Synergise IT

The internet boom since the mid 90s is more than 10 years now and kids and youth nowadays are more techno savvy than many adults. Just for example, I was in Singapore a month back and a primary school boy was chatting to someone on msn via his mobile phone in a train. There is also an advert on TV in Australia that says by the time a child is eight years old, the child would have taken in more information than their grand parents in a lifetime (not sure if this is true though).

I work in a consultancy firm with alot of young people and for us to learn how to setup and use wikis, blogs and stuff like that is just so simple. However, at my client’s project, getting some of the older folks to work on excel spreadsheet can be a nightmare. Adoption of technology is just much slower with the baby boomers - in general.

Therefore I would like to infer that if your organisation is predominantly younger people, Gen X / Y, then then likelihood of enterprise 2.0 to work is higher.

I was just thinking about the whole idea of open source and software being free.

Peer production is a great idea. With the whole world pouring in their talents and ideas into a product. However, why would anyone do that? Why would I program something on a Sat afternoon instead of having a beer by the pool/beach?

Everyone does it for a certain reason, I believe. Some might do it to build up their resume, some might be because the company that the person works for support open source and pays people to do it. Some might be due to passion for programming.

However, assuming that everyone on earth needs to make money for a living and would try to maximise their income, then why would open source work? There are a number of websites like odesk and elance which offers paid programming work. I do understand that companies like IBM is pouring money into open source software like linux but what about other software? There are a huge number of projects out there which is smaller and still very successful.

If you have any idea why people contribute to open source, please leave me a comment. Thanks heaps.

Google apps team edition was just released and as the name states, it has the power to collaborate! Check out the YouTube Video. I guess for all the Google apps users out there, there isn’t any rocket science in what you are about to watch and some of these functionality has been around for a while.

As technology evolves towards SOA, open source, ready made web services and global collaboration, IT consulting firms must evolve as well. Traditionally, IT consulting are after large cash rich clients where they are able to fork out millions and billions of dollars and invest in IT. Consulting firms charge a huge amount as well and earn truck loads of cash from a big client. These projects varies from small functionality implementation to large end to end transformation project. Many of these projects involve customising off the shelf software like Oracle and SAP.

However, with the changes in technology development, delivering value for clients does not come in the form of software anymore but more in the form of strategy, aligning business and IT, change management and good system architecture.

Consulting firms must continue to develop their in house technical expertise but I believe, in future, it will be a small team of highly skilled developers instead of large warehouses of developers.

There is a highly interesting blog entry posted by David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer - Yahoo! and the future of the Internet. He said:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

I do think that if Microsoft does buy over Yahoo, the competition in the online world would be even more intensive and aggressive. There will be three very big players in the online world - Mircosoft, Google and the open source world. We have seen wonders in the open source community so far with traditional successful examples like linux, apache and mysql being so widely used by web servers nowadays. Online traffic for content is also moving towards user driven sites like Wikipedia and YouTube.

The people in the online world is extremely powerful and Microsoft or Google must appease the internet community as a whole. Internet is a free and open platform - no one can control it fully.

Many years ago, I had a chat with my dad (he runs a small construction firm) and he commented that its difficult to compete with the big construction firms as they have the money to invest in technology which increases their business process, performance and efficiency.

SaaS has solved this problem for small companies. Office 2.0 database has a long list of SaaS providers for small companies to use.

The next step is for small companies to experience the power of global sourcing that large companies enjoy through outsourcing.

Collaboration across nations is just not just about cost savings but having access to a pool of global talent. Global collaboration is about capability. Its about experiencing endless possibilities and growth and innovation. As long as a company has an idea, they can find an expert around the world, get their expert advice, build and implement it. In fact this is something that anyone can enjoy - large or small companies.

I have heard people say, globalise or die but now I believe its “Collaborate or die”

The deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is an interesting one. Why Microsoft is interested in Yahoo? What are the strengths of Yahoo that interest Microsoft?

Yahoo
Yahoo is great for online content and innovation. They have heaps of sites like Y! Sports, Y! Movies that generates alot of online traffic - which is something that live.com doesn’t have. Yahoo is absolutely innovative as well. Buying De.li.cious, Flickr previously, displays the fact that they have recognised web 2.0 is a phenomenon. However, even with the amount of online traffic it generates and numerous innovative ideas, Yahoo was not able to turn it into cash.

Microsoft
Even though Microsoft has started on embracing web 2.0 but they are generally slower in adopting such technologies and making it a large scale product/offering. I do believe that microsoft, is serious about innovation (for example, web2.0) but they are lack of a vision and possibly talent as well. Microsoft would be buying yahoo’s innovation, people and online traffic (thus advertising revenue / large user base).

If Yahoo is acquired by Microsoft, there will be massive job cuts and I am not sure if Microsoft would be able to fully take advantage of Yahoo’s innovation and the Yahoo ’spirit’.

Preventing the buy over
Yahoo isn’t good at search and to prevent them from being bought over by Microsoft, Yahoo can cut a quick deal with Google, outsource search to Google, focus on content and innovation and that would prevent the buy over. However, I am quite sure this deal will go through.

Conclusion
This is a good move for technology in general. Microsoft is serious about innovation and improvement. This buy over is not about competing with Google on search but at a higher level - innovation and traffic. In general, this is good for web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. More innovation, more fun and more improvement. I do hope that this deal is all for the better.