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.