From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/12/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/061201.htm

The News – 06/12/01

Go With the Information Flow

Everything you know about computer interfaces is wrong, according to David Gelernter, noted computer author and thinker, and founder of Mirrorworlds Technology. The desktop metaphor was a revolutionary breakthrough in the ‘60s (yes, the ‘60s, when Douglas Englebart invented it and the mouse.) Almost 40 years later, the metaphor is worn out and unable to keep up with the demands of computing. The rise of small personal devices such as phones and PDAs has made the obsolescence of the desktop obvious. What we need, Gelerntner says, is a way of organizing information that is closer to the way our brains do it: in chronological order with a fast (well, relatively fast for those of us over 40) associative search engine.

Rather than dealing with information by conforming to computers, Gelernter wants computers that conform to the way we think. To accomplish this, Mirrorworlds has recently released Scopeware 2.0, which allows you to organize your life around streams, rather than a “standing pool of sludge,” as Gelernter calls current file systems.

The stream would be an all-inclusive electronic diary: every information item that entered your life would enter the stream at the same time. When you made plans for the future, you’d store the plans in the "future" of the stream. The stream could reclassify everything instantaneously. If you wanted to see all your zeppelin documents you would type "zeppelin," and all non-zeppelin-related documents would disappear, and you’d have a pure zeppelin stream. You’d rely on the powerful symbiosis among full-content-searching, easy browsing and time-order to find exactly what you wanted, fast. Emails, electronic images, and other information items would be first-class citizens of the stream, alongside documents and applications and anything else. In other words, this information management system would actually manage information, instead of gazing off into space while YOU managed information.

Scopeware allows companies or individuals to set up a stream which will contain all emails, word processing files, spreadsheets, PDFs, contacts, calendars – any of the electronic bits of information that currently rule our lives. Using sophisticated security, permissioning, and distribution technology, you can access the stream from any computer or any device, at least eventually.

Gelernter, whom you may be familiar with as a result of the Unabomber’s letter bomb attack on him in 1993, envisions a world in which we can forget all the arcane things we’ve learned about dealing with computers and concentrate on dealing with the information. Streams will be provided as a utility, like power and water, rather than being purchased in boxes that grow obsolete every 18 months.

Whether Mirrorworlds’ scheme pans out or not, you can expect some radical changes in the way you do computing over the next few years, what with dramatically increasing bandwidth and computing power, and the proliferation of computing devices.

It seems obvious that the primary computing metaphor, the desktop, will need to change. My feeling is there will be a variety of schemes to fit the variety of ways that people interact with information. I once had a colleague who filed everything by time, much the way Scopeware does. When she left, we couldn’t find anything, but it all was immediately and intuitively accessible for her. We’ve probably all known people with idiosyncratic filing methods. Chances are good, then, that the new computing environment won’t be a tyranny of standardization like the current one, but rather infinitely adaptable to the way people think.

Scopeware

Briefly Noted

• Buzzword Alert: We’re all familiar with megabytes by now, and most will recognize gigabytes (1,024 megabytes). You may even know that a terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes and a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes. But now, for the first time, I’ve seen a number associated with the Internet that dwarfs them all: zettabytes. A zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeroes. That’s the current estimate of how much information the Internet will contain by the end of the decade. Any bets on how long it will take to get to a googolplexbyte ?
  Dallas Morning News
• NetZero and Juno Online Services, two ISPs who made their names with free Internet service, said they would merge to form a new company called United Online, expected to be the second biggest US ISP after AOL Time Warner’s America Online.
  WiredNews
• It’s Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away: At least 54 US Internet companies closed in May, pushing the casualty total for the first five months of this year to 269, beyond the 222 total closings for all of 2000. According to Webmergers, a San Francisco research and advisory service, at least 493 Internet companies have shut down since Webmergers began tracking the phenomenon in January 2000. The company estimates that there are 7,000 to 10,000 substantial Web firms still in business.
  SFGate
• Ferry Tale: Forbes columnist Rich Karlgaard waxes eloquent on the topic of assessing broadband demand: “How accurate is it ever to gauge, say, traffic for a proposed bridge by counting ferry boats and swimmers? Forget last-mile as you know it today: clunky DSL or cable modem service. These are mere swimmers and ferry boats. The bridge will come when last-mile connections are easy to order (one phone call or Web click); quick to deliver (the very next day); always on (like electricity in, uh, 49 states); and cheap ($20 a month or less). When the dogs are served that, they’ll eat till they burst.”
  Forbes

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — The News – 06/07/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/060701.htm

The News – 06/07/01

The Ultimate Movie Machine?

It took a lot to get me to go to www.bmwfilms.com . Despite being a BMW owner, I am very allergic to the idea of any kind of advertising. I view my attention as a precious commodity that I don’t want to squander on commercial appeals. But I kept hearing this buzz about BMW Films, from the company direct mailing, from the (always muted) TV commercials, and from chatter on the Net. So, fine, I joined more than 200,000 other lemmings, went to the site, endured the massive downloads of the BMW Interactive Film Player and the Apple QuickTime player and the 77 MB movie itself. Even on my cable connection it took quite a bit of time. I watched the movie, The Follow, which is the third in the series. It was quite nice, although a little dark, and it played smoothly at a reasonable size on my monitor.

OK, I thought, what about the first two films. How do I see them? There was no indication in the BMW Film Player as to how to view anything other than high and low resolution versions of The Follow and its trailer. I go back to the Web site. It says I can download the BMW Film Player to watch the enhanced version of Ambush, the first film. But I don’t want to do that. My alternative is to see an un-enhanced streaming version. So I’m stuck with a really small version, and it hangs right at the climax of the film.

Frustrated, I read all the help, and go back to the player. And here’s where the point (and I do have one) comes in: Down at the bottom of the screen, which is mostly black, is the word, “Films.” I had long ago figured that had something to do with selecting the film to play, but had clicked it uselessly several times. Turns out there are invisible clickable areas to the right of that allow you to select the available films. When you move your cursor over these areas, a number appears, a sound effect fires, and a film thumbnail travels into view from the margin. Now that’s intuitive design.

BMW has obviously put a lot of money into this marketing effort. But they got me, a Beemer (or Bimmer if you are to be Germanically precise about it; a Beemer is a BMW motorcycle) enthusiast, ready to hang it up and never visit again because some artsy design idiot preferred an interface that was cool looking over one that was functional.

I’ve had an ongoing war with designers throughout my Web career, and I must say I am biased toward content and functionality. I really couldn’t care less what it looks like as long as it works. That’s the key: The doggone thing’s gotta work. People have got to be able to find it (content on sites that use Macromedia Flash exclusively doesn’t show up in search engines), and when they get there, they have to be able to use it or they’re gone. Businesses would do well to remember this when considering designs (such as all-Flash sites like this truly awful one from Balthaser ) that may be long on the eye appeal and short on the effectiveness. BMW forgot this and almost lost a viewer.

BTW, the second film, The Chosen, by Ang Lee, is easily the best of the four currently available films (although the newest, Guy Ritchie’s comic take on wife Madonna’s stardom, is the funniest.) I particularly like The Chosen’s chase, in which The Driver’s BMW is pursued by a Toyota, a Mercedes, a Ford, and a Jeep, all of which are outmaneuvered and out-powered by the Beemer.

BMW Films

Briefly Noted

• Sun Microsystems announced the industry’s first implementation of the Electronic Business XML (ebXML) Registry/Repository specification, based on Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology. The ebXML specifications, which were developed through the joint efforts of OASIS and UN/CEFACT, were finalized last month. Sun
• Home Depot is trying a new wireless handheld PalmOS-based scanner from 360commerce and Symbol to speed checkouts. Associates scan purchases while customers are in line; records are retrieved when they get to the register.
  RetailTech
• Buzzword Alert: The private exchanges that I’ve been yammering about for more than a year have achieved buzzword status: They’ve been christened Private Trading eXchanges (PTX). You know a trend has arrived when the buzzword mongers get busy. A PTX is a private marketplace run by a single company for the benefit of its supply chain members. There’s a lot of talk these days about whether PTXs or B2B exchanges will prevail. My money’s on the PTXs. AMR recently predicted that $5.7 trillion in commerce would be transacted via the Internet by 2004, with most of it passing through a PTX.
  Stores

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/01/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/060101.htm

The News – 06/01/01

Scan-Based Trading

There’s a revolution a-brewing in retail. It’s called Scan-Based Trading, and if it really gets off the ground, every aspect of the supply chain of businesses involved in retail will be changed.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers defines SBT this way:

If you could somehow marry the retailer’s goal of not wanting to own inventory with the manufacturer’s goal of a just-in-time, no excess inventory supply chain, then you would have something. The key to this marriage would be to allow market demand to dictate the supply. And probably the best proxy we have in the market today for demand is capturing real-time consumer purchase activity.

In this union of marital bliss, a manufacturer would produce a product according to demand. It would be transported to the retailer’s shelves just in time to be picked up by a customer who would take the item to the checkout. The item would be scanned, the customer would pay, the manufacturer would be paid automatically, and a replacement order would be placed electronically. The retailer has no inventory investment, the manufacturer has optimized its supply chain, and a consumer transaction controls settlement all along the supply chain. That is the essence of scan-based trading, or SBT for short.

This is a drastically different world than the one we’re living in today. Supply chains today are relatively inefficient, resulting in overstocks, out-of-stocks, excess inventory (and subsequent markdowns), and money lost to out-of-date merchandise. SBT intends to address these various inefficiencies by extending the just-in-time concept to the retailer’s shelf. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette put it this way:

We believe that the next wave in supply chain management or B2B is about to be rolled out. We expect the next wave to reduce retailers net investment in inventory to near zero, pull inventory out of the channel reducing markdown pressures and transaction costs, and substantially reduce out of stocks.

Basically, in SBT, retailers pay the manufacturer for the merchandise only after it has been scanned at the point-of-sale cash register. The retailer doesn’t own the goods in its stores, or its warehouses. Obviously, there are many issues to solve, not the least of which is, what to do about shoplifting? Alert SNS reader John Gehring asked the following questions about SBT. I provide what answers I can.

• Do suppliers actually get paid 30-60 days after the sale is made?

  Payment is generally made a good deal more quickly after the sale using SBT. That’s part of the upside for the supplier. There are actually three concepts involved in SBT: Scan-based Settlement, Scan-based Replenishment, and Scan-based Promotion. Each speeds up the ability of the supply chain to respond to events at retail such as out-of-stocks and promotions, while getting money to the supplier much faster. See the PWC white paper link at the end of this article for more information.

• Will there finally be a backlash against retailers adopting this policy?

  It’s hard to say. The retailers own the customer and that won’t change. That’s a pretty big hammer. I think, however, that if the supply chain can get efficient enough and responsive enough, there will be upside for everyone. The key is going to be the demand chain info flowing back to the supplier. This info is gold, gold that ACNielsen has been selling for years. If retailers can make it work in their supply chains, and manufacturers can use it to plan demand, everyone will be happy. But this is by no means a slam dunk. There was a lot of activity back in ’99 on SBT, with pilots and tests, but now I think folks are waiting to see what WalMart does with it before going crazy on it. Nonetheless, grocery retailers such as H. E. Butt, A&P, Safeway and Schnucks, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers, including Proctor & Gamble, Gillette, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola have all tested SBT.

  Plus there’s plenty of savings for the manufacturer. Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream uses SBT in more than 1,500 stores, and has been since 1994. But they haven’t had to add any vehicles in spite of recording 10 percent to 15 percent increases in volume each year. Here’s what the Grocery Manufacturers of America pilot tests found:

• Will the resulting margin erosion make sales to some retailers unprofitable, especially for lower-volume suppliers?

  SBT won’t work for everyone, initially. But I think it will eventually be the way of the world. The key to making SBT work is for there actually to be no margin erosion. Manufacturers make up for any price pressure by becoming more efficient. In addition, there is a recognition that several of the traditional retailers’ costs need to be rolled in to the manufacturers’ margin.

• How will the huge increase in accounts receivable days outstanding look to suppliers’ lenders?

  Lenders have to be clued in for SBT to work. The point of SBT is to reduce the number of days between manufacturer and sale, so this could make things better, accounts-receivable-wise, rather than worse.

• Where is the opportunity to make money on this "pain" being inflicted by retailers?

  While at first blush it may seem to be all pain for suppliers, I don’t think it will necessarily be a one-sided proposition. Both sides have to win for SBT to take over the world. Nonetheless, supply chain enablers are going to be the big growth B2B firms, because of SBT and many other factors. In order for SBT to work, all kinds of new accounting, tracking, financing, logistics, and decision support systems need to be implemented. All that needs consulting and applications.

It all really boils down to WWWD: What Will Wal-Mart Do? The secretive retailing giant is playing it close to the vest, but indications are that, after a rocky start, its SBT experiment is yielding double-digit same-store sales growth. The company has said selling 100 percent of its inventory before paying suppliers is a reasonable three-year goal.

Regardless of how the gorillas go, there are many obstacles to SBT, some technological, some process-oriented, and some trust-oriented. Nonetheless, businesses that sell into retail need to be aware of this trend, especially for products that are direct store-delivered, a segment where SBT seems to be taking hold.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers White Paper

Briefly Noted

• I’ve just re-ranked my list of important Internet trends in the TrendSpot .

• I’m speaking at the Designing a Handheld Computing Strategy for Your Enterprise conference in Rosemont, IL, Tuesday, June 19. My topic is The Next Wireless Killer Apps: Will You Have to Have It?

• I’ve been pretty down on the Internet appliance market because I just don’t see the appeal with cheap PCs and new Net devices on the horizon. Nonetheless, Cahners In-Stat Group predicts a 101 percent compound annual growth rate between 2000 and 2005 for sales of 20 million units and a total of $1.3 billion by 2005. Most of the growth will be outside of North America and Europe, where the PC market is well-developed.
  Newsfactor
  NUA Surveys

• Alert SNS reader Mike Todey sent along a reference to incredible data base research at the University of Rochester (NY). At a recent conference on lasers and optics in Baltimore, researchers reported that they had invented a way to use light to do a database search of 50 items in a way that can’t be duplicated in any particle-based computer. Rather than relying on a digital system that uses strings of 1s and 0s to encode data, the Rochester machine is analog. It works on a simple principle discovered in the 19th century: When different waves of sound or light combine, they create unique patterns, called interference.
  BusinessWeek

• Insight Research says small and medium-sized businesses really want fixed broadband wireless services, and projects revenues will reach $3 billion next year, 93 percent from small and medium-sized businesses.
  NUA Surveys

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

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

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/15/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/051501.htm

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?

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

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?

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/09/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/050901.htm

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 .

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

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.

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05/01/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/050101.htm

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

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.

Return to Mike’s Take