Google Grows

Google is growing. Recent post in NYTIMES talk about how Google's share in search market grew.

The research firm Hitwise, which measures Web audiences, said that Google accounted for 58.3 percent of all searches in the United States in March of 2006. By November of 2006, Google’s share had grown to 61.8 percent, and by this November, to 65.1 percent. That’s more than triple the share of its nearest rival, Yahoo, and more than nine times that of third place finisher Microsoft.

Microsoft has been trying out and out to kill Google's growth. To an extent where they are paying corporates for using Live Search and trying to raise concerns over Google's acquisition of DoubleClick.

NewYork times article has also mentioned that:

“As long as Google’s competitors are aiming to be like Google or almost as good as Google, Google will continue gaining share,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “It has more resources and engineers focused on search. It is an arms race that they’ve won by a landslide.”

Competetion is going to grow, but with speculation about Google's intention to launch Androind powered phones in February can leave competetors way behind.

Year 2007 was about iPhone. Year 2008 will be about Android.

Updated: Here is an article at slashdot.org which portrays Google and OSS as big threats to Microsoft's survival. Linux is increasingly being used and market share is growing. Unless, Microsoft revisits it's pricing and "openness".

Hilarious one on Facebook Beacon

One of the blogs that I read often is Geek And Poke.

Here is a smart and hilarious one by Olive Widder on Facebook Beacon.

I am sure Google Reader's privacy issue is not as bad this. ;)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

INTEL coined the term Platform as a Service (PaaS) in their post on 9 Nov, 2006. But the applicability was more inclined towards "the idea that a hardware platform can be architected with service-oriented concepts from the very beginning, having built-in service abstractions available at the bare-metal level."
But, salesforce.com has come up with the first (Software) Platform as a Service. They claim to be the first. Check this video.

1. User Interface as a Service
2. Logic as a Service
3. Integration as a Service
4. Database as a Service

Interesting? Read more here

IT in India heading for a fall

I posted this in my personal blog. Just copying it here.

Economist in it's post Is India's computer-services industry heading for a fall? talks about the challenges that India Inc. will face.

The reasons that they quote are:
1. Insufficient infrastructure
2. Talent shortage - India Inc. runs on man power.
3. Employee "jumping"
4. Competition
5. Future threats - American economy slump, automation

While I agree to all the points, I have few points to add.

Methodology and capability to deliver

Foremost challenge Indian IT giants face is the struggle to offer innovative solutions. Please note that I am not talking about product companies and only about IT services companies. I have not seen major application development deals being won on the basis of traditional methodologies. There is a lack of ability in solving new business problems.

All IT companies have "Onsite-Offshore model" and their proprietary "development methodologies". Essentially, these are all flavors of the same thing. All of these showcase the company's ability to deliver and how it can help the client go to market with reduced costs. But, you cannot see these IT firms pitching in for new technologies. Atlease not too many of them. If I try to find out, how many IT services firms India have expertise in ILOG JRules or IBM Process Server, there will be only very few who can offer solutions. Unless the client asks for a specific technology to be implemented, or a Software Products vendor recommends a services firm to the client, this never happens. There are CoEs (Center of Excellence) coming up in most of the IT firms to nurture talent and help innovation. But, the effectiveness has to be questioned. Also, the employees in services firms are so busy doing billable work that they hardly find time to spend on CoEs. However, there are new small firms sprouting all over India, trying to provide innovative solutions, but they do not have the nerve to hit big deals. Here comes the other factor, which I want to talk about.

Resources

The quality of resources have gone down. IT firms are increasingly relying on Non-IIT graduates, and offlate B.Sc, B.A and B.Com graduates. The justification is that these resources are cheap and the work that we have can be done by these guys. But, with this approach, how will you nurture innovation? Another aspect to the resources issue is career growth. After 2 years of industry experience, most of them wants to get into management side. This, either leads to employee leaving the company, or we end up seeing a lateral hire/fresher.

Quality of recruitment also have be inspected. 80% of the hires turnout to be just machines with no brains of their own. SOA is the latest buzzword. While you see sales team and architects suggesting SOA based approach, how many employees in an IT services firm understand what SOA is? How far can this organic growth go? With dollar value falling and rising inflation, how will we sustain the 10-15% growth in salaries?

Aquisition and merger trend

Yasu Tech bought by SAP. Wipro acquires AMS and Nervewire. Infosys acquires Expert Information Service. And the list goes on ...

This is a good strategy. Inorganic growth, no IT investment required, no more hiring required. Acquiring European firms will definitely help penetration into Non-English market. But, how will they face the challenge of integration issues? We have seen this time and again.

My project lead in one of my previous projects, had told aroudn 2 years back. Most of what we do now will be automated. We will end up becoming machines doing maintenance job. I hope not. All of this when Internet is facing a meltdown in another 3 years.

Innovation - Football way

A recent post I ran in to by Tim Leberecht was really insightful. Most of it can really be applied to IT services.

The post has a quote by Ronaldinho, the soccer player:

"The important thing is to keep on innovating and finding a way to surprise. You always look to surprise, with dribbling, a new move, a new pass. (...) As long as I believe I have the creativity for that, that's what I'll try and do. I'm never going to lose my characteristics because that's what I know how to do. I want to mix everything that is innovative with the same things as always. Perhaps the fans expect me to do all the tricks, the opponents as well. If you don't innovate, they all take the ball away from you. I believe it's important to innovate in order to avoid repetition."

It concludes by saying:

Soccer can be researched, carefully planned, and strategically devised -- however, the most beautiful thing about this "beautiful game" is the fact that there is no lag between idea and implementation. Creativity can be immediately applied and has to be found on the pitch again and again. Every match is a blank slate. There is no history, only anticipation. Nothing is ever the same. This is what business leaders can learn from soccer: Innovation is, literally, a "play," and the best players will win.

So true. Like I said in my previous post, innovate and promote innovation.

Technology Trends 2008

Economist writes in the post about trends in technology in 2008.

In short:

1. Surfing will slow
2. Surfing will detach
3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open

Another one I found as far as IT is concerned: Green IT
Read more here

Collaboration in large and growing Enterprises

How will you manage collaboration among employees in an Enterprise with over 80,000 odd employees? Damn difficult.

Study states that the more employees your company has, the less productive each of these employees are.

...when you triple the number of employees, you halve their productivity

How do we address this? How can a large Enterprise bring in people together to provide innovative solutions?

Organizations have invested money in existing systems and there is a resistance to change since it works. Another concern that you hear frequently is security. Organisations implemented Wiki for Knowledge Management and it was a significant step for them. With Wiki, you can create and publish content and get lot of people to contribute. But, it is not really a communication mechanism. Feedback being an integral part of communication, Wiki is not really helpful.

Serena has introduced Facebook as it's intranet. The press release states:

As Web 2.0 technologies such as instant messaging (IM), wikis, and texting make communication faster and more efficient, the “human” element of communication can feel increasingly removed. How can people bring that sense of personal interaction and community back into the workplace? Surprisingly, through one of the hottest technologies around—Facebook, a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.

Directorate of National Intelligence has deployed MediaWiki, blogging software and Google search. This should take away the security concerns from the minds of people.
Using blogs will take away the worry of how it looks and you need to worry only about the content. Once you have your employees subscribing to your blogs, publishing news and communicating down-stream is a piece of cake. Wipe off emails.

It's high time to bring Internet trends to Intranet. iGoogle for example can be used to provide portlets/gadgets to connect to business and at the same time, it provides Google Talk gadgets for collaborating with employees with in the company. Employees can create project specific gadgets to publish information and accelerate productivity.

Here is an example of how blogging helped project management. This, however, is not the best display of it's application and has tremendous untapped potential.

We used Wiki in one of our projects, but it has it's own limitations in it's application on project management. The complexity of understading wiki formatting did not prove motivating. It's support for rich media was also limited. I would rather suggest, we have a blogger, and use it as a project dashboard. This presents an informal way of sharing people's ideas and the author is required to bother only about the content. This encourages feedback and also provides automatic RSS signals for any new content.

Most financial services firms or any technology company runs on technology and 90% of it's work force make their living out of technology.
Facilitate collaboration and promote innovation.