K-Logs and News Aggregators - Robb

Another super post by John Robb on how blogs (K-logs) and news aggregators can improve employee productivity.

Combining blogs, RSS aggregation, outlining and directories to construct the digital dashboard is, I think, a killer idea. It is the 21st century knowledge management platform (or atleast for the 200X-decade!). Simple concepts linked together to weave magic. Many times companies feel that unless they have spent lots of money they don't have a solution. The best ideas in life are the simplest, and when done, seemingly, the most obvious.

Courage, not Calculation...

Arun Katiyar pointed me to Esther Dyson's answer in The Edge to the question: "When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just go ahead and do what you know is right?":

In the world we live in, mathematicians and investors have become ever better at calculating risks, assessing outcomes, laying out possible scenarios. But real economic progress comes from taking challenges, not risks, and building something fantastic despite the odds, because you know you're smarter and more dedicated and more persistent, and you can gather and lead a better team, than any rational calculation would indicate. That's how new businesses get built, new markets get opened, new value gets created.

And real political, social and ethical progress, likewise, comes not just from negotiating a carefully calibrated "win-win" balance-of-power compromise, matching move for move, but from taking the lead, challenging the other guy to follow, showing the way forward. We make progress by stretching the imagination and doing things we won't regret. When you cannot predict consequences, then you need to consider your conscience and do what's right.

We need not calculation, but courage!

Wonderful! There are times when we do need to think from the heart, and not the head. The heart (and courage) is what guides the entrepreneur in the early days, when is trying to invent the future and make others see a world that does not exist. There is self-doubt many times a day. Will it work? Will it become a profitable business? Will one get customers? Is this the right path? If in doubt, these are the words to remember.

Emerging Technologies - Business Week

A BW special report. One of the articles is an interview with Clay Christensen on "Why Innovations Score -- Or Stumble". Writes Business Week:

One of the most important rules of successful innovation is to develop technologies for new markets where industry stalwarts have no status quo to protect -- and no need to steal someone else's customer to succeed. In management-speak, this is called "taking root in disruption."

One example Christensen points to is the rise of the personal computer. The original Apple II computer was targeted at kids -- the only customers willing to play around with such a dorky machine. But as PCs improved, parents started paying attention. By listening to these new customers, Apple and rival PC makers were able ultimately to unseat the computing incumbents, who were still focused on mainframes and other large, professional computers.

According to Christensen, a company with a new technology has only a 6% chance of success if it tries to make a similar but better product than an incumbent and sell it to the same customers. By contrast, he says, the chances of success for a "disruptive strategy" are 33%.

Equally important is the principle that new technologies should disrupt competitors, not customers. Too often, new technologies try to make customers change the way they do things. Instead, Christensen says, innovation should help customers do things they already do more easily, conveniently, and for less money.

Interesting points for us to ponder when we start marketing our products.

Cloudmark fights Spam

Cloudmark, a startup, has come with an interesting anti-spam tool. Kevin Werbach: a distributed response to a distributed platform.

Windows and Mac Users - Mossberg (WSJ)

Walter Mossberj, one of my favourite columnists, writes this week on the type of users whom the Apple Mac is suited for. It would be good to do a similar article for Linux. That probably won't happen, because most of the world has given up on using a Linux desktop.

There's the world which can afford to pay for it, and then there's the world which just pirates it. Either way, its Windows everywhere. So, the solution is not to just create another OS, but to change the game from the hardware side. Think disruptively about dramatically reducing the cost of the system on which the OS runs, and then create an OS for that low-cost hardware. That will make people stand up and take notice. That is what creates a new market. That is what we want to do with the Thin Client-Thick Server approach. That is the opportunity for Linux on the Desktop. This market doesn't exist today, but will be at least 500 million (the current installed base of PCs and Windows) by 2007.

Sun to give away Application Server

Sun is giving away its AppServer to try and catch up with BEA and IBM in the USD 2 billion market. Maybe we should try one. Had been thinking of JBoss, which is open-source. The AppServer with the J2EE/EJB interface is the platform on which to build the enterprise software components.

What the World's Poor need

James Wolfensohn of the World Bank: "When you talk about the use of technology to bridge the digital divide, China probably will be in 10 years the No. 1 example. But it will be closely followed by India. The interesting thing is that on the Voices of the Poor study, where we interviewed 60,000 poor people in 60 countries, we had a number of the very poorest come to the bank for the launching of the book, and I asked them what was the number one thing they wanted. They said technology and information, they didn't say food, they didn't say charity, they said technology and information. Poor people know as well as anybody else that what keeps them poor is lack of competitiveness and lack of knowledge." So true!.

That is why the most important thing to focus on in briding the digital divide is to takes Bill Gates' earlier vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home" a reality in every emerging market of the world. This means computers at USD 100 and software for USD 5 per month.

Asian IT in 2007

IDC's John Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice-president, in an interview in The Far Eastern Economic Review replies to a question on "What will Asian IT companies be focusing on in 2007?":

I think they'll be most active in the simpler things--they'll be making servers, not just PCs, but they'll be making low-end servers, they'll be making appliance servers, they'll be making all the chips . . . I think they'll still be doing that, but at the same time building up indigenous software and services organizations along the way Israel has done. I don't think they'll be exporting intellectual property, exporting a lot of software packages or multinational services firms unless they acquire their way in. But every other geography is looking to Asia to grow . . . it's like the last great frontier for IT vendors and it's the indigenous vendors who have the best shot at taking advantage of that. So I think Asians should be looking at Asia first and Europe or the U.S. second. There's a whole regional second tier that we think is going to build up . . . Globalization has gone pretty far. Now it's time for regionalization to happen.

Agree with him on most points except the part about Asian cos. not exporting IP. This is in fact the real opportunity. Asia has about 70% of the world's SMEs. Let's start creating solutions for these companies. Its a big market, running into millions of companies. Over time, move upwards to disruptively target the bigger enterprises. Unfortunately, most Asian companies are only looking at outsourced manufacturing and services -- that mentality needs to change.

Thick Server - Operating System

One of the ideas we had recently was to think of what we are doing as creating an Operating System on the Thick Server. This gives us a framework to think from a marketing standpoint also -- we need to look at what Microsoft did in the mid-1980s! There aren't too many OS companies to study, though.

What we need to look at is doing what we do best: integrating (assimilating) software. On the Thick Server, we have to put together a unique package of applications together for the SME. We've already been doing that in Messaging (built on top of a stripped down version of Red Hat) as part of our MailServ product.

The MailServ product has support for Messaging, Instant Messaging, Proxy, Firewall, Anti-Virus and LDAP. On top of that now get added functionalities like a File Server, Print Server, Terminal Server (to support the Thin Clients), Web Server, Desktop Apps, etc. This together becomes the Thick Server OS. The challenge lies in integrating them all together to weak seamlessely.

The proposition to end users can become very compelling: Thin Clients can bring down the Client Machine cost by 60-70% (assuming the Thin Clients cost about USD 150). This is cheaper even then what Walmart's Lindows-based PC (which is USD 299 in the US excluding monitor). The software costs can come down 80-90% (no need for MS Windows and MS Office). This is what can dramatically increase PC penetration in emerging markets.

TECH TALK: Rethinking Enterprise Software: Digital Dashboard

What is the most popular use of computers? No, it is not for email or web surfing or even chat. It is for playing video games. The gaming interface provides a real-time snapshot into the world in which we immerse ourselves when playing a game. In the words of Ramesh Jain (co-founder of Praja), it is an “experiential environment, where the query and presentation spaces are the same”, thus providing a more wholistic picture. It is, therefore, not surprising to find three-year-olds learning to play games with ease. Video game interfaces provide natural environments, with their real-time, interactive display.

The Digital Dashboard for the Enterprise needs to do something similar – provide a real-time “state of the enterprise”, showing information relevant to what one is doing currently, and providing the necessary interfaces to dig deeper, if necessary. It builds on the “management by exception” philosophy propounded by Vivek Ranadive (of Tibco, and author of “The Power of Now”). The Digital Dashboard is the user interface to the Real-time Enterprise.

The Digital Dashboard needs to become the new desktop. When one switches on the computer, there is no need to show a collection of icons entitled My Computer, My Documents, Network Neighbourhood, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. What users in the enterprise need to see is an integrated information screen, which has events/news, or even alarms from different sensors. More than Icons, what’s needed are Insights. More than Applications, what’s needed is Assimilation and Value-Added Aggregation.

Information has become always on – it needs to tell you when it has changed, instead of you asking. Writes Kevin Werbach in Release 1.0 (December 2001): “Even though real-time computing involves machines, it becomes valuable only when it can get information to people who can make use it through good monitoring systems.”

This is where the Information Bus and the publish-subscribe concepts come into play. Subscription and Syndication are the two key concepts to build the digital dashboard. The RSS feed with the weblog work as the integrator. An RSS Aggregator can collect all the events from feeds that one has subscribed to. These “events” are published on to the information bus. Publishers can be news feeds, other weblogs, Mail, or the enterprise applications. Each of the event entries can be annotated and posted on to weblogs and redistributed (syndicated, again via RSS).

RSS

It is important to understand RSS. This is the real innovation in publishing in recent times. WebReference provides an introduction:

Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for your site. Originally developed by Netscape to fill channels for Netcenter, RSS has evolved into a popular means of sharing content between sites. RSS defines an XML grammar (a set of HTML-like tags) for sharing news. Each RSS text file contains both static information about your site, plus dynamic information about your new stories, all surrounded by matching start and end tags. Each story is defined by an tag, which contains a headline TITLE, URL, and DESCRIPTION.

RSS thus provides a mechanism for creating an “information flow” across websites. WebReference, once again:

RSS, is a natural for layering on additional services. In addition to displaying news on other sites and headline viewers, RSS data can flow into other products and services like PDA's, cell phones, email ticklers. and even voice updates. Email newsletters can easily be automated with RSS. Even more compelling, affiliate networks and partners of like-minded sites (say a collection of Linux sites) can harvest each other's RSS feeds, and automatically display the new stories from the other sites in the network, driving more traffic throughout.

Tomorrow: Digital Dashboard (continued)