chips can be read from a distance, right through your clothes, wallet, backpack or purse -- without your knowledge or consent -- by anybody with the right reader device. In a way, it gives strangers x-ray vision powers to spy on you, to identify both you and the things you're wearing and carrying.

- that uses tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand

- This technology is rapidly evolving and becoming more sophisticated. Now RFID spy chips can even be printed, meaning the dot on a printed letter "i" could be used to track you.

- RFID could drive gains in productivity by cutting labor costs, shrinking inventories and reducing out-of-stock items. A study by AMR Research in Boston finds that RFID tracking could trim warehouse labor by 20%, slash inventory by 25% and boost sales by 3% to 4%, compared with current methods of keeping count.

The technology surprisingly pretty old has gained momentum of late. It?s pretty soon to take sides, but surely it seems that it won?t be rid of controversies if implemented on a large scale. The size and cost and the operational method seems baffling to me!

RSS is...

2004-09-04T04:27:00.001-07:00

Date: June 01, 2004

Dave Winer 's Everything a non-tech user needs to know about RSS 2.0. site list down RSS in plain simple objective manner...

Go Mono Go!

2004-09-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

Date: May 22, 2004

Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET framework which allows you to use the .NET platform over Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac came out with its first beta release version and the expectations are humungous.

I personally had envisioned the .NET framework to be ported on Linux, but more so by MS itself. However its Novell which has taken the initiative!

Some salient features of Mono, which appealed to me quite a bit:

- Mono includes a compiler for the C# language, a Common Language Runtime (CLR) for the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and a set of class libraries. The runtime can be embedded into your application. It implements both ADO.NET and ASP.NET.

[The CLR is the .NET equivalent of the JRE, so the frameworks (.NET and J2EE) were basically the same following a similar line of implementation, just that the CLRs were missing on multiple platforms]

- Cross platform class libraries for data access: Postgress, MySQL, DB2, TDS, Sybase, Oracle, ODBC and Gnome's GDA.

- A code pre-compiler to generate native code ahead of time.

[This might be worth looking into, but I think it must be on the lines of the SWT in Java, an implementation which also takes into account native enhancements]

- Gtk# a toolkit to develop GNOME applications on Unix and Windows.

[This is again something which was Linux specific till now, but GNOME finds its way to Windows too now, through this framework]

- A CORBA implementation for Mono.

[With this, CORBA could be used for .NET's object location and reuse something which wasnt possible earlier. This will be a serious hit to COM/DCOM. The key difference between CORBA (and COM) and the CLI is that the CLI allows "data-level interoperability" because every language/component uses the same data layout and memory management. ]

* Mono supports GTK# and #WT for GUI applications and support for Windows.Forms is underway. For achieving this, the basic system used will be WINE, which has already worked wonders by running many Windows applications on Linux. It will be used as a library - WineLib

- Most of Mono is being written using C#, with only a few parts written in C
[This is in line with J2EE]

- The IKVM project builds a Java runtime that works on top of .NET and on top of Mono. IKVM is essentially a JIT compiler that translates from JVM bytecodes into CIL instructions, and then lets the native JIT engine take over.

[The basic difference between J2EE and .NET would be that .NET supports multiple languages, multiple platforms, whereas J2EE was single language (Java), multiple platforms. This makes .NET a more generic implementation for better use in the future]

I would bet HIGH on Mono's success with whatever I am reading. It is a well thought of framework and will do wonders once the final release is out.

Linux on the Desktop

2004-09-04T04:26:00.000-07:00

Date: April 17, 2004

Rajesh Jain put down the Economist's article extracts of the facts of Linux deployment on the Home User's desktops. Some interesting point to be noted from the article...
- Today, almost 94% of all PCs in the world run on Windows, while slightly more than 3% - mostly in creative industries and universities - use Apple's Macintosh system. Fewer than 3% use Linux.

While Macintosh is viewed as a high-end, graphics-rich, entertainment OS, Linux is much more a common man's affordable (and mostly free) workable system on the Desktop. Linux has most of its existence on the servers but with the attractive RedHat 9, among other flavors, the GUI has had considerable improvements to pose a challenge to the dominant Windows OS on the Home User's Desktops.

- the next version of Windows, called Longhorn, has been delayed to 2006 at the earliest, in part by Microsoft's realization that it has to tighten up security a lot more. So, for the next two years, companies and home users thinking about updating their operating system might be reluctant to buy the current version, Windows XP, knowing it will soon be overtaken. Hence they may consider alternatives more seriously. If Linux can establish a good reputation during this period, it might look even more attractive once Longhorn, which will be expensive and is likely to require new hardware, is released.

This is a HUGE opportunity. And the article correctly mentions that the new hardware requirement might just not be welcomed by the users. Linux could even enter the "paid" OS sector for the desktops here with user-friendly interfaces and a flurry of applications on it.

- Unlike rich countries, which have a huge installed base of Windows computers and billions of documents in Microsoft's fiddly file formats, most users in Asia and South America are starting with a clean slate. For a country such as China, says Sun's Mr Schwartz, the attraction of open-source software is obvious: it is cheaper, so it will reduce the incentive to get pirated software (most copies of Windows in China are fake) and thus help China improve its relations with the World Trade Organization. Better still, it allows China to avoid being locked into a single vendor - and an American one at that.

Many governments around the world have encouraged and adopted whole-heartedly. If the push is from the root itself, Linux will be able to do a Windows - getting people used to it. Pirated version of Windows is a hard reality in developing countries as the norms aren't that strict (nor would Microsoft want to make it that strict). Microsoft here has the opportunity to launch a cheaper OS too which is up with the times i.e. able to run all the latest applications on that platform. It can keep piracy in check that way.

- On the other hand, despite improvements Linux faces real obstacles. It can still be a nightmare for home users to install and, unless bought as part of a commercial package such as Sun's, it does not come with a help-desk. Worse, there are still too few applications. Less than 1% of all computer games, for instance, work on Linux. Software to manage personal finances or organize digital photos is also missing. In theory these programs could all be written but, without a huge increase in users, code-writers will not bother.

Applications for Linux are increasing in gigantic proportions, its doing way better than Mac. The only fear people have is whether the person who didn't spend a penny for his OS, spend for his application? The answer is Yes, if the application is affordable enough and good enough.

- The future is uncertain, and Linux still might yet represent another kind of threat to [Microsoft]. No standard operating system has yet emerged for mobile handsets, robots, watches, televisions, printers, car gadgets and other such devices. Microsoft, naturally, wants to extend Windows' dominance to these as well. It is here, rather than the desktop, that Linux could be a real threat to the mighty company's ambitions.

EXACTLY!!! The PC is not the only computer that requires an OS. All those devices mentioned are becoming more and more sophisticated and converged. The marriage of the cable, the net and telecom (Communication) with Computers and Consumer Electronics is the whole future - Convergence. Compatibility among different devices to interact with each other is eminent. I hope the protocols are standardized (like the SOAP which worked magic for EAD) else its not going to be an easy task for the consumers.

MS - Java Settlement

2004-09-04T04:25:00.000-07:00

Date: April 11, 2004

The latest settlement amongst arch rivals... Microsoft and Java, and the resulting technology sharing might boost the EAD scenario. It will certainly improve inter-operatibility amongst .NET and J2EE.

CNET's articles on Microsoft reveals a softer side and Sun settles with Microsoft, announces layoffs reveals more.

Now what's making things work on Mars?

2004-09-04T04:24:00.000-07:00

Date: March 13, 2004

Well surprisingly Java has a lot to do with it. The Mars Rover Mission uses Java technology for 3-D reconstruction of terrain for controlling the Rover. Here's a link logging the interview with James Gosling (CTO, Developer Programs, SUN) on the ongoing Mission to Mars. Some excerpts from the interview ...

Q:How is the Java assisting in controlling the Rover from earth?
A: There's a Java API called Java Advanced Imaging, that's used for the images captured by the panoramic camera - the one that producing images with excruciating detail. Those panoramas are being created by combining images from two different cameras onboard the Rover, so with the two lenses they get two images - just like you've got two eyes - so you can do a stereoscopic mapping where your brain is able to figure out how far away things are. Because they've got these stereoscopic images, they can go through a process that's called stereo-image correlation, so they can calculate for each pixel in the image how far away that picture element really is.

Q:What is it about Java that makes it so attractive to this type of application?
A: The answer is there's a bunch of things, not just one thing. One of the aspects of Java that was really important to them is that it runs on a lot of platforms. If you look at JPL, they've got Solaris boxes, Linux boxes, Windows boxes, Apple boxes - it works on all of them. [Jet Propulson Laboratory (JPL), managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology. JPL undertakes the robotic exploration of the solar system for NASA.]

Also for the technologically inclined (or geeks) you can download a software that lets ya see images from the Red Planet like NASA sees them!

After the mobile arena, this is one more arena where Java seems to be a good (and probably the only) option. There is also an office suite coming up in Java (as reported on emergic) - Evermore Integrated Office (EIOffice). Looks like Java's definately shinning and will keep doing so for a long long time. I bet high on it!

Trends: Look Ahead for this decade - III

2004-09-04T04:23:00.000-07:00

Date: March 13, 2004

Today I will focus on some of the technologies that are still in the development phase but will soon turn out to be one of the most important by the end of this decade. - Artifical Intelligence (AI) and Robotics.

First AI, from thinkquest...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the area of computer science focusing on creating machines that can engage on behaviors that humans consider intelligent. The ability to create intelligent machines has intrigued humans since ancient times, and today with the advent of the computer and 50 years of research into AI programming techniques, the dream of smart machines is becoming a reality. Researchers are creating systems which can mimic human thought, understand speech, beat the best human chessplayer, and countless other feats never before possible.

So we had Eliza (1960s), a personal psychotherapist, which simply said can understand english and react to it in some way. Its just amazing what it can do when you try to figure out the logic. Also Sam (not tried out by me) is a program that can comprehend e paragraph and answer some questions on it. Add to this some practical applications, auto room temperature adjustment, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, missile guidance systems, Gaming AI algorithms and we see that smaller steps are already underway.

AI is capable of much more than that. Infact, theorically (as best seen in science fiction) it can replace all activities of humans, making them merely users and not workers. While sounding unconvincing, this might just be the future.

Current breakthroughs in AI applications is best connected to another field, quite necessary for its full-fledged development - Robotics.

From TheTech, There's no precise definition, but by general agreement a robot is a programmable machine that imitates the actions or appearance of an intelligent creature, usually a human. To qualify as a robot, a machine has to be able to do two things: 1) get information from its surroundings, and 2) do something physical - such as move or manipulate objects.

Think ... the Mars Rover (expedition on planets), Sony Robo-Dog (entertainment), Bomb buster (locate and dispose bombs), Eureka robotic vacuum cleaner (home appliance), Robug (inspection and maintainance of mechanical faults in dangerous areas), Honda Humanoid (human emulation)... and you get an idea of not just the acheivements done in Robotics but the potential of the road ahead.

Robots are ideal for jobs that require repetitive, precise movements. Human workers need a safe working environment, salaries, breaks, food and sleep. Robots don't. Human workers get bored doing the same thing over and over,which can lead to fatigue and costly mistakes. Robots don't get bored. Robotics effectively summed up as "sensing, thinking, acting" is the thing to watch out for and plan towards. While Sensing and Acting are more of a mechanical achievement, thinking is entirely software/programmatic... specifically AI.

The combination is going to take us much into the science fiction movies in the near future.

Trends: Look Ahead for this decade - II

2004-09-04T04:22:00.000-07:00

Date: February 29, 2004

Continuing on the series today I take upon search engines and yellow pages (the discussion which has gone on fairly well at Emergic). Firstly, let us look at the present scenario. Google dominates head over heels, Yahoo's next and there's lot of conceptual differences between the two. Google is a 'Topnotch Search Giant' whereas Yahoo is a 'Gigantic Portal'. Biztechlink reports the following statistics:

Google gets 35% of all web site traffic or 112 million hits per day!
Yahoo gets 32% of all web site traffic or 105 million hits per day!
MSN gets 12% of all web site traffic or 39 million hits per day!
AOL gets 4.9% of all web site traffic or 15 million hits per day.
AltaVista gets 1.7% of all web site traffic or 6 million hits per day.

If this doesn't sound good, get this - currently 85% of people use search engines to purchase a product or service. Now think potential! Search engine connect, aggregate, classify and sort huge amount of content generated by the net daily, in diverse formats. With conventional algorithm no longer powerful, flexible enough to customize content for the distinct needs of today's net users and the eminent need for organizing, ranking content, search engines are going all out in a battle for superiority.

One of the dire needs of today's net users is the ability to be able to PERSONALIZE search according to individual needs. Imagine Search engines maintaining a record of the user's pattern of searches, his/her interests, specialty, favorites/bookmarks, most visited sites, preferences for personal sites over commercial ones etc. Considering factors like these during that person's searches can deliver much more relevant content to the users.

Another facility I recently came across is the concept of search PARAMETERS/VARIABLES. Search ranking variables can be thrown open to the user allowing him to specify weight to be given for say, popularity (number of hits received by the content), personal or commercial sites weightings, freshness etc. If the user can alter these, it will greatly help him to specify exactly what he wants from the repository.

The third consideration is for verticals. A person searching for say a particular type of flower would normally like to have results relating to the stores which are providing them (at least that's what the current search engines think). However if he wants to read about the history, or any other general information about it, he should be given a facility to avoid results relating only to shopping. The search engines have to classify content based on verticals and allow the user to search within a specific one if he wishes. Thus shopping, entertainment, news, software, piracy results can all be separated for a person searching for MP3s.

Algorithms which are able to all of the above and more are the key for the success of next generation search engines. Google currently has the advantages of a better algorithm, better crawler whereas Yahoo already has a large registered user base (with its convenient, integrated id mechanism) and better support for verticals. However both of the majors have yet to really work on personalizing results for guiding the puzzled information seekers.

Another opportunity for smaller local player is Yellow pages. Portals and giant search engines are currently unable to give the convenience of a local search. A recent article mentioned that around 100M American small businesses don't have a web address. Same is the case with all the other countries incl. India. This presents a good opportunity for local search engines to provide more relevant results for say a city or a state and for some even a country. These businesses can collect data about SMEs, NGOs within an area and provide access to the untapped local market information and earn a good 2-way deal. The content may be put up in a standard template at a small fee. It also presents an opportunity for regional advertisers to aim localities at a reasonable cost.

Trends: Look Ahead for this decade - I

2004-09-04T04:21:00.000-07:00

Date: February 24, 2004

Trends will be a series where I will list down the events I expect to happen in the near future in the technology industry. As for the first edition, I will take upon the subject most surprising to many, but the most expected move according to me.

Microsoft's extension for Linux:

Strange, but this is something I have been waiting for, for quite a while. With everyone adopting and moving towards enterprise software development and convergence, the development platforms have already come up with integrated solutions for multiple languages compatibility, multiple devices extensions, inter-application interactions through support for legacy systems, plug-in, messaging etc. Currently there are only 2 major application platforms that hold a promise of convergence for all purposes - J2EE/Sun ONE & .NET

Both of these basically follow the same strategy of Byte/Intermediate code interpretation on different hardware to adapt to their specifications. However the philosophy basically differs on their understanding of convergence. While .NET brings together multiple languages, J2EE through Java brings together multiple platforms. There are already attempts to make them interact with each other basically with 2 of the common components in both the architectures - SOAP and XML.

Though multiple language support has its own advantages, Microsoft(MS) has been missing one important point for its Enterprise Application Development (EAD). It is a separate tool/product/application, so it is expected to work on multiple platforms provided by different vendors. Platforms be it hardware/devices or OS or software development architectures. The customers for its EAD solutions are much different than the customers for its Operating System (OS).

The interpretation of platform has been changing over a period of time - from hardware to OS to EAD architecture. When hardware decided the kind of applications you can develop on it, it was given the highest priority by the industry and recognized as the "platform". With OS's starting to support a multiple hardware and devices providing a common set of APIs for developers to work with, it was also considered as a platform. The newest generations of platforms are the EAD tools which isolate the underlying hardware and OS and even some other applications like Databases. As we have traveled across this path, we have tried to integrate more and more diverse devices. Convergence at the EAD level can virtually eliminate all underlying diverse hardware to a single bunch of APIs to develop a single application to work on them all.

Now, with the compatibility issues getting addressed, the industry is obviously going to prefer the technology which supports the most underlying dependent platforms. Currently Java has a BIG BIG advantage which it and developers are exploiting the most. MS has to provide support for these platforms to hold forth its proposal as an alternative to J2EE and that too. Currently more and more companies are adopting to the Java specifications/standards and this is definitely eating out MS's long standing IDEs for its platforms.

I expect MS to come out with Unix/Linux's interpretation of Common Language Runtime (CLR). There have already been Windows Emulators on Linux such as WINE which run Windows Programs on it, however its the official support which can really have an impact on its EAD offering. I expect MS's .NET to Linux compatible in 2-3 years.

Consumer Electronics Show 2004

2004-09-04T04:14:00.000-07:00

Date: February 15, 2004

Marshall Brain writes about some of the latest consumer electronics hitting the U.S. markets. Although some of them make you wonder who really wanted it?, there are some who seem to be quite promising and disruptive. I will list down the ones that grabbed my attention.

Solar-powered jacket One thing that all the electronic gadgets at CES require is power, and you may not have a plug nearby. If you are outdoors and it is sunny, then this jacket from ICPSolar in conjunction with SCOTTeVEST might be an option. Although not available yet, it generates 5 volts at 50 milliamps and can power something like a cell phone or a portable CD player. Another option is this roll-up mat, which is significantly larger. It generates 1.2 amps at 16.5 volts (20 watts) and can therefore power or recharge just about any portable electronic device. What's making these wearable and rollable solar arrays possible? It's these new flexible solar cells manufactured on a thin plastic film.

Quantum-Optical RAM It's hard to know if this is real or not, but I will report what I saw. A company called Compu-Technics was showing something called Quantum-Optical RAM -- a very dense, non-volatile, high-speed memory device. In another display (and on the AtomChip Web site), there is a 256-GB device not much bigger than the connector on a USB cable. The brochure the company was handing out says things like this:

The chip has a much higher capacity when compared with Flash memory, has the lowest cost per gigabyte, and does not have a limited number of cycles to update information. Therefore, Quantum-Optical memory can be used as RAM, unlike Flash memory, which can only be used as storage.
The new Quantum-Optical technology has a minimum sustained write speed of 6 GB per second and a read speed of 8 GB per second.
Does it all with low power consumption, which means longer battery life.
256 GB of memory fits in a recording [medium] with the physical dimensions of 10 mm x 4 mm x 4 mm.
Complete lack of mechanical parts combined with ultra-high density, ultra-high speed and extremely compact size distinguish this memory from all existing memories.

Sony UX50 PDA This PDA runs on the Palm OS and has just about anything you've ever imagined stuffing into a PDA. For example, it has a decent-sized keyboard, a nice little color screen, both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, a camera, a Web browser and e-mail capability. It also uses a new low-power processor that gives it great battery life. For example, I was told:

You could go into a Wi-Fi hot spot and browse the Web for more than four hours on one charge. It can play MP3 files for 16 hours.
If you cannot find a hot spot, it can communicate with a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone and use it to get an Internet connection.
It can play video files that you've saved on a Memory Stick.
And it will accept an external battery that triples the battery life.

Visteon Visteon is a huge company, but chances are you have never heard of it. They make components like steering systems and instrument panels that go inside of cars. At CES, Visteon became more visible by demonstrating a variety of in-car entertainment and computer systems. For example, Visteon had a Hummer 2 that they had outfitted with a variety of new in-car systems. The Hummer had an onboard Pentium 4 computer, and in the back of every headrest (along with the front console) there was a dockable ViewSonic Smart Display. You could detach the display and hold it in your lap, or leave it in the headrest. The computer had Wi-Fi, so you could also fire up a normal laptop inside the car (or up to 100 meters away) and interact with the car's network, as well. A cell phone connection provided the car with Internet access. The car's computer could understand voice commands. And that's just a few of the features. It was a very impressive demo.

In the center armrest was an innovative charging system from a company called Splashpower. A compatible PDA, cell phone, etc., doesn't need any wires to recharge. You simply place the device on the SplashPower pad and it starts charging automatically through induction.

Flat Speakers Two different companies were showing flat speaker technology. S3i had speaker drivers that you build into a wall to turn entire sheets of drywall into speaker elements. You could attach these drivers to anything -- the inside or outside of walls, large sheets of glass, etc. NXT had a flat speaker technology being used by a variety of manufacturers (Pioneer, Sony, NEC) to make flat speakers. It is also possible to turn a laptop screen into a speaker with this technology.

Its nice to see these innovations on the hardware front, giving software a chance to show what it is capable of. I am particularly excited about Visteon's offerings. I agree with Marshall, in-car entertainment is about to explode.

MP3s and Piracy

2004-09-04T04:13:00.001-07:00

Date: February 15, 2004

MP3s are here to stay and no one can bet against it. The format is being widely accepted and the industry has to embrace it rather than shy away from it. The only issues marring its progress is piracy.

I can't see why music companies are still sticking to the older CD format. Consumers want songs (the file) now not the CD (the disk). Music is not different than a software now and it cant be sold like books. The digital age demands companies to provide users an open portal to stream/download their latest songs/albums with a reasonable price. There are a few advantages music companies will have over pirated mp3s and some they will need to enforce:

a) The quality of pirated MP3s are no good. Music Companies can give customers the best quality anytime.

b) MP3 softwares can be provided by the Companies themselves which will only be allowed to connect to their sites with a valid username and password through something like a SOAP protocol for automated billing and checking the genuineness of the customer.

c) Streaming can be an option rather than downloading. This would become a reality once the wi-fi networks and convergence has become full-fledged. Until then they would have to think of some way to allow d/load mp3s to be played only on the customer's MP3 player, this also has to be done without making a custom format mp3. If it is absolutely essential to make it custom format, there should be a software which can convert custom format into generic format at runtime and stream the mp3 to the customer's player.

Why just mp3s, even video has to be distributed now. The only concern being bandwidth which is getting overcome quickly. A whole new world of possibilities is opening up, companies have to adopt to the disrupting technologies.

Weblogs v/s CMS

2004-09-04T04:13:00.000-07:00

Date: February 15, 2004

John Hiler, the CEO of WebCrimson, personal publishing software notes down the differences between Weblogs and Content Management Software (CMS) and how Weblogs are slowly but surely eating away into the CMS market as a disruptive technology.

Interesting analysis of News Architecture

2004-09-04T04:12:00.000-07:00

Date: February 07, 2004

Rajesh Jain has recorded interesting concepts on the new News Record and Delivery system.

Recently I find plenty of news items appearing on rediff and Times of India which would be infact some content posted on CNET news. I think the general delivery system can be converted to RSS feeds and content linking in this format can do wonders for the readers.

Chat: The Look Ahead

2004-09-04T04:10:00.000-07:00

Date: February 07, 2004

Chat softwares have been in existence for a long time now and their popularity and progress are no surprises. Chat starting as just an entertainment gizmo has soon got the business & enterprise nod for becoming an interactive community networking for effective communication. Lets look into the progress so far, today we see Instant Messengers ruling the roost with the strong benefit of integrated support for emails, news etc. We also have web cam and voice conference extensions in most of these and also archiving of chats, private conferences, whiteboard support etc.

The emerging needs of convergence should now require a re-think of the whole process of chat in general. Firstly, the huge amount of content generated by chat can be effectively integrated to other needs. For example, the decisions taken in a meeting can be directly cut out and individual opinions and suggestions can also be kept for future enhancements and considerations. A brainstorming session can effectively generate random ideas which can be analysed later.

Currently, the major thrust of archiving is on text which was possibly due to limited storage and communications capacity. A recorded voice and video conference can hugely benefit organisations. Even white-boarding can be included.

Net chat, along with its entertainment extensions, promises to hold one of the best recorded forms of communications ever conceived.

Mobile Arena - Things keep getting better

2004-09-04T04:09:00.000-07:00

Date: February 04, 2004

Mobile phone manufacturers have finally given a positive indication of their move towards convergence by adopting to the Java technology jointly. It is quite welcoming that all companies have started java-enabling their phones to support the fastest growing software development platform of today. This opens up a lot of opportunities to go for cell phone enhancements for a wide variety of software products.

It will also hopefully make way for lots of personal and business applications like word processing, text-speech and speech-text, online connectivity applications like stock market tickers, breaking news service in a powerful integrated manner. This will be much of a welcome change from the past mobile fads - Ring tones, Wallpapers.

There plenty of things still needing attention which hopefully should add on to customer satisfaction.

1. Net Connectivity: In India, I think the net connectivity charges on phones is now slowly getting into the common man's reach. Network operators should realize that net connectivity is now a basic utility to be offered in their pack of services. It should also be put into the prepaid segments. Instant Messaging and MMS should be given a boost.

2. Memory Space: With applications being loaded onto the device, it is going to need lots of space. Memory sticks are already making waves providing huge amount of memory in a compact space. Another big advantage of it is upgradeability.

3. Bigger Screens: All applications will have to worry about the big restriction of screen size on most mobile phones. Here perhaps the manufacturers can do little. However what they can do is provide an extension point to load the UI on some other devices - Palm, Laptops, Desktops. This is again debatable.

4. More Convergence: Java is just the first step. Until the industry comes up with a single application framework, mobile phone manufacturers will have to support some of the most popular technologies as plug-ins. The technology which I am personally waiting for is Flash which can do wonders for the entertainment industry.

Apart from the time it will take to provide these add-ons (and much more), the major factor will be the cost. The cell phone revolution we are experiencing in India wouldn't have been possible without affordable connectivity and handsets. So far so good, still a long way to go.

Convergence - the final frontier

2004-09-04T04:08:00.000-07:00

Date: February 04, 2004

Convergence. Without doubt, this is what everyone is and should be aiming at, all the time. The great mistakes of the past are the reason we are today facing such a mockery of situations where some software and programming languages are being dubbed 'platform-independent'. Software is essentially a combination of data representation and logic. Both don't dependent on any physical device. We can digest the fact that devices have different capabilities (Interfaces, speed, memory capacity) and as such many software can't be ported onto all the computing devices. However this does not necessarily make the software, platform dependent. Those are merely not made to be ported on those devices.

Convergence is basically a mix of three 'C's - Computers, Communications and Consumer Electronics. In an ideal scenario, any software should be able to make it to any platform/device by merely extending it a user interface. The bulk of the logic and data processing can be devoted to powerful distributed servers, and the thin clients are to be floated around on all the devices. Every consumer electronic having a communication point and computational capabilities has to provide a set of the industry standard tools to make that industry standard software work on it. It is the responsibility of the industry to provide such a set so that newer developments can be directed towards a common goal of convergence.

Software has only Hardware constraints

2004-09-04T04:07:00.000-07:00

Date: February 04, 2004

Software - Solutions, Programs, Applications - has come a long way adopting to different paradigms, different approaches, different levels of requirements and has essentially eased/facilitated a lot of development activities in various fields. However take a moment to think upon what has actually aided software to reach this level of importance, flexibility, performance and robustness. It has of course been dependent upon the demand and monetary support of the market. But thinking from a broader perspective it's not what software really needs, as a technology, to grow. The only real support for software development was in fact the development of hardware, which is why I truly believe that hardware is also the only constraint for it.

We have been watching / hearing in the so-called sci-fi movies about the future of computers in abstract concepts like Artificial Intelligence, Cyborg, leaps in the Bio-Genetic technologies, Inter-galactic voyages etc. If we ponder upon what is it that stopping us from achieving this magnitude of technology, it's not software at all. Software through its various concepts and paradigms is already miles ahead of what many think as remotely possible. All it ever needs to unleash its power are merely the equipments which allow it to perform what it is capable of. All it is ever constrained by will be Hardware. This is why software really needs rapid hardware advancements and only proper standardized directions to its own development.

My Weblog – A commitment

2004-09-04T03:53:00.000-07:00

Well this is a start to another blogging series by me. The last one on weblogs.us got into a mess and I really didn’t spare anytime to update that blog, to my dismay. Now, with the start of this one, I have made a commitment to update it regularly on the lines of atleast - a blog a day – and to replenish a missed day with an extra one the next day. Now let me see how does that go along, and how much can I adhere to this commitment.

For introductions, I am an I.T. guy, and the last blog I had kept on weblogs.us was completely about technology. While this too will be dedicated to technology items mostly, it will include some more diverse topics too, as I think I got much more than tech stuff to share in me.

I will be maintaining 2 blogs – A mirror at FreeRoller (http://www.freeroller.net/page/kshitij/Weblog) – for the inconveniences faced by me from the earlier free blog service provider. I will keeping both of them in sync, and the readers can have a choice of the UI. I will also be posting all my previous entries from my old blog to this one, cause I really value my “typing”…lol. I wish there was a way to transfer them automatically to preserve the timestamps. And if there was one, I wish I knew how J

So with a wave of a flag, I have started this one off…

- Kshitij Chandan.