Trends I'm Watching

Web-based office software

Trend: Software as a service is about to become much more visible as web-based office software (word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications) become functional and available.

Richard MacManus at ZDNet describes why web-based office software is coming and why it will be good for most businesses. Excerpts below.

Link: ? Why you need a Web Office | Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet.com

Collaboration

That's a key point - that office tools on the Web are about enabling users to more easily share information and collaborate. It's something existing desktop office tools are woefully inadequate in. Ever tried to email a Word document to 10 of your colleagues and then keep track of changes or suggested changes?

So here's where a Web-based word processing tool would come in handy. Imagine being able to view the latest version of a collaborative Word document, via your browser window. Instead of using emails to discuss the document, it's all done in one place - the URL of your online Word document. All changes are neatly tracked and versioned. Collaboration is happening, because there's a single point of reference on the Web - and it's not email!

Another positive for Web-based office software is that it makes integrating with other web-based software easier, via open Web standards and formats.

Reduces Costs

... "Web Office is cheap", which it certainly is compared to those large licensing fees your company is probably paying Microsoft currently! Plus as some commenters on Slashdot noted, deploying office software ONCE on a server is much more efficient than deploying hundreds or thousands of instances on desktops. It's also easier to do upgrades and backups.

Productivity

Business decision makers are interested in productivity - and Web Office software potentially increases that.

Investing in Disruptive Change in Technology

Trend: Disruptive change in technology will continue to create opportunities for significant gains (and losses) in investments.

Jim Jubak at MSN Investing describes how to invest in disruptive change and what the next seven disruptive opportunities might be.

Source: MSN Investing, Jubak's Journal - The 7 next big things in tech

No truly big change takes place without overturning traditions, sending competitive rules to the dustbin of history, and destroying formerly flourishing companies.

Obviously, disruptive change creates huge problems for investors. But disruptive change also presents huge opportunities for investors. EBay and Google, for example, have done pretty well by investors by rearranging the landscape for online retailing and advertising.

3 rules to profit from destruction:

Look for companies that actually have a plan for profiting from the disruptive shift in technology. Innovation is neat, but for investors it's not nearly as important as a profitable business plan.

Don't pay too much. Yes, it's notoriously hard to value the stock of a truly disruptive technology company. More than 20% of the readers who responded to my pre-IPO survey on Google thought the stock was worthless. But since the odds are that at least 30% of the stocks that you pick as disruptive opportunities will head south, the key is not to pay so much for them that the successful picks can't put your portfolio comfortably in the black.

Don't ignore established companies that are willing to cannibalize their existing business in order to reap the potential profits of disruption. Since these companies aren't betting the store on the disruptive technology, the returns to you, the investor, won't be as high as with a home-run-or-bust bet. But the losses won't be as large either.

Disruptive opportunities:

• The "Cell" microprocessor.
• The home-entertainment gateway.
• The home-entertainment hub.
• Internet telephony over mobile phones.
• Electronic, networked health-care records.
• Mapping everywhere. 
• Batteries.

Does Distributed Software Development Work?

Trend: Software developers can work from any location with a broadband connection as long as appropriate procedures and tools are implemented.

Here are excerpts from an interview by GL Ness of Always On with Borland senior vice president Chris Barbin about distributed software development. (Disclosure: I do distributed development.)

Link: Does Distributed Development Work? :: AO.

There's something to be said for having a critical mass of people in one location: It makes it easier to communicate, collaborate, and learn. However, with the right technology, people skills, and processes in place, an individual working in a home office can just as effectively contribute to the team as someone working at headquarters or in a branch office.

...we're really only at the beginning of the virtual enterprise with software development. People used to think that knowledge capital had to exist in one place for software development to be most effective, but our customers have found this isn't necessarily the case. What is important is that the employer defines roles, responsibilities, and business goals up front and then properly aligns teams to accomplish those goals—regardless of where those teams are located.

Distributed development  is a broader term that refers to software that's being developed by team members in different locations: It could be in a different city, a different country, or by a different company altogether (as in outsourcing). Outsourcing,  in contrast, is just one type of distributed development scenario.

General Public License may be revised

Trend: Open-source software continues to adapt to the commercial and legal environment, to the dismay of some large software companies.

IBD summarizes the proposed revisions to the open-source software license that would eliminate some legal challenges and minimize abuses. Excerpts below.

Source: Investor's Business Daily: Open-Source License Key To Nascent Field (subscription required)

Proposed changes to the General Public License would be the first since the Free Software Foundation released version 2 in 1991. The group's founder, Richard Stallman, says he wants to head off new threats to Linux and other free software.

The license is important because it dictates how software can and can't be used. Free software may be free, but that doesn't mean you can use it any which way you like. And indirectly, the license rules shape the development process and affect how popular the software becomes.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds credits much of his software's success to the GPL, which is by far the most popular way to license open-source code.

While free to use, build on and redistribute, open-source software is still under copyright, and comes with strings attached. Those wanting to incorporate the code into their own work for public use must agree to several conditions.

Proposed Changes:

Who Knows Where You Are? Your Cell Phone...

Trend: Government and marketers will know exactly where we are when we have a cell phone with us. The trade-offs are mind boggling.

Here's an excerpt from a San Francisco Chronicle interview with Paul Saffa. He mentions a hidden cost of having a new cell phone. As Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, said "We have no privacy, get over it."

Link: INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE / On the Record: Paul Saffo

Most people don't realize that our Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission have all mandated that cell phones need to have position recording built in. They want to be able to pinpoint your location with a global positioning chip in your phone or some other way of identifying your location. This costs the telephone companies money, so the bargain they made with the Feds is that we'll implement it, but then we get the right to use this for commercial purposes. You will get location-based marketing.

via The Pondering Primate

Chinese Government Regulates Internet – with Corporate Help

Trend: Companies such as Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo must cooperate with China's censorship policies to gain access to Chinese markets.

The Mercury News describes the issues related to internet censorship by China's government officials. Excerpts below.

Link: MercuryNews.com | 02/20/2006 | `Great Firewall' doesn't seem to faze Chinese.

China's Internet-filtering system has become an issue in Chinese-U.S. relations. At a congressional hearing last week in Washington, legislators grilled executives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco Systems about their role in helping China filter information or track down those who run afoul of restrictions on free speech.

Earlier in Beijing, Chinese authorities dismissed concerns about censorship, denying that they widely block Web sites and asserting that they've never arrested anyone for expressing an opinion on the Web, despite a series of detentions that indicate the contrary.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based advocacy group, says 49 Chinese are known to be in prison for "posting on the Internet articles and criticism of the authorities.''

There could be other, unknown cases. Asked at the hearing in Washington how many times it had turned in e-mail users to government authorities, Michael Callahan, Yahoo's general counsel and a company executive, said Chinese law prohibited revealing such information.

Can Terrorists Hit the US?

Trend: Terrorists are using attacks on infrastructure targets to create economic and social disruption.

John Robb describes how terrorists might attack the US. Excerpts below.

Link: Global Guerrillas: THE NEXT ATTACKS ON AMERICA.

Osama bin Laden offered a truce to America last month. This is a religiously mandated action prior to an attack. We should anticipate that new attacks on US targets will occur soon.

The timing, target, and nature of the next strategic attack on the US is shrouded in uncertainty. Its arrival will be a black swan -- an unexpected event that can't be anticipated with any degree of assurance.

The networks used by the terrorists in any future strategic attacks on the US will be small, decentralized clusters....Since the tools and training necessary for infrastructure attacks are crude, the moral burden of these attacks is meager (these attacks don't result in the deaths and dismemberment of random civilians), and the chance of capture is relatively small, the pool of potential participants is quite large.

Aiding China Censors Beats Exclusion

Trend: Many countries and companies overlook China's repression of its citizens to benefit from its economic growth.

IBD describes tech companies cooperation with Chinese censors. Excerpts below.

Link: Investor's Business Daily: Aiding China Censors Beats Alternative, U.S. Internet Giants Testify To Congress.

Officials for Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco went before Congress Wednesday and defended their decisions to comply with China's laws to do business there, even though the moves allow for censorship and, in some cases, the jailing of dissidents.

A congressional subcommittee that oversees global human rights invited them to a hearing on how U.S. Internet firms do business in China. All four companies are investing heavily to expand in one of the world's hottest economies.

Concerns about ISPs operating in China were heightened after two Chinese citizens received lengthy prison sentences, allegedly after Yahoo gave information on the individuals at the request of authorities. Officials never told Yahoo why they wanted the information.

Microsoft's MSN shut down a blogger in December at China's request.

Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., chaired the hearing, titled "The Internet in China: A Tool for Suppression?" He's drafting a bill that would put stricter regulations on how companies operate in China. It includes forcing Internet companies to keep computer servers out of China and other nations repressive to human rights.

The tech companies boiled down their decision to engage China to a simple choice: Do business in China and abide by its laws, or walk away.

China's Internet filtering is the most sophisticated in the world. It filters content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, the Falun Gong religion, the Dalai Lama and the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. No outside group really knows how much China filters. The only way to find out is to call up Web pages inside China and see whether they appear.

E-Health Systems Can Communicate

Trend: When medical records are stored electronically, the data can be shared by health care providers nationally using current technology.

IBD describes the Connecting for Health project, which created and tested a model for exchanging patient information. Excerpts below.

Link: Investor's Business Daily: Prescription Near For E-Health System?

In November, the Health and Human Services Department awarded $18.6 million in contracts to four groups for development of national health information network prototypes.

The Connecting for Health project was part of one group, which also included Computer Sciences Corp., Microsoft and Sun.

"The power of the Connecting for Health model is it accommodates a variety of technologic solutions," said Dr. Marc Overhage, president of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, on a Feb. 8 conference call.

Participants planned and built a secure network that could be reached through the Internet. For anonymity, they scrambled the data they used — 20 million records for some 500,000 patients. Then they started running tests.

The groups looked at things like how hospital A could find and get a certain patient record from hospital B using only basics such as a name, birth date and ZIP code.

They ran hundreds of thousands of queries via medical facilities that are part of MA-SHARE (the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium), the Indiana Health Information Exchange and Mendocino HRE (Health Records Exchange).

The group focused on trading two common types of health data that often aren't handled well: medication lists and lab results. Shirky says that in Massachusetts roughly 15% of overall health spending is redundant or unnecessary. At times, tests are repeated because a worker can't get access to the original results.

Concentrated Solar Power

Trend: Large-scale alternative energy plants are being built and implemented, thanks to leaders with vision and bold entrepreneurs.

Jesse Broehl at RenewableEnergyAccess.com writes about a solar collector in the Nevada desert.

Link: RenewableEnergyAccess.com | A New Chapter Begins for Concentrated Solar Power.

This weekend, in the Desert outside Las Vegas, a major milestone was reached for renewable energy that could represent a shift in how the fastest growing region in the U.S. get its energy. Hundreds of people from around the world were on hand in Boulder City, Nevada, to commemorate the groundbreaking for the beginning of construction on the first Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) energy project in the U.S. in more than 15 years.

Called Nevada Solar One, the 64 MW commercial-scale solar energy plant will encompass 350 square acres, a nearly endless sea of mirrored troughs that will concentrate the strong desert sunlight and convert it into 750-degree F thermal energy, which can then be used to create steam for electrical power generation.

A combination of state policies and support from both the Governor and the legislature, steady advances in this type of technology, all coupled with skyrocketing energy costs have helped make this unique project a reality.