Boeingification of Microsoft September 2, 2008
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , 4 commentsOn surface it might seem that Microsoft keeps missing the technology waves, change in consumer attitudes, don’t have their blind-spot covered but if you look deeper - it is clear that the company has become a victim of its own success.
Over the last 3-4 years, the decision making process of Microsoft has started to resemble that of Boeing, not that there is anything wrong with it but Boeing has only one competitor, worldwide while Microsoft gets poked from all different directions. It is not that people at Microsoft are not coming up with interesting products or concepts, the problem is the timing .. it is taking years before something gets out in the new “decision-by-committee” corporation.
That has made the company lethargic and it just can’t play well in the Internet economy. IE is perfect example of this .. given the monopoly, they have been just sitting on their previous versions for ages. IE6 was launched in 2001 and has over 25% marketshare. IE8 was just launched last month. This lack of foresight has given the opening to the likes Opera, Firefox, Safari, and now Chrome to keep etching away marketshare.
Microsoft has the resources to fight back but it will need a different mindset, borrow something from the yesteryears to make it competitive and nimble again. Unlike the airline industry, number of competitors in this space are only going to great larger and stronger.
Same is true of their story in mobile. Lack of comprehensive strategy has left them on the sidelines for now. Can it bounce back? It will take a little bit more than a few reorgs to prepare the company for a prolonged fight.
What will we learn from Gustav? September 1, 2008
Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, Federal, Mobile Ecosystem, Worldwide Wireless Market , add a comment
Stephen Morton/Getty Images (NYTimes)
Thankfully, Gustav won’t be as devastating as Katrina was. The lessons from the previous disaster forced the authorities to put together better evacuation plans, infrastructure contingencies, and better planning in general. Citizens also understood the gravity of the situation better having been there once before in the recent past.
From a technology perspective, there is still a lot that can be done, esp. where mobile can play a significant role in making the organization and communication in crisis better.
As I argued in my United Nations Foundation paper for the eHealth Summit in Bellagio, Italy, mobile can be used in the following ways:
As we have seen over the past many years, no country, whether in advanced state of development or in an emerging state of evolution, is immune to natural and man-made disasters. Mobile will have a significant impact on how we detect, monitor, respond, and analyze small and large-scale disasters. One of the areas where mobile will have the most significant impact is emergency response. The always-on capability of mobile will allow a channel of communication with the populace in an emergency situation. The channel can not only be used to inform but also be used to guide the affected in a very personalized way and in the process save millions of lives. Mobile will have an impact in the following areas of public safety:
Early detection – Just like life-threatening diseases, the chances of survival from a disaster are the greatest if it is detected very early. To gain an upper hand on the crises, the command-center must be in the position to take inputs from a variety of sources – humans, machines, sensors through a variety of channels – mobile, emails, phone calls, etc. By using such an infrastructure of early detection, many serious crises could be averted lowering the human cost.
Data gathering – the biggest impediment in effective command-control during an emergency is lack of data. Command centers are often operating in the dark without any real-time feeds that can help them prioritize and direct resources effectively. By placing various sensors in the impacted area as well as using the available cellular connections as sensor objects, officials will have a much better grasp on “situational awareness”[i] that can have significant impact on planning and execution of a strategy. For example, by having the data inputs of GIS, GPS, wind flow field, temperature, humidity, fuel load, topology, satellite imagery, citizen response, traffic status, evacuation response, etc., first responders in a case of a fire-event can be better prepared to get a quick grasp of the situation and respond appropriately.
Modeling and predicting disasters – Disasters don’t announce their arrival. As such, significant effort must be put in to model and predict behavior of an emergency from disease epidemic to terrorist attacks to wildfires to earthquakes. How are you going to direct an evacuation plan? How would you inform all affected citizens? What if the sensor networks fail? How does one feed the modeled data into a real-time emergency response?
Guidance in Emergency Response – The effectiveness of response is determined by how rapid it is and how good is the communication. By coordinating well with the application platforms and operators, command centers can issue very specific guidance and information to the end-users so that they know exactly what to do, which route to take, how to contact the authorities, etc. The guidance platform is not only for the end-users but will also be used by the authorities as well to coordinate their response by tracking their assets and resources, providing up-to-the-second status, and most important, based on real-time modeling, what to expect in the next few minutes and hours to come.
[i] Some of the ideas discussed in this section were developed during discussions at Future in Review 2008 conference. www.futureinreview.com.
Google launching its own browser
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentGoogle surely knows how to take the fight to the other camp. Hopefully, this will get Microsoft going and foster innovation.
From their blog post
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
India crosses the 300M mark
Posted by chetan in : Indian Wireless Market, Worldwide Wireless Market , add a commentHappy Sept.
Last month India crossed the 300M subscription mark. The country continues to add 8-9M/month. For reference, China is at around 615M and US is around 264M.
More in our upcoming global wireless data update later this month.
