Monthly Archives: December 2014

General

New Year, New Opportunities

Thirty-eight published blog articles, nine delivered speeches, numerous learning engagements later, TriStrategist has concluded the year of 2014, a year of big changes, unsatisfied questioning, insatiable curiosity and rapid learning. In the year, we met hard obstacles, we had deep disappointments, but we also turned many unexpected into opportunities, especially the opportunities to be more open, curious and daring. This year, we have learned to value our talents and our time more.

Because our interest has always been broad, in global business, in leadership and management, and in many technologies, the subjects of our blogs have been wide. We published TriStrategy’s 3T Framework on Innovation in Service Business and studied disruptive innovations in greater depth. We studied several biographies of the well-known CEOs of the current society and their key leadership approaches. We also summarized our thoughts and suggestions on several present-day leadership and management issues per our observations. We strived to cover the new topics and concepts related to today’s fast-growing technologies in the most concise manner (Yes, we counted words for each blog article!), including cloud computing, Big Data, distributed computing, AI, nanotechnologies, and IoT. We shared our learning and our visions of the coming years. It was definitely an exciting year to learn and keep a pulse on the new trends in various technology landscapes. Many of these trends will continue manifesting themselves in the years to come.

In the new year of 2015, we’ll continue our learning, our questioning, our sharing of the knowledge, and our weekly blogs as a vehicle of thoughts and exchanges. We hope to connect with our readers more. We want to put more of our ideas, thoughts, plans and creativities into actions and realizations, to help others’ businesses and help ourselves grow. May the New Year of 2015 promise us and everyone else more opportunities.

Trend of Technology

Nearables, Farables and, Escapables?

Following the smart wearables on the market, now come the term “nearables technologies” to describe the technologies that allow smart objects to communicate with the receiving devices within a few meters’ distance via Bluetooth Smart protocol. The release of low-energy example of such technologies, iBeacon (as an indoor positioning system) from Apple in 2013 has further promoted the conceptualization and realization of the Internet of Things (IoT), where almost everything, including humans, can be positioned as smart objects in the near future carrying wireless beacons.

With the near comes the far. If “Near” means a few meters’ range, by the sense of a beacon, “Far” will be a distance of more than 10 meters away. TriStrategist believes that very soon, new developments will enable “farables technologies” to fill in the picture of ubiquitous computing and IoT of the future.

Imagine a future world, with or without one’s knowledge, everyone becomes a smart object emitting signals constantly about their location and other personal profile information. Even with the modern encryption technologies or proprietary communication protocols, no matter how advanced, if any of these signals is captured by some ill-intentioned party, all information about this person can be potentially exposed and misused. It’ll be a grave privacy and security concern. Many today’s hacking stories have already demonstrated that no advanced technology setup can be truly hack-proof.

Could anyone escape this scenario? Not easy. In the near future, the clothes you dress, the shoes and socks you wear, the jewelry you pick, any piece of personal item you carry, of course your cell phone or any gadget with you, could all have sensors built in. The legal Opt-Out checkbox only fools the unsuspicious. TriStrategist thinks that our society will soon be in real and imminent need for “Escapable Technologies” – complex technologies that can allow the signal shielding or effective signal interference from the individual carrier so that a private person can choose to become “invisible” from any electronic signal receiver or monitoring screen.

A stealth plane carries special coating and is designed in carefully measured optical geometry to become nearly invisible to the radar. An “invisible man” on stage, performed by a magician, usually takes advantage of the lighting of the surroundings and wears special reflective clothing. Similarly, TriStrategist believes that future “escapables” from the electronic or optical signal receivers, may need a combination of different advanced technologies. Complete sensor signal shielding would be ideal, but may be hard to design and may not apply to all situations. Interference may be another approach. The signals or data captured, mixed with the interferences from the “escapables”, would become unreadable or undecipherable by majority of the receivers. These “escapables technologies”, once on the market and mature, could become far more valuable than any of the sensor technologies in the near future.

What else? Welcome to the new world where we will be experiencing numerous new technology innovations, new cultures and new vocabularies along with the explosive changes around us.

Trend of Technology

Consumer or Enterprise?

In traditional PC-dominated world, the distinction of enterprise vs. consumer business was fairly clear. However mobile devices are for today’s market just as desktop PCs were for the PC Age in the past. The line between enterprise vs. consumer market has become increasingly blurry as we see the proliferation of mobile devices adopted at workplace in place of desktops and mobile devices become more of the productivity tools than just the communication and social tools.

Today’s competitions in consumer device market are extremely fierce. New devices, new features, new global players are coming out every day. Domination in any global consumer market becomes increasingly short-lived and difficult. Companies are forced to constantly seek new markets and new ideas to hold onto market shares which may promise new service revenues in the near future. One such strategy is the push to cross of the protected boundary of enterprise vs. consumer market.

Google, with free Android mobile platform and rich assortments of its different price-point models from many manufacturers, has been gaining steady shares from cost-sensitive consumers and school buyers. Today Google has a strong push in cloud-based enterprise productivity software online and on devices with “Google for Work” solutions including Gmail, Google docs, etc. Microsoft, with the year-over-year decline of global PC shipment endangering its once-a-stronghold enterprise software space, on the other hand, is trying hard to gain more shares of the consumer market with its Windows Phone and Surface tablets.

Thanks to Steve Jobs’ visionary leadership, Apple has been very successful in high-end consumer market with its popular iPhone and iPad. However Apple also started observing a slower growth with iPad and more competitions in global smartphone market for iPhone. Of course they turned their attentions to the enterprise space. Apple devices have been flowing nicely into the corporate world in recent years. iPhone has long replaced Blackberry as the mobile choice for enterprises. With the new reality that enterprise solution providers and internal IT departments nowadays must offer applications both online and on mobile, Apple devices are riding on the lucky wave of the corporate changes. iOS is usually the No.1 targeted mobile platform for these developments. For example, Salesforce.com and SAP are observing increased traffic from Apple devices for their mobile versions of the CRM/ERP applications. Apple is also consciously deepening its corporate customer pursuits by allowing its devices to easily connect to enterprise emails and shipping new security features in its newer models such as the Touch ID fingerprint readers and anti-reflective screen coating in Apple Air 2 and Mini 3. This year Apple formed a joint venture with IBM to leverage Big Blue’s enterprise service reach to push more mobile apps running on its devices in enterprise environment. It has already borne fruits after a few months with the first set of mobile apps targeting key industries such as airlines, banking, financial services, insurance, etc. With more apps to come to ease enterprise pain points, they also hope that Apple’s strength in product design and user experience will appease to more enterprise users.

It looks like the merging of the enterprise and consumer markets in the future may be inevitable. A new reality appears fast approaching that all major enterprise applications will be running in cloud and all users can connect, do the needed work and run their daily life activities via mobile devices. Ease-of-use concepts and design innovations in consumer experience will surely be carried into business world as well. Wouldn’t it be cool that in the future work and play can merge?

Trend of Technology

The Stellar Rise of the Open Source Technologies

For more than 20 years in the past, Open Source was like a crying baby – loud but not loved. Many open source companies including Red Hat, a pioneer, had only made marginal revenues compared with other concurrent big software companies. Players around the world who genuinely loved open source concept, were competing against dominating windows-based software in guerrilla warfare fashions. The randomness came with the volunteering contributions, the shortage of funding, the lack of general organizations and development roadmaps had made open source software painful to use, especially for large enterprise environments where robustness and ease of maintenance are often the core requirements.

But things are dramatically changed with the new waves of cloud services and Big Data today. Now it becomes everyone’s favorite baby almost overnight. For example, Docker, a small San Francisco startup who just barely released its v1.0 software container solution for cloud about 1.5 years ago [See our August blog on Containers and Cloud], is instantly pursued by all major cloud providers. Google is using container templates directly for its cloud deployment features including autoscaling and load-balancing. Microsoft rushed to sign a new deal with Docker in October in order to allow generic Docker containers to be supported on windows servers and Azure platform in the near future. Today Amazon and Google’s popular cloud platforms have promoted a major chunk of Big Data solutions from open source communities, by either insulating the complexity of management tasks or delivering automation packages to the market. At the meantime, big old telecommunication companies are spending billions to develop open-source-based software-defined network infrastructure. Late for the party but with its own flair, Microsoft started to open its developer source code a few years ago to join the community. This week Microsoft disclosed its intention to open source its re-architected .NET Core as a foundation for both open-source application development and for cross-platform cloud services and application deployment.

On global mobile market, many OEMs and ODMs in emerging markets have been developing and packaging customized mobile applications using open source technologies on their devices, mostly on top of free Android mobile OS. This strategy has proved both fast and effective for many of them. The rocket rise of Chinese local smartphone maker Xiaomi, now #2 in market share in smartphone delivery in China, is a great example. [See October blog on The Fast Shifting Market of Mobile].

What are the reasons for the rebirth and stellar rise of an old baby? First, through time when a disruptive innovation has accumulated enough momentum, reached critical adoption mass and refined enough its solutions to form a sustainable ecosystem, it transforms itself from a smaller player in marginal markets to a powerful player that can compete head-to-head with incumbent dominating technologies in main markets. Second, other disruptive forces of present, triggered by the Second Machine Age innovations, demand new thinking, new ideas, new solutions to brand new problems which incumbents are not prepared to deal with. The disruptive technology thus becomes a more attractive, creative and cost-effective alternative for the experiments of seeking new solutions. Third, once worldwide great minds start gathering around on the subject, everything is possible. To sum up, the current condition is ripe for a broader penetration of a once insignificant disruptive technology to the mainstream market.

Some recent comments on Wall Street Journal explained the current appeals of open source software to big businesses. Companies think that it’s less expensive and easier to customize than proprietary software. They believe that open source options can help them develop new services faster. Obviously speed and cost are the top decision factors and signatures of today’s technology market.