EnjoyTech

This is the story of Tim Zimmer who has been working as a technician for one of the large appliance store chains. His job is to attend service calls for washers and dryers. He has seen a lot in his life; a lot has changed but a few things have stayed the same. The 80's saw a rise of homegrown IT systems and 90's was the decade of standardized backend automation where a few large vendors as well as quite a few small vendors built and sold solutions to automate a whole bunch of backend processes. Tim experienced this firsthand. He started getting printed invoices that he could hand out to his customers. He also heard his buddies in finance talking about a week-long training class to learn "computers" and some tools to make journal entries. Tim's life didn't change much. He would still get a list of customers handed out to him in the morning. He would go visit them. He would turn-in a part-request form manually for the parts he didn't carry in his truck and l...

I find it ridiculous that people are blaming Apple for job creation in China  as opposed to in the US. People are also debating how US might in-source some of these manufacturing jobs to compete with China who has sophisticated manufacturing abilities and large skilled labor force supporting these operations. They are all missing the point. This is a wrong debate. The US lost manufacturing jobs to other countries a long time ago. I find it amusing that people expect the high-tech companies such as Apple to create manufacturing jobs in the US. If Apple were to even consider this option we would not have seen the tremendous success of Apple as a company and its products. What Apple created is an ecosystem of people and companies that are doing amazing things with their platform and their devices. It's a different kind of ecosystem and America should focus on that innovation as opposed to bringing those manufacturing jobs back. On one side we are whining about the loss of manufacturin...

A lot has been said and discussed about RIM's downfall: indecisive leadership, inability to innovate at fast pace, and no clear path to recovery. I don't disagree at all with the analysis and the interpretation of the situation, but I do disagree with the conclusion that many people are drawing and vehemently disagree with their advice to RIM to keep trying to regain the smartphone market share. That train has left the station and RIM doesn't have a chance to catch up, even if they do everything that they could. But RIM may have stumbled upon something that they probably least expected. It's the BlackBerry Messaging, popularly known as BBM. We got to see the power of BBM during the London riots . During my recent trip to India, I firsthand witnessed how much of people's lives depend on BBM. These people were sad, upset, and depressed due to a RIM infrastructure outage. This is a phenomenal success. The recipe behind this success is quite simple: provide free messagi...

The two-third of world’s 4.6 billon mobile users live in the emerging markets. Millions of these users live below the poverty line and are part of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). Nokia is the market leader in these emerging markets, at least for now, with 34% market share. It’s clear from rapidly declining Nokia’s marketshare and an appointment of new CEO, Stephen Elop , that Nokia needs a second act. I believe the BOP is what could be the next big thing for Nokia. The recent NYTimes story highlights a Nokia’s service, to supply commodity data to the farmers in India, using a text message . So far, 6.3 million people have signed up for this service. Nokia is planning to roll out this service, Life tools, in Nigeria as well. This is part of their Ovi mobile business. I have written before on impact of cloud computing and mobile on the bottom of the pyramid and the importance of public policy innovation in emerging markets . The BOP is one of the biggest opportunities that Nokia curren...

In my previous post “ While Entrepreneurs Scale On The Cloud The Angels Get Supersized ” I wrote about how cloud computing is disrupting the VC industry. Continuing on the thread of entrepreneurship I am seeing more and more entrepreneurs building applications who do not belong to any formal organization, start-up or otherwise. The definition of what used to be a start-up itself is changing, primarily because of two reasons - simple and easily accessible PaaS tools to design, run, and maintain applications on the cloud and access to a market place to sell the applications. We have been witnessing this trend for the mobile applications for a while - Android as well as iPhone and now iPad. I see the same pattern for the cloud-based applications. I have seen many useful, productive, and successful applications that are designed by individual developers with no affiliation to any organization. Google has done a great job in designing the tools for the developers to build applications that ...

Today Google announced  Google Buzz . Watch the video: The chart below shows the spectacular adoption failure of Google Wave as a standalone product. This was predicted by a lot of people including myself. As Anil Dash puts it  Google Wave does not help solve a "weekend-sized problem" . Besides the obvious complex technical challenges there are three distinct adoption barriers with Google Wave and Google Buzz has capability to overcome those: Inseparable container, content, and collaboration: Changing people's behavior is much more difficult than inventing or innovating a killer technology. Most of the people still prefer to keep the collaboration persisted separately from the content or not persisted at all. Single task systems such as email, Wiki, and instant messaging are very effective because they do one and only thing really well without any confusion. Google Wave is a strong container on which Google or others can build collaboration capability but not giving an o...

CIO no longer means Career Is Over. CIOs should not underestimate their skills and organizational clout to lead the company in its sustainability efforts by being a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO). Leverage relationship with the business: As a CIO you work closely with the business and have holistic understanding of the challenges that the business faces and the growth opportunities that they aspire to go after. You can leverage the relationship with the business to own and execute the sustainability strategy and effectively measure and monitor the progress using the expertise and investment into the IT systems. You can walk your business folks through your scenario-based architecture to help them quantify the business impact of the sustainability initiatives and estimate the required transformation efforts. Start with Green IT and lead the industry: Start with the area that you are most familiar with. Reduce the carbon footprint of your IT systems by improving the PUE of the data...

I was invited as a guest blogger to Structure 09 - a day long event by GigaOM focusing on cloud computing. It was a great event with an incredible speaker line-up of thought leaders in the domain of cloud computing. The panel and keynote topics included persistence on the cloud, hosting web apps on the cloud, infrastructure design etc. I won't attempt to summarize everything that I saw and heard, instead here are some impressions: Solving interoperability with Open Source: A founding developer of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg , strongly advocated open source for the cloud for two reasons. The first reason is to achieve interoperability and the second is to ensure the business continuity when certain vendors cease to exist. As I have argued before there is a strong business case for open source on the cloud . It was great to see the reaffirmation that other thought leaders feel the same way. Operational excellence: Javier Soltero , CTO of Management Products at SpringSource, emphasiz...

Nokia announced mobile email service, Mail on Ovi, currently targeting the emerging markets . Nokia has had great success in selling reliable and inexpensive handsets in the emerging markets. In the countries such as India the consumers never used the voice mail on their landlines and went through the mobile revolution to use SMS as a primary asynchronous communication medium. Many of these users are not active email users, not at least on their mobile devices. If Nokia manages to provide ubiquitous user experience using Ovi to bridge email and SMS on not-so-advanced-data-networks it can cause disruption by satisfying asynchronous communication needs of hundreds of thousands of users. The smartphones would certainly benefit out of this offering and give Blackberry a good run for their money. Nokia completed the Symbian acquisition that makes them a company whose OS powers 50% of all the smartphones in the world. Symbian is still a powerful operating system powering more than 200 milli...