In a world of iOS, Android, Windows 8 - who needs another Mobile Operating
System?
One has to wonder what the folks over at Mozilla are thinking with their
newly announced Firefox OS for mobile devices.
The Mobile OS Market
According to the latest IDC Research reports, Android, iOS, BlackBerry,
Windows and Linux accounted for 98.7% of all smartphone shipments in Q4 2012
(IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, 2/14/2012).
That leaves scant market opportunity for anyone trying to get into this
market.
The top five players have already established their positions in the market -
with each owning a segment of the market that has substantial (and perhaps
insurmountable) barriers to entry.
The OS Players and Their Niches
iOS: Applications galore - at least 700,000 applications from the Apple App
Store - plus a hoard of applications available for jailbroken iPhones. An
asto... (more)
I like writing about "Infrastructure Software." One of the most challenging
things about being an advocate for a broad horizontally applicable technology
is that it does not solve a particular business problem.
Instead, it solves about 100,000 business problems.
That was an admittedly uber-geeky joke I made on my column "Integration Edge"
on ebizQ in an article about Legacy Modernization.
Although I was making light of the situation, the impact for a technology
advocate is real. The problem with writing about infrastructure software is
that everyone is impacted by it, yet nobody ... (more)
IT exists to support the business - and in best-of-class IT departments, this
truism is embedded deeply into the departmental culture.
Yet in so many cases, this self-evident truth gets lost in the mayhem of
building, maintaining and supporting the myriad of complicated and brittle
legacy application systems that have been put together over the years to
support the enterprise's business.
Legacy Application Modernization is a transformative initiative that has the
potential to not only change the way IT supports the business, but to change
the very nature and culture of IT.
IT Cu... (more)
Dell is making some exciting waves in the "solutions" business. Building on
the momentum as a result of the acquisition of Perot Systems some years ago
and a buying spree where they acquired a host of best-of-breed software
solutions such as Boomi (Cloud-based Integration Platform), Dell has just
announced a newly created Software Division and has appointed veteran John
Swainson as president, reporting to Michael Dell.
Swainson led IBM's huge software business until 2005 and was CEO of CA
Technologies from 2005 to 2009. On the heels of the appointment of Steve
Felice as Chief Co... (more)
Nearly 20,000 British men were pregnant in 2009 and 2010 - according to the
UK's National Health System. 8,000 of them had office appointments with their
gynecologists, and a total of 17,000 of them were admitted to hospitals to
undergo various obstetric services related to their pregnancies.
As a big believer in equality across all genders, faiths and genetic
backgrounds - I was initially very enthusiastic about this medical
breakthrough.
But my excitement was short-lived as I shortly found out that it was simply a
matter of bad data introduced as data were manually re-entered f... (more)
Derek Granath
Tom Flynn
Patrick Pushor
Bob Evans
