Chinese Buyer of PC Unit Is Moving to I.B.M.'s Hometown

Chinese Buyer of PC Unit Is Moving to I.B.M.'s Hometown (Free Subscription required)

American multinational companies outsource manufacturing to China. Why can't a Chinese company outsource management to the United States?

Scott McNealy's Xmas dream

Scott McNealy's Xmas dream
Next up on the Big Guy's lap is Paul Otellini of Intel. "Santa, can't I please, please have a 64-bit processor that works?"

Santa puts on a very stern face. "Paul, last year you wished for that and I gave you Itanium. Now you can't just throw it in the trash because you're fed up with it. You've got to find a way to make it work."

"Aw, Santa. You know it'll never work. Our engineers know it'll never work. Only HP believes it'll work - and those guys believe in fairies and elves." Paul trudges off sullenly.

Next up is a parent without her son. She looks out of breath and flustered, and I realize that her Timmy is one of the kids who have been ricocheting around the mall like a pinball. As she rushes by, she stops for a second to say to Santa: "Can I please have something that lets me keep track of my youngest son Timmy? How come you can track a present halfway around the world in real-time, and I can't find my son halfway across the mall?"

Santa pats her on the arm and says, "I have just the thing. Use it to track the reindeer and the Claus kids myself. It's called an RFID locator and I'll put one under the tree for you."

"Make it two," said the mom over her shoulder as she spotted Timmy on the second floor crosswalk. "Half the time I can't find his father Bob either."

The Enduring Magic Of Software

"My optimism for the future of computing has never been greater" - Bill gates, in the InformationWeek Magazine

Alternative to MS Powerpoint

Eric Meyer and gang has released a very useful alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint called S⁵. It uses XHTML, CSS and Javascript and thus is very usable and accessible. The feature I like most is that it is very printer friendly. Check it out.

S⁵ is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

Webnote - Another Collaboration tool

Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser(IE 6, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari supported) available. You start by creating a workspace and creating notes in the workspace. You can save your workspace at any time and return to them from the same computer or any other computer. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.

The best part, you can create RSS feed of any workspace (consisiting of one or multiple notes). Check it out.

Google Desktop Search

Mother of all Search Engines, Google, delivers a baby for your desktop, Google Desktop. Although in beta version, this thing rocks.

• Find your email, files, web history and chats instantly
• View web pages you've seen, even when you're not online
• Search as easily as you do on Google

It will directly compete with Lookout (bought by Microsoft) for Outlook Searches. While I am very satisfied with Lookout, Google as always takes your attention. I searched for some names using Lookout and Google Desktop and no suprises there, both returned very similar results. You can even Reply, Reply to All, Forward, Compose or View the mail in Outlook, all from the google Search results page. This is very cool. For people who mind installing .Net Framework which is a requirement for Lookout to work, Google will be the de-facto search engine for both WWW and Desktop.

Open Workbench

Free Alternative to Microsoft® Project.

GMail Drive shell extension

Noticed many blogs talking about GMail Drive. Way too cool. More information below:

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

Ever since Google started to offer users a GMail e-mail account, which includes storage space of a 1000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your GMail account and retrieve them again.
When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.
You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag'n'drop like you're used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Tata Infotech joins Mainframe Migration Alliance

One of the things I was involved in the last few weeks was partnering with Microsoft in the Mainframe Migration Alliance. The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a group of companies that are working together to help customers migrate workloads off of the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. The Alliance represents a group of companies that have their interests aligned in making Mainframe Migrations easier and more efficient for customers. Tata Infotech (company I work for) has a long history of successful Mainframe Migration projects. Many of these migrations have been to the Wintel (MS Windows + Intel) platform (using .NET/Java technologies), so it was but obvious for us to join this alliance. I look forward to working with Microsoft and other alliance partners in helping our Customers move from Mainframe platforms to Windows.

Press Releases
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/sep04/09-28MainFrameMigrationPR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2004/sep04/09-28MigrationAlliance.asp

Where have I been, Where am I going?

Last few months have been very hectic for me on the work front and whatever time I could take out (very minimal), I tried to spend it with my wife. The result being, it left very little time to blog (both read and write) and other things I love to do. Hopefully, the long work hours will subside and I will get good time to blog.

The day google went down

Never thought, I had to break my blog hiatus with this news, GOOGLE IS DOWN ! That's crazy, Right ? In my last 5 years of using Google, this is happening for the first time. Has the day of reckoning arrived?

More stories signaling the apocalypse here:
Search Engine News :: Search Engine Lowdown: Google Under DNS Attack
Outages hit Google search CNET News.com
Google, other engines hit by worm variant CNET News.com
Internet News Article Reuters.com

The Distributor vs. the Innovator

The confrontation between Hewlett-Packard and Dell is more than a particularly lively bout of competition in the $106 billion-a-year printing industry. It is a clash - and an intriguing test case - of two different models of innovation and corporate strategy.

ZapThink: Web Services Management Market Set To Expand Dramatically; Growth Tempered by Fragmentation of Market Leading to Dominance by Incumbent Vendors

XMLMania's commentary on a new report titled "Web Services Management: The Maturation of a Transitional Market" by ZapThink:

Web Services Management, an emerging set of capabilities for handling the runtime requirements of emerging Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), is set for rapid growth, concludes ZapThink's latest report, "Web Services Management: The Maturation of a Transitional Market," released today. The short-term trend in the Web Services management market is primarily one of fragmentation, as the vendors in the space focus on solving various customer problems. However, in the long-term, the market will consolidate as customers look to their current vendors to provide coordinated frameworks that offer not just management capabilities, but all the components needed to build, run, and manage SOAs.
"Companies are coming to understand that Web Services Management is critical for both the operation of Web Services as well as SOAs," said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. "As a result, vendors in this space are finding customer traction by offering a range of different capabilities, from monitoring, to SOA enablement, to metadata management."

ZapThink's report discusses the strategies of all the vendors in the space, and lays out a detailed map of how the Web Services management market will continue to transform as it matures. The report also provides clear advice and direction to companies looking to understand and take advantage of the Web Services management products that are currently available.

Other key findings of the report include:

• The total Web Services Management market will reach $30.4 billion by 2010, where 85% of that market will be represented by incumbent System Management vendors who have Service-enabled their products.
  
• The opportunities for new entrants in the Web Services Management (WSM) market will peak in 2004-2005, and drop off rapidly thereafter as incumbents move to consolidate the market.
  There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity of at most two years for new entrants in the WSM space to achieve sufficient customer traction to establish themselves as successful WSM vendors.
  
• The WSM market is especially cutthroat, as vendors seek to achieve sufficient traction in advance of the dominance of the incumbent players. This market for new entrant WSM vendors will peak at $350 million in 2006, and then gradually be subsumed into the incumbent System Management and SOA markets.

The reality behind the politics

Out of all the vitriol surrounding the offshore-labor question, remarkably few concrete suggestions have emerged to address this controversial trend.

In stripping away the hype, this CNET News.com special series examines the social, economic and political dimensions of offshoring and offers tangible steps that can be taken for the U.S. industry to maintain its historical lead in high technology. The report includes a poll of nearly 500 key industry decision makers, conducted jointly with Harris Interactive, the research firm that created The Harris Poll. Continue Reading...

New Development in the Search Engine Space

The Search Engine space saw yet another new development yesterday with the launch of A9, a search engine by Amazon. The Search Engine internally uses Google to power searches but adds results from the Amazon's Search Inside The Book program, site information from Alexa, and search and site history information they've collected. Check the What's New and Cool page to know more about these features. You can read more about the launch at the following URL's:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/000575.php
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/print/0,17925,611251,00.html

Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig is making his latest book available free on the Internet. The book can be downloaded online at free-culture.org/freecontent.

Reverse BPO

Indian company taps IBM in outsourcing deal - IBM plans to take over the information technology operations of Bharti Tele-Ventures, an Indian telecommunications company, in a deal that could be worth $750 million over 10 years.

Web Service Specs

Over at Burton Group Weblogs, Anne Thomas Manes (author of Web Services: A Manager's Guide) is writing about the current status of Web services standards and specifications. Good read for anyone who wants to keep up the pace with the everyday emerging standards.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Life in a Mall

This book review from Knowledge@Wharton caught my eye. Lots of interesting detail on why the malls are, the way they are.

In his new book, Call of the Mall, Paco Underhill explains that the reason the rest rooms in America's shopping malls are typically located at the end of a long, gloomy corridor : the suburban equivalent of a city alley : is because malls are built by real estate developers, not merchants.

Real estate developers, says Underhill, so resent having to dedicate any space to a non-revenue producing amenity, that they tuck it out of the way. If you are looking for a rest room at almost any mall in the U.S., Underhill advises, look for an uninviting, dimly-lit hallway. You're there. ....

Underhill explains why the stores closest to mall entrances tend to be occupied by hair salons or banks, not shops catering to impulse buyers: "When we enter any building we need a series of steps just to make the adjustment between out there and in here," he writes. "We need time to allow our eyes to adjust. We are not ready to make any buying decisions. If there is a sign close to the door, you won't read it."

Thus the best locations are further in the mall. And since the mall owner charges tenants a flat rent based on space plus a percentage of sales, it is in the mall's own interest to have the hottest stores in prime locations, says Underhill.

He says every mall has a food court because they prolong a shopper's stay. The food court is usually noisy and the offerings not exactly gourmet. But, he asks, "is there another place where the quasi-foodstuffs of Mexico, China, Italy, Thailand, Greece, Japan and South Philadelphia come together like this?"....

SOA Editor

Cape Clear has released a new version of their popular WSDL Editor called SOA Editor. Haven't tested it yet but according to Cape Clear, It is designed to help developers take a SOA-approach to SOA development!
Download link: Cape Clear's SOA Editor

Overview of the .NET CLR and Friends

Great to see, Sam will be presenting his highly regarded talk, .NET CLR and Friends, at the Maryland and Pennsylvania Microsoft Developer's UG on 29th April. Although, Shrewsbury is about 40 miles drive from Harrisburg but what the heck, How many times do you get to see a .Net guru so closely.

Blog Maverick [via Robert Scoble]

Mark Cuban has a blog. Although Mavericks are not my favorite team but if anyone has seen Mark during a game will know how passionate he is about his team and basketball. Great to see him writing and hopefully he will write more about the world of managing an NBA team and what goes on behind the scenes during the Draft.

Great CSS Articles

ALA is churning out some great CSS Articles over the last few issues. These are all real world problems and solutions that anyone can apply to his/her design.

CSS Drop Shadows: Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design … until now.

CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death: Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution.

This article combines several of the freshest CSS and markup methods the web design community has devised over the past two years, blending them into something shiny, smart, useful, and new.

Zebra Tables: While misused tables are becoming increasingly rare, the table retains a legitimate role in data formatting. A little CSS and JavaScript magic can make tables better at what they do best: displaying tabular data.

This one is for all designers who have ever wanted to differentiate table rows by color without hacking up their markup. Until all browsers correctly support all of CSS3, Zebra Tables are the answer.

Google and You

Couple of articles on how to improve your rankings on Google (in turn The WWW):

Help the Googlebot understand your web site
Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google

What is Scoble?

Over at .Net Weblogs, Cameron Reilly is asking,

I recently finished reading "The Tipping Point" and I came away from it wondering if Scoble is a connector? The ability of a popular blogger to create a memetic epidemic seems plausible. Especially if they are connected to other connectors. Are bloggers influential just because they are widely read? If Scoble says "read this book", will you read it? Well, I read "The Tipping Point" after I read about it on someone's blog and I've ordered quite a few other books from Amazon after reading about them in various blogs lately. I don't think this in itself is enough to cause a global epidemic. But the impact of this "word of mouth" promotion of new technologies is something I can imagine.

Well, For me, Scoble is definitely a Sneezer (read Unleashing the Ideavirus to find more about it). To all unintiated ones, A sneezer is a person who is believed when he tells large number of people about some new thing. So when, people like me and Cameron follow his blog(RSS) and finds a good review of software like Lookout, they try with full trust that this guy will not fool us. Scoble is a Powerful Sneezer.

Note: You can read an excerpt of Unleashing the Ideavirus book here which discusses exactly this topic of Sneezers.

Who is Mr. Enigma?

PCMag has the answer.

How to Give Feedback

Seth Godin provides rules of How to Give Feedback.

Give great feedback! Most people don't. Here are four rules for making your input count.

Does Microsoft .Net measure up?

Infoworld Reports:

Microsoft's bet-the-company initiative turns 4 this year. Are developers happier? Has the Windows experience improved? We take stock of .Net's tools and technologies for a top-to-bottom evaluation

Microsoft Home Magazine

Never knew about this site. Very well designed and colorful. Enjoy !!

Use WTO to bolster outsourcing - Vinod Khosla

According to Vinod Khosla, India must use WTO rules to protect the unfettered growth of U.S. technology outsourcing from protectionist attacks in an election year. He says:

"It's important for India that IT services and outsourcing be part of the open trade, global trade paradigm..." "...The WTO is about free trade and it's important that some of these things that are important to us be part of those agreements.."

Read more here. Also, note how the same news story gets different header on Reuters India (Use WTO to bolster outsourcing, says tech guru Vinod Khosla) and Reuters US (Use WTO to Bolster Outsourcing, Says Pro-Bush Tech Guru) websites.

Google Ads

Hopefully, You guys have noticed it, We have been running Google Ads on our website for slightly over a month now. The run has been great with Google Ads bringing quite some revenue (a year's website hosting costs covered already). Google pays by Click Through Ratio of the ads. What this means is that it won't pay for the number of impressions but instead will pay for the clicks on these ads. So for e.g. you had 50 impressions and only 5 people clicked the ads, you will get money for only 5 clicks. Now, we've not quite understood how Google calculates Click-Through amount to be given. It varies all the time it seems.

A very cool feature of Google Ads are the content specific ads. So for same javascript code that Google supplies you when you register for Google Adsense program, you get different ads on different pages. Well, this is expected of Google.

One more thing we can make out is that if the content is stagnant for some time, the revenues start dropping off. This is because the readership falls when we don't write anything new. So we now have one more motive to keep blogging.

Feels Great !!

Thanks to the wonderful guys at AWP, couple of days back I received the "Developing Microsoft Office Solutions : Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97" book by Ken Bluttman. This is another book that I reviewed for AWP and it feels great seeing your name in the book. Needless to say, this book upholds the great technical content we all are familiar with coming out of AWP.

The book is very detailed and has very good coverage of Microsoft Office Object Models, Smart Tags and Infopath. The various case studies like, Generating "on-the-fly" Excel charts from imported XML data, Using InfoPath to overcome key XML processing limitations etc makes it even more worthier of a purchase.

I have written a more detailed review (slightly biased..:)) of this book under the Book Reviews section.

E-mail Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of Electronic Communication

HBS Working Knowledge points to an interesting paper on how E-Mails impact the process of conflict management and how the best way to resolve a dispute is to pick up the phone or just walkover and resolve the dispute face-to-face.

Why is it that e-mail emboldens people to new heights of rudeness, combativeness, and off-the-cuff stupidity? Why do small conflicts escalate into huge problems when e-mail is involved? Those questions are asked and answered in this paper by conflict expert Ray Friedman, a professor at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Friedman says that when we meet face-to-face, disputes are often safely negotiated thanks to our ability to interpret voice intonations, physical mannerisms, and facial expressions. That context is missing as we sit isolated in front of our computer launching pointed digital missives, which no amount of symbols can blunt. The answer? Handle your disputes by walking down the hallway and talking them out.

...India emerged as a great economic power...

Good to know, India is now getting recognised as Great Economic Power. Always On Ten top trends of 2003 places India at no. 3.

3. India emerged as a great economic power -- at last. Which country has the world's second biggest middle class? Not Germany. Not Japan. Not Russia. India.

Among its 1 billion consumers, anywhere from 150 million to 300 million are certifiably middle class and can afford a simple car or motorbike, electric appliances, perhaps a home. Of course, there is huge and desperate poverty, but India is rapidly growing and climbing out of slough.

For years after it gained independence from Britain in 1947, India was a massive pain to the United States, leaning to the left in politics and economics, throwing up trade barriers, severely limiting U.S. investment, and generally acting superior. Much of that has started to change, and India, while still socialist, is moving closer to the middle of the road. It also has been building a famously first-class education system, turning out tens of thousands of technological experts who work in the home country and throughout the world.

Now Indian workers are taking more and more jobs from America, and there could be some confrontations ahead, with U.S. labor demanding some form of protection.

Happy New Year

A Very Happy and Prosperous New Year to all of you !!