http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Fri, 6 Jul 2007 19:28:57 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/07/06/192857.php V P KochikarToday’s business environment is characterized by a rapidly changing technology landscape, rising customer expectations, and accelerating competition. Thus, agility, which can be described as the ability to respond quickly and effectively to environmental change, is a critical imperative for organizations today.So far, so good. But do we really know what being agile means in practice? What qualities constitute agility?* Most practicing managers, if asked to enumerate these qualities, would be able to list a few intellectual and mental faculties such as receptiveness to change and the ability to learn continuously. But this is at best a partial list.One key to answering this vexing question (what qualities constitute agility?) is to realize that while agility certainly is a function of mindset, it is also a function of many attributes that have little to do with mindset. To get an idea of what these other attributes may be, let us posit a first-cut, working definition of what we might call "agile capability":"Agile capability" is the ability of an individual (or organization) that allows that individual (or organization) to transition into, and become adept in, a new discipline.Let us pause for a minute to consider the implications of this definition. Does being "agile" mean that we expect a person adept in the discipline of software engineering to become a great bridge-builder? Of course not. Instead, agility here would probably mean an ability to continue to be an excellent software engineer even as new technology platforms, development methodologies, and tools come into vogue. Thus, agility is not an ability to transition effortlessly across massively diverse, utterly unrelated disciplines.** In other words, the notions of agility and agile capability have meaning only when delimited by the context of a specific discipline, or perhaps a few closely related disciplines.We can thus update our definition as follows:"Agile capability" is the ability of an individual (or organization) that allows that individual (or organization) to deliver continued high performance in their chosen discipline in the face of change or to transition into a related discipline.This of course means that the notion of agility is inextricable from the specific, pertinent discipline; it is unrealistic, perhaps even utopian, to define a generic concept of agility that encompasses the ability to transition effortlessly across disparate disciplines.The capability to be agile must thus be defined in terms of a bundle of competencies, some relating to subject knowledge of the relevant discipline, some to the skills required to excel at tasks demanded by the discipline, and others to mindset.We have embarked on the task of deconstructing the capability to be agile into its constituent qualities. The result is an Agile Capability "Stack" that represents the various competencies that collectively make up the capability to be agile. The results are being published in a forthcoming issue of OD (Organization Development) Journal. If you are interested in learning more, send me an e-mail, and I will send you a reprint of the article when it appears (expected in late July).The ingredients that go to make up "agile capability' have long been known to great companies that have thrived in the face of business and technological change. Think Intel transitioning from a RAM maker to a world-leading maker of microprocssors. Or Canon transitioning into digital photography as conventional photography has faded away. Or IBM retooling itself to emerge a formidable competitor in Information Technology services. Collecting these ingredients under the ambit of one concept, concretizing that concept, and according it the status of an explicit capability - "agile capability" - will enable agility to be consciously recognized and cultivated. _____________________________________________________________* it is worth noting that the term 'agile' is used in the general sense of being adaptive to change, and is not to be confused with the connotation common in the software world, where 'agile' often refers to a class of lightweight software development methodologies that emphasise speed, rapid development, and so forth. ** Such an ability, perhaps, would not be agility but alchemy! Sci/Tech66159@blogcritics.org Fri, 6 Jul 2007 19:28:57 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/04/27/172424.php V P Kochikar"Virtual worlds" such as Second Life hold out a promise that is dramatic, liberating, and irresistible to most: a parallel, electronic world where people can conduct their lives unencumbered by many real-world constraints and limitations. But is this promise merely a phenomenon conjured up by over-zealous marketers, technology buffs, and commercial interests, or is it backed by real capabilities? Second Life, the most popular virtual world environment, certainly appears to have expanded past the early adopter stage. The company reports a total number of users at 5.9 million, of which about 1.76 million have logged in during the last 60 days.More importantly, many leading companies have put together a Second Life act. Adidas Reebok, Nissan, Mazda, Toyota, and Starwood Hotels all have Second Life initiatives. Dell sells computers there. IBM and Sun are active. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano visited and held a meeting in Second Life recently. IBM is reputed to have set up a business group to address Second Life. Reuters has a news bureau in Second Life. Harvard Law School has offered a course there. Perhaps a key sign that a technology has arrived is when governments start adopting it. The Swedish government is setting up an embassy in Second Life, through the Swedish Institute, an affiliate of its foreign ministry. The city council of Manchester, UK, has taken a few Second Life islands too. Of course, all is not hunky-dory. There is a need to look at success metrics that go beyond raw usage numbers. A very down-to-earth caution is that the products and services that real world companies offer may appear mundane in the context of the fantastic, imagination-stretching possibilities that are common in cyberspace. In an environment where people seem to leap tall buildings, athletic shoes are hardly exciting.Nevertheless, a virtual world offers people the possibility to break out from real world constraints and do things impossible in the real world. With increasing familiarity and access to technology, people will welcome the chance to use this new-found freedom in ways that they could previously only imagine. Even more fundamentally, it is not inconceivable that many people will see this as an opportunity to create, from the ground up, a new identity that they have always wished for but could never have in real life. Thus it can safely be expected that virtual worlds such as Second Life will see widespread traction and uptake from people of all ages and persuasions. The sociological ramifications of a blurring between the real and imaginary worlds can be staggering, but that will not stop adoption. How seriously should businesses take this phenomenon? Smart companies go where people go. If people are flocking towards the virtual world, companies need to go there too. That is, if they want to show they are tech-savvy, and gain mindshare with the young crowd -- who make up the market of the future. They can also actually generate revenues by selling products and services in virtual space. As with any endeavor that needs to catch people's imagination and fire up large numbers of people, first-mover advantages are obvious. Is the road ahead paved with silicon? While that may be overstating things somewhat, it seems clear that the lives of large numbers of people will increasingly involve excursions into the wild blue yonder of worlds that exist only in computer-enhanced reality. In the meanwhile, it appears inescapable that every company worth its salt should busy itself thinking up a Second Life strategy -- even if that strategy is only an informed wait-and-watch. The best approach is perhaps to be like a cat: wait and watch with great care, but be ready to jump when the time is ripe. But unlike cats, companies (and people) are not naturally endowed with nine lives, and so should welcome the opportunity to be granted a lease into a second life. Sci/Tech63120@blogcritics.org Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:24:24 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/04/11/151528.php V P KochikarThe automatic calculator was invented in the 1950s. Mobile telephones were invented in the early 1970s. Agree? If you agreed with either statement above, you were off by only a few centuries in the first case, and a few decades in the second. IBM, Bell Punch and Sharp pioneered electronic calculators in the 1950s, but automated devices for performing numerical calculations have existed, in concept as well as in actual physical form, since the 17th century, when Wilhelm Schickard and later Blaise Pascal built the first mechanical calculators. AT&T and Southwestern Bell introduced the first commercial mobile radio-telephone service to private customers as early as 1946. Bell Labs received the patent for cellular telephony in 1972. Surprised? You are far from being alone. In fact, this fits what appears to be a general - and generally wrong - pattern of how we view the process of technological innovation. We tend to underestimate the time it takes for a technology to be born and gain widespread use. I call this pattern the "Creative Burst Fallacy". But before we talk any more about the creative burst fallacy, why do we need to be aware of it at all? Knowing it is of great practical interest. In fact, this belief is one of the reasons for what I call the human race's Technology Foresight Deficit - our inability, demonstrated time and again, to correctly foresee the potential of upcoming technologies. Thomas J Watson, no less than the Chairman of IBM, opined in 1943 that the world would need no more than 5 computers. 3G, or third-generation telecommunications technologies, were projected to become the wireless communication technology of choice by the early 2000s - they are yet to take off in any big way in any part of the world. This was a costly mis-judgement indeed: ask the companies that paid billions for the rights to roll out 3G. The days of the dot.com bubble saw legions of such technologies being touted as the panacea for a wide range of business and consumer problems. At the same time, many technologies fly "under the radar", or remain unrecognized. Using these and other examples, I have written elsewhere how we can Re-engineer our Crystal Ball, or learn to look at emerging technologies more realistically. So, here's the Creative Burst Fallacy. The popular view of how technologies evolve typically includes the belief that a new technology takes birth in a burst - or a series of bursts - of creative energy. The reality is usually far more prosaic. Technologies are rarely conceived in a "Eureka!" moment - the birth of a technology is typically a deliberate, painstaking and well-thought out process. Further, once having been born, most technologies spend months, or even years, before they reach a stage where they get widespread attention and use. Then why this fallacious belief? As with most erroneous beliefs that are widely held, this one has some very good reasons for it's existence. I outline some reasons in my article, "Did Somebody Say Eureka!?", in the March 2007 issue of R&D Magazine, and show some patterns which drive how technology takes shape in reality. Overcoming the creative burst fallacy is an important part of improving our ability to foresee emerging technologies correctly, and of overcoming humankind's technology foresight deficit. Sci/Tech62356@blogcritics.org Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:15:28 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/03/29/214917.php V P KochikarAdvertising is a wonderful industry. It employs some of the most creative folks on earth. It makes us aware of lots of useful products and services we may otherwise not know about. And without it, newspapers, magazines, and TV shows wouldn't exist as we know them. And it is often very entertaining too.But most people will also agree that advertising can be an irritant at times. That is why I am somewhat disconcerted by the prospect of advertising on cell phones taking off in a big way, as it appears set to do. Yahoo, Google have both shown extreme keenness to cash in on this new form of revenue generation.Why is this a bad idea? Because displaying an ad on a small cellphone screen will shrink the effective display area to an even smaller size. Although I use a Blackberry, which has one of the larger screens around, I would hate to have any more clutter on that screen than there absolutely needs to be. And I can only sympathize with people who have regular cellphone screens. But it is bad for an even more insidious reason: while print ads can be ignored, and TV ads can generally be sidestepped by changing channels or using recording technologies such as TiVo, it will be well nigh impossible to escape the ads being pushed to your cellphone screen.If proof were needed that people don't welcome cellphone ads, a survey found that 64 percent of Europeans polled said they had "zero tolerance" for mobile phone advertising in any form.Here's the horse sense view on this: Pushing ads in this manner helps the interests of cellphone services providers (a new revenue stream), cellphone makers (increased demand for cell phones with larger screens), and advertisers (presumably, increased revenues). Given this formidable alignment of interests, sheer commercial pressure will ensure that this phenomenon will grow. Expect lots of irritated cellphone users. Over time, things will improve as advertisers get smarter, and cellphone screens get bigger. And users will just learn to live with a feature that derives its legitimacy not from genuine user need, but from the commercial compulsions of the various entities that exist to serve that user need. Sci/Tech61739@blogcritics.org Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:49:17 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/03/01/070149.php V P KochikarIn the 13th and 14th centuries, China led the world in printing -- the leading 'information technology' of the time -- but with the renaissance, and later the industrial revolution, Europe drew ahead. In the 20th century, America strode the technology arena like a colossus. In the 21st century, China is still way behind in what is one of the leading information technologies of today, the World Wide Web. That's easily explained: they're a developing country with education and income levels substantially lower than in the West and they are disadvantaged by a lack of familiarity with the English language, the lingua franca of today's Web. So, of course they are well behind in adoption and use of the World Wide Web, or so conventional wisdom says.Conventional wisdom can be wrong. While researching for a presentation recently, I visited Alexa Web Search, which tracks World Wide Web traffic. I pulled up a list of the top 25 websites by traffic, fully expecting to find the usual suspects (Yahoo, Google, Myspace, etc). Sure enough, there they were. To my surprise, there was Baidu at #5 and qq, apparently a Chinese portal, at #9. The top-25 list was rounded off by five more Chinese websites.Think about it. This means fully a quarter of the 25 most popular sites on the web are written in Chinese, for Chinese users. China is big on Internet penetration, too. According to reports, they may already have more broadband users than the United States. China is not far behind in Internet activity of the more nefarious kind. The country is one of the top sources of spam and phishing sites.China is an awesome force on the World Wide Web. Couple this with their already phenomenal domination in IT hardware (much of the world's supply of computers, including IBM-Lenovo, and almost the entire gamut of electronics hardware, including iPods, are being made in that country), and you have a fairly staggering picture of just how influential this country has become.If you agree, as I do, that the World Wide Web is powerfully shaping social mega trends, then all of us had better accept that China is going to play a far bigger role in deciding how technology and society will evolve in the coming decades.Who says the Chinese need to learn English? Sci/Tech60373@blogcritics.org Thu, 1 Mar 2007 07:01:49 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/02/05/193647.php V P KochikarTechnology has pervaded (some would say invaded) our personal lives irreversibly. While in the Orwellian 1980s this statement would have assumed ominous dimensions, today it merely causes most people to drool at the thought of the next cool device that is poised to hit the market.Sure enough, there'll be plenty of sleek, gleaming devices that will come on the market this year, and they'll be jam-packed with enough functionality to keep the most inveterate gadget freaks among us drooling well into the next year. And of course, they'll be ever smaller, cheaper and more powerful. But is there one defining trend that will dictate how technology products will evolve over the year?I believe there is. And that trend is an inexorable march towards simplicity. Of making technology products, notorious today for being clunky, difficult and even intimidating, simpler to learn and use. Simplicity has long been something the customer has hankered after, and at last producers of tech products are beginning to listen and respond.What is so profound about simplicity, one may ask, and isn't it obvious that products must be simple to learn and use? Well, for a start, they aren't! Creators of technology products have always had a propensity to over engineer their products, in a well-meaning but mistaken quest to pump in tons of functionality and the newest features. But that has begun to change over the last few years, and will change a lot more this year. What makes me think so?The trend of simplicity and ease of use assuming such centrality is partly a logical consequence of the increasing socialization of technology, or the rapid rise in the use of technology to meet social needs - collaboration, sharing, getting together, interacting with family and friends, and so forth. This trend has seen technology being enthusiastically embraced by ever-younger people, and first-time users who tend to be unfamiliar with technology - constituencies that are far more likely to demand ease of learning and use than the traditional geeks and 'early adopters'. Also seen from a demand side, ease of use is one of three key determinants of success of a personal technology.There are good supply-side reasons as well, chief among which is that in a rapidly saturating market, growth goes to the player who wins more of those demanding, first-time users. (That is why innovation has increasingly come to mean delivering simple, easy to use products).But there are massive supply-side constraints too. Think how much complex functionality a typical device - even the humble cell phone or digital camera - encapsulates. Often these are functionalities that did not exist even a few years ago. Just 10 or 12 years ago, talking on a telephone or surfing the internet for most of us meant sitting in one place, or at best being confined to one room.Today those activities are completely untethered. Less than a decade ago, getting your birthday party photographs meant waiting at least a day or two, and several trips to the studio. Today you can not only get those photos instantly, but you can even edit them yourself, and all for a fraction of the cost! Creating those new functionalities in just a period of a few years has meant that many complex technologies - from storage, display, communication to batteries - be mastered individually, and then integrated. Doing these well and delivering a package that is simple at the end of it is clearly a daunting task.Perhaps more fundamentally, Moore's law relentlessly drives devices to grow smaller, cheaper and more powerful - what it does not do is drive devices to get simpler, or for diverse technologies to integrate better. (That is why innovation is so hard!).Who are the gurus and pioneers of simplicity? Google has always been emblematic of minimality, a close cousin of simplicity. Google's Marisa Mayer likens their design philosophy to a Swiss Army Knife - neat, easy to carry, but possessing an enormous array of functionality. However, their original minimalist look arose out of necessity. Google is now turning its attention to making web site design easy.Apple has of course been the beacon of all designers who strive to make products that are elegant and easy to use. First there was the iconic iPod. Now, the iPhone (never mind the dubious moniker) has all the makings of a deserving descendant of this heritage by encapsulating a phenomenal range of functions in one neat package.Philips has wholeheartedly embraced the simplicity mantra. Sony and Canon have, without getting much credit for it, delivered for years some superbly engineered products. Motorola and Nokia are beginning to get it.There are less fancied players too, who have hit the simplicity sweet spot. RIM's BlackBerry is widely regarded as a joy to use. The Open Source browser Firefox has fired the imagination of lots of users with its simple yet powerful set of features - it has garnered about 14% of the browser market and a fan following in the bargain. Making a complex technology product easy to use is clearly a task that is far from easy. But the fact that vendors are trying hard to make their products easy to use is welcome news for consumers everywhere! Sci/Tech59129@blogcritics.org Mon, 5 Feb 2007 19:36:47 EST