Posts Categorized ‘General Blog’
Client/server based enterprise solutions are sucker’s bet-incredibly expensive to implement, run and replace when they fail to keep up with your organization’s growth. The internet affords you the opportunity to update these antiquated processes to gain a new competitive edge. The internet’s flexibility, ease-of-implementation and low cost allows you to effectively deploy new solutions and gain s fast return on your investment. The internet supports the infrastructure for the entire organization such as marketing, sales, fulfillment and service/support. And each function can be conducted via the Web, allowing customers, suppliers and partners to collaborate and interact seamlessly, all the while providing the organization with the business intelligence necessary to compete in today’s fast-paced, global market.
The Web is the essential infrastructure for today’s growing business. Web browsers furnish the ideal access tool for customers and partners, since they’re universally available and require little training to use. However, a one hundred percent internet platform should not be confused with browser frontends that merely link to client/ server applications on the back end. Since such outdated solutions often suffer from high costs and a lack of scalability.
Now a far more important source of leading to corporate America than before, financial markets can offer cheaper alternatives to banks and other traditional thrift institutions. With the growth in securitized commercial and industrial loans, there are more opportunities for firms to raise funds. But it’s a fragile, delicate arrangement, since more corporate and individual wealth is tied to the markets. What is all adds up to be this: Our economy today is more open, competitive, and reliant on financial markets than it was in years ago. The interaction of all the factors is important to propel the expansion. For example, without cheap plentiful financial capital, many would no t be in a position to invest in new technology.
Current thinking says that if you invest as such possible in technology, the customer has come. Not quite-economists are starting to see things differently. If customer confidence wilts, the benefits of deregulation are tapped out, the market drops, or foreign investors take their funds elsewhere, then the economy could melt. There are a hundred of other factors that could go wrong too-things that technology can’t offset. Keep that in mind next time you hear this expansion called the internet boom.
The internet changes everything. We’ve heard that phrase so often in the past that it has ceased to have any shock value. Of course the internet changes everything. The reality is the internet, for all it’s buzz, has wrought flashy but mainly superficial change in the most industries so far. It has transformed back office procedures for how goods are inventoried, brought, and sold; it has served as an intriguing new medium for marketing and selling to customers; and it has even streamlined investing so much that millions in average Americans, once sheep led by stockbrokers, are now trading stocks daily- no, hourly. Yes, buying an obscure book or auctioning off Granma’s can-oil lamp has never been easier, and e-mail has vastly improved internal communications at most companies. And over time these e-changes will grow to seem more fundamental. But those who proclaim that the net is a revolution that has already ripped through American business mistake a clear view for a short distance.
And now, in the internet age, the number of IT big shots is further multiplying by virtue of the all-embracing nature of ubiquitous networks. The IT industry is no longer a simple value chain with a handful of key links and choke points, but instead is a value “web” built around universally agreed-upon network standards.
A major transformation is going on right here, right now. The internet is driving it. And it’s for more than a retail channel for consumers. It will affect every player in the consumer channel and every business-to-business relationship in some material way. Inevitably, e-business will become the dominant channel for commerce. In fact, the message is already clear: Those businesses that succeed in e-business will do so by focusing on customers rather than on products. They will reinvent themselves by finding new ways of adding value to the buying experience. They will built and maintain customer loyalty by recognizing, exploiting, and appealing to the difference- rather than the similarities- among the customers, and will use this new information to differentiate themselves and their products from the competition. Refocus on energies not on products and services, but on creating long-lasting relationships that deliver value for the customer.
As a result of these efforts, a company will generate a sense of how it can analyze the risks, reward, and new opportunities- how it can become an e-business. What’s clear is that there’s no turning back. Companies do not have a choice about becoming electronic corporations; they do have the choice on what to do first- what systems they need to deploy, and who works with them to achieve the goal.
For the past 20 years, most of the net addition to employ in advanced economies has come from self-employment or from small companies. The trend will accelerate in the next twenty years, as the structural changes wrought by the new technologies play themselves out. In some countries, there is already nearly half of nongovernment jobs come from companies with fewer than fifty on staffs, and almost one person in seven is self-employed- much higher than other country, where the promotion is one in twelve.
Clearly, countries will have to adapt their social systems. The U.S seems to be ahead in building this wide-open, individualized workplace of the future. Entrepreneurship is prized and supported through such things as relatively lenient bankruptcy laws and the availability of venture capital. New houses sometimes come equipped with home offices. But in one important way-how it provides health care-the U.S. is way behind. The cost of health care is a serious deterrent to leaving a job that provides good coverage. Continental Europe scopes with the health care of the self-employed pretty well. But it fails in its labor legislation, its burdensome social security levies, and its barriers to new business.
I took a couple of runs at using the computer to shop for digital cameras, but it was an unhappy experience. Sitting in front of a computer means sitting and typing commands or clicking on links on screen, and all too often being frustrated because the links go nowhere or the software on the computer doesn’t work or you don’t have the right plug-in or the website is sluggish because too many people are trying to use it at the same time. More important, while you’re typing to shop on the web, you’re not doing something else that is more immediate-like actually buying a product or reading e-mail or looking at news stories or trading stocks or any of a hundred other things that the web is great for.
No, for me the essence of shopping is a communal experience that involves physically entering r booths and handling products and talking to people. After spending two or tree fruitless, boring hours surfing the web, I spent two or three truly pleasant hours visiting actual stores-where I looked at and handled digital cameras while talking to sales people. And then I spent some equally pleasurable time reading catalogs from merchants that sell cameras.
I wondered if they had in fact been fired, but one of my more experienced colleagues-a definite insider-explained what was going on. The folks, who left, he said, had joined the company in its early stages, more than a year before the IPO, when the company has just a couple of dozen employees and shaky prospects. In order to attract new hires, a company gave out large stocks grants, at prices of just pennies per share. When we went public the folks who joined early were already vested in tens of thousands of share at a strike price of pennies per share. They were too junior to get caught in the six-month lockout; once they were out, they had sixty days to buy their vested shares at the option price and they hold or sell.
If they get in, get out, get rich strategy strikes you as a bit disputable, then there’s the next best alternative to consider: get those penny shares and stay on for at least for years. The share price may roller-coaster over the months, but if you have penny shares the company has to really crater before your shares are out of the money. Over four years, there is a nice averaging effect if you sell out monthly. My colleagues call it VIP, for “vesting in peace”. The ones I know who got it right seem to buy a lot of new cars and other toys.
Advertising has been good to us. Sure, it’s often tiresome, but it’s brought us cheap newspapers, as well as radio and television. It pays for most of this magazine. On the internet, however, it’s not doing its job. We’re not paying attention to online advertising and not buying what it’s promoting. That’s a major problem, given the most internet companies count on advertising revenues. And that’s also a major opportunity. Startups are creating new ways to pitch products and services on the web, which could render the ubiquitous banner ad of today antique and enable the net to rival cable TV and even radio as an advertising medium.
Ways have even found to bring internet advertising to our desktops when we’re not browsing the internet. The result is not only messages with motion and sound but messages that can be tacked, so an advertiser knows at once who has looked at the ad and whether a purchase was made. Several companies have devised techniques to embed advertising in freeware. So that clicking on a banner in the program will automatically take you to the advertiser’s website. Other companies provide free event-planning or reminder services in exchange for personal data, which are use to send ads in form of email.
Never mind that most music lovers are still listening to their old-fashioned CD’s or that some diehards are sticking with their vinyl records. If you believe any of the hype surrounding internet music companies, the foundations of the current recording industry are crumbling, and new world order is about to be ushered in. In other words the digital online music is out there somewhere, and someone is going to get really, really rich buying the stocks. Literally dozen of companies have been founded to capitalize on the internet music revolution, as the industry shifts from a world where recorded music is packaged and sold in retail outlets to one where music is digitalized and zapped to your computer and your car.
But even in a sector that’s synonymous with risk, the stocks o these new internet music companies stand out as especially dangerous. Among the issues that could unplug their performance: Industry wide standards haven’t been agreed upon, the selection of no pirated music is still lacking, and the consumers may not be willing to pay for music via the net. Other infrastructure providers specialize in the distribution of music online and make a complex system that offers secure downloading and tracks copyright ownership so that royalties get paid. That’s another feature that makes the big labels happy.
In today’s high-stakes marketplace, the internet now owns the house. Established players in established fields are discovering that the rules of engagement have change overnight, while savvy “dot com’s” with fists full of venture-capital rake in their winnings; your client base. In this volatile environment, customers shift their loyalties with a mouse click to whichever vendor is paying off right now in fast, effortless global service, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The enterprise applications that you rolled out at great expense only a few years ago to differentiate yourself from competitors are available to even the smallest internet startup. What was once your trump card has suddenly become commonplace.
Web-architected applications have retired your current enterprise client/server solutions, which were supposed to carry you well into the next century. These cost-effective Web solutions support communications and transaction of all kinds, empowering customers, staff and partners alike through standard Web browsers. In addition to impacting your infrastructure, the speed and ubiquity of the internet have shifted your company’s focus onto your customers. The internet has conditioned them to expect immediate and complete gratification: They want what they want, when they want it. And your competitors are poised to oblige.
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