Category: Business
The Big Fat Geek’s thoughts on Business and how business processes can be automated via workflows and technology.
Microsoft to open up?
Microsoft has started to take the power of the development community seriously. In a press conference yesterday, they have put a very verbose official release regarding increasing the interoperability of all the high volume MS products by releasing and maintaining documentation of their APIs on their site. As quoted from Steve Ballmer,
For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today’s announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies.
Read the complete release here.
The products whose APIs would be released are Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products.
Can we have someone look into the revenue of these products as well?
Translated, will now have to buy a license and become a registered member of MSDN to understand the APIs for the “high volume products”.
Addendum
RedHat was not so much impressed with this release, read more of it here.
Business World
Theres a section of Business World which is Quick take, the question of the next week’s issue was posted to me via through a friend.
The Indian IT industry has several set backs –
- Lack real technology work – with around 60% of the work lying in the AMC and Testing (Support) bracket, there is dearth of scope for your average Indian techie to get their digits (pun intended) dirty in some concrete techie work.
- Project orientation – Most of the biggies in the Indian IT industry are service oriented, and more concerned with projects for foriegn customers. Their business orientation is towards projects, so much so that the entire organization bases its financials upon projects and their profitability. It may seem as a sweeping statement, but think about it, projects for the same client cumulate into an account. Accounts cumulate into a Geography. How this is bad is that there is no focus on IT products in the market.
- PPP of economies – How can one sustain themselves on pure projects alone? Esp. those that are based on a foreign economy. The moment the domestic economy starts doing better than the foreign economy (read those of the clients), the cost of the project rises (either for the firm or for the client). To remain competitive vis-a-vis other foriegn IT vendors, the indian firm will have to drop rates, losing profitability.
- Attrition – With an average attrition of around 15%, the costs of a project are constantly going up. Whenever a resource switches to a new firm, he gets a pay hike. A pay hike translates into more costs for the same resource. More costs without increasing revenues results in reduction of profitability.
That was my answer, I was a little surprised to learn that theres such a small amount of people who agree with me. No matter, it will be a good thing for India if I am wrong ;-).
Head Hunting
Above is our ad (first draft) about to be released in TOI in all the major cities. Interesed?
Sun takes over MySQL
With Sun being now the hands-down largest contributor to the opensource community, corporate users can only wish that MySQL retains its brand image.
Else we can always see Mr. McNealy smiling all the way to the bank.
Updating this post after seven years now, MySQL has also been forked into a separate RDBMS which ensures that the open source movement is strong, this fork is better known as MariaDB.