StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/21/01

Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/052101.htm

The News – 05/21/01

Briefly Noted

Shameless Self-Promotion Department: Geneer has published Open Source and Your Business the latest in their newsletter series, The Geneer Business Report. The article was written by yours truly.
Jupiter Research says 32.7 percent of US Internet users’ online time was spent on AOL in January. As if that weren’t enough, 74.8 percent of US residents with home Internet access visited sites within AOL’s community.
KB Toys successfully bid $3.4 million for eToys’ intellectual property. As a shareholder of the now-defunct eToys, I’m a little disappointed. eToys had a tremendous brand and seemed like a survivor. However, the downturn in B2C eCommerce and a dismal Christmas performance shot them down.
LA Times
Who knows what will happen in the area of mobile commerce, or "m-commerce"? Nobody, really, but that doesn’t stop the pundits from making projections. eMarketer presents a roundup of current thinking.
Cahners In-Stat Group predicts that almost 1 billion Bluetooth products will ship in 2005.However, Forrester predicts that Europeans will be slow to adopt mobile payment systems until after 2005. And AT Kearney says interest in mobile shopping is falling off. In June 2000, 32 percent of mobile phone users in Asia, Europe, and the US said they would buy products or services from wireless retailers. Now, only 12 percent remain interested.
eMarketer also reports on trading volumes on online exchanges. For example, almost 11 percent of the cattle sold in Q1 were sold online. Moo.
The US moratorium on Internet taxation ends in October. There have already been some rumblings from the states about taxing online purchases. So naturally Congress appointed a commission to look into the matter. Oddly, that didn’t help. But if Internet purchases are to be taxed, something must be done about the 7,500 tax jurisdictions in the US. Otherwise it’ll be mayhem for online retailers.
NeuLevel , the domain name registrar in control of the new .biz domain, has announced a three-step process for beginning registrations. Trademark owners can start the registration process today and have until July 9 to try to reserve their trademark.biz name.
The American Arbitration Association (AAA) has released its “B2B E-Commerce Readiness Study.” The survey of 100 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies found that more than 70 percent of those surveyed have already moved part of their supply chain online and a like number expect to complete building their B2B e-commerce supply chain within the next two years. This is a rather small sample, so I wonder how representative it is. Still, the study represents a tremendous vote of confidence in B2B eCommerce.
Spreichen zie Web? US-based English-speakers are already the minority on the Web. This means businesses need to get serious about globalizing their Web sites. An Aberdeen Group report states that by the end of 2000, fewer than 35 percent of Web users were US citizens and only 48 percent of total users were English-speaking.
DeliveryPoint has created a solution for Internet retailers of hard goods and groceries: a pass-through refrigerator accessible from outside the home and secured via electronic codes customized to the delivery. This is a really great idea, but is a little pricey at this point: ₤7000. The unit has freezer, refrigerator and ambient temperature compartments. The delivery person has a one-use-only code to open the unit, and the consumer can open it from the inside to retrieve the purchases.

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.

I’ve dubbed my Weblog entries “Stratlets”, and they are available at www.stratvantage.com/stratlets/ . Let me know what you think. Also check out the TrendSpot for ranking of the latest emerging trends.

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May 16, 2001

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/16/01

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StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/16/01

Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/051601.htm

The News – 05/16/01

Microsoft’s Not Guilty; My Face is Red

Well, not guilty of what I charged them with yesterday, anyway. Alert SNS reader Andrew Hargreave pointed out that the Yahoo story that sparked the Entrepreneur.com story that sparked my rant about Microsoft’s alleged password backdoor was in error. In fact, it was in error a year ago when Yahoo first published it. According to Russ Cooper of the NTBUGTRAQ mailing list, nothing fishy is going on with the dvwssr.dll file:

The story, from a year ago, pertains to the discovery of a string in dvwssr.dll and its alleged ability to backdoor NT. My message from 4/14/2000 about the issue is attached below. There is no new backdoor discovery, Microsoft hasn’t recently confirmed anything of the sort, Yahoo deserves to be shot for not putting a date on the article and not realizing it was wrong when it was first run. Looks like they’re a bit hard up for ad revenue.

I apologize for believing what I read. I deeply regret having maligned Microsoft.

It’s sometimes difficult to know when you read an item from a single source whether it’s a scoop or an error. With news coming a mile a minute, journalists and would-be pundits like myself risk being wrong and appearing foolish.

I stand by what I said, however, about Microsoft’s dismal record on security, and their tendency to abuse their monopoly. There are alternatives to IIS in the marketplace, and I recommend business owners seriously consider them.

NTBugtraq

Microsoft Plays Hardball with Corporate Users

In the spirit of balanced commentary, I feel compelled to report that Microsoft has given what amounts to an ultimatum to corporate licensees: Get current, or pay full price the next time you upgrade. If corporate sites don’t upgrade to Windows 2000 and Office XP by October 1, they’ll lose the privilege of preferred pricing for incremental upgrades. According to ZDNet (who could be wrong, after all), “Under the new Software Assurance program, companies that are ‘current’ can sign up for maintenance agreements and get future upgrades as part of the deal, but will pay 25 to 29 percent of the purchase price every year for this perpetual license–whether they want the new software or not.”

How’d you like that kind of arrangement for your business? Pay us whether you use us or not. I’m thinking of trying to work that into my contracts, but somehow I don’t think it will work. Why? Well, unfortunately, I don’t have a monopoly. Darn.

ZDNet

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May 15, 2001

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/15/01

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StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/15/01

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The News – 05/15/01

Microsoft’s Big Brother Attitude, part 2

I hadn’t planned on continuing my rant about Microsoft lest I appear biased. But last week, Microsoft provided us with perhaps the best example of why you don’t want to entrust your personal information, and perhaps not even your Web site, to a closed-source monopolist: The software giant admitted it has installed a back door password into its Internet Information Server (IIS) that Microsoft engineers could use to gain access to documents and information without customers’ consent.

How much longer can we allow this sort of thing to go on? While Microsoft admitted the back door was against their policy, the fact that their engineers would even consider inserting it demonstrates the hubris and arrogant disregard for privacy that, unfortunately, has been Microsoft’s hallmark. When outed, the company said it planned to notify customers and recommended that IIS users delete the file, dvwssr.dll, which contains the offending code.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen many instances when Microsoft has issued security-related recommendations that were ignored by large percentages of those affected.

There are alternatives to IIS in the marketplace. Apache, an Open Source Web server, runs the majority of sites on the Web, including some huge ones like Yahoo. The source for this server is open, meaning it is available for any user to inspect for security holes like the Microsoft backdoor.

Businesses who value their privacy and security should consider adopting Apache to avoid security problems like this one. In addition, businesses should think twice before employing any solutions based on Microsoft authentication and security solutions such as Microsoft Passport or the recently announced HailStorm project.

Entrepreneur.com

Briefly Noted

· So Long, and Thanks for All the Books. Sadly, Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author and one of the funniest men on the planet, died over the weekend of heart failure at age 49. Adams was also a Web multimedia pioneer, having previously pioneered CD-ROM-based multimedia with the Last Chance to See series.

· Earlier this month, international standards groups and 28 vendors from around the world successfully completed the most extensive ebXML proof-of-concept to date. ebXML (Electronic Business XML) is a standard being developed to allow businesses’ eCommerce efforts to easily interoperate. The demonstration simulated an end-to-end B2B transaction using messages from RosettaNet, Open Applications Group, Automotive Industry Action Group, EDI X12, SWIFT and ebXML Core Components.

· Finally! A research firm gives a low estimate for an eCommerce market size. ARC Advisory Group says the market for supply chain process management (SCPM, also called supply chain event management and supply chain visibility) is growing at nearly 33 percent and will reach $518 million by the end of 2005. The study defines SCPM as software that provides alerting, alert resolution logic and extended supply chain visibility into inventory, along with a real-time view of key performance indicators. ARC says it is keeping its estimate low because the SCPM market is still immature.

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

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May 11, 2001

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/11/01

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StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/11/01

Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/051101.htm

The News – 05/11/01

Microsoft’s Big Brother Attitude

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I’m not a big fan of Microsoft’s behavior over the past few years. I used to be a big supporter, especially when they finally released a half-decent operating system with NT 3.1. As recently as 1997, I spec’d out an eCommerce hardware system with all NT servers. So don’t think I’m just a bigot when I say Microsoft must be stopped!

The latest thing that raises my hackles concerns Microsoft’s typically-delayed next OS, XP. Seems that M$ doesn’t want to lose any revenue whatsoever from people installing a copy of the OS on more than one computer. To prevent this, you must contact M$ before reinstalling the OS on your PC beyond the limited, but unspecified, number of reinstalls the software giant permits you. Yes, you must actually telephone the monopoly to ask, “Pretty please, may I reinstall your POS OS that trashed my hard disk for the fifth time, and I’ve spent hours finding all my backups, so will you deign to allow me to recover from the problem you caused me?”

But that’s not all. To put some teeth in this requirement, when you “activate” the OS upon first install, your computer sends your hardware information, such as the CPU ID, to a Microsoft server! Can you say, “invasion of privacy?” Microsoft will get my CPU ID when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers!

Microsoft realized this process would be an annoyance for corporations, and so this little bit of Big Brother is reserved for consumers and small businesses. But I bet they still collect the hardware information even for the big companies. And there may be a hidden agenda in all this, according to Bloor Research’s Mat Hanrahan: "Microsoft is going to intervene more in the future, and this infrastructure and control of desktop sounds like they are trying to build the ground work to deliver software as a service. This looks like a simple activate button, but the infrastructure it has will connect into .NET services in the future."

Businesses, especially small and medium-sized businesses, should pressure Microsoft into changing this policy. I myself will boycott any OS that breaches my privacy in this way.

Silicon.com

Briefly Noted

· Sun announced the availability of Sun Chili!Soft ASP software, a cross-platform implementation of Active Server Pages, a “standard” developed by Microsoft and, up until now, fairly exclusively implemented only on Windows operating systems. The software will allow ASP developers to host their Web applications on Sun’s Solaris™ 8 OS.

· The number of US households with Internet access dipped 0.3% to 68.5 million in the first quarter of this year, says Telecommunications Reports International. It was the first time in 21 years that the number dipped, the group says.

· New rules for privacy on the Internet could cost businesses between $9 billion and $36 billion, an industry-funded study warns. Economist Robert Hahn gathered data from 17 information-technology consulting firms, which said they would charge from $46,000 to $670,000 for a system to track how personal data is handled.

Reader Feedback

Alert SNS reader John Gehring (an expert Internet marketing consultant specializing in agriculture, BTW) noted the similarity between Ray Kurzweil’s concepts of our perception of change, and a famous movie:

Your News Summary about the acceleration of time reminds me of a scene from "The Jerk." Navin says to Marie:

"I know we’ve only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days and the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days and the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half."

That’s how I feel some days, or is it some weeks?

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

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May 9, 2001

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/09/01

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StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/09/01

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The News – 05/09/01

The Accelerating Pace of Change

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and a deep thinker about the future. He’s also perhaps a bit odd, having performed White Rabbit as a virtual reality female named Ramona at the recent TED XI Conference in Monterey, CA in February. He’s invented many innovative things, from synthesizers to speech recognition. And he’s finally put into words something which we all have probably sensed: the rapidly accelerating pace of change.

In a book précis for his upcoming book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil asserts that we’re doubling the rate of progress every decade, which will result in a century’s worth of technological change in only 25 calendar years. He says that we tend to think of the rate of change as constant, and adjust to this acceleration automatically. When people make predictions about how long it will take to accomplish some innovation, they unconsciously base their estimates on a constant rate of change. Kurzweil argues that the rate of change is actually exponential, and this is the characteristic of any evolutionary system.

Kurzweil calls this the law of accelerating returns and he claims it has been in effect since the beginning of the evolution of life.

The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel–took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn’t exist at all a decade ago.

The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 25 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.

I often ask a question of my audience when I speak: “How many of you think the pace of change will slow in the future?” I’ve never had a hand go up. Businesses need to understand that they can’t stick their heads in the sand and hope that the paradigm shift of the day (dotcoms, B2B exchanges, peer-to-peer computing, wireless, whatever) will blow over and they can go back to the old ways of doing things.

The obvious joy felt by the bricks and mortar businesses at the dotcom implosion may have been a smug pleasure (“I told you they wouldn’t last”), but the innovations the Internet has introduced won’t go away. Sure, lots of essentially worthless dotcoms have blown away. And it’s fun to ridicule the excesses of the 20-something dotcommies and their lack of class in handling their short-lived success. But the reality is, something has fundamentally changed about business, and that bell can’t be unrung.

Your business’ ability to absorb change and to recognize paradigm shifts will be its most critical success factor in the coming years. Those who can’t foresee how the need for their products can disappear are doomed to go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers of last century. Heck, forget the buggy whip companies, they’ll go the way of modern long distance providers, who have seen Internet long distance providers drive rates to under 7 cents a minute, generating a problem so severe that the Baby Bells no longer hunger for the long distance market.

What new idea is sprouting in a garage somewhere that will threaten your business?

Kurzweil

Briefly Noted

· IBM has announced they’ve created transistors using nanotubes of carbon that are 10 atoms across. This yields transistors 500 times smaller than today’s silicon-based ones.

· Think that’s small? How about packing a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) into a cubic centimeter?

· Today I spoke at the Eleventh Annual EC Breakfast with Executives sponsored by the Twin Cities Electronic Commerce Forum. My topic was Boom or Gloom? The Future of B2B Exchanges, and the PowerPoint is available here .

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May 4, 2001

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — StratVantage News Summary 05/04/01

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StratVantage Consulting, LLC — StratVantage News Summary 05/04/01

Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/050401.htm

The News – 05/04/01

Electronic Ink is Here

Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon the E Ink Web site. I had first read about the electronic ink project at MIT years ago and figured it would be a good long time before the technology was commercialized. Turns out E Ink, which was formed to exploit the MIT technology, already has products!

The MIT technique involves spherical capsules that are filled with charged white particles. The spheres themselves are colored, typically blue, and are printed on plastic film sandwiched between two layers of circuitry. Depending on how the current flows in the circuits, the white particles are either attracted to the top of the spheres, making them appear white, or the bottom, making them appear blue.

The company had a successful test of their in-store motion signage and is readying the next generation based on user feedback. They are planning to release displays to replace LCDs in PDAs and other devices next year and “Paper 2.0” for printing applications in 2003. Some of the features of E Ink include:

· Wide viewing angle	· Readable in sunlight
· Holds image without power drain	· Legible under most lighting conditions
· Lightweight	· Thin (~1 mm)
· Easily scaled to large sizes	· Supports curved designs

This is just another example of how fast the world of technology is changing these days. I first read about e ink in 1997when it was a research project at MIT, somehow missed E Ink’s beta in 1999 , and noted that IBM was in the race in 2000. Although I thought it was exciting technology, somehow it seemed like Star Wars stuff, a revolution that was still a ways off. But these days it only takes five years to get a technology from lab to revolution. And revolution it will be, for the sign, computer display, publishing, advertising, labeling, and who knows what other industries.

But wait! E Ink may be exciting for output, but there’s an even bigger paper revolution growing one the input side: paper and pen. Mobile phone company Ericsson and startup Anoto are planning to release a pen that, when combined with paper that’s been specially treated (but cheap enough to be ubiquitous), forms a wireless text input system.

The Bluetooth-enabled pen will enable you to scribble a note and check a special box on the page to fax or email your creation. Anoto, whose name is taken from the Latin annoto, meaning “I scribble,” could totally eclipse Bill Gates’ latest planned product: the Tablet PC , a luggable portable computer with advanced handwriting recognition. Gates unveiled the product at Comdex in November and, in a shocking victory for hype, its oh-so-20th-century technology beat out Anoto for Best of Show (insert Fred Willard joke here.)

This project is so ambitious and so potentially life-altering, that I had to check the article twice and verify it from other sources, especially after noting it’s from the April, 2001 Wired issue. I recommend you read the whole thing to get Steve Steinberg’s explanation of the virtual map that makes the pen work.

So if your business uses paper, and I know mine does, you should keep an eye on these new developments in one of mankind’s oldest communications technologies.

Wired

Briefly Noted

The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Business Registry is now operational , hosted at both Microsoft and IBM. Ariba pulled its promise to also host, but HP looks like it will step in. I profiled the effort in November .

LoudCloud, the Marc Andreessen startup with the ‘nads to brave the current IPO market is already on hard times, cutting 20 percent of their staff.
A little late for the last election, but check out Publius , a site that assembles a customized online version of Michigan voters’ ballots. You can’t vote with it, but the ballot does contain links to all the candidates’ Web sites so you can research them. Try it with the name John Doe.

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May 1, 2001

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/01/01

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StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/01/01

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The News – 05/01/01

Micropayments Are Neither Micro, Nor Payments. Discuss.

Many folks are forecasting that micropayments are a coming thing. Never mind that they’ve been coming since at least 1995. Back then, I remember sitting in a meeting with Nathaniel Borenstein who was pitching First Virtual Holdings and their e-cash solution. Micropayments were going to be the Next Big Thing (NBT). People would retail their information or other downloadable goods for pennies or fractions of pennies, First Virtual would roll up the transactions, skim off a transaction fee, and pay the content owner once enough money had accumulated. It was a brave new world a-comin’.

First Virtual’s payment system didn’t make it. Borenstein, a true Internet innovator whom I wrote about in January , now is Chief Scientist for NetPOS (that’s Point Of Sale). NetPOS is selling an Internet Point of Sale (POS) system that uses the Application Service Provider (ASP) model to provide real-time purchasing information to a central site. They aim to replace cash registers, which definitely can’t be used for micropayments

BTW, There’s a bit of First Virtual’s history preserved in the ancient Downtown Anywhere site (last updated, 1996) if you want to make like Disney and stroll down the virtual main street of the retro-future. This was the demo that Borenstein pitched us so long ago.

So, anyway, micropayments have been imminent for years, and now, wireless providers are resurrecting them as the NBT for m-commerce, or mobile commerce. Recently, Australia’s Telstra announced a micropayment trial using mobile phones to buy soft drinks. This has been done already in Finland, and it does sound cool. One major difference between the micropayments of the First Virtual era and today is, pop costs a buck in most vending machines, and that’s not really micro, in my book.

John Brand of the Meta Group calls the effort “cute (and mildly useful).” But Brand is not too optimistic about the long term use of such technology. “However, the infrastructure costs of networking these machines and providing the billing applications ensure this will remain a niche play for some time. However, we expect to see telcos move much more aggressively into this ‘embedded services’ space during the next 3-5 years, as the competition for control of the customer relationship intensifies.

OK, that’s two howevers in a row, so it’s hard to tell what Brand means about telco aggression. However, there are others who don’t think the micropayment thing will ever fly. Clay Shirky, of The Accelerator Group, is one of them. I wrote about his article, The Case Against Micropayments , in a stratlet a while ago, but that got caught in the bitbucket, and so I’ve recently reposted it. Basically, Shirky argues that, for micropayments to work, at least for information, users have to simultaneously believe that the information is worthwhile (expensive) and that the information is not worth all that much (or free). This doesn’t seem to be a problem for a Coke; you know what it’s worth, and you’re likely to be willing to pay for it if you’re thirsty. But what about a business transaction or a white paper, or maybe a special search?

Northern Light has tried to make a business out of selling reprints of newspaper and magazine articles at $2.95 apiece. Despite having more than 50 million articles, I can’t imagine it’s working that well. On the other hand, Northern Light’s last round of financing was in 1999, so they must be doing something right.

So what does this mean for businesses? I’d watch the micropayments effort closely, especially if you sell something that can be bought on impulse. There are many problems to solve, not the least of which is, what do you do when someone steals your phone? Will payment enablers indemnify you against fraudulent use of a phone for payments like credit card companies will? (BTW, and slightly off topic, did you know a thief can use your Check Card without ID or your PIN? And that banks will cover the fraud, but make you carry the charge in your account while they investigate?)

If these and other issues get hammered out, the cashless society may be at hand.

MetaGroup Metabits

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