silentblue | Quantified

An editor of the Harvard Business Review has earned him the ire of the IT industry for basically stating that a business’s amount of IT investments are no longer proportional to a business’s rate of profitability. His recommendations for companies to spend less on the latest newfangled thing is obviously advice the IT industry cannot stand.

He does have a point – for example, Excel 97 has virtually all the features you’ll ever use in a spreadsheet, so there is little incentive to upgrade to something sexier like Excel 2003. In the same vein, you don’t need to go out and grab 3GHz powered PCs to run your office software. IT spending is way down compared to two years before. In the meantime, it’s become more expensive to maintain one’s current IT infrastructure, with all those pesky viruses, hack attacks and junk email everywhere.

But perhaps that is being to short-sighted. Admittedly, standard office software and hardware have matured to points of diminishing return. However, I see it as a next stage in the IT evolution – a shift to exciting new technologies, such as VoIP, wireless, web services, and e-conferencing. Beige boxes are becoming commoditized, but the PDA and WAP cellphone markets are booming.

So perhaps IT isn’t dying, but merely taking a new shape. At least we know that the IT industry won’t go down without a fight.

The latest sign that computers and technology have truly gone mainstream: a growing number of maids (or ahmahs) are putting a little IT value-add into their work. Along with cleaning house, they’ll clean the family PC too, performing regular maintenance tasks such as scanning for viruses and managing the family website.

Need a forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting, wacky-sounding company name? You can grab a snazzy brand name from Whatbrandareyou.com. Just remember it’s a joke – even if 20 of these absurd names, such as “Phellatio”, “Winwin” and “Ovisovis” – have already been snatched up and copyrighted.

Next, you need a fear-and-awe inducing title for yourself to stick on your business card. Look no further than the Amazing IT Title Generator. And if you need some inspiration for your core mission statement, refer to the Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2003Categories tech

Jim Stewart attended the NGN2003 conference last week, and saw an incredible demonstration by Harvard Medical.

All lectures are video recorded, and then automatically encoded to streaming multimedia, and automatically indexed via a voice recognition system. Within hours any given lecture is online, and most importantly, searchable. Now that’s a nifty automated publishing system.

It is no surprise that as the Internet has entrenched itself in the lives of regular folks all around the world in the past nine years, people are spending more of their time and money online.

Communities of netizens has essentially become a brand new society – a new society of digerati. In the end, the net is all about communication, and as it evolves, it will become a conduit for communicating with people, and so-called social networking technologies will become in demand. The decline in corporate travel budgets doesn’t hurt.

Currently, we have email, instant messengers, forums and webcams. We have chatrooms, blogs, wikis, and even virtual worlds. People get married online. But netizens still lack a way of being truly interactive, cohesive communities.

Microsoft Research has been pretty busy this year trying to tackle this problem. Their first jab at it was a P2P app called Threedegrees that allowed desktop communities to share music and communicate via MSN Messenger. Threedegrees looks stillborn though since it doesn’t seem to have addressed the real social divide – although its juvenile interface and the fact it could knock out your Internet connection probably didn’t help.

Their second jab is via something called “Wallop“, but not very much is publicly known about it. Basically, by combining a bunch of collaborative tools such as photo sharing, document synchronization, profiling, blogging and RSS, they hope to allow information to be easily shared by online communities.

Some tools, such as the Social Map (aka MSR Connections), lets you visually manage relationships and identify points of knowledge transfer. This is astoundingly powerful stuff, because if you need to find someone or something, you can immediately zero in on who knows what.

It’s powerful because such software can allow people to interact in a natural social context, and information to aggregate and flow easily within a community. It’s a 24-hour electronic wine and cheese.

MS isn’t the only one interested, many other companies are pitching similar concepts. But it’s coming, whether it’s Microsoft or someone else that finally pulls it off.