Blessing or Curse? The emergence of dominant designs

Another entry in the competitive Tablet and mobile device operating system market will quickly fade away:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/hp-punts-on-webos-discontinues-touchpad-cuts-outlook/55386

The once promising Palm (remember that this was probably the first successful Personal Data Assistant, PDA) introduced by US Robotics in 1997.  Not quite a touch screen device, it used a gesture-based stylus input called graffiti to enter text.  Clearly, a forerunner of today’s finger-based control and input for smart phones and tablets alike (no I did not forget the Apple Newton).

Sold to 3Com and then spun-off and then purchased by HP, the linage from those humble early days of PDAs to the WiFi, 3G, 4G, platform of today is essentially unbroken.  However, as many other early leaders in the field, this Operating System (OS) line may have just stopped with the announcement from HP.

Once a viable competitor to the RIM Blackberry environment (Palm introduced a PDA Smartphone, as best I can tell around 2002), Palm OS lost traction to RIM OS and Symbian, and then to Apple iOS and Google Android.  Valiant efforts in pushing cool devices such as the Palm pixi, etc. never had any market impact.

Without significant traction in the competitive consumer marketplace (or in the business market), there is a whole list of environments that have essentially come to a screaming halt once a new set of   dominant designs emerge (an interesting question is how many can a market support?).

Examples include:

• GONE: DEC – VAX VMS was the engineering environment development of choice.  Killed with Unix and Windows products. (VMS is still supported, but has no significant impact on the marketplace)
• GONE: Atari, Amiga, and a host of other personal computers.  Killed by Apple (although after some significant stumbles) and most assuredly by the IBM PC.
• GONE: CP/M, GEM, and a host of other operating systems.  Killed by the Windows juggernaut.
• GONE: Symbian.  Once the darling of the mobile device world, Nokia has stopped development.
• GONE: WebOS.  Well, maybe not gone (that was not what the announcement said) but HP is killing the mobile devices that use HP WebOS.
• GOING?: Blackberry OS.  RIM has to continue the development and support for a platform (really multiple platforms) that runs only on RIM devices.  With a significant shift to iOS and Android, how long will this last?
• GOING?: Windows Mobile.  Although there are several committed manufacturers (Nokia being one of them) market share is scant, so the future is a bit uncertain.
• MAKE IT AS A NEW DOMINANT DESIGN?: Windows 8.  A clear push by Microsoft to change the paradigm of the desktop (and I assume tablet as well) to a presumption of connection to the Internet for collaboration, interaction, and services.

There is no easy answer to how a dominant design emerges.  In some cases, an open platform that can be used my multiple hardware providers works well.  This is the Android and Windows model.  In other cases, it still looks like a closed, proprietary environment like Apple iOS.

However, there are some clear items we can identify:

• You have to have an excellent customer experience.  This is an Apple trademark.
•  The device has to have a full range of value.  In general, customers do not care about the platform, they care about it doing what they want reliably in a way that feels good (that look and feel thing).  iTunes brought huge value, to customers (I can get the music I want right now), to developers (I can sell something to a customer right now), and businesses (I can differentiate my business to a customer right now).
• You can not let the platform go stale.  This has two parts.  First, make them feed on the next cool device (again, Apple).  Second, the guts of the system need to keep up.  Windows plays catch-up with Apple OS, and RIM let their OS lag and now has a fragmented environment driving customers and developers to go nuts.
• Feed the ecosystem.  Apple is the best at this.  This includes software developers (see the above issue with RIM) and the companies that make add-ons to the iPhone and iPad.

Soon up, a look at dominant design in other emerging services, such as Cloud processing, storage, and applications as well as a look at the growing three-way (and maybe four way) battle in the IT landscape (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon).

The Market Keeps Shifting – Where do you find stability and growth?

So, apparently CenturyLink will not buy Sprint for their wireless network and services.  The CFO of CentryLink says that it is much more important to continue to integrate their recent acquisitions (i.e., Qwest and Savvis) than to continue their buying spree:

http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/centurylink-wont-buy-sprint-will-focus-business-broadband-opportunities/2011-08-11

This is probably good news for local customers as CenturyLink will have to improve their broadband Internet service offerings to attract new customers.  With a drive to higher speeds and IPTV services, what could go wrong?

Well, in this economy and the shifts in technology and social activity, there are a couple I can think of immediately:

1. Adding new areas to the broadband footprint is expensive
2.  Subscribers to Pay TV services took their largest decline in history.

In the above Fierce Telecom article, Qwest was quoted that it added only 12,000 net broadband subscribers for all of second quarter 2011.  I am pretty confident that there were many more traditional voice (read POTS) customers that cut the cord completely.

As for adding IPTV Pay services, competition, new Internet-based services, broadband wireless, new Internet-based social activities, and the economy are causing record number of customers to leave Cable and Satellite TV services:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/pay-tv-faces-toxic-mix-as-subscribers-cancel-in-record-numbers/2011/08/10/gIQAH6Vk7I_story.html

So, for traditional telecom companies that do not have wireless services, the pressure is on to find the formula to stabilize revenue and find customer and revenue growth:

1. Wireless 4G services.  A few more customers that cut the cord at home,
2. Streaming and Downloaded Internet Video.  Even if it does not kill wired to the home video, it certainly reduces the likely revenue per customer (i.e., fewer OnDemand and premium channel purchases)
3. Price Competition.  Satellite TV may continue to drive to very competitive and tailored packages.  Hard to fund wired infrastructure builds in an area where you can get the right share to make the numbers work.
4. It’s the economy, stupid.  We are all starting to cut back.  People are apparently much more likely to trade Pay TV, POTS, and maybe even wired broadband services to keep their ever increasing in capability mobile device.
5. Business Services.  Customers are using the Internet-based VPN services as opposed to MPLS/VPN services to save dollars (reduced dedicated access costs, more competitive pricing, etc.).

So, can these traditional telecom companies find stability without wireless services?   If I can figure something out, it will be the topic of a future post.

Government Data Center Consolidation - The Wrong Metric?

A recent article in Information Week Government : Federal IT Pros Question Data Center Consolidation Benefits indicates that data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says that agencies are expecting to close 195 data centers this year and a total of 800 or more by 2015.

Wow, this is quite amazing, but what the heck is a "data center" in this context.  Could it be that agencies are finding the proverbial "server under someone's desk" and moving that into a more consolidated infrastructure and calling that the elimination of a "data center"?

Statistics can lie, but so can definitions.  Does anyone really think that there are 195 data center buildings that are going to close this year?  Does GSA have a fire-sale going on for leased data center space that is no longer being used?

The problem here is that the directive and OMB are measuring the wrong thing.  By measuring data center closures as a measure of success, I am pretty confident that agencies are taking a good deal of liberty in the definition and their resulting activities to make the numbers look pretty.  A better measure might be to measure IT overhead in an organization and measure it against a benchmark of commercial companies for like services.

The drive for IT efficiency is not going to be arrived at by shuffling "data centers" and consolidating into fewer rooms.  Common infrastructure at an agency, managed by an Infrastructure Service Provider (ISP), drives two essential behaviors:

• It stops IT development organizations from running out and buying a new set of hardware and software every time they deploy a new application
• It drives efficiency in the operations of the ISP 

There are many facets it getting an ISP really operating (maybe a subject of future posts), but there are several essential elements that the CIO of an agency must drive:

• The ISP must be efficiently run, very responsive to its customer set, and provide highly available services
• The developers (which in many cases are contractors), must have in their contracts that they are developing applications for execution within the ISP environment and not a new standalone "data center"

This first step will consolidate within an agency, but it also sets the stage for multiple agencies to start thinking about sharing and consolidating their ISP infrastructure.  This is there the real savings will develop.

The good news, is that there are government CIOs that see this big picture.  Wouldn't it be great if we had a metric that talked about efficiency and sharing rather than some artificial count of data centers?