Month: August 2004

Defining Success

Shrikant Patil quotes from the welcome address by Subroto Bagchi, COO of MindTree Consulting, to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore: “Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.”

Gartner on XP Starter Windows

News.com writes that Gartner’s suggestion is to “steer away.”

Gartner analysts Dion Wiggins and Martin Gilliland noted that missing features in the Windows XP Starter Edition would frustrate users and claimed that its limited software upgrade path would “likely increase software piracy.”

Targeted at first-time users, the operating system has had some features removed, such as file-sharing, print-sharing and support for local area networks.

In its report, Gartner agreed that such home-networking functions have “little relevance” to Microsoft’s target audience. However, it chided the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant for imposing other restrictions, such as allowing users to run only three applications at a time.

The research firm also cited security as an issue, particularly the provision of patches and updates for users with slow and expensive Internet connections.

“Many citizens who do not own a PC are already familiar with basic PC use from cybercafes and schools,” wrote Wiggins, vice president and research director of Gartner Research and Advisory Services. “Windows XP Starter Edition is likely to frustrate these users, as it is not delivering the same quality experience due to the limitations imposed.”

Amazon CTO Interview

Excerpt from the interview with Al Vermeulen:

InformationWeek: How would you describe Amazon’s services-oriented architecture? What are the components?

Vermeulen: There’s a host of them, probably 15 or 20, maybe more, and they range from components like personalization and search applications, to fulfillment applications, supply-chain services, and on and on. The basis is, let’s think about everything we do at Amazon.com and about how we break it up into individual pieces, smaller pieces. What we try to do is break apart a piece of the business. From a technology point of view, that becomes a service. From an organizational point of view, it becomes an autonomous team with their own mission, and then we work on defining the interface to get to that service. We try to solidify that interface and make it permanent and robust. It’s kind of a bottom-up, decentralized way of building your technology, as opposed to a top-down way where you try to make all the technology look like one piece.

Systems Builder

Richard MacManus points to a ComputerWorld article by Michael Hugos who writes:

got into the IT business because I love to design and build systems. After doing a lot of designing and building and watching others do a lot of designing and building, one of the most important things I’ve learned is that successful projects are always run by a certain kind of person. This person can speak both the language of technology and the language of business. This person understands the specific business issues that a new system is supposed to address and is always looking for simple and effective ways to use technology to get things done. I call this person the systems builder.

The competence of the systems builder goes a long way toward determining the success or failure of any development project.

Often, the systems builder comes up through the technical ranks and learns about business along the way. Sometimes the systems builder comes up through the business side and manages to learn about technology. Either way, this is someone who can clearly demonstrate skills in two main areas: designing systems and leading projects to build systems.

Michael discusses five skills that the systems builders needs:
– Understand the business operation.
– Create an inclusive process.
– Tolerate not knowing.
– Look for the simple underlying patterns.
– Use simple combinations of technology and process.

TECH TALK: Reinventing Computing: Looking Ahead

The computing industry has had a great run for the past two decades. With hardware and software working in tandem to get users to upgrade every four years or so, the resulting price dips have got a new wave of users each time. The result is that the worlds computer user base stands at about 600 million. That is no mean accomplishment.

Yet, the benefits of computing have been largely limited to the developed markets and the very top of the pyramid in the emerging markets. In India, for example, the installed base of computers is only about 10-12 million. Even though Indians are buying 300,000 computers each month, this growth pales in comparison to that of cellphones. About 1.5 million new mobiles are being purchased every month on a much larger installed base of 35 million. The story is quite similar in many other emerging markets, though other than China, the quantities are much lower.

More than the cellphone, it is the computer which has the potential to transform the future for the worlds emerging markets. Be it education or healthcare, governance or business, entertainment or communications, the computers versatility can help overcome some of the infrastructure gaps that exist in these markets, and open up new vistas for businesses, consumers and students.

Yet, computing for emerging markets suffers from four key problems: affordability, desirability, accessibility and manageability. Even as there are efforts to make computing more affordable (as hardware prices continue to fall and Microsoft considers lower-cost versions of its Windows operating system in local languages), the challenges in taking computing to the next users are much deeper.

Unlike most other industries, the computer industry has two giants in Intel and Microsoft which control the supply of two most important components. The rest of the industry revolves around Intels CPU and Microsofts Windows-Office combo. If computing has to be made available to the next-generation of users, this Wintel stranglehold needs to be broken.

Various visions of the future of computing have been put forward. From Mark Weisers ubiquitous computing dream to Don Normans information appliances as invisible computers to the human-centred computing ideas of Michael Dertouzos, Jef Raskin and Ben Shneiderman, there have been various efforts to define the future of computing. Many companies have also tried to create alternative platforms. The Network Computer and WebTV are two examples from the past. The Simputer is one effort from the present. AMDs soon-to-be-launched $200 Emma, Smartphones like the Treo 600 and Apples iPoD are, perhaps, harbingers of the future.

All such prognostications and products have suffered from two flaws. First, their primary focus has been on the developed markets where computers have a near-universal penetration. They tend to ignore todays non-users in the worlds emerging markets. Second, they have looked at only one or two dimensions of the computing ecosystem. As I will argue later, what is needed is a set of rainbow revolutions to make a difference.

To reinvent computing, six challenges need to be overcome, five goals need to be met, and seven revolutions need to happen. This is what will start the next 12-year tech cycle which will bring in the billion users across the worlds emerging markets.

Tomorrow: Six Challenges

Continue reading TECH TALK: Reinventing Computing: Looking Ahead

Bootstrapping Checklist

Brad Feld has a checklist for bootstrapping entrepreneurial ventures. One of the points:

Figure out what to do if you fail (face your fears before you start):One of my favorite quotes is from Dune – “Fear is the mind killer.” I’ve always believed that fear is one of the most completely useless emotions. “What if I fail” is one of the biggest fears of a startup entrepreneur. Face it – play with it – figure out what happens if you fail. In most cases, failure is not going to be death (although it could be very uncomfortable). Understanding what your fears are and trying to stare them down in advance of actually encountering them will help you enormously in the process of trying to create a new company.

Searchstreams

John Battelle writes about the “ability to capture and record your search history as well as the things you looked at, all in one package.”

What I really wish for, both to tell the story of my search, and to annotate my book, is the ability to take that searchstream and turn it into an object – a narrative thread of sorts, something I can hold and keep and refer to, a prop to aid in the telling and retelling of how I came to my answer. Tracks in the dust, so to speak, so others can follow and make their own, or follow mine and see (and question!) how I came to my conclusions. Imagine, I thought to myself, if instead of footnotes and citations, I could append searchstreams…

That’s when I remembered As We May Think, Vannevar Bush’s famous essay in The Atlantic. I had read it earlier in my research, and was struck not by the idea of the Memex, which is well understood, but by Bush’s explication of the problem – that knowledge and learning has become so complicated, so layered, so inefficient, that it is near impossible for anyone to be a generalist, in the sense Aristotle was. Bush’s answer to this problem was the Memex, of course, but what I find interesting is the mechanism by which the Memex is made potent – the mechanism for capturing the traces of a researcher’s discovery through the Memex’s corpus, and storing those traces as intelligence so the next researcher can learn from them and build upon them.

Searchstreams, I realized, are the DNA which will build the Memex from the flat soil of search as it’s currently understood. Engines that leverage searchstreams will make link analysis-based search (ie, nearly all of commercial search today) look like something out of the pre-Cambrian era. The first fish with feet are all around us – A9, Furl, del.icio.us. We have yet to build the critical mass of searchstreams by which this next generation engine might be built (nor will it necessarily be built with our tacit consent). But I can sense it coming.

Manmohan Singh’s Message

Indian leaders use the Independence Day speech to give their vision for the future. Sify reports on what the Indian Prime Minister had to say:

Outlining a seven-pronged agriculture and employment-oriented strategy for higher economic growth, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Sunday said the challenge for reforms was to “breathe new life into government.”

Identifying seven priority sectors — agriculture, water, education, health care, employment, urban renewal and infrastructure, Singh, in his first Independence Day address from the Red Fort, said, “These saat sutras (seven principles) are the pillars of the development bridge we must cross to ensure higher economic growth and more equitable social and economic development.”

At the same time, he asserted that, “The challenge for economic reforms today is to breathe new life into government so that it can play a positive role where it must.”

“The real challenge for me and for the government at all levels is the challenge of implementation of our stated policies and programmes,” Singh said and quipped, “Today, I have no promises to make but I have promises to keep.”

Emphasising that Central, State and local bodies had to work in tandem for government to be an effective instrument of development, he said the concern of most of citizens revolved around action on the front of agriculture, water, education, health and employment.

While committing to deploy most modern technology to improve lives of ordinary people, he said the government would improve broadband access and enable the required investment in IT infrastructure.

“The promotion of scientific temper must truly become a massive national movement,” the Prime Minister asserted but pointed out that that a “concerted action” was needed to deal with two perennial albeit fundamental problems of drought and floods.

“Dealing with the problem of water is an important commitment we have made as part of our new deal for Rural India,” he said.

This new deal must encompass investment in irrigation, credit deliver, availability of electricity, primary education, rural roads and modernisation of farm sector infrastructure, Singh added.

Taking a leaf from the National Common Minimum Programme, Singh said key progress in major infrastructure sectors like power, roads, railways, ports and airports would be “critical” to development.

Although committed to “widen the space” available for private enterprise and individual initiative in tune with economic reforms aimed at ending stranglehold of bureaucracy, he said governments could not be wished away, specially in developing countries like India where it had important role to play.

It will all boil down to execution and elimination of corruption across all levels of government. On that rests India’s future.

Tech Sector Recovery – or Not

WSJ writes in the wake of results that show that even as HP faces challenges, IBM and Dell are doing well.

Combined with recent cautious comments from Cisco Systems Inc., National Semiconductor Corp. and a host of business-software companies, the announcements highlighted how the tech recovery first glimpsed a year ago may already be faltering.

One troubling sign: rising inventories of semiconductors, which are at the heart of all high-tech devices. Chip makers say they expect inventories to return to normal by September. But Tuesday, Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc., a maker of semiconductor-packaging equipment that was among the first companies to feel the tech slowdown in 2000, slashed its three-week-old revenue forecast for the quarter ending in September by 19%.

The gloomy outlook has dashed hope among tech executives and investors that the sector will soon return to the supercharged growth of the late 1990s. Pummeled again yesterday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is down 12.5% for the year, and 19% from its peak in late January.

Knowledge@Wharton adds: “Technology buyers hit the brakes toward the end of the second quarter 2004, and it’s worth asking whether spending on software and hardware–not to mention capital spending overall–is being hampered by gun-shy corporate executives.”