Major Technology Transformations & How Time Flies

I am writing this post after a long time. In the hiatus between the previous post and this, technology powering our lives has moved several notches. Android has moved to Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 for tablets, Apple has released iOS 5, 3G is a reality in my country and hardware capabilities have leapfrogged many times that allow SAP and Oracle to build applications provide generational leap in application performance by concepts such as in-memory computing. It is also a fact that one of the towers of innovation in the tech world, Steve Jobs is no more.

 

The cloud over cloud has somewhat evaporated, with organizations and service providers having accepted the cloud as a fellow citizen of enterprise IT landscape. The Android Market now has over half million apps, and I use one of them even for banking! I have also upgraded my Android phone from 1.6 to 2.1 to 2.3.

 

Apple and Samsung are killing one another over intellectual property with no salvation in sight. And for one, the world instead of loving competition is loathing it.

 

Hope to keep up the writing more  frequently now. Lets see if I can target 3 posts a week if not more. What do you say?

Blackberry Collapse Will have Cataclysmic Impact for Organisations not having a Plan B

Even as the announcement of a job cut and some management alignment are out in the open, many observers feel Blackberry is collapsing under the weight of its own organisation that does not foster rapid innovation. Whether R.I.M will actually go down under and be sold off to some suiter such as Microsoft is a matter of early speculation, it remains a fact that businesses that have routinely issued Blackberry devices to their employees need to start looking at options. While no one has a corporate offering so complete as R.I.M, it is the devices that have got R.I.M that have got them into trouble.

If one sees two models of iPhones running on two different versions of iOS, or two Android phones running two different versions of Android, the user notices a very significant change in the total experience. That is  not the case with Blackberry.

Nokia Innovation Derailed; Will there be a Reprise?

The mobile devices industry is on the cusp of yet one more potential upset. Not too many years back, Nokia was an industry standard of what a good mobile device is all about it. At least in several parts of the world, including India.

Then someone sold them the concept of bottom of pyramid too literally. Nokia, no doubt a company that is capable of great innovations, almost completely closed its eyes on the top end of the market and focussed exclusively on making ‘cheap’ phones for the mass market. And today they realize that the sands below the feet have shifted. Instead of innovating at platform and convergence level, they probably were too focussed in cutting down the manufacturing costs to the point that they now probably compete with the cheap Chinese counterfeits. While their foray into frugal manufacturing may have succeeded, they have completely lost out innovation leadership to likes of Apple, HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc.

 

In fact, HTC and Samsung have managed to do exact opposite of Nokia. Few years back, they were perhaps considered as manufacturers of cheap devices, Today they are focussed on top of the line high value devices and their devices have been accepted and succeeded in the market.

 

The question is, what will be the new act in the play? Will Nokia continue its stodgy march towards finishing itself, or will there be a change of course. The answer perhaps lie in its history. Nokia began as a wood pulp company, dealt in rubber, made cables, tyres, etc. So there is a history of reorientation and course correction. As a company, Nokia may today be known for its mobile handsets business, but its past agility clearly shows that it has a great propensity to take bold decisions. IMHO, a healthy and refocussed Nokia will be a great thing for the consumer. Hope that happens sooner than later. I am in for my next Nokia.

Enterprises are Becoming More Daring With the Cloud

As the foundations of this new idea based on the twin concepts aggregation and disposability find better grounding, enterprises are getting more daring with it. The best example is that all vendors, including the messiah of client server – SAP has joined the bandwagon.

To be fair, many people confuse SAAS and Cloud Computing as two sides of the same coin. It isn’t. You can have enterprise applications running seamlessly without any change and even have them hosted on the cloud. In other words, not every application hosted on the cloud is a browser based application. And not in every instance, is the application run on rented time.

These changes signify evolution. It is clear to me that after an initial splash in the form of GApps, even Google has found itself largely disoriented in this space. Microsoft, on the other hand, with its Dynamics portfolio of largely bought out applications, seems to be gaining ground. What is surprising to me indeed is that in this technology wave, no absolutely new vendor has emerged as a shooting star – something that happened in several other technology waves.