Trends I'm Watching

Web-based Office Applications

My PC went dark last week. I felt sick thinking about re-installing all the applications on it (my data is backed up to a DVD every night). Not just re-installing, but getting all the updates and security patches in place. Fortunately, Windows XP Pro System Recovery let me recover and I didn't have to rebuild. But web applications look better and better when I think about installing software and keeping my PC secure from internet vermin.

Source: The Web-based Office will have its day | Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet.com.

A recent Computerworld article states that laptops will soon replace the desktop as the preferred business PC, citing mobility as the main reason for this trend. Microsoft office products - and increasingly OpenOffice and other open source desktop programs - will continue to be used on both laptop and desktop PCs for the forseeable future. The reason is the advanced and wide ranging functionality they offer, together with perceived stability in an office environment.

However I do think that long-term, the writing is on the wall for desktop office applications. Once the current crop of alpha and beta web-based office products reach a level of maturity, they will be ready to challenge Microsoft for the minds and pockets of consumers. One of the keys is achieving the level of functionality that Microsoft Office undeniably has. But there are also issues of online security and reliability that web-based apps will need to address, in time. Office apps are just too important to corporate productivity for CIOs and IT managers to entrust their businesses with web-based apps, without complete confidence in their functionality (ability to do the job efficiently) and performance (security and uptime).

Stock Market Values Responsible Companies

Link: GreenBiz News | Stock Market Values Responsible Companies, Says New Prizewinning Study.

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 29, 2005 - The 2005 Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing has been awarded to a new study which claims that the stock market could provide a higher value to companies rated above-average on environmental issues.

The prize is awarded by the Center for Responsible Business Center at the Haas School of Business, in cooperation with the Social Investment Forum, which promotes the concept, practice and growth of socially responsible investing.

The study -- titled The Economic Value of Corporate Eco-Efficiency -- found that "company managers do not face a tradeoff between eco-efficiency and financial performance, and that investors can use environmental information for investment decisions." The study examined a long-running debate about environmental versus financial performance by focusing on the concept of eco-efficiency, a measure developed by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.

Nadja Guenster, Jeroen Derwall, Rob Bauer, and Kees Koedijk authored the study. Guenster, Derwall, and Koedijk -- are affiliated with the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, and Bauer is affiliated with Limburg Institute of Financial Economics at Maastricht University.

Why is More Software being offered as a Service?

Source: Partnerworld Industry Networks : Blogs : Amy Wohl.

This represents a clear change from a few years ago when software services were still considered oddities, reserved for something special, or to address a market that it was hard to sell traditional, packaged software to.

In the meantime, several things occurred:

(1) We became much more familiar and comfortable with using the ubiquitous web.

(2) We got a lot smarter about how to write software that exploited the Internet (rather than merely trying to repurpose software written for traditional implementation onto the Internet). This blog has addressed this issue many times, so we'll just mention two items in passing -- writing software that permits the user to be their own system administrator and writing software that permits multi-tenancy (many users to share a single server in a secure fashion).

(3) We discovered that customers were willing to make a different set of trade-offs in purchasing software:

-- Lower prices could justify less customization
-- Instant (or nearly instant) implementation and immediate usability could justify less control
-- Being able to outsource non-critical applications could free up scarce IT resources for higher priority projects

(4) The idea of where an office is or who's on a team changed radically. Today, offices can be anywhere, from the brick-and-mortar offices of the past to cars, hotel rooms, and desks at home. Teams are not just fellow employees, but may also include contractors, suppliers, and customers. In both cases, providing them with common on-line workspaces and access to applications and data is much easier in the flexible, dynamic world of a Software Service than in the behind-the-firewall world of IT, with its necessarily tighter security rules and project lag cycles.

via Emergic.org

Big Changes for Hardware and Software?

Is this the beginning of the commodization of hardware and software?

Source: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog.

In just the last few weeks, we've seen, particularly on the software side, growing signs of a sea change. As consolidation, commoditization and weakening demand turn traditional packaged software into a rust-belt industry, dominated by a couple of big suppliers looking to milk the installed base, innovation and growth seem to be shifting quickly to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) arena. Pushed by diverse utility upstarts like Google (on the consumer side, so far), Salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies, 37signals and Rearden Commerce, traditional software makers are now jockeying to position themselves as players in the SaaS world.

Software applications are, of course, only one side of the utility model. The other side is the infrastructure - the trillions of dollars worth of hardware and system software that companies today maintain privately, within their proprietary data centers. That, too, is an obsolete model, and the shift to a rationalized, "multi-tenant" utility infrastructure will likely entail even more profound changes than the related shift to software-as-a-service.

via Emergic.org

Investing in Choppy Markets

Source: Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news.

...it pays to remain cautious when the market's showing choppy action.

In such an environment, try to lock in profits if you can get a 20% gain. You should hang on only if a leading stock you own rallies 20% or more in just one or two weeks. And always cut your losses at 7% to 8% below your purchase price.

If you take your 20% profit and cut losses at 7% or 8%, you could be right once and wrong twice and still come out ahead. If you find it's tough to stay above water with these guidelines, you can lower the bar by taking gains at 15% and cutting losses at 5%.

Turning Waste Into Watts

Link: Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: Features :: Turning Waste Into Watts.

At no point in its life cycle -- from assembly to operation to disposal -- has the internal-combustion automobile ever been accused of sparing the planet. That is, until a recent breakthrough from Ford (F) Motor. By recycling a by-product of its manufacturing process, a Ford plant near Detroit is now generating enough electricity to power two homes a day. Any day now, a second Ford site should be producing sufficient power to light an entire city block. The secret? Taking paint fumes and converting them into electricity -- using, of all things, an external-combustion engine invented by a Scottish clergyman nearly 200 years ago.

Here’s how it works: To comply with smog-control laws, automakers must capture and dispose of paint fumes before they seep into the air. Typically the contaminants are burned -- a highly imperfect process, given that the natural gas used to incinerate the fumes is expensive and that hydrocarbons, a potential energy source, are wasted. But two years ago, a Ford plant in Dearborn, Mich., tried something different. Before burning the pollutants, Ford stripped out the hydrocarbons and, using fuel-cell technology, converted them into energy-rich hydrogen gas. Then the hydrogen was combined with oxygen to produce a chemical reaction that generated about 5,000 watts of power an hour.

That’s not much for a plant that consumes 15 million watts or more per day. But volume wasn’t the point, says Mark Wherrett, the Ford engineer who led the project. The company first wanted to make sure that the technology worked. Now Ford is taking it to the next level: A truck plant just coming online in Wayne, Mich., is expected to start converting paint fumes into about 55,000 watts per hour.

One key difference from the Dearborn project: Instead of fuel cells, the Wayne plant will use a cheaper but less efficient Stirling engine as its power generator. (Physics buffs will recall that the Stirling was invented in the early 19th century but has never been widely used for commercial purposes.) Next Ford plans to employ its fumes-to-fuel technology at a plant in Ontario that’s slated for renovation in 2007. The estimated output, Wherrett says: a whopping 100,000 watts an hour.

Ford won’t reveal financial details, but insiders say the three plants should save the company several million dollars a year. And the technology might provide a boost on the revenue side too. Ford and partner Detroit Edison have applied for five patents on the process in hopes that it can be sold to other smog producers like oil refineries, paper mills, and semiconductor fabs. To bring it to market, they’ve hooked up with Climate Technologies, a $10 million Michigan company that has licensed the technology and will pay Ford and Detroit Edison a royalty on each sale -- a market that Climate CEO Walt Zimmerman estimates at $2 billion by 2015. “I’m sober to the fact that there’s a lot of work to be done,” Zimmerman says, “but for a small company like ours, this opportunity is a dream come true.”

Inflation Is Coming

Source: MSN Money - How the Fed lost the inflation fight - Jubak's Journal.

The global economy is supply-constrained in industries from mining to lumber to oil refining, largely because companies haven't invested enough in production capacity over the last few decades. There's no puzzle or global plot here, just economics. The profits in many of these industries were so low that nobody invested in new production capacity.

The good news is that this cycle will turn, as such cycles do, as current high profits, created by this very lack of supply, are invested in new capacity. Eventually supply will catch up -- as long as the profits are there, it always does. (Unless the world is indeed facing a growing shortage of discoverable and recoverable oil, and the jury is still out on that one.) And if this cycle is like most, companies will overinvest, lured by current and temporary high profit margins, setting the stage for a period in many of these industries when supply again exceeds demand.

The bad news, however, is that building new capacity to produce the basic materials in such short supply can't be done overnight. We're talking about developing iron and copper mines (after exploration companies have discovered the new deposits). About drilling for oil in deeper and deeper water -- or in politically more and more unstable countries. About building new refineries and smelters to turn raw materials into consumable goods. And about constructing docks and pipelines to get these materials to markets. And then there are the really long-term projects -- like liquefied natural-gas terminals -- that will take decades to build, if they get built at all.

But there's a major source of inflationary expectations that isn't under the Federal Reserve's control. That source: the White House and the Congress.

The sheer size of the annual budget deficit -- no matter whose accounting you use -- is damaging enough to any effort to prevent inflationary expectations from becoming embedded in the economy. As one spending plan gets piled on top of another, more and more people find it easier and easier to believe that the conscious plan in Washington is spend and spend, and then inflate and inflate, to make it easier to pay down the huge debt that's been built up.

Watching our government at work, it's hard to believe that money, especially the U.S. dollar, has any value at all. Certainly the politicians don't behave as if it did. If money has value, how do you justify the recently passed transportation bill, filed with more than $30 billion in vanity projects designed to get politicians re-elected -- and the recent refusal by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, to even consider giving back a dollar from that bill to pay for Hurricane Katrina?

Seven Technologies That Change Everything

Source: Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: Features :: Seven Technologies That Change Everything.

Innovation always has the power to disrupt business. Here’s what to watch in the years ahead.

1. AJAX
WHAT IT IS: Software tools that make browser-based applications behave more like software running on a PC.

2. BIOGENERICS
WHAT IT IS: Generic forms of the patented drug proteins sold by big biotech firms.

3. DEEP WEB SEARCH
WHAT IT IS: Technology that boldly goes where no search engine has gone before.

4. HIGH-DEFINITION RADIO
WHAT IT IS: Forget satellite. Regular radio is getting an upgrade, with CD-quality audio and many more channels.

5. HYBRID CELL PHONES
WHAT IT IS: Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones that bring together cellular and landline phone systems.

6. MICRO FUEL CELLS
WHAT IT IS: Batteries for portable electronic devices that use a refillable external fuel supply, from hydrogen to natural gas, methanol, ethanol, and sodium borohydride.

7. WI-MAX
WHAT IT IS: Wi-Max is like Wi-Fi on steroids, with a theoretical range of 30 miles.

Ford Revs Up Hybrid Production

Link: Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news.

America's No. 2 automaker will boost output of gas-electric hybrid vehicles tenfold by 2010 — to 250,000. In 5 years, most Ford, (F) Lincoln and Mercury cars and light trucks will have hybrid options to boost fuel efficiency. Hybrid leaders Toyota (TM) and Honda (HMC) have seen demand soar amid surging gas prices.

Open Source Software

Source: Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news.

It's hard to gauge the full breadth of open-source software. In most cases, users are free to download and use the software without contacting the company that made it. Only a fraction of those wind up signing a contract.

But there's ample evidence of open source's growing clout.

Just a few years ago, it was hard to find Linux versions for some of the most popular software applications for business.

Today, executives say more than 750 major business applications run on Linux.

"It's a rare occasion when someone important in the (software) industry decides not to support Linux," said Oracle President Charles Phillips, in a speech at the recent LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco.

Another sign of open-source growth: Every major hardware vendor sells Linux systems alongside those running Unix and Microsoft Windows.

According to International Data Corp., server vendors sold $4.2 billion worth of hardware running Linux in 2004.

That's small compared to the $18.9 billion worth running Windows and the $17.6 billion running on the various versions of Unix. But for Linux, the total reflected a 44.2% jump, vs. 14.6% for Windows and a 1% drop for Unix.

The Next Wave

Beyond Linux, a new wave of open-source software is gaining traction.