Google Challenging Microsoft's Monopoly?
Interesting perspective from Mitch Wagner: his contention is that Google is building the world's largest fault tolerant platform. Search, web mapping, web logging, even email are secondary to Google's goal of owning the underlying infrastructure on which billions of folks depend.
"Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on," wrote Jason Kottke, a web designer and developer, in his weblog, kottke.org, last week...
"Google's money won't be made with search," Kottke wrote in Feb. 2003. "That's small peanuts compared to selling access to the world's biggest, best, and most cleverly-utilized map of the web. And I have a feeling that they know this... but they're just not letting on..."
...The misconception about Google's core business leads to the surprise over Google's challenge to Microsoft. How could an Internet search company challenge a desktop operating system monopoly? But in retrospect, Google's challenge to Microsoft is obvious. Established technology vendors are not generally challenged by competitors doing the same thing, but better and cheaper. They're challenged by companies that do something different that makes the established technology relatively unimportant...
For example, Microsoft itself didn't unseat IBM by making better, cheaper mainframes...
Google Challenges Microsoft Monopoly
Inquirer on Outsourcing
Insightful article from the Inquirer on the drawbacks of outsourcing, with emphasis on call-centers. This should (but probably won't) be must-reading for C-level execs:
[Outsourcing of] ...Customer support is a real stretch, in fact it is basically saying that you don’t want to deal with the only source of income you have. Technical support outsourcing is just plain stupid.
Outsourcing your tech support is more or less the kiss of death for an organisation. Dell recently came to this conclusion. It outsourced its bread and butter corporate support to India, and customer satisfaction went into the toilet. It backpedaled pretty quickly, which is a pretty good indicator that it was hurting sales...
...What most people don’t seem to realize is that it is worse for the company that does the outsourcing. There are two reasons for this, neither one of which is obvious. First is an expansion of the "Institutional Memory" concept I wrote about earlier. If you outsource, you effectively destroy the ability to promote from within. The other is that you place your only contact with the customer in the hands of people who have no economic justification to care...
...When you outsource the call centre, this chain of command and ability to promote from within is irrevocably shattered. Those one in 100 people that HR would kill for get washed away in the next bidding cycle. There is no bottom up knowledge and personnel transfer, the bright ones simply go away...
Web Services
Looking for a good overview of web services? WebServiceResource is in the process of creating a portal around the topic. Tutorials, books, technologies all play a part. If it's maintained and built out, it could become a very interesting site.
WebService Resource
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