Saturday, July 12, 2008
Why Google may not win the Social war
This piece would not happened without the encouragement from Andy Mulholland, Global CTO of Capgemini. He was kind enuf to post this to his CTO blog, and we did manage a pretty decent response. The original posting can be found on http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2008/06/why_google_may_not_win_the_soc.php Read on...
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I was very interested by the views of a younger colleague – who therefore is more representative of the mainstream social networking – and I asked him if he would write a guest Blog piece. This is the result and I think it ought to encourage some really good responses. Here it is:
In the past few weeks, I have been spending most of my time reading, debating and challenging some popular wisdom around the future of the social networking scene. I would like to share some of my conclusions and ask for your reactions to my thoughts.
Microblogging site Twitter was one of them and I find it exciting. However, leveraging Twitter for business purposes provides a different challenge. My twittering for business quest got a major push when I read the story of how Southwest Airlines is using Twitter for customer service and brand protection. A bit of googling, got me further twitter success stories at companies like Jetblue, Fox Chicago and Comcast. Companies and users can very easily do a brand search on Tweetscan and create a feed for any new postings. Twitter is quickly becoming the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs and companies are latching on. While Twitter is big in the US and Japan, it is yet to make much inroads into the UK, but looks like we are onto something and I would love to hear more stories.
The other thing I am keenly looking forward to is 'Web Slices' that make their debut with IE8 next year. While Microsoft has gone to great lengths to explain the whys and the hows, a simplistic view of Web Slices is to look at them as glorified mini-RSS feeds located inside the web browser real estate. So why visit the Facebook website, if all your friend’s status updates can be fed directly into your browser? Or Why refresh your ebay page, if a part of your browser is updated directly when the auction is updated. It is a simple idea whose time has come and I think it is the next evolution. My reasons are based on history. After Blogs, we had micro-blogging. The likes of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc are taking the Internet to the next level of interactivity. Similarly after RSS we need micro-RSS technologies like Web Slices to make the Net more useful. I am sure once we have got used to web slices, we will wonder how we lived so long without it.
While the trend to become micro seems to be working fine, the other end of the spectrum is where things get a bit tricky. Most technology trends seem to find a flavour in trying to be Mega (or rather Meta). During the early days of search engines, when Altavista and Yahoo Search ruled the world; there was a brief period of Meta search engines - search engines that would parse your query to other engines and displayed the results. The theory of having such a search engine is sound and some of these still exist (Mamma.com, dogpile.com, search.com, metacrawler.com), but they have barely got out of the blocks after all these years. A similar grave yard can be seen in the Instant Messaging scene. IM fatigue gave rise to Meta or Multi-protocol IMs like Trillian, Gaim, Meebo etc which could consolidate your AOL, Yahoo Messenger and MSN among other. While such technologies have scored with early adopters, the success of these among the wider Internet user community is still debateable.
This sets me up nicely into the debate around OpenSocial from Google. While much is being said about what it can do, it is still very unclear on what it can deliver. The big stumbling block is the lack of Facebook in the OpenSocial movement. Also, at this stage OpenSocial is more ‘Open Widget’ rather than ‘Open Social’ since a ‘list of friends’ of one social network cannot connect with others through OpenSocial. OpenSocial does provide a platform for developers to port their widgets across networks. I think Google is unfortunately caught in the wrong place, since a move towards Open Widget does not provide too much end user benefit, but a move towards becoming a meta-social engine does not bode well with history. Will Facebook do to Google what Google did to other search engines? I guess we will wait and watch, but I am not giving up my Facebook account in a hurry.
As the whole point is the ‘social’ or people aspect it will follow the direction that we all choose to make happen, so I hope this will start a good debate on how you think the future will go.Labels: CTO blog, Google, OpenSocial, Twitter, Web 2.0
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Death of the back office
I think the whole story about offshore will go away!!
No, I don’t mean, offshore will not work anymore, but I believe, offshore will be yet another commodity within the next five years. The 500 of the Fortune 500, the 1000 of the Fortune 1000, businesses in the US, UK and continental Europe (the so called new offshore battleground) will have already offshored. What needs to be offshored, will have been offshored. Quantum leaps in bottomline growth via offshoring will have been factored in. Marginal bottomline gains will continue to be made via a mixture of
1) Location: Which country to offshore ie. India, China, Poland etc
2) Automation: Anything that can be automated, should be automated
3) Project Delivery Pyramid and Efficiency gains: Flatten the delivery pyramid (more junior resources) and reduce the number of people via efficiency gains.
4) Pricing Models: Service oriented pricing, output based pricing etc etc
5) Business Process changes: Adopt industry best practices and install packages to implement them (chicken and egg story here)
Debates around choice of offshore location and level of automation will continue in the newer future – since these are the easiest parameters to tweak. However, I think cost reductions via pyramid and efficiency gains probably carry the highest risk in the new scheme of things. Similarly changes to pricing models will continue to tweak the bank balance.
However, points 1-4 will only deliver marginal gains to businesses which are currently outsourcing some or all their tasks. I believe the next few years will require businesses to swing the pendulum back to their front offices. It will come not thru taking more meat off the bone via cost cutting, but by changing the way we do business. Businesses will need to change by changing the way they address customers, the way they innovate products and services, they way they extend their brand.
Two companies equally admired (and loathed) by me, Dell and Apple are prime examples of this phenomenon. Both have taken major chunks of cost out of their bottomline. I am not even sure where their products are made these days – except that they arrive in the post 10 days after they are ordered. However, both companies are facing very diverging futures. While Dell continues to thrive in the sub-1000 GBP PC/laptop market, it still finds it difficult to break into the lucrative gaming PC/laptop market.. Why? – as I cannot see Michael Dell playing Halo 3 in his blue suit, similarly a green+black Dell gaming laptop does not appeal to me either. As Dell struggles to break the top end, it is getting a run for its money by Lenovo et al at the lower price bracket. Any guesses on it future is not worth making.
Apple on the other hand, has re-invented itself in the product innovation space. A company with no future less than a decade ago has been revived thanks to the iPod. An iPod is a simple laptop hard disk or a clumsy USB memory stick with a fancy cover. But it was Apple which reinvented a commodity product into a Christmas must have toy – and Steve Jobs has been laughing all the way to the bank. I believe, we will see more product innovations on the iPod rather than simple extensions on size (4, 8, 30, 60, 80GB.. what next – and what happens when a Chinese company comes out with a 300GB mp3 player?). iPhone is a good extension of the brand – but we need more. I believe, the only thing that will differentiate Apple and the 300GB Chinese company will be the customer experience. After all, a brand is nothing but an experience and this will be a new battleground after cost and commoditisation creates market shakeouts.
This is also a more difficult battle since, unlike offshoring, customer experience is ethereal and winds can change without notice. I am sure Apple did not expect the force of customer backlash when they dropped the price of the iPhone within weeks of the launch. The media has been awash with reports of customer feeling cheated. The $100 handouts by Apple may only go a small distance in getting back some of the lost goodwill.
As the service offshore industry matures, the battle will move back to the front office. The current credit crunch and looming recession will only accelerate the need for the fight for the customer. As any trained stock market punter will tell you, buy when the markets are low: Business will have to learn to attract more customers rather than just reduce costs. The pendulum is indeed swinging.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
From Korma to Vindaloo
As you would have figured out, India is slowly becoming the ‘Kitchen of the IT world’. We are dishing out whatever the world is ordering or has an appetite for. So whether it is Siebel Upgrade, Oracle CRP in a week, SAP in a box - the kettle is on 24x7. I don’t make any pretensions that we get it right all the time, and that everyone is ok with curry. However, it is still a great thing to enjoy especially, since we can alter the flavour to suit every taste. Little wonder that Tesco has a ‘Indian Food Heat Guide’ in its world food aisle. A bit of caveat emptor – If Vindaloo is not your cuppa, why not try the Korma – we have got it sorted
The Rightshore™ kitchen is motoring along well. The great thing about the kitchen is that you get opportunities to work with multiple front offices. Indeed they do say cooking Indian ‘Balti’ is really simple. All you need is 3 basic types of gravy – Yellow, Yellow-Red and Red – and you dunk in your meat or veggies as per order and presto, you have the full range from Korma to Vindaloo. Indian IT is a bit like that too, we do the full gravy range from Bespoke Java/.Net to Package Siebel/SAP; Dunk in ‘Industrialisation (low prices) of the Back Office’ and ‘Intimacy from the Front Office’ and presto, a great value proposition for the client.
I can continue gazing out and wondering why is it taking the Front Office so long to take the order, but my yellow gravy is starting to boil over and I need to run. In future editions, I hope to share with you some of the recipes for success. But at the moment my greatest fear is someone in India ordering for a Chicken Glasgow or a Lamb Liverpool for they don’t exist either!!!
-This article by me appeared in the Capgemini 'Organic Kitchen' CRM Newsletter.. (C) Capgemini
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Service of Nations
The two buzz words that is attracting a lot of attention these days is SOA or Service Oriented Architecture and Shared Services. Will talk about Shared Services later, however SOA intrigues me. Not necessarily because of what it does but because of the aura around it and the hype that it creates. Put simply, it means, that a certain ‘service provider’ will be able to provide the service to anyone who request it. I don’t think it is a new big idea. I think it has been around for some time. Nearly decade ago, I remember working on OCX, and then component programming (COM/DCOM) etc etc. I don’t think the new SOA concept was very different from this. At a very basic level, the very fact you can have an Ms-Excel within Ms-Word or Ms-Powerpoint is a very deconstructed version on SOA according to me. (Purist look away!!!)
I am sure that the purist would want to look at much stronger opinions at how SOA adds up. I have seen very little of it in action. The only souped up working implementation that I have seen, was while working for a bank in
Kotler has a book called ‘Marketing of Nations’, Adam Smith has ‘Wealth of Nations’, as we globalise further, are we seeing ‘Services of Nations’ coming into play. Last decade we saw the rise of
My mind wanders to the fact that, does this mean that
Meanwhile, Food for thought, does it mean we would soon have
Friday, September 15, 2006
Writing for Sanity and Insanity (& IBM)
Me getting back to writing has had varying reactions from different people who have navigated to the site. Some cant understand why I did it, and if there is any hope in writing a blog in the first place, when our time can be better spent ‘doing stuff’. Others have been a bit more supportive. Though I am not sure how much is lip service and how much is genuine.
I think writing is not an ability that everyone possesses. However, the emergence of blog and vblogs and mblogs etc, have provided people with the ability to stick their thoughts on the web without much rethink. It does have its up-sides since we all get our release, but the downside is that it the whole thing starts looking a bit like a gutter with quiet a mishmash of thoughts going nowhere. But then, not everything in life needs to run with a bottom line attached. It can be a stagnant cess pool with no cross currents driving across them. It can be bog that boggles the mind and the mindless. Eventually, someone will find a business idea that can string these together and make enuf money to line someones bank account or a boat. Little wonder that sites like Blogspot and Youtube are going great guns.
While writing may be for the active mind, the rest of the divided world needs to let some steam off too!! During one of my chats with a friend on strategies to drive Internet traffic, he suggested that I should pose questions or queries for the reader to respond to. According to him, everyone wants to be heard and want to give their opinion on everything under the sun. This should have a cascade effect on site traffic. I have been using Yahoo Answers, and it is exactly the same phenomenon. I posed some random queries about Cameras, Golf, Relationships etc. It is very interesting to see how the world at large reacts, and wants to be heard. Sure enuf there is a business idea lurking there too. Maybe sites like TrinTrin, Arzoo etc that wanted to get into Social/Open networking systems were ahead of its time and went under. However, more solid business models like CollabNet are staying afloat. As the CollabNet website boasts “Today, more than 800,000 developers and IT project managers use CollabNet to collaboratively develop software and deliver better products.”. Now that is a thought
Quite recently, one of my mentors, had a peek at my blog, and sent me a note in his rustic style (laced with the chosen expletives) While the note itself made interesting reading, he liked the fact that I am trying to retain my sanity thru this. Indeed, it takes 10 minutes of the day to keep the system unclogged. In case you still have doubts about the insane world, check the body copy of this advertisement from IBM “In a world flattened by globalisation and collaboration, where the riptide of commoditisation threatens to pull us into a sea of sameness, the key to staying on top is to do something no one else does.To do something special. That’s where IBM comes in….” Q.E.D (ROFL :) )
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Virgin Atlantic v/s Jet Airways and FC Kohli
I had a distinct hope that I would be able to write more ever since I discovered email blogging, however the chaotic work day can keep one away from it. So it is a triumph of human (read laziness) over technology to help write this one. The reason I wrote this is because, this idea struck me in a
One of the things that FCK mentioned was the convergence of hardware and software. Acc to him, anyone has a hardware advantage, would finally win the software war. He had a fair point. The best example was the increased convergence (read collapse) of software into hardware in the mobile phone industry. As you see these days, most of the software is now hardware, and phones are becoming more powerful thanks to all the embedded software. I lingered on it for some time, but it looked plausible.
On my way to
On my way back, I flew the
